PIA-Based LAN for the Atari 8-bit

[_The Doctor__]

agree whole heartedly except in that the side board should have went with all 800's... that's mod that I'd want out to every 800 and carried down the the line well that and standardizing the empty pins between the eci pbi 130xe, pbi 600xl, pbi800xl, and some of what's in the sheets for the 1090 and buffer cable.

[Kyle22]

Good card for the proposed 890 box. Look here:

 

[Faicuai]

57 minutes ago, Curt Vendel said:

Just reading this thread...

 

I think the better route to go would be to go off the PBI/ECI bus and build an 8530 based Appletalk compatible LAN interface.   There is more than enough documentation on the protocol, its just a souped up RS-422 network.   This would allow Atari's to be able to connect to Apple IIGS and older Mac machines.  A check of IC stocks shows over 9500 available for purchase, so they are still readily available and this would be the least complicated LAN design.

 

I personally would prefer Corvus Omninet but the protocol and command set are not as widely known and there are very few available devices to use where as the Appletalk products are still plentiful.

 

Or there is the WIFImodem device that plugs into a serial port.    I've posted up the schematics and Driver ROM to the Atari PBI Serial/Parallel board, so making a PBI serial port would be straight forward.

 

At any rate, we need to start focusing more on external expansion devices to plug into the PBI/ECI ports and not doing internal mods.

 

 

 

Absolutely, no doubt about it: we have already reached end-of-line for this fragmented and non-cohesive approach to designing and building mods, that, at the end of the day, do not really leverage each other, nor the host system's architecture (e.g. PBI BUS, in-rom-support, etc.) We just have enough of these (with some notable exceptions, of course, being Ultimate/SIDE and (especially) Incognito, the most "integral" of the bunch.

 

Time to evolve.

[Mathy]

Hello guys

 

We need this:

 

 

But in more modern redesign.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

[tschak909]

Yes, for the love of god, please off-load and abstract any and all network maintenance i/o. The lesson that wasn't learned with the CS8900 based network cartridge, was that you literally lose a substantial chunk of RAM just to maintain a really cut-cornered TCP/IP stack on the 6502, to say nothing of the used CPU cycles...

...there's a reason that most of the programs written for these devices are basically either telnet or irc clients.

 

-Thom