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Released Lightspan Online Connection CD

Posted: November 7th, 2017, 12:00 am
by Davide_G
The GameRaveTV has released his copy of the online connection cd on the Internet archive site!! :praise

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr4Kzzd-ZbE[/youtube]

Re: Released Lightspan Online Connection CD

Posted: November 7th, 2017, 12:52 am
by CosmoGuy
Damn, it's actually long awaited gem right here!
I'll give it a try when i get some free time.

Re: Released Lightspan Online Connection CD

Posted: November 7th, 2017, 6:54 am
by CodeAsm
coowl :D I wonde if there are easier ways to make it dialup with like a raspberrypi or something

Re: Released Lightspan Online Connection CD

Posted: November 7th, 2017, 7:38 am
by Shadow
The hardware side is easy, but it's the software side which is tricky. Lightspan is rubbish. The best solution is to honestly just code up a TCP/IP stack protocol and get something basic like IRC working. Then, work on HTTP.

Re: Released Lightspan Online Connection CD

Posted: November 7th, 2017, 10:26 am
by Someone
Such a weird gimmick, but hey, even Famicom had its own network contraption.

Re: Released Lightspan Online Connection CD

Posted: November 7th, 2017, 1:00 pm
by nocash
Interesting. Controller ID for the PS2 keyboard/mouse adaptor seems to be 96h. I haven't yet figured out how it's transferring the actual keyboard/mouse data. After the ID byte, there seems to be an 8bit "number of following bytes" entry, then followed by whatever bytes, maybe that are the keystrokes (and keyrelease) messages in whatever format...

Running in no$psx... It seems to work better with my kernel clone (hangs with original sony kernel? or maybe works only with certain version/region?).

The mouse arrow drawing (or actually: hiding) is somewhat buggy in no$psx, maybe somehow related to hires/interlace rendering.

Options can be changed when pressing start, selecting the 'key' symbol, then entering "baseball" as password. And then... in no$psx the thing seems to produce huge delays whenever entering/leaving option pages (like waiting about 60 seconds and not responding to user input until eventually showing the next options window), don't know what's wrong there.

I am wondering if it's really so difficult to get it connected to internet via some random dial-up modem. As far as I remember, the owner of the CD never got that working (or did he do so meanwhile?). I haven't used a dial-up modem for years, and don't know if/where dial-up providers are still active. And modern VOIP phone lines might make things more difficult, but maybe it would help to disable VOIP compression to get analog-style quality...

Re: Released Lightspan Online Connection CD

Posted: November 7th, 2017, 2:25 pm
by Shadow
If I recall correctly, the owner of the disc managed to get it working, but it was just to see if it was actually possible still. I remember I asked for the disc image years ago, but he never released it (until now, but I've lost interest in it).

The keyboard input has got my attention though since I've been wanting to get a keyboard working on the PSX for years, and I have some assembly code which does just that. I just never got around to making the hardware to do so since there isn't really a point in having a keyboard if you can't do anything with it, which is why I'm keen on getting some sort of TCP/IP stack protocol going so that way we can connect over ethernet to a router and perhaps get onto IRC from a PSX as a crude test point since there are heaps of open source IRC clients we can port over. An ethernet card for the parallel port would work nicely I reckon.

Really though, I'd like to get my hands on a Sony SCPH-2000 and reverse it since it's 'genuine' Sony hardware and it'd be interesting to see how they implemented it. I mean, I managed to get Linux working on the PSX, so if it can run something like Lynx, then we can get onto the web better than this Lightspan disc could.

http://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=223

Re: Released Lightspan Online Connection CD

Posted: November 7th, 2017, 8:35 pm
by CosmoGuy
Shadow wrote:... I mean, I managed to get Linux working on the PSX, so...[/url]

:praise
You mean Runix?
Wow where did you post screenshots or something :O
I've always wanted to see it in action.

Re: Released Lightspan Online Connection CD

Posted: November 7th, 2017, 10:30 pm
by CodeAsm
CosmoGuy wrote:...
Wow where did you post screenshots or something :O
...
http://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtopic.p ... 419#p13419 but lets keep this thread ontopic :P we havent got a rootfs yet (sources gone(?) and I havent been succesfull yet in getting the kernel to like my attempts at a fs.)

A browser of some sorts or IRC would be sweet tho :P my PS1 as a irc bouncer? ;)