![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
|
Vintage Computers Any vintage computer systems, calculators, video games etc., but with an emphasis on 1980s and earlier equipment. |
![]() |
|
Thread Tools |
![]() |
#1 |
Hexode
Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Luton, Bedfordshire, UK.
Posts: 449
|
![]()
I finally took the plunge and got a Spectranet ethernet adapter for my Sinclair Spectrums (I have a 48K "rubber devil" and a 128K toastrack these days)
I have to say, I am impressed. The unit worked right out of the box, connecting to the manufacturer's server which is pretty useful itself. Though I found Mark Round's site even better. And there's even Platoterm - a Plato terminal with access to much of the old Plato material from the 70s and 80s. I enjoyed playing Plato at battleships for the first time in 41 years. The humble Speccy is online. I never once thought I'd hook up a Spectrum to the internet! There's even an irc chat client and a telnet client! But most of the pages designed for the spectrum are a bit of a cross between the old BBS and modern web pages. It's rather like surfing the web on your Spectrum. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
#2 |
Heptode
Join Date: May 2018
Location: Northampton, Northamptonshire, UK.
Posts: 889
|
![]()
I got one of those Spectranet assembled-PCB from the original Designer, Dylan Smith, (back in 2013 at the Silicon Dreams Computer-Show Weekend, held at Snibston Discovery Museum in Coalville, near Leicester) - Who I believe also gave a talk about it, (alongside Chris Smith's ZX Spectrum ULA Rev Eng talk & selling of the book Chris wrote describing the Spectrum ULA & the Rev-Eng process he used)
But I've never got round to trying it, so there might be some firmware updates since then. And I see you can now get cased versions: https://www.bytedelight.com/?page_id=3515 So I wonder if it's possible to buy a case, separately. Or can download a file to 3D-print one. It's surprising that it's claimed to be about the only Spectrum Ethernet interface. I remember someone I know showing me the Spectrum PC ISA interface he'd designed & built on veroboard, that allowed him to connect an old PC Network card to it.But not sure how far he got, with creating software to support this, and I can't see anything about it on his website: https://www.mike-stirling.com/ But he was involved in the early days of reverse-engineering how parts of the ULA worked, to create an FPGA-based emulation of it. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
#3 |
Moderator
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Oxford, UK
Posts: 25,965
|
![]()
I've no personal experience of this, but I'd imagine implementing a TCP/IP protocol stack on a Spectrum would be more of a challenge than providing a raw packet level interface. An impressive achievement though.
|
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
#4 | |
Heptode
Join Date: May 2018
Location: Northampton, Northamptonshire, UK.
Posts: 889
|
![]() Quote:
Xilinx XC9572XL-TGC100 100pin TQFP FPGA + AM29F010B-90 1Mbit FLASH and an IDT71024S12YG 1Mbit 12ns SRAM So may be a processor core running in the FPGA, with rather more computing power than the Spectrum's Z80, that this is off-loaded to and doesn't present much overhead to the Spectrum's Z80. |
|
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
#5 |
Nonode
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Warsaw, Poland and Cambridge, UK
Posts: 2,517
|
![]()
Yes, those Wiznet chips are really handy. They have the Ethernet interface and TCP/IP stack all built in, so the host microcomputer only has to say "open a socket to this address please" and it will. They make implementing internet applications on an 8-bit micro quite straightforward.
All the smarts on the Spectranet must be in the Wiznet chip. The XC9572 is a very old CPLD which doesn't contain much logic - just enough to make a few counters and gates, so it's probably used as glue logic, or maybe to create an SPI interface to talk to the Wiznet chip (though the W5100 has a parallel bus interface), as well as doing some bank switching to allow the RAM chip to be used (more memory comes in really handy when doing network stuff). Chris
__________________
What's going on in the workshop? http://martin-jones.com/ |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
#6 | |
Tetrode
Join Date: May 2021
Location: Titz, Germany.
Posts: 61
|
![]() Quote:
https://github.com/adamdunkels/uip/b...uip-refman.pdf for uip. You had to link the stack into the application, which means if the application ends, the system would not respond to a ping any more, much like NCSA telnet on DOS back then. uip needs an interrupt and a timer to handle timeouts. Michael |
|
![]() |
![]() |