The possibility of connecting the Commodore 64 to an Ethernet local
area network has been a collective dream in the Commodore community
for decades. A C64 Ethernet adapter would make it possible to connect
the C64 directly to the Internet, making it possible to download
software, transfer data to and from the C64, play network games over
the Internet; the possibilities are endless.
With our TFE cartridge (The Final Ethernet cartridge) this is now possible.
The TFE cartridge is designed around Systor Vest AS' CS8900a-based Embedded Ethernet board. The board is mounted on a circuit board which contains a single 74LS139 chip that constitutes the glue logic between the C64 and the Ethernet chip. More information including the full schematics and pictures of the hardware can be found here.
The C64 real-time streaming audio server is an example of the kind of abilities that Ethernet brings to the C64. We have connected an unexpanded Commodore 64 equipped with our TFE cartridge and a standard Datasette player to the Internet. The Commodore 64 runs a web server and a real-time streaming audio server. The audio server is streaming real-time Internet streaming audio sampled from the casette in the Datasette player. The audio is sampled in 2000 Hz using the 1-bit built-in casette sampler of the C64. More information including the full source code for the web- and real-time streaming audio server can be found here.
The hardware was designed and realized by Peter Eliasson <petere@lsil.com>. The software was written by Adam Dunkels <adam@dunkels.com>.
The idea of building an Ethernet adapter for the C64 was concieved by Peter numerous years ago, but it was not until recently that we had the necessary competence to actually build the hardware and write the software for this project. With Adam's uIP TCP/IP stack, we now had what we needed for completing the TFE project.
Over one of the many lunches where TFE has been discussed and planned, Peter mentioned that it would be cool to, in addition to serve web pages, be able to play streaming audio from the C64. Although that sounded quite unlikely at first, it turns out that it indeed was possible to both serve web pages and run a real-time streaming audio server.
$Date: 2002/10/17 19:25:07 $