New Dragon Ethernet cartridge interest check

[gambler172]

I would take one too....if ever available

[w1k]

i have problems with open www pages..

 

[danwinslow]

? Did this actually get made?

[_The Doctor__]

On 12/30/2021 at 1:12 PM, danwinslow said:

One that integrates as a device driver (I:) and runs on either an interrupt or polling. I had gotten one up to handling ICMP,ARP,DHCP, and UDP largely by wrapping/modifying parts of IP65 into extended memory and a relocateable driver handler. Was trying to support 4 channels from anything that could use CIO. Ran out of time and energy on the TCP part of it. My target was the UDP part for games, anyway, and that's easily incorporated into games from IP65, as was done recently.

If on an interrupt, it would stay up and processing ARP, ICMP, etc., in the background while DOS is being used. I wrote a standalone ping command usable from DOS, etc.

where are these located?

[_The Doctor__]

I used to use the ethernet cartridge quite a bit, then things got crazy - you had to use 'm' pages for some sites (m=mobilephone version). Soon everything went HTTPS or encrypted with some sort of authentication... so most things just went away for me.

Edited April 30, 2023 by _The Doctor__

[+CharlieChaplin]

5 hours ago, w1k said:

i have problems with open www pages..

 

 

With the old (original) Dragoncart I also had these problems.

 

It took very long to load a part of a webpage, if it loaded at all (5 minutes and longer). Only http could be loaded (no ftp, no https, etc.) and only text could be displayed - but still many http pages did not load. Back then I could load the Abbuc.de mainpage, but could never load the subpages (e.g. the forum), no clue why. Many other webpages would only work when I loaded their special mobile phones versions, e.g. instead of cnn.com I had to use mobile.cnn.com or something similar. But errmm, after a while mobile phones had enough power so these special mobile phone webpages were switched off. Think with the original Dragoncart it will be hard nowadays to find webpages that can be loaded and displayed, since almost everything has changed into https, including atari age forums. And loading time (+converting into text) is much too long, I do not want to wait 5-10 minutes to get a small excerpt of a webpage displayed as text. Thats something PC's are actually good for.

 

The only good things would be (similar to Fujinet) a) to download or boot ATR images from certain webservers / webpages (setup especially for the A8) and b) to play a few A8 games online with or against other players (if we ever find someone who is online at the same time). There is e.g. the 8Bit unity project  https://8bit-unity.com/ and the available game 8Bit Slicks https://8bit-slicks.com/, but it looks like interest has declined quite a lot and only very few Atarians are online at the same time to race against each other. Maybe thats due to the high interest on Fujinet, Fujinet webservers, Fujinet games, etc. ? Abbuc and Atari Age forums already have a sub-forum dedicated to Fujinet... so maybe Dragoncart and similar planned carts are no longer of interest to the Atarians and their developers ?

 

[tschak909]

1 hour ago, CharlieChaplin said:

 

With the old (original) Dragoncart I also had these problems.

 

It took very long to load a part of a webpage, if it loaded at all (5 minutes and longer). Only http could be loaded (no ftp, no https, etc.) and only text could be displayed - but still many http pages did not load. Back then I could load the Abbuc.de mainpage, but could never load the subpages (e.g. the forum), no clue why. Many other webpages would only work when I loaded their special mobile phones versions, e.g. instead of cnn.com I had to use mobile.cnn.com or something similar. But errmm, after a while mobile phones had enough power so these special mobile phone webpages were switched off. Think with the original Dragoncart it will be hard nowadays to find webpages that can be loaded and displayed, since almost everything has changed into https, including atari age forums. And loading time (+converting into text) is much too long, I do not want to wait 5-10 minutes to get a small excerpt of a webpage displayed as text. Thats something PC's are actually good for.

 

The only good things would be (similar to Fujinet) a) to download or boot ATR images from certain webservers / webpages (setup especially for the A8) and b) to play a few A8 games online with or against other players (if we ever find someone who is online at the same time). There is e.g. the 8Bit unity project  https://8bit-unity.com/ and the available game 8Bit Slicks https://8bit-slicks.com/, but it looks like interest has declined quite a lot and only very few Atarians are online at the same time to race against each other. Maybe thats due to the high interest on Fujinet, Fujinet webservers, Fujinet games, etc. ? Abbuc and Atari Age forums already have a sub-forum dedicated to Fujinet... so maybe Dragoncart and similar planned carts are no longer of interest to the Atarians and their developers ?

 

I know I will ruffle some feathers, but I am just being straight and honest:

The design is a dead end, and literally why FujiNet exists. Putting all the processing onus on the host is the absolute most wrong way to do it for a system that can address at most 64K of RAM, not-quite-2MHz CPU (slower because of DMA cycle stealing). There is no way to ever get designs like this to support the required encryption, and the payload sizes generated by modern web services easily overwhelm the entire address space of the machine. 

 

FujiNet (at least on the Atari) does have its limitations, but they are minor in comparison to what's provided.

 

The lesson we learned is, it's better to be useful, than to be fast.

 

-Thom

[_The Doctor__]

and there would be no reason a parallel solution couldn't be made to do that work so you get usability and speed.

[ol.sc]

2 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

I used to use the ethernet cartridge quite a bit, then things got crazy - you had to use 'm' pages for some sites (m=mobilephone version). Soon everything went HTTPS or encrypted with some sort of authentication... so most things just went away for me.

If you already have such a cartridge then using http://frogfind.com/ may give you some fun back in using it.