Anyone following comp.sys.cbm will have seen a recent thread on Commodore networking. Some jumped up little American sysadmin has started making a lot of noise about the idea of Ethernet on a CBM machine, as well as being rather rude about certain peoples' software. Anyway, hysterics aside, what do cbm-hackers think about the viability of native Ethernet on the C64? I've often thought of an NE2000 - C64 adapter much like my Soundblaster adapter design, but I've always been put off by the sheer quantity of protocol required by TCP/IP and the fact that a machine running at 1MHz is really going to have a hard time keeping up with Ethernet data coming in at 10Mbit/s. What do other people think of this? The only way I can possibly see it working is by running the NE2000 with an REU, so you can use the DMA controller to handle the NE2000's DMA requests (with a little bit of software to set up the transactions). Even then you still have the possibility of Ethernet data coming in far quicker than the C64 can process it. Any thoughts? Richard - This message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list. To unsubscribe: echo unsubscribe | mail cbm-hackers-request@dot.tcm.hut.fi.
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