MacPPP via serial port on PCE Macintosh Plus
Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2017 3:01 pm
Hi,
I am trying out the pce-macplus emulator (http://www.hampa.ch/pce/pce-macplus.html) by compiling the source and run it on Ubuntu 15.04! It is great, emulates many more features than Mini vMac, and is able to run System 6, which Basilisk (another 68k emulator) cannot support.
However, I currently have some issues with the serial port emulation. I use pce-macplus the Macintosh Plus ROM to run System 6.0.8. When using ZTerm together with minicom on Ubuntu to send/receive files via ZModem, the serial port works fine at 19200bps or even 38400bps and files are sent/received correctly. But when I use MacPPP to connect to the Internet (via a PPP server running with pppd on another machine connected through a null-modem cable), things do not work properly. The symptom is that, once MacPPP starts to send out PPP handshaking packet and the server acknowledges with a reply, the incoming channel of the serial port would lock up and MacPPP will no longer be able to communicate with the server, resulting in a “Link Dead” error message. MacPPP statistics dialog also shows 0 “in octets” and 0 “in packets”, but a lot of outgoing octets/packets, which means that data are not received properly. Even after I quit MacPPP, the serial port will no longer be able to receive any data, but can still send out data in ZTerm. The problem will persist even after the Macintosh Plus is rebooted. To recover the serial port functionality, I would need to close the pce-macplus application and run it again!
The issue is not with MacPPP alone because when MacPPP is running with no PPP server on the serial port, but with some process running on the other computer sending random data to the serial port, the port does not get locked up and MacPPP statistics page will show some incoming octets are received. So I guess it is a combination of data being sent/received on the port at the right time causing the issue. The issue happens both on the modem port and the printer port, with various baudrate settings (I tried as low as 9600bps), and with or without handshaking.
Does anyone have any idea how to fix the issue? Maybe some serial buffer overflow or something?
My ultimate goal is to get the Internet (MacWWW, Eurdora email, NNTP news reader, Gopher, FTP, telnet, etc.) up and running on System 6 through the pce-macplus emulator. I got a physical Macintosh SE here with Internet access working (via the serial port connected to a Raspberry Pi running pppd on ubuntu 15), but it will be good to have the same setup running on the emulator just for fun
If anyone has any ideas, let me know. Thanks.
I am trying out the pce-macplus emulator (http://www.hampa.ch/pce/pce-macplus.html) by compiling the source and run it on Ubuntu 15.04! It is great, emulates many more features than Mini vMac, and is able to run System 6, which Basilisk (another 68k emulator) cannot support.
However, I currently have some issues with the serial port emulation. I use pce-macplus the Macintosh Plus ROM to run System 6.0.8. When using ZTerm together with minicom on Ubuntu to send/receive files via ZModem, the serial port works fine at 19200bps or even 38400bps and files are sent/received correctly. But when I use MacPPP to connect to the Internet (via a PPP server running with pppd on another machine connected through a null-modem cable), things do not work properly. The symptom is that, once MacPPP starts to send out PPP handshaking packet and the server acknowledges with a reply, the incoming channel of the serial port would lock up and MacPPP will no longer be able to communicate with the server, resulting in a “Link Dead” error message. MacPPP statistics dialog also shows 0 “in octets” and 0 “in packets”, but a lot of outgoing octets/packets, which means that data are not received properly. Even after I quit MacPPP, the serial port will no longer be able to receive any data, but can still send out data in ZTerm. The problem will persist even after the Macintosh Plus is rebooted. To recover the serial port functionality, I would need to close the pce-macplus application and run it again!
The issue is not with MacPPP alone because when MacPPP is running with no PPP server on the serial port, but with some process running on the other computer sending random data to the serial port, the port does not get locked up and MacPPP statistics page will show some incoming octets are received. So I guess it is a combination of data being sent/received on the port at the right time causing the issue. The issue happens both on the modem port and the printer port, with various baudrate settings (I tried as low as 9600bps), and with or without handshaking.
Does anyone have any idea how to fix the issue? Maybe some serial buffer overflow or something?
My ultimate goal is to get the Internet (MacWWW, Eurdora email, NNTP news reader, Gopher, FTP, telnet, etc.) up and running on System 6 through the pce-macplus emulator. I got a physical Macintosh SE here with Internet access working (via the serial port connected to a Raspberry Pi running pppd on ubuntu 15), but it will be good to have the same setup running on the emulator just for fun
If anyone has any ideas, let me know. Thanks.