Getting an Amiga online in 2025

[patters]

Part One - Obtaining a Network Card​

The first challenge is finding a NIC without paying way over the odds. Most sellers have discovered they can scalp Amiga owners for £50 for a compatible PCMCIA NIC.

I ruled out wireless network cards on the basis that none of the Amiga compatible ones will have 802.11n radios, and that WPA2 encryption in software, although recently added to the prism2 driver, will be unusable on unaccelerated machines. Consequently for PCMCIA Amigas (A600/A1200) you're essentially going to be limited to wired Ethernet cards supported by one of two drivers:

• 3c589.device - for 10Mb 3Com 3C589 family (inc. 3C562 and 3C563 LAN + modem combo cards).
• cnet.device - for a diverse range of NE2000 compatible cards, some of which may be 10/100Mb, though it's unlikely they'll ever use that extra speed.

The former is compiled for 68000, the latter has a 68000 build (cnet.device.000).

The next big problem is that even once you've found a cheap supported 16-bit PCMCIA card, the odds are that it will be missing its dongle. One strategy is to pick a slightly bulkier card from the cnet.device compatibility list that includes a moulded RJ45 connector (e.g. a Netgear FA411 which I was lucky enough to find for around £10). Another option is to find a 3Com 3C589 card with an XJACK flip-out RJ45 connector, but these tend to be expensive (£40-50).

The proprietary dongles will be almost impossible to find, but the 3Com ones were manufactured and sold separately in sufficient numbers that you may get lucky. There are some caveats though. The dongles are not all interchangeable. Despite sharing a common card connector, the pinouts are divided into two categories: the 10Mb-only 3C589/562/563 design (single link LED), and the Fast Ethernet 10/100Mb 3C572/574/575 design (dual 10/100 link LEDs) which are not Amiga compatible cards.

I bought a cheap bare 3Com card which I suspected had an XJACK connector because the backside label featured an XJACK trademark, but it turned out to be a regular 3CCE589ET requiring a dongle. However, I was able to acquire this separately (for around another £10) by carefully searching for these part numbers below, which I gathered from many sources including auction photos. I've listed them all out here to help others...

Useful 3Com Part Numbers​

Supported 3Com XJACK PCMCIA cards (no dongle needed):

• 3CXE589DT
• 3CXE589EC

10Mb Combo Coax/RJ45 dongle for 3C589/562/563 (very bulky):

• 07-0385-000 3C-PC-COMBO-CBL

10Mb 8ft Cat5 cable for 3C589/562/563 (neatest option):

• Foxconn 07-0362-000
• Foxconn 07-0383-000

10Mb RJ45 dongle for 3C589/562/563:

• 07-0276-000 3C-PC-TP-CBL (original more angular card connector)
• Foxconn 07-0405-000 3C-PC-TPS-CBL (newer, curved card connector)
• 3rd party CPN-3C10T-SP (svideo.com, now discontinued)

10/100Mb RJ45 dongle for 3C572/574/575 (not Amiga compatible!):

• Foxconn 07-0408-000 3C-PC-TX-CBL
• Foxconn 07-0337-002
• 3rd party CPN-3C100T-SP (svideo.com, now discontinued)

This long defunct web page was a very useful source of information. It contains pinout details which will allow adventurous tinkerers to directly wire some Cat5 cable to the card, in the event you have a cheap card and can't be bothered to wait for a dongle.

Additional confusion: the Amiga requires 16-bit PCMCIA devices and there are 16-bit variants of the 3C574 (with XJACK even), but unfortunately these are not supported by the 3c589.device driver.

Additional additional confusion: Be aware that the link light on these 3C589 cards can mislead. Since I now have both Netgear and 3Com PCMCIA NICs, I noticed that the Netgear will report its link status from the moment the card is inserted and powered. The 3Com on the other hand only reports its link status via the LED when the driver successfully initialises. When I was flapping around trying to get a working TCP/IP stack (more on that in a subsequent post) I had started to suspect it might be broken, or that a 10Mb link is now so old a spec that my switch was refusing to negotiate, but this is the normal behaviour for these 3Com cards it seems.

 

[patters]

Part Two - Selecting and Configuring a TCP/IP Stack​

Let's set some expectations: an Amiga browsing the modern Web is going to be pretty horrendous. If, like me, you have an unaccelerated A600 the only real purpose of getting online is just out of curiosity, but it's also nice to be able to directly fetch stuff from Aminet. Bootstrapping if you will. With that in mind, my aim was to install the absolute minimum of software on my Workbench to achieve this.

The Candidates​

The principal Amiga TCP/IP stacks, if we ignore specialised/licensed descendants, are:

• AmiTCP - this was the first. Though it works and is fully free and open source at v3.0b2, its Installer script was never finished so you'll need to manually fix some config files by following a guide. Pre-dates the DHCP protocol.
• Miami - more intuitive, but requires Magic User Interface (MUI) and ClassAct to be installed. Formerly commercial, its author has permitted redistribution but lost the key generator. You need a registration key to overcome the trial timeout period. Guide here.
• Roadshow - a commercial modernised refactoring of AmiTCP, I gather by the same author. It costs €25, or the demo will nag and disconnect after 15 minutes.

Selection Logic​

My selection process was to try Roadshow demo which worked on a basic connectivity level (DHCP, DNS, ping) though the timeout was annoying. However I couldn't seem to connect an application, specifically an FTP client session using ncftp (illegal instruction error, I think).

I suspected that Roadshow's bsdsocket.library is not compiled for 68000 and indeed there is a mention in the version 1.15 release notes about a compact 68000 version 'available on request' presumably to paying customers, which implies that the regular version is not 68000 compatible. I already spent €50 on AmigaOS 3.2 (mainly to replace my A600's bugged Kickstart 37.299 that can't boot from IDE) so this was fast getting too expensive to justify.

I ruled out Miami owing to the additional packages I'd have to install. Amiga software, as a rule, can't easily be uninstalled if later you change your mind.

...Which left AmiTCP. This is nice and self-contained and, although it doesn't have DHCP, it works perfectly well on 68000. I followed the guide linked above, and simplified things further since I'll never use dialup.

My AmiTCP Confg​

I don't want the TCP/IP stack to run every startup, since usually I don't have the network card inserted and I usually have all 8MB of my Fast RAM expansion enabled (which blocks PCMCIA). I use the a608mcfg tool too switch to 4MB only. I'm fine with running 'startnet' from a shell, so I commented that part out. I will not host services so I don't care about inetd or login.

S:user-startup​

;BEGIN AmiTCP/IP
setenv HOSTNAME amiga.home.net
assign AmiTCP: Workbench:AmiTCP
path AmiTCP:bin add
;AmiTCP:bin/login -f amiga_user >"con:*/*/*/200/AmiTCP-IP Login/AUTO/CLOSE/WAIT"
;AmiTCP:bin/umask 022
;run >NIL: AmiTCP:bin/startnet
;END AmiTCP/IP

I also want the interface to be called eth0 to align with modern convention.

AmiTCP:bin/startnet​

run >NIL: AmiTCP:AmiTCP
WaitForPort AMITCP
; configure loop-back device
AmiTCP:bin/ifconfig lo0 localhost
; Configure Devs:Networks/cnet16.device unit 0
AmiTCP:bin/ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.205 netmask 255.255.255.0
; Add route to this host
AmiTCP:bin/route add amiga.home.net localhost
; Add route to the default gateway
AmiTCP:bin/route add default 192.168.1.254 >NIL:
Assign TCP: Exists > NIL:
IF Warn
  Mount TCP: from AmiTCP:devs/Inet-Mountlist
EndIf

I want the option of switching between my two NICs so I'll leave both definitions here, with the unused one commented out.

AmiTCP:db/interfaces​

# 3Com 3c589 PCMCIA 10Mb Ethernet card
# eth DEV=devs:networks/3c589.device
#
# Netgear FA411 PCMCIA Fast Ethernet card
eth DEV=devs:networks/cnet16.device

We Have Lift-Off! ​

I didn't at first notice that AmiTCP already includes an older version of ncftp which doesn't need the ixemul library, unlike the standalone version on Aminet. This means that a standard AmiTCP install enables all I wanted to be able to do: to use the Amiga to download its own software!

As I do with Macintosh Garden, I can use my phone to browse Aminet, and once I know the URL of the file I want, I can FTP get it using the Amiga.

I scratched around looking for 68000 builds of browsers and although a 68000 build of AWeb Lite 3.5 exists, it's reckoned to be very slow. Apparently you copy these binaries over the top of a regular install of AWeb 3.5.

I tried out the AWeb 3.2 demo instead which is leaner, compiled for 68000, and seems to run ok even without the stated requirement of ClassAct. The newer Web standards support which v3.5 offered has long since become irrelevant.

I mean it's cool to have got the browser up, but I'll probably just stick to command-line FTP transfers in future. Still, tinkering is what this hobby is all about.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

My A4000T has a Zorro Ariadne card. It's not a particularly fast card, but it works.

There is an 68K Amiga build of NetSurf you might try. It's slow even on this 68060, but it works, and you can access a lot more sites with it.