What is FujiNet?

What is FujiNet?

FujiNet is an under-development device for Atari 8-bit computers (400, 800, XL and XE series, and XEGS) which connects to the SIO (peripheral) port of the Atari (or another peripheral connected to the SIO bus, via daisy-chaining) and makes available to the Atari a number of devices.

It currently (as of Rev3, December 2019) consists of an NodeMCU 1.0 device attached to an interface board which electrically attaches the NodeMCU to the SIO bus and provides the needed SIO connectors.

In some cases, these devices simulate real Atari peripherals, such as floppy disk drives (D: devices), RS232 and modem interfaces (R: devices), and more.

Utilizing the device's Wi-Fi networking capabilities, it's possible to connect to other devices on a local network or Internet, e.g. Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) or other systems over Telnet, or even mounting floppy disk images from the "cloud".

What Does it provide?

Note: This project is under heavy development. This list is as of December 2019:

Current functionality under development

• D: disk drive
  • Virtually mount, read, and write ATR disk images over TNFS.
  • TNFS is protocol borrowed from the ZX Spectrum Spectranet community, developed by creator of the Spectranet interface, Dylan Smith.
  • It was understood that protocols like NFS and SMB were way too heavyweight to implement on 8-bit microcomputers, protocols like FTP and HTTP had way too much overhead, and protocols like TFTP and BOOTP were far too simple. So a nice medium was developed which maps the underlying filesystem in a simple, easy to implement protocol that can be used over UDP or TCP that uses a single connection.
• R: RS232 / modem
  • Via Type 1 POLL handler, to provide a virtual Wi-Fi modem.
  • Use with existing Communications programs such as Ice-T, BobTerm, AMODEM, and PLATOTERM.
• N: TCP/UDP networking, and controlling the FujiNet adapter itself (setting configuration, mounting images, etc.)
  • This will allow whole new programs to be written which can natively handle network traffic (chat clients, games, etc.)

Since devices are handled via the Atari OS's Central I/O (CIO) subsystem, practically any programming language on the Atari will be able to make use of these features network. For example, here's a simple networked program in BASIC:

10 OPEN #1,12,0,"N:HTTP://WWW.GOOGLE.COM/"
20 DIM A$(1024):TRAP 100
30 INPUT #1,A$:PRINT A$:GOTO 30
100 CLOSE #1

Possibilities

• D: disk drive, using storage local to the FujiNet device
  • Allowing the FujiNet to stand in for real floppy disk drives (Atari 810, 1050 and XF551), SIO2PC adapters (available from AtariMax and elsewhere), and stand-alone devices like SIO2SD (available from Lotharek and elsewhere), SIO2USB, and others
  • (This has been demonstrated with FujiNet Rev4 (code name "Ice Cream Sandwich") the ESP32-based version))
• C: cassette drive
  • Interesting possibilities, since an audio track can be utilized (seen here)
• P: printer
  • Print from the Atari to modern network (IPP printers
  • It might be possible for FujiNet itself to render to PDF, meaning the existing Atari software won't need to learn about modern printers
• Z: realtime clock (a la RTime8 cartridges)
  • Say, using an NTP client

On top of TLS and UDP, cryptographic protocols designed to provide communications security over computer networks, Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) respectively, are also a possibility, thanks to the computing horsepower of device powering FujiNet.

What revisions have there been?

See the Prototype-Board-Revisions page

More information

The information from the "#FujiNet - a WIP SIO Network Adapter for the Atari 8-bit" thread on the AtariAge forums should all be covered here in the wiki, and/or on the FujiNet website. For now, visit that thread for more info.