FujiNet for Atari ST/TT/Falcon

[tschak909]

Calling all #AtariST hardware and firmware hackers

It should be possible to make a version of #FujiNet that uses the ASCI port, to act as a full fledged network adapter and virtual disk drive adapter.

What is #FujiNet? Watch this video here for the #Atari8bit version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izdCLDQ1ZxU It is a WiFi network adapter based on the #ESP32 which provides virtual disk, printer, WiFi Modem, and a network adapter with protocol offloading.

The Virtual disk drive should be a no-brainer. It is the no.1 use case for the current installed base of FujiNet users, being able to access disk images directly from the network beyond or from a local SD card storage has proven to be the biggest win. It is useful within 30 seconds of coming out of the box.

The Virtual printer is the no.2 use case, and it provides a complete PDF rasterizer, emulating a variety of printers, so that you can quickly print something on modern printers by just opening it up in the web interface.

There is a WiFi modem in the firmware, how this would be exposed on the ST, would be up for debate, so I won’t go too far into it.

But the most powerful aspect of the #FujiNet comes from its network adapter functionality, which is designed in a way similar to a mainframe channel processor, in that the #FujiNet handles all the network protocol arbitration, and presents a nice clean and simple I/O channel that the target computer can sample at its leisure.

One of the problems with accessing the modern Internet, has to do with lackluster support for modern encryption. Offloading this onto the FujiNet fixes this problem completely, and #FujiNet has support for protocols like TLS(SSL) and SSH out of the box. There is also support for JSON and XML parsing of the channel, which means that coupled with the encryption support, modern web APIs can be directly accessed by FujiNet equipped machines. Wins all around.

All of this, in a device with an average target price between $60 to $80.

So why not see if we can bootstrap an effort? There are already efforts underway for the #ColecoAdam, #Apple2, and #C64, in addition to the #Ataribit version which has been in production for over a year, and has over 2000 happy customers.

What say you all? Come to our discord, https://discord.gg/7MfFTvD and let’s talk about trying to make this a reality. -Thom

[stormy]

Sounds like a very cool device. At the moment on the ST series we have NE2000 compatible network interfaces with drivers written to use either the Sting or MintNet TCP/IP stacks. As you say, that is quite CPU intensive especially with modern protocols, so if this device can offload all the TCP processing that sounds nice, I guess it would require a Sting and Mintnet compatible device driver which recognises which aspects it can offload or expect from the device.

[Cyprian]

@tschak909 cool idea. FujiNet is well known for me and a new dedicated hardware for the ST sounds cool.
What about existing solutions like CosmosEx, which has embedded RPI and supports STinG/STicK (internet access for the ST) https://github.com/atarijookie/ce-atari ?

[mikro]

Hardware isn't the biggest issue here. Drivers (inside the FujiNet device) are. Look at the CosmosEx code base, it is HUGE and it has a supporting operating system (linux) and hardware (Raspberry Pi) underneath. Replicating such effort is not a short-term task for sure, even if you copied some of CE's code (for instance virtual drives).

Atari ST and I would say any 16-bit system requires far more effort when interfacing with modern infrastructure because its operating system/drivers/applications already have established protocols for communication unlike 8-bit system where you can control basically everything as long as it has ability to push/pull data bytes.

[tschak909]

Agreed, and by all means, if the CosmosEX guys want to cross pollinate with what we've done, then that's awesome. I'm trying to spur on development, and pass on lessons learned from our time bringing FujiNet to the 8-bit systems. It's important to note that FujiNet behaves like a mainframe channel processor, and this behavior especially permeates the network codebase, by trying to offload as much as possible onto the ESP32, even JSON and XML parsing.

-Thom

[mikro]

By all means go ahead. I just wanted to give you a rough idea what is ahead of you. Ironically, CosmosEx development is in a sort of hiatus right now because, well, the main author has burned out due to... the massive code base to maintain and endless stream of bug reports.

So, you have been warned. ;-)

[Deadfiber]

It's to bad FujiNet did not make it to the ST There is Nothing The ST has that would be Equal.