Test boards arrived yesterday, and I stuffed last night. Initially, the board failed to function, which greatly concerned me. I started debugging and eventually found out I had tied the 4.99K reference resistor to Vcc, not to Ground (I misread the earlier designs). I field modified the board, and now both boards work. I will release the boards for final production tonight, and I am hopeful they can make the PCB fix during assembly, but if not, we'll need to cut the trace and solder to ground.

I still need to test the EPROM portion, but I don't want to hold up production.

So, issues with the first run:

• Top silkscreen is incomplete. Does not affect operation. Will fix for next revision.
• Aforementioned issue with reference resistor. Will fix for next revision.
• middle hole for cartridge case is a tad too large for a snug fit. I don't think it'll cause any concern when the Jack and other items are present, but I'll reduce it 1 mm in diameter for the next run.

Pics at: http://www.jbrain.com/vicug/gallery/nic

Jim

Good news Jim!

Wow I just found out about this and this board looks like the best place to find the info. about it.

Very good Jim that you are making this!

I been reading from about 7 pages back on here. When they do the 100 do they put all the parts on it? Or do you have to hand solder them?

Is this a Gigabit Ethernet?

I have the Retro Replay with the Ethernet on it. I will attach a image of it in here. But it works very good. Yours looks like it will be better. The price too is better so looks like a lot will get this one.



Maybe some one can make a patch for Q-Link so it works with this cartridge.

I posted about my RR-net a wile ago here.

Thanks for doing this Jim!

-Raymond Day

Well done Jim!
Looks really neat and proper. If I could get one of these carts with grahams TFR rom I'd trade it for a RR+RR-Net

They solder them all up for me.

No, it's functionally the same as the RR-NET

No problem.

You know a long time ago about a year before Q-Link ended Jim Collette made Q-Link work with the CMD turbo232 or Swift Link RS232 and at 2400 boud.

Maybe some one can look at his code to get Q-Link reloaded to work with the RR-net. At lest he did it with the turbo232 so looks like it can be done for sure.

I have that patch code at here to download if any one wants to look at how it works and from that I guess could find out how to mode it to work with the 64nic jim is making or the RR-net. Click on this line to download it.


-Raymond Day

Raymond, you should check out Quantum Link Reloaded on Wikipedia.

Although the website seems to be down (quantumlink.tk) I found the IP adress to the server which seemed to be up at 66.135.39.36:5190

You need a hayes emulator/gateway though until somebody writes a new client from scratch with internet support

Raymond knows all about Q-Link. Trust me.


I believe Raymond is using a UDS-10 terminal server to access QLR. What he's suggesting is that it may be possible to modify the client to support ethernet. I don't know if that's possible (I lean towards not) but if it is, that would be fantastic. I had no idea anyone had managed to modify the Q-Link client to work with expansion port RS232 adaptors so maybe there is hope...

_________________
Call me Golan; my parents did.

I purchased a cheap EPROM programmer a few weeks ago and finally got it working. I burned a copy of 65netboot, and it works like a champ in 64NIC+. I have yet to check the rotary bank selector, but I'm confident all functionality now works.

Of course, the question is: What else should be put in the ROMs?

Jim

Did you get a chance to try the tftp boot function? I've got a public tftp server available at nb65.jamtronix.com - it is currently world writable (play nice please!) - to boot a prg file from it, do this:

- boot up with the cartridge attached (use the latest version - 0.9.6)
- on the main screen, hit F7 to get to the "config" screen
- on the config screen, hit F5 to set teh tftp server
- type in "nb65.jamtronix.com" and hit enter
- assuming you have DHCP and DNS working on your LAN, then the hostname you entered should be resolved automatically.
- hit F7 to get back to main menu
- hit F1 to boot from the tftp server. you should see a list of files to select from, including the one you just uploaded (as long as it has a .prg extension). use the arrow keys to move thrpough the list of files, and hit the letter next to the name of the file you want to run

Of course if you have a PC with ruby installed on your local LAN, you can also use the tftp server included in the netboot65 dist file.

Cheers

Jonno

I was thinking you could put a flash RAM in it. That way you would not need a EPROM programmer. Can it be done so it can use Flash RAM or EEPROM.

What else should you put in th ROM? How about it's MAC address, Contiki web server, and the Contiki web browser. Them are easy ones that can think of that will go with it good.

-Raymond Day

It's a 32 pin JEDEC standard socket. Anything that is JEDEC compatible work.

If you can get me a ROM-able version of Contiki that autostarts at $8000 and is an 8kB or 16kB image, I'll add it in.

Jonnosan, you mentioned a script to create unique MAC addresses in the ROM images? I should probably get that.

Jim

How about a small bunch of utilities. Copy/Format/Directory Viewer there are already a bunch of these available.

Is there a way of freezing what in memory, then dumping it to a file and loading that file at boot up via 65netboot.
Similar to how the action replay cartridges does it ?. Would it require a loader of some kind to be placed into the 64nic+ ROM for this to happen. ? Is this at all possible !

Contiki Web_Server on a cartridge with a nic built in.
This would be possible but would require a great deal of effort and time, well beyond the scope of this project.
It would also most likely require some extra hardware/software to be added to the 64nic+. BUT I can Dream Too

_________________
Commodore 8bit Web Services http://cbm8bit.com
Try our new browser driven disk image editor.

It's in the latest netboot65 dist (v 0.9.6 - d/l from https://sourceforge.net/project/showfil ... _id=250168 )
the script is in the "bin" folder, called "set_ip_config.rb"

to use it to set the mac, the command line will be something like:

set_ip_config.rb nb65_std_cart.bin mac ab:cd:ef:12:34:56

run "set_ip_config.rb" with no parameters to see all the options for what can be configured.

it needs ruby, not additional gems are used though.

I'm not sure what your plan is for burning all the EPROMS - I guess you'll need to wrap the "set_ip_config.rb" script in another script that changes the MAC address on each run. Alternatively if you want I could do a version that creates a pseudo-random MAC (the lower 3 bytes at least, it's cute having the top 3 bytes set to 00:80:10 because then wireshark (etc) identify the traffic as a CBM NIC) so you don't need to worry about maintaining any state.

The 64NIC+ cartridge doesn't have a 'freeze' button. With a bit of effort though you could use another freezer (e.g. if you have an Action Replay or The Final Cartridge) that makes a single-load file on a standard disk, then you'd need to copy that file up to the tftp server through some means(if all else fails - there is an app in the latest netboot65 dist that copies up the whole disk as a d64, and you can then use many tools including 'ripxplore' to extract individual prg files from a d64 image).
If you then have a 64NIC+ with the netboot65 rom, there's enough bootstrap code to d/l and execute the prog.

Theoretically it would be possible to do a freeze straight to the tftp server using something like the Retro Replay + RR-NET (which has the necessary chips) but I don't see working on that as a priority for me. Happy to assist with anyone else who was inspired though.