Video Games
I've been catching up on the paper issues of "Compute!'s Gazette" which have been piling up in my closet as I've been putting almost everything on hold over the past month to get acclimated to my new job-- and in one of them I found out about FujiNet. I could barely get to sleep, I was so excited.
Many years ago, I researched what it would take to get my Atari 1040ST online-- turns out it would take hours for its Motorola 68000 just to do a single SSL handshake. The first part of FujiNet is a wireless adapter which has the hardware to do all of the cryptography stuff, leaving the computer itself clear to simply send and retrieve data. Problem solved!
The second part of FujiNet is an online "service"-- I use that term loosely, because it's all one hundred percent open and Free, both on the hardware and software sides-- which lets people host and execute software directly from the web site! So you can plug one of these FujiNet devices into a, let's say, 8-bit Atari computer from the 1970s, use the device to mount disk images from the web, and then execute that software.
If you want to print something out, the device will "intercept" the printer call, generate a PDF, and upload it to the web. So far, this is already the coolest thing I've ever heard of. But here's the craziest part: it supports real-time, online gaming. For example, they wrote a "Yahtzee" game for it, and you are literally playing online, in real-time, with other human beings, on computers from 1977.
Regular readers know I have one of these coming, maybe even as early as this month. The FujiNet contributors are currently working on a Commodore 64 version of the adapter-- needless to say I am going to try to get one of those as soon as they come out. I might even be tempted to try to write a C64 multiplayer game for it in Basic, if such a thing winds up being possible-- and I very much think it will.
Many years ago, I researched what it would take to get my Atari 1040ST online-- turns out it would take hours for its Motorola 68000 just to do a single SSL handshake. The first part of FujiNet is a wireless adapter which has the hardware to do all of the cryptography stuff, leaving the computer itself clear to simply send and retrieve data. Problem solved!
The second part of FujiNet is an online "service"-- I use that term loosely, because it's all one hundred percent open and Free, both on the hardware and software sides-- which lets people host and execute software directly from the web site! So you can plug one of these FujiNet devices into a, let's say, 8-bit Atari computer from the 1970s, use the device to mount disk images from the web, and then execute that software.
If you want to print something out, the device will "intercept" the printer call, generate a PDF, and upload it to the web. So far, this is already the coolest thing I've ever heard of. But here's the craziest part: it supports real-time, online gaming. For example, they wrote a "Yahtzee" game for it, and you are literally playing online, in real-time, with other human beings, on computers from 1977.
Regular readers know I have one of these coming, maybe even as early as this month. The FujiNet contributors are currently working on a Commodore 64 version of the adapter-- needless to say I am going to try to get one of those as soon as they come out. I might even be tempted to try to write a C64 multiplayer game for it in Basic, if such a thing winds up being possible-- and I very much think it will.