Tecnobytes’ MSX Ethernet cartridge
Posted by Javi Lavandeira in Gadgets, Hardware, MSX, Retro, Technology | October 03, 2015I 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)
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.
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.