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Tecnobytes’ MSX Ethernet cartridge

Posted by in Gadgets, Hardware, MSX, Retro, Technology | October 03, 2015

I finally got my Ethernet cartridge from Tecnobytes Classic Computers. It works like a charm on my FS-A1GT with the Internestor Lite TCP/IP stack and related network utilities.

Tecnobytes' MSX Ethernet on the FS-A1GT (click to enlarge)

Tecnobytes’ MSX Ethernet on the FS-A1GT (click to enlarge)

The cartridge is very well built. It has a single Ethernet port mounted on the right side of the case, with two status LEDs next to it: one for power and another for link/operation.

obsonet_msx_ethernet_cartridge

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

The Ethernet controller supports only 10 mbps links, but that’s not a problem because the TCP/IP stack can only reach a theoretical 30 KB/s transfer speed tops. According to Konamiman, this is because Internestor Lite sends and receives a single 512 byte packet per interrupt, or every 1/60 of a second. In practice, during my tests the average speed I saw was about 8 KB/s when downloading a file from an FTP server.

Konamiman has developed several applications that work with his TCP/IP stack. They’re available in his home page. Among these there are:

  • An FTP client, to transfer files from servers on the Internet
  • An NTP client to synchronize the clock of your MSX with an Internet server
  • A basic telnet client
  • A text-based Twitter client
  • A Dropbox client
  • FTP and SMB servers, to share the files hosted in your MSX

Hopefully we’ll see support for this board in the openMSX emulator in order to do some development.

 

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