#FujiNet for the NES, wanna help?

Discuss hardware-related topics, such as development cartridges, CopyNES, PowerPak, EPROMs, or whatever.

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tschak909
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#FujiNet for the NES, wanna help?

Post by tschak909 »

Hey guys,

You may know me from other projects. I am the primary firmware engineer and spokesperson for the FujiNet project, which aims to bring a comprehensive network adapter to every single available retrocomputing and retrogaming system, each with similar capabilities and programming models.

For the video game systems, this would essentially boil down to:

[*] Being able to load any game from either local storage or the network
[*] Being able to interact with Internet services and/or other game players, even on different platforms due to common protocols of all shapes and sizes.

To this end, we've made a very comprehensive code-base that is extremely modular, and split across bus, device, and media lines, all interoperating with each other.

The fundamental issue that is being worked on at the moment, is to create a generic 8-bit bus interface that could easily be adapted to either computers with bus interfaces (ZX Spectrum, IBM ISA, etc.) and video game console cartridge slots. To this end, there are currently two approaches being investigated:

[*] The developer for the NEC PC-8801 is investigating an SPI to 74HCT595 interface.
[*] The ZX Spectrum developers are trying to do it with a minimum of TTL logic.

And I'm reasonably sure that some people here may have another approach that might work, and should be investigated.

One of the big wins with our code-base is the network protocol adapters that are a part of the network sub-device, which abstract complex protocol interactions for a variety of protocols (TCP, UDP, HTTP/S, SSH, SMB, TNFS, FTP, and others.), and provides a nice clean I/O channel that can be read by the target system at its leisure. Combine that with complete TLS support and on-board XML and JSON parsers, and you have everything needed to talk to modern web APIs and other complex systems, and to be able to do things like store data from native development tools somewhere else. :)

Would you like to help? Come by the Discord. https://discord.gg/7MfFTvD
tschak909
Posts: 142
Joined: Mon Jul 03, 2017 4:37 pm
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Re: #FujiNet for the NES, wanna help?

Post by tschak909 »

For example, we made a version of FujiNet for the Atari Lynx, that connects via the ComLynx port.

We were able to tunnel ComLynx traffic over UDP:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2jKz0cyvaU

Another example, is the ISS Tracker, which uses the network adapter, which has a full JSON parser, to connect to an HTTPS endpoint, and get coordinates for the International Space Station, and display them on a map:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFbuI240O6g

Finally, this is using a flash card's non violatile memory to stream a game in from a cloud server:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7oudLJqHNM
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Individualised
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Re: #FujiNet for the NES, wanna help?

Post by Individualised »

I can't help sadly but from the sound of it this is very similar to an idea I had, even down to cross platform play and being able to load games from network storage. Really cool that someone is trying to make something similar materialise!
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