Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6goTATDSLAU
FujiNet Is A Game Changer For 8-Bit Machines
Introduction
FujiNet is an open source hardware project that adds a whole raft of functionality to Atari 8-Bit machines - and others - including a virtual printer and WiFi modem, disk and tape emulation, some very impressive online functionality and more. So let’s check it out!
Script
Today I have something quite interesting to show to you - it’s called the FujiNet, and it’s an open source hardware add on for the Atari 8-Bit home computers, and indeed other machines of a similar vintage, which of course we will talk about a bit later on in the video. Now, this isn’t a new project - this has been around since 2021, and I’ve even been following along quite closely with its development, fully intending to pick one up for myself and check it out - and I’m ashamed to say that it’s taken me this long to finally get my hands on one.
Now, this thing has really, really impressed me over the past few days of playing with it, and that’s why I want to share it with you today. If perhaps you’ve heard of it but you’re not fully aware of what it’s capable of, or maybe it’s completely new to you and you just want to check out an interesting new gadget for these vintage computers.
So with all that said, I just want to say upfront that this isn’t a sponsored video - the creators of the FujiNet haven’t sent it to me for review, and indeed they have no idea that I’m even making this video. Just like I said, it has impressed me so much that I wanted to help get the word out - so with all of that out of the way, I think it’s about time we took a closer look!
…and what better place to start than with the official FujiNet website, fujinet.online. This will be linked down in the description, along with a load more information about this project if you are interested in learning a bit more about it, but as we can see, they describe themselves as “The Future of Retro Computing” - and as we’re going to find out a bit later on in this video, that is a very apt description indeed.
Now, they have an introduction to the project here, which is probably better than anything I could have come up with - so let’s just roll with this:
So “FujiNet is a multi-peripheral emulator and WiFi network device for vintage computers. The first completed hardware was for Atari 8-Bit computers and development has begun for other systems with the goal of supporting as many as possible.”
Now, just to elaborate a little bit more on that, they do use that phrase “multi-peripheral emulator” and yeah, in the case of the Atari 8-Bit computers, this thing emulates multiple devices at once - so it appears to the actual machine itself as a tape drive, as a disk drive - or indeed multiple disk drives at once - as a printer, and also a modem, and that’s made possible by the Atari 8-Bit’s fantastic SIO Connector, which I will talk about a little bit more in a second, but going back to the description:
“What sets FujiNet apart from other WiFi devices is the new Network Device (the N device, or NDEV). The N device allows vintage computers that do not have enough processing power to handle TCP/IP connections to talk to the modern internet over WiFi.” - and just to elaborate a little bit more on that point, the actual processing of the networking side of things is handled internally within the FujiNet itself, so it doesn’t put any additional load on the machine’s CPU, and of course that’s very, very useful when we’re talking about these old 8-Bit machines with these very, kind of, dare I say, primitive CPUs compared to what we’re using today, and of course the massive overhead of connecting to the modern internet.
And then, of course, they go on to mention the virtual adapters that have been created for the various different internet protocols: TCP, UDP, HTTP - you can see the list on screen now, it really does support a lot of stuff natively onboard the device itself - and here we have a photo of the Atari 8-Bit and the Apple II versions of the FujiNet - as mentioned in the intro, it does support multiple platforms, and if we scroll down a little bit further we can see that those platforms are the Atari 8-Bit, the Apple II and III, the Coleco ADAM, the Commodore IEC, or indeed the C64, so any peripherals compatible with the Commodore 64 and other related machines, and the Tandy Color Computer - the CoCo - and I’m just wondering actually, I think the Dragon32 is very closely related to the CoCo, so I’m not sure if it’s supported by the Dragon32 as well. But they are actively working on this project, there’s a lot of people contributing to it, and of course new platforms are being added all the time.
Now, I mentioned a second ago that I would talk a little bit about how the FujiNet actually interfaces with these Atari 8-Bit machines, and this is all down to Atari’s SIO, or Serial Input/Output System. It was a fantastically impressive system back in 1978 when it was first designed - of course, it launched a year later in ‘79 alongside the 400 and 800 computers, and indeed I am using an original 1979 Atari 800 to demo this in this video.
So one thing that you will notice about SIO is that there is just the single port on the machine - and that doesn’t mean that it only supports one device, of course. These devices are daisy chainable - so you’ll notice on the FujiNet there is a male port on one side and a female port on the other - and that was indeed true of most of Atari’s peripherals back in the day, because in theory, the system actually supported up to 256 devices connected to the same machine - now, in reality, you could only actually address eight of them.
I mean, I say only, that is an insane number of peripherals for 1979 - even by today’s standards, that is quite impressive - and it’s bi-directional serial, it’s supposedly hot pluggable, and if that sounds familiar, it’s probably because it sounds a bit like modern day USB - and if we check out Joe Decuir, and I’m really sorry if I’ve messed up the pronunciation on that, but that Atari engineer who actually designed this back in 1978 did indeed go on to develop the USB standard as well and actually cites the Atari SIO as an inspiration for that standard - so yeah, modern USB ports actually can trace their lineage all the way back to this Atari SIO system and I think that’s why it’s worth mentioning.
Now, of course, just before we put the FujiNet through its paces, I should point out that this is open source hardware, and that, of course, means that you can have your own fabricated if you so wish - and that’s where this channel’s sponsor comes in: PCBWay.com. You see, PCBWay has been offering PCB fabrication services for 10 years now, and also recently started offering complementary services such as 3D Printing, CNC, machining and injection molding - and indeed, if you check out their shared projects, you’ll find the FujiNet over there, so you can place your order, have it fully fabricated and even get the case 3D printed with them as well - so that’s certainly an option if you’re looking to get your hands on one of these - and of course, a big thank you to PCBWay for sponsoring this video.
So with all that said, let’s see how this thing actually works!
Okay, so just before we get this plugged in, let’s take a closer look at the actual hardware itself - and perhaps the most obvious thing is this SIO connector, of course, as previously mentioned, Atari’s proprietary interface connector - and this is nice and deep, so in systems like my 800 here, This plugs really securely into the side and you can actually leave it permanently connected and connect your other peripherals through it using the passthrough connector here.
And if you don’t want to use the FujiNet, you can switch it off - there is a power switch on the side, which I have to say is a very clever design decision on their part, it saves a bit of wear and tear on the port, plugging it in and unplugging it all the time - and just while we are on this side, you can see there is a USB port on here - in this case, this is a USB C. There are different revisions of the FujiNet, some of them are Micro USB or Mini USB or whatever, but in any case it’s there for the same purpose: you can use it for debugging, you can use it for updating the firmware, and most importantly for certain models, including my 800 here, they do recommend that you actually power this externally using this port.
Now I must admit, I didn’t actually read the manual at first and didn’t realize this so I didn’t power mine externally and it actually worked perfectly fine - I didn’t really run into any issues but as that’s what they’re recommending that is what I’m going to be doing going forwards and in this video as well.
Now, on the top we have three buttons, and they are referred to in the manual as the A and B button and the reset button, but to be honest, I haven’t really discovered anything that uses these A and B buttons, so I’ve kind of been ignoring those, but the reset button is useful to know about, and it’s just the one that’s on its own on the end here - and if we just swing it around to the side, we can see the microSD slot.
Now, all you need for this is a FAT32 formatted microSD card - you don’t need to put any software on the card or anything like that, the FujiNet itself actually handles that for you. I’m using just a really old 2GB card that I found lying around and haven’t run into any issues whatsoever It’s just used for temporary storage for the stuff that you actually download and run on the machine.
So that is the FujiNet. Let’s get this thing plugged in and booted up!
Okay, so with our FujiNet plugged into that SIO port, all we need to do is power the machine on via the switch on the side.
Yep, it makes a horrific noise when it’s booting up - I have no idea whose idea that was, but there we go - and this is the main menu, the main FujiNet menu - so we have our hosts at the top and our drive slots at the bottom, and as you can see, the top host is just called SD - and that is of course the internal SD card - that freshly formatted FAT32 microSD card - and you can drop images on there as per any other flashcart - so disk images, tape images, and it will actually load from that.
But of course, the USP with the FujiNet is this other part, this list of hosts, using that internal WiFi via an ESP32 chip. But of course, first we need to actually connect to a wireless network, and we can do that by going to the configuration by just pressing C.
So we have our nearby wireless networks here - it only took a second to find those - and using the arrow keys I’ll just go down to Ctrl-Alt-Rees of course which is mine, and press enter and then we just need to type in the password.
And, wow, yeah, literally just a second and we are connected to the WiFi. Now, I think there might be a little bit of subterfuge going on here - I have previously connected this and I think this is probably why it had this host list kind of pre-cached, but, anyway, we shall continue - and if I just go back to that config screen we can see here that we have our SSID, our IP address and gateway and everything else, so we can see that that’s all set up properly - and the reason we might want to know that IP address is because there is a web interface that we can actually use to configure the FujiNet and also check out some of its other functionality - so let’s have a quick look at that and then we’ll get back to this host list.
And this is what the configuration page looks like - so just browse to this on a modern machine, on a modern browser, I just went to the IP address, and we’ve got some quite useful information here like our IP address and everything else - of course we’ve just seen that up on screen. You can change the host name if you like for whatever reason, perhaps you have multiple FujiNet devices running.
We’ve got the hardware version and uptime, current time and date, stuff like that over here - which obviously that’s picking up from the internet somehow. We have our hosts list here, so we can actually browse these on this computer here, and we can go through and look at the various things on that host.
But we’re going to be doing that on the actual machine itself, on the Atari 800 - so I will skip that for now but easy enough to do that from an external machine if that’s what you require - and also the same for the mount list here on the right, so we can see what disk drives we have mounted.
Of course, thanks to that wonderful SIO system, we can have up to eight drives connected to this machine!
Just a bit further down, and essentially if you have any software running on here that can print, then this will actually appear to the computer as a printer, and you just print as normal, and then it will actually pop up as a PDF file here, which you can save, which is very interesting indeed.
Over on the right hand side, if you - again - if you have any software that uses a modem, that’s where you can configure this - so we have our virtual modem up and running, and we have the modem sniffer as well, and you can download the log files for that.
HSIO settings - you probably don’t need to touch this. You can just set that. I have no idea what that is, actually, to be honest…
We have the timezone on the right hand side, so if you want to configure your timezone there, but I’ll just leave that alone.
UDP stream, so for MIDI Maze, for example, if you have modern homebrew software that uses UDP to communicate, then you can configure that here.
The program recorder is quite interesting: of course, if you’re doing any programming in BASIC on the Atari 8-Bit machine, you can actually use this as if it was a standard Atari tape deck - so that 410 tape deck that we saw earlier, for example. You can just record that on here and then obviously you can upload that or save it to the SD card.
We have our CP/M settings - so a virtual CP/M device - I’m not going to touch the CP/M side of things again, because it isn’t really something that I understand.
We’ve got the PC link here as well, which obviously allows kind of sharing with your modern machine and stuff.
We’ve got the disk swap setting down here for the SAM rotation, and on the right hand side, just here at the bottom, we have just a few configuration options to do with boot settings, so how the FujiNet is actually configured when it first boots up. Probably no need to touch these unless you’re having any kind of specific problems. But anyway, back to our Atari.
So back at this main menu, which we saw a second ago, we have our host list and drive slots again - and let’s just check out one of these servers - so this is one I was looking at earlier, this fujinet.atari8bit. net - and we’ll just press Return - and this is Mr. Robot’s TNFS, of course, Trusted Network File System - and I should just add that because TNFS is just a standard and you can host your own wherever you like, you could have your own internal, in house TNFS server, couldn’t you? Hosted on a Raspberry Pi or something like that, keep all of your disk images and things on there on your own network if you wanted to go down that route.
Just an idea, anyway - so, as we can see, these are sorted into Applications, Games, and Scene - and, of course, different servers organize things in different ways depending on who’s running the server. But we’re going to check out games because that’s my main interest when it comes to these machines - and Mr. Robot here has sorted these by date for us - so we’ve got some interesting stuff here. We’ve got some BASIC 10 Liners, we’ve got some extra levels and some hacks, all sorts of interesting stuff we can check out, we’ve got some type-ins as well - Snorkers will love that. But yeah, if we go back to 1979-1999, and they’re all sorted by publisher.
So I’m just going to go to Atari - and here we have our classic Atari games. Also with the XEGS, the XE Game System games, sorted into their own little directory there. Let’s find something interesting to play…
…Ah, Pac-Man! Excellent version of Pac-Man, this, on the Atari 8-Bit, so let’s go with that. As you can see, these are all XEX files, and the FujiNet does indeed support a few different file formats - XEX and ATR and kind of all of the usual suspects, if you are familiar with flashcarts and things on these machines.
So I will just press Return because as you can see down here it says “Return: Choose” - so I’ll just pick that and it’s asking which drive slot we want to mount this image in so we’ll just pick the first one, press return, and it’s asking us whether it wants it to be read only or read write - so I’m going to go with read only I think.
…and that has now mounted it in the first drive slot but it doesn’t automatically boot to it - so you’ll see at the bottom here we have an option that says Option and Boot, and that of course corresponds to the physical option key on the actual machine itself - so if we just hold that down for a couple of seconds…
…it reboots, and we’re straight into Pac-Man!
Oh, I think it’s still loading. Of course, this device is- there we go - it’s actually emulating a tape deck or a disk drive, of course, so the games do take a few seconds to load as they would do on the original hardware, but this looks like it’s fully loaded now, so Select for a two player game, Option to change difficulty, or just press Start to play a game.
[Pac-Man noises intensify]
Well, there we go - now, if you’re a regular viewer of this channel you’ll no doubt be aware that I am terrible at games, but it proves that the system works so let’s go back to the menu and see what else we can find.
Okay, so let’s see what’s on the official fujinet.online server here - so we’ll go to the Atari section…
…Interesting - perhaps we can try out this printing functionality? Yeah, we’ll go for AtariWriter, that sounds simple enough.
We want that as read only…
Hold down Option again…
AtariWriter! Wow, look at that title screen, that’s quite cool - so “Print File” - are there any files? No files. Okay, so we need to create one - so we’ll go to C and we’ll just do a simple…
…hello world.
Right, Escape to return to menu, and hopefully that means we can now print this.
Right, and we are configured to use the Atari 1025, just because it’s the first one on the list - you can change the type of printer in the web interface as shown before, and if I just press 1, hopefully…
“Print whole document?”
Yes.
“Number of copies”, just the one please - and now back over on our modern system, we have the printer here, so if I just click on “Download your current printout” - is this going to work?
Looks like it is!
Hello world! Wow! So yeah, it’s that simple, the printer emulation on the FujiNet. I have zero experience of printing from these Atari 8-Bit machines, and even I managed to work it out in a matter of seconds, so that is actually really, really cool.
So one more thing that I wanted to try out on the FujiNet was this lobby functionality down in the right hand corner - you can see you can press L for lobby - I was playing with this the other day and it’s quite interesting, so we have “Boot Lobby?” - and we’ll just say yes to that.
“Booting Lobby” - and it just reboots on its own - and this takes us to the FujiNet Game Lobby - this is so cool - so we’ll enter my name. Which, of course, is Rees. You should probably know that.
“Refreshing Server List” - and, oh, there’s nobody online!
Oh well, anyway - so yeah, you can play online against other players, of course this is something that they are working on and expanding all the time, but at the moment we have two different games on here - so we have Five Card Stud and we have Fujitzee. Now, I kind of vaguely know how to play Five Card Stud, I was playing with this the other day, so let’s just play against a couple of bots here.
So “Pick a server and hold option to boot game” - so if we pick that server and hold Option.
“Mounting” oh, I see - so this is actually in the form of a disk image - and that reboots…
…and we are now booted into FujiNet Five Card Stud - so we have to enter our name again here.
“Welcome Rees”.
“How to play Five Card Stud.”
“Players are dealt five cards over the course of four rounds. On each round, players bet, call, and re-raise” - and of course, we’ve got fold, check, bet, or raise, and call - so, just go in to press any key, connect to server.
“You sit down at the table.”
That did amuse me the first time I saw it - I thought this was going to be like a text adventure kind of card game, but it is fully graphical, and we do have computer players as well.
So what do we have? We have a Jack of Spades and a King of Diamonds here… let’s just call.
Oh no!
This is what happens when you’re dealing with 1970s technology! Let’s not do that again. I guess we’re gonna bet five…
I genuinely have no idea what I’m doing here.
Eugh, so interesting looking hand - I don’t think we really have anything at all there, do we!?
“Rees won! King high!” Oh my goodness!
There you go, I’ve won with a king!?
Now this is well worth checking out if you have a FujiNet - these are actually modern applications which have been specifically developed for this platform - I guess similar to that lobby and that card game that we just saw, but these are more of those applications actually developed by the FujiNet team and they are hosted on fujinet.online and there’s some quite interesting names here as you can see - there’s a weather app and a wikipedia app, there’s election stuff - it’s probably best if we don’t look at that.
YAIL.XEX?
So let’s check out this weather app here - so we’ll just press Return…
…and then we’ll mount that in that first slot and see if we can boot into that.
“FujiNet Open Weather Client. Initializing options, loading theme, press start to show forecast.”
Ah! Haha, look at that! Chesterfield, Great Britain - I wonder where that is? Is that near me!? That’s probably near me. It’s probably used some kind of IP geolocation - so we’ll go with that. It’s 42.9 degrees Fahrenheit, I don’t know what that means, we’ve got the air pressure here, we’ve got the date and the time, we’ve got wind speed and sunrise and sunset times. That’s really cool! So you can leave that running up on screen and you can see what the weather’s like in your local area! What a cool little application that- can we actually get back to that main menu?
Ooh, we can change the units!
What did I do? Did I press that twice? Units.
That’s probably me doing something wrong. But anyway, that’s the current temperature - 42.9 degrees F in freedom units - I’ll put the actual temperature up on screen somewhere here.
Right, there was one more of these apps that I wanted to check out - something that I just spotted on that list, so let’s go back to this. We’ll go to the FujiNet apps. Of course there’s so much more on here to explore and that’s exactly what I’m going to be doing over the coming days. But yeah, Wikipedia, I mean, Wikipedia on your Atari 8-Bit computer? Let’s get that loaded.
Read only … and Option to reboot.
“FujiNet Wikipedia Article Viewer” - Wikipedia on a machine of this age? I mean, Let’s go for “Atari”, Let’s see if we can find any articles relating to Atari.
“Enter ID.” I see, so we’ve got the name of the article here, and I guess the number next to it is the ID - so, let’s go for the main Atari article: 2234.
“Atari is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French holding company Atari SA, formerly Infogrames, and its focus is on video games, consumer hardware, licensing and blockchain.” - so there you go, you can browse Wikipedia on your Atari 800 from 1979 - and if that’s not impressive, I don’t know what is!
And there we have it - the FujiNet. A very impressive piece of hardware indeed for these old 8-Bit Atari machines, and I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get around to checking it out, but I am very glad that I did - and I hope this video has been useful and informative to you as well.
Now, if this has whetted your appetite for the FujiNet, there are some links down in the description to various guides and retailers, and of course all the bits and pieces that you need to be able to get one fabricated yourself if you want to go down that route. But that’s all I have for you for this video, so thank you ever so much to my supporters over on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and indeed my YouTube channel members as well.
They get videos a little bit early and also ad-free - and all that’s left for this one is to say a big thank you to you for watching, and hopefully I’ll see you in the next one.
Original Video Links
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Episode Links:
Official Website: https://fujinet.online
Official GitHub: https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI
Official Vendor List: https://fujinet.online/purchase
Joe Decuir image credit: https://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_joe_decuir.html
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