Getting Retro Computers Online!

Share unrelated electronics stuff, ideas, rants, etc!
Post Reply
User avatar
D3thAdd3r
Posts: 3221
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 10:00 am
Location: Minneapolis, United States

Getting Retro Computers Online!

Post by D3thAdd3r »

I stumbled across this recently and I bought 5 for $35 shipped and mean to try this out, specifically for the TI 99/4A. I have modems for most machines that had them available, even ones I will likely never be able to use like those for SNES/Genesis, etc. I bought a phone line emulator(supplies line voltage and tone, and rings the other port for the other modem in the same room to answer) to play Sega Saturn netlink games because I always dreamed about this when I was a kid, actually sparked a strong interest in networked games since, and the device works for basically everything that used direct dial networking also. Digital phone services are completely unreliable for this stuff due to latency and jitter.

This device, a Lantronix UDS-10, appears to be the end all for those things that are hard to get online and it is quite cheap. It might even provide faster speeds than available on some painful 1200 baud modem for an Apple II or those even more insane acoustic coupler modems(set an old telephone handset on top, and use speakers/microphones to interface with the POTS...) which was the only thing available for the TI 99/4A. Pretty much anything with some form of serial and a terminal emulator could get online instantly!

Anyways it is pretty nifty and presents itself as a modem and handles all the IP stuff behind the scenes without a separate PC doing the work like other setups require. It interfaces with standard ethernet RJ45 connections to your internet router. More popular systems like the C64 do have other solutions for this stuff, but for less loved computers..oh like a nearly useless Radio Shack TRS-80 I have no modem for yet, it seems pretty cool if you could just telnet something with it! I might post some of my experiements with this stuff when I get to it, probably a few months in the future though.

Also, it really is high time we have telnet for Uzebox, we could easily communicate with nearly any computer in existance just for the cool factor.
Post Reply