search

eigenco / frankenpi

119 stars 4 forks source link

Ethernet adapter emulation #4

Open coreyfro opened 1 year ago

coreyfro commented 1 year ago

Hey Eigenco,

Has anyone talked to you about emulating an Ethernet card?

If a pi emulated a 10mbit network card, the pi could then be a firewall for any old ISA PC which has no security of its own and likely dozens of vulnerabilities.

Not to mention using the Pi to share files with the vintage PC. I know that is why you have hard drive emulation but for PC's from the 90's, they would already have ATA 66 to ATA133 which would be superior to ISA.

Also, TCP IP and IPX gaming while keeping the PC safely behind the firewall.

Lastly, it would be a great way to get a vintage PC without PCI on WiFi.

Thanks for the project. I hope to use it for vintage PC's I am build for a retro gaming museum in Oakland CA

20230418_201213

eigenco commented 1 year ago

Ethernet adapter could certainly be emulated, probably with relative ease as from what I understand some adapters like NE2000 are quite simple. Lately I've been more involved in hardware design which I hope would help with the availability of the card itself. I designed one with cheap readily available FPGA (Lattice iCE40HX1K or iCE40HX4K) for easy of use. Unfortunately I have somewhat limited amount of time to work on this as my day job takes most of my time, but if the hardware becomes easily available then perhaps contributions to the software development can come from many people and things move faster. Let's see.

Your retro gaming museum sounds interesting, perhaps I get to visit it some day.