--- Gary Hildebrand <ghldbrd_at_ccp.com> wrote:
> Happened to notice they are 10Base2 (BNC connector and AUI interface
> (DB15). According to what little I've found on the web, there is an
> adapter available that goes from the AUI DB15 to 10BaseT, so I can test
> these out through a hub.
Yes. An ordinary 10BaseT transceiver. Nothing magical (thankfully).
> Any comments?
I have a couple. If you haven't used one before, you'll need a TCP/IP
stack and a semi-modern version of AmigaOS (2.0x or higher, IIRC). Don't
forget to check the state of the jumpers up by the BNC - it's how you
select AUI vs Thinnet.
The two flavors of drivers are "SANA-2" (Standard Amiga Networking
Architecture v2) and "MNI" (Miami? Network? I??) - a more efficient
(but proprietary to Holger Kruse's Miami stack) driver standard (less
buffer copying, among other things).
There are SANA-2 and MNI drivers for the A2065 and for my GG2 Bus+,
among other network cards. The A2065 is unremarkable, but it _is_
the gold standard for Amiga networking cards. As you already know,
they aren't cheap. I did a brisk business selling a $135 ISA adapater
to which you added a $25 (at the time) ISA NIC, in large part because
I _had_ stock (still do ;-). You couldn't get a used A2065 for under
$200 a few years ago, let alone new. So few were made that several new
designs came out years after Commodore went away - there was that much
demand. These days, there are several possibilities for network cards
that we just didn't have back then. OTOH, the A2065 card is _the_
card to have to run AMIX (*BSD supports it _and_ the GG2 Bus+)
If you have never used an Ethernet card with an Amiga, it's a great
experience. It add lots of life to the old girl. There's AWeb and
AMosaic for browsers (don't know what the current offerings are), NFS
clients (NFS server packages are rare and typically not freeware), FTP
servers and clients, telnet, Samba, all the usual stuff you'd expect.
Networking software is an add-on for most versions of AmigaOS. Packages
include Miami, AmiTCP and AS225. There's also Envoy, a Commodore-produced
AmigaOS peer-to-peer stack for printer and disk sharing. I have several
original copies left from when I used to bundle them with GG2 Bus+
boards, if anyone is interested. It's only useful if you have multiple
Amigas on the network, being a proprietary stack, but it's efficient
for native-mode sharing.
Good find. It's the most compatible, best supported network card for
the Amiga. You can't go wrong.
-ethan
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Received on Thu Apr 11 2002 - 09:40:07 BST