Martin_Head wrote:As I understand it, Apart from finding someone to write the network stuff for Q68, your big problem is that TCP would be too much overhead for the Q68's processor to handle.
When it comes to full TCP/IP, I'm not really looking for someone else to do the job. QLwIP seems the most realistic (and probably only) native solution anyway. The likelyhood that someone else would ever get as far as QLwIP, seems low. Also, I see no other person pioneering native hardware drivers anyway, and I have functioning ethernet code for both Q40/Q60 and Q68. I think I will slowly keep working on QLwIP, as a background task, while I'm not on hardware projects.
The idea of "QLNET over ethernet" was something I saw as a possible shortcut, so people don't have to wait for QLwIP. With the added benefit of being very efficient. One idea was this: I would isolate the (basically working) CP2200 ethernet driver routines I already wrote for QLwIP, so they can be used "standalone", and someone else familiar with QLNET (like Martyn) would replace the lower level of the QLNET driver with my routines. It could simply be implemented with raw ethernet packets first, already allowing LAN connections between native machines. In a second step, I would try to "fake" UDP, so the packets could also be seen by emulators, or pass internet routers. This simplified UDP implementaion would have some restrictions, but I'm optimistic it would practically work.
When discussing this, it appeared that your driver (if it used UDP) might be a better starting point for "QLNET over ethernet" than the current "QLNET" driver for the Q68. (I mean a variant of your driver running natively on the Q68).
I wouldn't say TCP is
too much overhead for the Q68, as I did not yet sufficiently debug the speed issues, and there is room for improvement. But it is certainly
much overhead for a 68000-like core. And in case of "QLNET over ethernet" a very
unnecessary overhead that has no benefit.
Martin_Head wrote:Now, I would expect that most people, who would want to us my IP Network driver and Q68, would be trying to use something like QPC2, or SMSQEmulator as well. So this Router program could sit on the PC ( or one of the PC's on the network) and all the data packets to or from Q68 could go through it. I have already written a C# version of this program, so a modified form could just run as a background job on one of the PC's on the network.
Do I understand correctly, that such a router program would be a requirement to get communication work at all?
For me personally, every approach that
requires a PC, Raspi or emulator is too restrictive to be interesting. Direct communication between several Q68 (or other native machines with ethernet) should also work.
The idea was to maybe to run (an adapted version of) your driver natively on the Q68 to achive "QLNET over ethernet". At the moment I do not see how that idea could work if it still depends on TCP. But maybe I misunderstand.