Finally: Broadband for the Commodore 64

GP writes "Now even die-hard Commodore 64 users are able to enjoy the benefits of broadband Internet connectivity. A newly announced Ethernet card together with the Contiki operating system lets you surf the web, send e-mail, host web sites with the built-in web server, and soon even play LAN games on your good old Commodore 64! All this with a computer that is old enough to drink."

But can it fill 10BaseT?

[SuperBanana]

As we all know, the standard is whether or not something can "flood a 10BaseT network". Anyone who has read the networking HOWTOs know that Pentium 100's can "do this easily".

So...can it? If not, how much traffic do I have to send it to bring it to a crawl? :-)

The funny thing is

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

any DSL modem or router is probably at least a hundred times faster than a C64.

That ethernet card uses an AMD microprocessor

[Squeezer]

You can see the AMD square/arrow logo on the corner of one of the chips. Cool.

Commodore firewall

[lsd4all]

What a great idea to limit bandwidth usage. Hookup up a C64 as a firewall and *presto* you are blocking ports and keeping the P2P usage down to 2K/sec. Burn the firewall code to a start-up cartridge ROM, make the C64 run off a 12V battery with a DC-DC converter for the needed +/-5V. Throw the whole thing in a black box with a solar panel on top and sell it as the next big thing in network security.

Re:It's the same guy...

[adadun]

ah, kicked that submit button too fast...

The RR-Net Ethernet card is a re-design and logical continuation of the TFE Ethernet card, for which Contiki was originally written. The RR-Net and the TFE are built upon the same Ethernet controller chip: the CS8900a, which has an 8-bit mode and is very well suited for interfacing with 8-bit CPUs and microcontrollers.

I am actually running Contiki together with an RR-Net Ethernet card on my 10 MBit/s broadband connection myself. Of course, it isn't actually possible to saturate the connection with the C64, but at least it is possible to finally use a C64 with the Internet without having to go through a PC, which is quite satisfying :-)

Re:Be relevant! 20% are hungry.

[Pharmboy]

Wow, another bleeding heart telling us we should feel bad if we don't spend all our waking hours taking care of the poor people.

You say case mods, games and broadband are not relevant or on topic? This is slashdot, this is not 'SaveTheWorld.org'

How totally pissed off and white do you have to be in order to walk around 100% of the time consumed with guilt that others are hungry? How arrogant must you be to come to a tech site and tell us how uninlightened we are because we are speaking about technical things.

Go preach your tree hugging gospel elsewhere please. This is "News for Nerds" not "Articles about Social Issues" as your site claims to be.

Got it!

[JoeCommodore]

I've have this (RRnet w/Contiki) since AmiWest (july), very nice! Contiki is still getting some bugs out, but for a no-frills text browser it works great. I connect via ethernet to my dial-up router. Can surf about any site, even do Google searches. So far I have only played with the browsing but even with that I'm impressed, even with it's limits it sure runs slick.

I would compare the stock 64 speed with it to about a 600 baud terminal connection (not bad for 1mghz displaying in hi-res mode), easy enough to read without stopping the stream (there is no buffer in the web browser, sice contiki uses a lot of the 64's 58k or so of accessible memory.)

With the C64 20 mghz accellerator, SuperCPU (by CMD - now offered by Commodore Key [cmdrkey.com],) the speed matches a modern PC - albeit a slower one.

To sum it up, given the tight memory and small amount of hardware needed now - it sure opens up opportunities for some low-end internet projects. (even grander ones when people with RAM expansions start developing for it) I hope one day someone makes a Commodore C/G BBS and C64 Telenet Client using them or maybe a internet variation of the old Commodore Q-Link network (Q-Link was AOL before they became AOL).

Also with the eventual release of the ultra-cool reconfigurable computer - the C-One [c64upgra.de] (which can use the RR-Net card) and Jeri Ellsworth's (she created the C-One) work on an Apple II interface which I believe also has similar capabilities - you are proably going to hear about a lot more 8-bitters on the internet with their little computers. :-)

But realistically I am hoping 'The Final Ethernet' card (which is just the Ethernet adapter interfaced to the 64) gets developed though, using the Retro Replay Utility Cartridge as an intemediary ads a buch of $$ to the price (I'm a Commodore fanatic, I had to buy one, not everyone would like those prices though.)

Re:New kind of bottle neck

[malfunct]

Its less about speed and more about convienece of network connection. Its much easier for me to plug into the ethernet at home than it is to set up a serial connection to another computer on the network.

Re:New kind of bottle neck

[bokmann]

According to the website, it comes with a VNC client. THAT would be a cool use of bandwidth... A commodore 64 with VNC capability would be a really cool, really retro, really cheap way to have a virtual console... Amaze your friends by showing them solaris, windows XP AND linux all running from a C-64!

If it had an ssh client, that would literally be everything I needed to telecommute.

You had a hard drive? Sheesh...

[gothicpoet]

I had a Commodore 64 when I was a kid. I didn't have a hard drive... I had a cassette tape drive.

The worst part was the errors in the listings of source code in the magazines. A whole lot of typing just to see the program not actually work.

Ah, yes, those were the days...

It made a dorm mate's Macintosh seem nothing short of miraculous when I went to my first year of college a couple of years later.

Using a C64 to cruise the Internet? That would be a strange experience indeed!

Re:Irresponsible

[Sloppy]

They're running kernels that haven't been patched in 2 decades.

C64 runs a kernal, not a kernel. ;-)

But anyway... patch them, remotely! All you need to do is find an unchecked buffer. Send some data that is so long that it overwrites the "hidden" RAM that lies in the same address space as the kernal ROM (the 6510 will let you write to that RAM, you just can't normally read what you wrote, because you'll see the ROM instead), and then continue overwriting until the 16-bit pointer wraps around to 0 and then overwrite the memory-mapped register that controls the bank-switching so that your new kernal image becomes visible! Muahahhaha! Patched kernal!