Thursday, April 21, 2016

NetUSBee configuration for Atari ST

NetUSBee is a network card for 16-bit Atari computers, which is compatible with modern ethernet devices. To make it work under plain TOS you need Sting drivers; you can find those drivers, as well as the installation manual, here.
Unfortunately, the manual covers only peer to peer connection, and it's not enough when you want to connect your computer to the Internet. Two importand pieces missing are gateway and DNS configuration.

Gateway, as the name suggests, is a network device which passes traffic from your host to the Internet, and vice versa. If you configure an Atari and a PC as specified in the manual, the Atari will have an IP address 192.168.255.1, and the PC's IP address will be 192.168.255.2. If you enable Internet connection sharing in the PC, it will become a gateway for the Atari, and the Sting drivers must be properly configured for it.
To do this, run a text editor (I strongly recommend Everest for this purpose), open file C:\STING\ROUTE.TAB and scroll to the end. You will see the following lines:
192.168.255.2   255.255.255.0   EtherNet        192.168.255.1
0.0.0.0         0.0.0.0         Modem 1         0.0.0.0
This is so called routing table; it tells the host which gateway it should use when communicating with a specific network. Because the entries above make no sense for NetUSBee configuration described in the manual, you should remove them. Instead, replace them with the following entry:
0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 EtherNet 192.168.255.2
This defines so called "default gateway". What it says is that for any IP address ("0.0.0.0" means "any") in any subnetwork (again: "0.0.0.0") the traffic should be passed through the computer connected to the ethernet interface, with IP address "192.168.255.2" (it's the PC's address).
Now very important note: you should use tabs to separate the column entries, so the line would be typed in like this:
0.0.0.0<TAB>0.0.0.0<TAB>EtherNet<TAB>192.168.255.2
If you use spaces, it will not work, and some editors silently replace tabs with spaces - this is why I recommend Everest (but QED will work as well).

Second thing you need to set up is a Domain Name Server configuration. DNS is a service used to translate human readable names into IP addresses - when you type in "blogspot.com" in your browser, it will contact a DNS server first, to ask what IP number hides behind it.
To configure DNS in Sting, open C:\STING\DEFAULT.CFG in text editor, find the line which says:
NAMESERVER  =
and enter your Internet provider's DNS addresses. If you don't know what they are, you can use Google's:
NAMESERVER  = 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4
Save modified DEFAULT.TAB and ROUTER.TAB files and restart the computer. If you configured Internet Connection Sharing properly in the PC, you will be able to use various Internet applications on your Atari.

No comments: