Modems

Do any of the new RISC OS motherboards have modem support and to what state? Do any of the dial-up programs work such as !DialUp?

I don’t know whether there is driver for the serial port of the BB xM already available. I don#t think so if looking on the devices.

An alternative would be in theory to buy an USB to serial converter. Unfortunately it is likely that this requires an according driver. My one for FTDI based convertes only works with USBdriver V0.49. I hope to correct this soon.

Also an alternative but expensive:
Use an USB Surfstick.

Raik Fischer and myself made our first but small connections to the internet with two different surf sticks. However it is still open how stable these connections are on the distance. In general it seems that Castles good old PPP from 2001 seems to work on the BB xM but I am not entirely sure. It would be great if some could at least recompile it for ARMv7.

Perhaps also possible:
Usage of USB modems. But I am entirely in doubt how they operating. In worst case they are containing a USB serial converter chip like a FTDI (see above). In best case they are providing simply 3 USB endpoints (1 bulk in/1 bulk out and 1 interrupt). Here I have written a small emulator modul to cope with such interfaces and to pretend for PPP to be a serial port. Interfaces with two USB endpoints seems to deliver some periodic information directly into the input stream. Whithout a special driver in general you won’t have joy with them.

All a bit complicated in the moment but not entirely impossible. Even it sounds silly it depends a bit on that what you want to do with the modem. A dial tone controlled program to control a house per telephone eg. seems to be possible with a bit of luck if choosing the right components. Doing internet using PPP seems to be possible (see above) but I am not entirely sure.

It is also the question wether certain programs which shall operate on the modem are ARMv7 compatible.

In principle, DialUp32 will work provided you have the Acorn PPP driver (supplied on the Iyonix, so it is probably in the source tree), and assuming you have a suitable serial block driver for the beagle serialport. We haven’t taken a feed out from that on the ARMini to the backplate (although I guess it could be done), as we couldn’t see much use for a serial port these days (built-in networking makes it redundant for an internet perspective, really). However, I don’t know if the standard “internal32” block driver would work. I suspect there’s some chance that it will, but I wouldn’t want to make a promise, as I don’t know how jeffrey implemented the serial port in the Beagle port.

I’ll happily compile up an ARMv7 version of !DialUp32-v4 for you if needed.

Support for the serial port is half-implemented at the moment. Basically the code is there, but I haven’t tested it, and for it to work properly we’d probably want to disable all the debug output which is going through the serial port. Stopping the ROM image from using the serial port for debug output should be quite easy, but if the output that x-loader and u-boot produce causes issues then that could be a bit trickier to fix. Plus you’ve got to remember that it’s only a simple 3-wire serial port (RX, TX, ground), so if you’re trying to use it with a device which requires handshaking/flow control/etc. then you’re out of luck.