[Freemint-list] slip.xif?

[David Henderson]

Good afternoon Freeminters.

First post here so apologies if this has been covered before, but my searching of the archives didn’t reveal anything. I’m a professional programmer and long-term Falcon owner who’s trying to get his old machine up and running again after almost 20 years in the cupboard.

I’ve been researching building a serial (hardware) module to replace the ageing (and pretty poorly performing) ethernec system. Looking at the specs, the SCC chip ought to be able to do a similar job speed-wise. I thought I’d do a few experiments with SLIP and PPP under MiNT, talking to a Raspberry Pi initially. 

I wasn’t having a lot of luck with MiNT 1.18.0. I’ve seen mixed instruction both to use and to not use HSmodem. Without it I can connect reliably at 9600bps but any substantial transfers bog down pretty quickly to timeout. Above it more often than not the Xaaes will stop responding although the mouse pointer continues to move. A hardware reset is the only way out of that.

Trying with HSModem (before & after MiNT in the auto folder) results in no connection at all.

I went back to try 1.16.0 with the same behaviour, so I thought I’d try the current snapshot: I get an error message about no PPP capability in the kernel and there’s not a slip.xif to be found.

Googling popped up a message from 2013 suggesting slip.xif was going to be pulled, but the wiki page seems to have been updated in January this year (this is the one that recommends HSModem) and I can see a ppp.c and slip.c amongst the source.

Can anyone let me know the current situation, please? 

1. Is slip.xif deprecated?
2. If so Is there a replacement for PPP or SLIP?
3. If not, do I simply have to compile it from source?
4. Should HSModem be used with MiNT or not?

I should say that for a few years back in the late 90s I did actually have a very solid 115k connection between Falcon and a linux box of the era working perfectly. Of course that would have been under KGMD (so probably MiNT 1.12 or similar?). My next step might have to be going back to that release to try to rule out hardware failure in the mean time.

Thanks in advance for any light you may be able to shed,

David.