In a recent video, [Chris Edwards] delves into the past, showing how he turned a Commodore Amiga 3000T into a wireless-capable machine. But forget modern Wi-Fi dongles—this hack involves an old-school D-Link DWL-G810 wireless Ethernet bridge. You can see the Amiga in action in the video below.
[Chris] has a quirky approach to retrofitting. He connects an Ethernet adapter to his Amiga, bridges it to the D-Link, and sets up an open Wi-Fi network—complete with a retro 11 Mbps speed. Then again, the old wired connection was usually 10 Mbps in the old days.
To make it work, he even revived an old Apple AirPort Extreme as a supporting router since the old bridge didn’t support modern security protocols. Ultimately, the Amiga gets online wirelessly, albeit at a leisurely pace compared to today’s standards. He later demonstrates an upgraded bridge that lets him connect to his normal network.
We’ve used these wireless bridges to put oscilloscopes and similar things on wireless, but newer equipment usually requires less work even if it doesn’t already have wireless. We’ve also seen our share of strange wireless setups like this one. If you are going to put your Amgia on old-school networking, you might as well get Java running, too.
You can do the same with OpenWRT on a $4 Linksys router from Goodwill. And it will support proper WPA2 so you don’t need a necro router on the other end.
Of course one of those little pocket travel routers for $10-20 will run off of 5v, so you could make a Molex to “usb” power jack for it to occupy one of the I/O panels in the rear of the machine. Would be fairly elegant. (OFC you could internal a whole TPLink 5 port with the kind of space on offer as well.)
Good guide, takes me back, WiFi B, G, and N. Crazy we have 7 and 6ghz now. Not that I’ve used it yet.
The Amiga 3000 is the ultimate 32 bit computer that can still run modern software today. The A3000T, even more so, with tons of room for expansion and for drives :)
I am a fan of recycling and using what I already have, so while I wouldn’t choose what Chris used, if I had it lying around I might.
Since many of my networks still use 802.11ac Airport Extremes, any Airport from around 2008 or later can be used to connect to an Airport wifi network and act as a bridge to ethernet.
GL.iNet makes good, inexpensive devices that can connect to any wifi network as a client and bridge to ethernet, and these are better than some of the cheap ones like Netgear and TP-Link that have issues with dropping packets and stalling.
Just curious (seriously), what kind of software are you referring to when you wrote: “…that can still run modern software today”?
The OS has been updated in the last few years, for starters, and there’s software for modern TLS, for ssh, for email, web browsers, et cetera.
I feel like this would be better framed as interesting how old devices can still interact/interface with modern devices instead of focusing on the wireless bridging.
Wireless bridging is rather old at this point and incredibly easy to set up. At probably the lowest effort there is hooking something into the Ethernet port of a laptop and just clicking a few buttons on Windows. IIRC you can do the same with many Android phones and a USB Ethernet adapter.
What’s interesting isn’t bridging its more interesting how it might still work with modern equipment and software.
10 Mb/s? Luxury! When I were a lad, I used the TRS-80 Network III networking at all of 1500 baud (and somewhat fewer actual bits per second once encoding and framing were taken into account, though I don’t recall the details). Though to be honest it wasn’t long before I was enjoying blisteringly fast 4 Mb/s Token Ring (which was upgraded to 16 Mb/s after a few years) and 10 Mb/s Ethernet (10Base5, 10Base2, and 10BaseT, in succession).
When compared to dialup or hard-wired async (or sync, with some IBM equipment), including bonded ISDN, or 56 Kb/s dedicated digital links, all of which I used extensively Back In The Day, 10 Mb/s was gloriously fast. There were times when I was running X11 clients from a remote machine to my local server over a dialup SLIP link. That was slow.
Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a cloud I need to yell at.
(Wish I’d had an Amiga, but when they came out I was already in the industry and had Responsibilities, and it was an indulgence I couldn’t justify.)
I ran once X client from two floppies to X server on Monkey Linux. Some junk hardware that was donated to me. All that over null serial cable probably on 56kbits. It was slow but the magic that was happening in front of my eyes … good times.
you could also use one of these setup in wireless client mode
https://mikrotik.com/product/RBmAPL-2nD
works on anything with an ethernet port
This guy is great at saving these computers. I sent him one a long time ago and he repaired it for totally free. Just to “see it live on” Shipping and all! Man This dude is great. I love his funny sense of humor. and the way he names his tools. I heard that Mona is his wife in real life and that “sound” was from a performance from long ago. which makes me love this channel even more.