Setup a Constant Internet Connection For MiSTer?

[mist-rich]

especially considering that a MiSTer without internet access would probably lose most of its appeal.
My 2c

I'm still very new to the Mister and have a lot to learn but am having a blast playing through some of the old console cores - I've not managed to setup a constant internet connection to it yet and now wondering what I might be missing out on?

[AngelicLiver]

especially considering that a MiSTer without internet access would probably lose most of its appeal.
My 2c

I'm still very new to the Mister and have a lot to learn but am having a blast playing through some of the old console cores - I've not managed to setup a constant internet connection to it yet and now wondering what I might be missing out on?

Update All and the constant stream of new cores (especially coveted arcade cores) as well as BBS and internet functionality for computer cores.

[Malor]

especially considering that a MiSTer without internet access would probably lose most of its appeal.
My 2c

I'm still very new to the Mister and have a lot to learn but am having a blast playing through some of the old console cores - I've not managed to setup a constant internet connection to it yet and now wondering what I might be missing out on?

Well, accurate time if you're running cores that care about that. The RTC is a workaround. Otherwise, as AngelicLiver says, the ease of running update_all and getting new stuff, hassle-free, is pretty nice. It can also make it much easier to load new ROMs, instead of having to take the SD to a Windows machine.

I updated my comment above with a method of setting the RTC. It needs to be set once per battery.

[mist-rich]

That makes perfect sense , thank you. I'm going to update_all asap as it has been awhile.
I have the wifi dongle so should use that more (I have to set up a hotspot on my phone first though which is probs why I don't connect it often). Thinking about it, my Mister is right next to my computer so I could easily add a short network or usb cable (if tethering is possible), that way it'll always be connected. How do you connect to yours can I ask Malor?

Also, whilst on RTC subject - back in the day on a real 486 the battery was used to save/remember bios settings. Obviously the FPGA does not have physical bios chips anymore - presumably it's now the SD card where it is getting the data from?

[Malor]

It depends on how your existing Ethernet works. If your computer is plugging straight into the wall, you'll probably need to add a firewall/router to share your Internet connection; reasonable ones are typically $75 plus.

If your computer is plugging into a little box, which then connects to the wall with a different wire, then you probably already have a firewall/router. If it's close to the PC, it should have spare ports, and you can just run another cable from the Mister into one of the ports adjacent to the PC connection. Total cost: one Ethernet cable.

If the PC is far away and running a second cable is a pain, you'd add a switch. You can get perfectly cromulent 8-port network switches from Monoprice for about $25, IIRC. You'd unplug the computer Ethernet and plug it into the switch, and then use two more Ethernet cables to connect both the Mister and the computer to the switch. Voila, done. Both devices should now be able to go online, at the same time. You also need a spare power port for the switch's AC adapter.

In networking, a "switch" is a technical term that means a backbone; they're typically how you connect a bunch of systems together with Ethernet wires. You plug them all into the same switch, and they can all see and talk to each other. I won't bother with explaining any more, just don't expect a switch to have any physical switches, except maybe on/off. Same word, totally different idea.

In regard to settings, yes, that's exactly how the Mister retains data between boots. /media/fat/linux/u-boot.txt stores kernel parameters (like polling rate for joysticks), which are fed to Linux when it starts. Then Linux stores a bunch of settings under /etc/, enough to get the machine booted and launch Mister. Then Mister loads its settings from /media/fat/config. Cores store their configs there, too. Memory card and cartridge-memory saves go in /media/fat/saves/[corename], and savestates go in /media/fat/savestates/[corename]. And you probably already know that the ROMs themselves are stored in /media/fat/games/[corename]. Well, except arcade games, which are in /media/fat/games/mame/[corename].

AFAIK, the DE-10 has no equivalent to the CMOS in a PC. It has a fixed ROM that knows enough to launch u-boot, and that's it. U-boot knows how to launch Linux, and that's it. Booting is a chain from very simple to much more complex.

PCs still hold their settings with a battery, btw, just like the old 486s. Nowadays, it's a CR-2032 (the most common coin cell), and the CMOS is gigantic, but it's the exact same overall idea. CR2032s typically last about ten years, so you may not have needed to swap one.

[mist-rich]

You're a clever guy Malor , i've learned a lot from you- i owe you

I've put my Mister next to my home office computer (don't really have space in the house) it's at bottom of garden so some 50m away. I have a wireless router in house I connect to (via Wifi card in PC) but it can be a bit patchy and online games bit of a no go. I might look into a switch as I think it might have a stronger range then wifi card. Currently if I loose wifi signal I'll use mobile phone to send out a Hotspot which works ok (still not good enough for gaming though).

That makes sense

[Malor]

Ah, okay, so what you'd want to do for better stability is to run an Ethernet cable from your wireless router to the room with the PC in it, and plug it into a switch, along with one each from the Mister and the PC. By doing it that way, you can share the one long cable instead of needing to run two. You can add more devices anytime with just a short cable to the switch.

If a cable is just not going to happen, another option is to buy a decent wireless AP that has 'client bridge mode' as a feature. To your existing AP, it just looks like a laptop or something, like any other client (that's why it's called client bridge mode). The new AP just copies anything it sees back and forth between the Ethernet ports and the wireless. It looks like an extra-busy laptop, more or less. That lets you hang several devices off it, while looking like only one to the existing AP. (There's an older kind of bridging that requires configuration of the main AP, and really sucks. It's called WDS. Avoid that flavor, you want client bridge mode.)

Usually, the antennas and radios are higher quality in an AP, so that will often get you better speed than little dongles. And the Mister particularly benefits from this, because it has a dedicated gigabit to its Ethernet port, where any WiFi device you plug into the USB will be much slower, and will have to fight for bandwidth with any other USB devices. For keyboards and controllers, this doesn't matter at all, but if you're trying to do both a USB drive and USB WiFi at the same time, you'll get pretty bad performance. Running an Ethernet cable to a client bridge AP will be much faster.

Running one long cable and using a switch will give you the best overall results. Wired networking is nearly always better than wireless, if for no other reason than you don't have to worry about what your neighbors are doing. No matter what atrocities they commit with the local spectrum, an Ethernet network will be serenely unaffected.

[mist-rich]

Thanks Malor Will have a look again at running a cable out. I've now bookmarked a few wireless AP units too just in case and can definitely see the benefits (having to connect all my office gadgets to just one point directly rather then having them try to reach back to the the main AP). That would make more sense.
Will let you know how I get on

[thisisamigaspeaking]

Thanks Malor Will have a look again at running a cable out. I've now bookmarked a few wireless AP units too just in case and can definitely see the benefits (having to connect all my office gadgets to just one point directly rather then having them try to reach back to the the main AP). That would make more sense.
Will let you know how I get one

If you want a simple solution, rather than setting up a more complicated home network with separate WiFi access points, there are consumer "mesh" router systems that come ready to do this kind of thing and you could replace your entire existing infrastructure (as appropriate).

Definitely recommend getting your MiSTer networked. If you use computer cores you'll probably find it's a pain to update files if you don't have it networked. update_all also won't cover that.

[mist-rich]

I shall look into that , thank you thisisamigaspeaking

[Malor]

Thanks Malor Will have a look again at running a cable out. I've now bookmarked a few wireless AP units too just in case and can definitely see the benefits (having to connect all my office gadgets to just one point directly rather then having them try to reach back to the the main AP). That would make more sense.
Will let you know how I get one

If you want a simple solution, rather than setting up a more complicated home network with separate WiFi access points, there are consumer "mesh" router systems that come ready to do this kind of thing and you could replace your entire existing infrastructure (as appropriate).

Definitely recommend getting your MiSTer networked. If you use computer cores you'll probably find it's a pain to update files if you don't have it networked. update_all also won't cover that.

That is absolutely true, but those mesh networks tend to be pretty pricey. Finding an AP with client bridge mode and doing it yourself can be enormously cheaper. The main appeal of client bridging is that you don't have to touch the main AP at all, and only have to do a little bit of configuration on the guest AP. You're basically putting it into 'stupid mode', where it connects to the main AP, and then copies all the traffic it sees on either wireless or Ethernet to the other interface. It doesn't do anything else, just copies the traffic back and forth.

That said, a mesh network setup will generally extend your wireless signals as well, and recent good ones can use the new 6E channels as a backbone. Any traffic that hits any AP is sent to all the others over the backbone, which preserves much more of the bandwidth that clients use. But that kind of setup, at least for now, is expensive as hell... you could easily spend $800 or $1K getting that going.

[thisisamigaspeaking]

I was thinking of the entry level consumer mesh systems, which I can't personally vouch for but I think would be easy to set up and come in at around $150.

It's true, putting a WiFi router in bridge mode is an easy way to get a remote network, but I think @mist-rich said he was having trouble with signal strength, so something is going to have to be done for that.

If going with mesh, it's important to make sure it is a true mesh system, or it's not going to work right for this. mist-rich needs to cover 50m of open space, so with a 3 unit set, one could go at the location of the existing router in the house, one could go along outside wall of house nearest the garden office, and the other could go in the garden office with the best possible angle on the closest node, maybe putting the two that need to talk over 50m in windows or something.

[Malor]

If he's really at extreme range, then even a client bridge AP may not work, but they generally have better antennas and radios than the little dongles. They'll often put a good signal through where the dongles fail.

The client mesh systems will generally have the same problem at the same range. They're not magic, they're doing a roughly comparable thing with roughly the same radios, antennas, and signal loss. If client bridge gives him problems, then it's quite likely that a two-router mesh also would. He'd probably need at least three units, with one sitting in the middle, to actually improve anything.

Configuring those correctly, so that they give you both range and speed, particularly with the cheaper units that can't use the higher frequency ranges, can be very troublesome.

[thisisamigaspeaking]

Looking into wireless bridges for something I need to do, I found that there are relatively inexpensive consumer wireless bridges that may offer considerably better range than standard WiFi routers and hot spots, which might solve @mist-rich 's problems (you'd get a pair of them). They're designed precisely for connecting buildings together at a distance and that kind of thing. I didn't know there were consumer grade products like that.

[Malor]

Range-extending bridges usually work by having every AP in the cluster repeat all the traffic to all the other APs. So if you've got X bridges, your bandwidth is cut to 1/X. This is called WDS, and it's an old technology and should be avoided.

Mesh APs work much better than this, using (ideally) Ethernet as backhaul, or (less ideally) a different radio channel as backhaul, saving the user bandwidth for clients. The difference between mesh and WDS is that mesh isn't repeating the signal on the same channel and killing your throughput. It works a lot better.

A client bridge AP is very simple in comparison to either of these. It's simply setting a single router up to look like a client. It doesn't extend range, it just connects anything on its LAN ports to the wireless network. It's not being an AP, it's in stupid mode. In effect, you're using it like a WiFi adapter, just with much better antennas and radios.