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Comment by ddingus | Hacker News Reader

Get a FujiNET for it.

I bought one of these. About $60.

The FujiNET is amazing. It works via the standard SIO subsystem provided by the Atari system OS ROM. Device independent I/O.

D: DISK P: PRINTER ETC...

Now has N: for network.

This device makes Atari Basic Internet capable. People have written 10 line programs to do all sorts of Internet tasks. Multi player online games are possible and have been done.

There are app servers hosting disk images.

I got mine, connected it to my home wi-fi and was playing Zork over the internet in about 5 minutes.

It has an SD card slot for local storage and the onboard CPU has all sorts of capabilities aimed at making the Internet useful to existing Atari software and permit easy new development.

That device is a lot of fun and replaces having a disk drive and some sort of modem or serial interface to work online.

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As a Commodore person, FujiNet (and thus SIO) is one of the things that I envy about Atari. <https://np.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/10cktls...>

There is a version of the FujiNET in progress for your C64 or 128, etc... :)

I am getting one for my Apple, and want to get a C128 sometime in the near future.

Was all Atari for a long time, and then a while back, I bumped into an Apple //e and realized just how much fun all these machines are!

The C128 is next.

And, in short order, we could all write programs that talk to one another over the Internet via FujiNET devices. Good times ahead.

And yeah, SIO is pretty cool. Atari got that right. The one thing I envy about the C64 and friends is full 320 pixel color resolution. The Ataris are 160 pixel. And I am not talking about size. Both machines can deliver 320 pixels, but Atari machines can only specify a difference in lumanance between pixels at that resolution.

In the last 10 years, that difference has proven itself with some damn cool demoscene productions on C64 and friends. Plus, the 128 has a real 80 column display. My Apple has that too, and I really miss it on the Atari.

Anyhow... have fun.

I’ve seen equivalents for the C64 and Apple II.

I'm not sure how far along the Apple II version is, but that's not surprising given its ability to autoboot from a card. As I discuss in the linked thread, FujiNet for the C64 is not and cannot be the equivalent because of lack of SIO or something akin to it.

At least the disk interface is a serial one, and the 1541/1571 drives are smart devices much like the Atari ones. The disk interface is not as "general" as SIO, but it seems they are functionally very similar.

Unless I understand it very wrong, in the base C64 OS, you run an "ls" by opening the floppy device and asking the drive to read it.

Again, please read the linked thread. I explain the difference between SIO and Commodore's approach and why the latter doesn't allow what the former does, specifically autobooting and throughput.

I understand SIO is better and Fujinet can do things on the Atari that are not possible on the C64, and can’t pretend to be a printer or modem because the 64 only used the disk port for disks.

OTOH, while autobooting or running unmodified software is not an option, nothing prevents the modification of existing software to run with the Fujinet’s extra features. The very basic stuff, the ability to load software off a disk image, is there.

The 64's serial (IEC) port uses device numbering to support daisy-chained disk drives, printers and other devices.

https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Device_number.

Fujinet on the C64 supports modem comms - the implementation is based on the Meatloaf project:

https://meatloaf.cc/

Thanks for clarifying to rbanffy about emulating the printer; you beat me to it.

I watched the Meatloaf videos; thank you. Does this mean that FujiNet hardware for the C64 will connect to both the serial and user ports? If so that would solve both the backward compatibility and throughput issues, at the cost of more hardware (but understandably so, given the C64's hardware).

PS - What is the upper throughput limit on the Commodore serial bus? I know it's a serial version of IEEE-488, but I assumed that the upper limit is lower than what is required for modem access. But now that I think about it, the throughput for disk access (even if brokenly slow by default) must be much higher than that of contemporary modems, right? To put another way, is there anything—whether throughput, or signaling/traffic—inherently preventing modems on the serial port à la SIO?

I thought this was about the VIC badlines inhibiting faster serial comms due to a bug in the serial chip. It's fuzzy, but some things in the C64 are bit banged, and the badlines necessary for video DMA make that difficult at higher speeds.

There are compromises on all the platforms. SIO is really slick. Any software written to it will work with FujiNET, and basically operate with the network, as it would any other device.

From what I understand, the C64 product requires one to use BASIC to kick something off, just like everyone does for the disk drives.

But, after that it's looking like the overall features and experience are going to be there. The video shows command line access working. A more friendly client won't be far behind, and that could be in BASIC and perform reasonably in most cases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfzj65zxrDc

>From what I understand, the C64 product requires one to use BASIC to kick something off, just like everyone does for the disk drives.

Yes, this is what I was alluding to. I know it's no big deal to type `LOAD "*",8,1` or whatever to start the FujiNet main menu, but there is still a qualitative difference between that and being able to turn the Atari 8-bit on and have the functionality automatically be available. That's possible on C64, too, but not if the hardware is connected only via the Commodore serial port; it would require the cartridge port, or a ROM change. As mentioned, I am also unsure of how the throughput would compare.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the lack of functionality with telecom software. Commodore modems don't connect to the serial port, so terminal emulators and such won't work out of the box with FujiNet the way they can on Atari.

I agree. Autoboot is just nice. Makes efforts that can be done that way feel like a part of the machine.

The serial port is a bummer! What is used? Cart port?

Haven’t watched this yet, but it should be enlightening

https://fujinet.online/2023/06/28/fujinet-and-meatloaf-at-vc...

Cool, thanks for the reference!

In the early '90s I wanted to get some drawings I did with the Atari Touch Tablet into my Windows computers. So I looked at the specs for the BMP format and learned enough 6502 assembly language to do the conversion on the Atari. Then I hooked the Atari modem and a Windows computer up to phone jacks in my parents' house, fired up TinyBBS (if I remember correctly) on the Windows computer, and uploaded all the graphics from the Atari over the household phone lines.

Felt pretty clever after that.

You were!

People moved data in many ways didn't they?

Print it out. I moved some code and data that way. Just type it in again.

Some people made cables and toggled lines in the controller ports.

Audio.

Who knows what else?

Ha, the controller-ports comment reminded me of a project I built that used the Atari's joystick port to sample audio. You could increase the A/D sampling rate of the joystick port to 8kHz, so with a simple transistor circuit you could plug an audio jack into something and sample it (with the program I typed in from whatever magazine it was, probably Antic).

Of course with only 32ish K available, you weren't sampling much. I think I probably still have the first one I captured: "White Horse" by Laid Back. Now there's a timestamp.

BTW, one of the drawings I converted from the Atari wound up in the documentation for a multi-million-dollar manufacturing system sold by Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in the '90s.

That's great stuff!! I had my HAM transmitter connected to those controller ports.

Was a great resource, especially in the older machines that had 4 ports.

Way cool. Hey, if you’re still into HAM, did you see the article on here a couple weeks ago about commodities firms petitioning to encroach on the spectrum to execute trades a couple milliseconds faster? There’s an FCC public-comment form. Don’t have the link handy.

I did see that and need to comment. That spectrum needs to stay with the HAMs. Fact is when bad things happen, our investment in those people pays off.

I say they can rent spectrum from someone. It's not like the people who are doing those kinds of volume need yet another free gift. And mooching off amateur spectrum is exactly that.

Life has taken me away from radio for a while now, but I could jump back in anytime. It's great tech.

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