Hi all, I have a quick question, that for the last year my research on has had me like a dog, chasing my tail. So if someone on here, or on the rest of the World Wide What has already done it, please link me the page.
The concept I am trying to figure out is a Pi Modem emulator, that can also pre-render and buffer the web page for the retro computer, so that way the retro machine can view and interact with the modern web, all be it very slowly I gather. That the retro machine acts like it is in terminal mode when connected to the Pi when web browsing. That the Pi does all the heavy lifting for web browsing, rendering the web pages and reformating them into a format that the machine connected can understand, that is if possible.
I do not know if my question is making sense, or what I am trying to do. So if you do not understand what I am saying, please ask, sadly English is not my best language.
I’m looking for a way to set up a proxy system that is seen as a modem for older machines, allowing for logging into BBS’s, but more so, can allow for the older machines to brows the web via a pre-rendering proxy server. That the server would handle the web browsing, and convert the graphical information into something the older machines can understand.Thus the older machines would be connecting to this proxy like a terminal, or as a server, but through the Serial connection for the oldest systems, or through Ethernet for the systems that can support it. For the systems over serial, they would see it as a modem.
In my collection is an Amiga 1000, Atari MEGA STe, MSX Turbo R, X68030, 286, 386, Pentium Overdrive, Commodore 128D, Mac 512, etc. to name a few.
Besides a, “This was cool to do”, i don’t think you will find something that is turn key as there is a lot of work for little use in the real world.
Wendel did something where he hosted a BBS by using an RPi and placing it into a modem housing. Then the machine would serial into the Modem to connect to the Pi internally hosted BBS.
Converting modern pages to something the old machines will understand basically would require you to create your own browser as you will need to deal with the DOM and AJAX, and other web technologies and convert them into text?!
Not saying that it can’t be done but that is very niche and you may be the one to start the work.
It has been a while since I watched it but I did see this some time ago. Connecting a C64 to the internet. Maybe not exactly what you are looking for but might start you off down a helpful rabbit hole.
If you just want to get online via a text interface using your 8-bit computer as a terminal, one of the easiest things you can do is simply rig up a serial cable that is adapted to work with your particular 8-bit computer and hooked to the Pi’s serial port GPIO. Then on the raspberry pi, you can telnet or SSH to your heart’s content to BBS’s that are available in this way. If you want HTML based web browsing, you can install some variant of lynx or links which are text based web browsers.
There won’t be any graphics, they rarely support advanced things like javascript, CSS or HTML 5 so you list of compatible/usable websites may be rather limited, but can be an interesting way to browse the web.
