chinny22 wrote on 2021-05-20, 16:38:

External modems are defiantly preferred but will be bottlenecked if your 486 or early Pentium only has a 8250 UART serial ports.
Internal modem bypasses this bottleneck but then you miss out on all the flashing lights which is all part of the fun IMHO

I'm using a 4DPS which is a fairly late board, so I hope it has 16550 UART ports. I think my Pentium 90 from 1995 had 16550 UART ports. I vaguely remember Wing Commander Armada detected port speed and reported it. I used to dial up to a friend's computer at his house and we played that in MP, along with Doom and some other games.

Scythifuge wrote on 2021-05-20, 22:49:

I'm using a 4DPS which is a fairly late board, so I hope it has 16550 UART ports. I think my Pentium 90 from 1995 had 16550 UART ports. I vaguely remember Wing Commander Armada detected port speed and reported it. I used to dial up to a friend's computer at his house and we played that in MP, along with Doom and some other games.

Indeed the 4DPS has 16550 ports 😀
Yeh I also remember playing Doom, C&C, Warcraft with a mate over modem. We even have a home movie where you can see me speaking to him fine tuning the AT commands we were using.
He also had a 33.6 modem but only had was 8250 ports, You worked with what you had back then.

One time I took my PC round his and they had 2 lines into the house 1 for phone and 1 for fax so we tied up both lines and played a game, I'm not even sure why as we had a null modem cable!

chinny22 wrote on 2021-05-21, 09:16:

Indeed the 4DPS has 16550 ports :) Yeh I also remember playing Doom, C&C, Warcraft with a mate over modem. We even have a home m […]
Show full quote

Scythifuge wrote on 2021-05-20, 22:49:

I'm using a 4DPS which is a fairly late board, so I hope it has 16550 UART ports. I think my Pentium 90 from 1995 had 16550 UART ports. I vaguely remember Wing Commander Armada detected port speed and reported it. I used to dial up to a friend's computer at his house and we played that in MP, along with Doom and some other games.

Indeed the 4DPS has 16550 ports 😀
Yeh I also remember playing Doom, C&C, Warcraft with a mate over modem. We even have a home movie where you can see me speaking to him fine tuning the AT commands we were using.
He also had a 33.6 modem but only had was 8250 ports, You worked with what you had back then.

One time I took my PC round his and they had 2 lines into the house 1 for phone and 1 for fax so we tied up both lines and played a game, I'm not even sure why as we had a null modem cable!

One of my friends used to bring his PC over and we would play games with a serial cable with a null modem adapter that we procured from the local Radio Shack, back when things were better (all the Radio Shack stores in my area have since closed down.) Sometimes, I would have multiple friends come over, and we would play "winners." Talking about this brings back a lot of fond memories of better times! I remember mastering the throwing of dynamite in Blood, and would chuck it from a long distance into my best friend's head, hehehe! Another friend thought he had me in a game of Warcraft, until I sent a pack of wizards to the north of his settlement and start inching towards him with those ice shard storm spells or whatever they were. He stopped playing for a little bit, hehe! While I am hoping to set up a network with a few retro PCs and get modems for them all, all of my friends form the 90's have moved all over the country, and my one friend who lives close by is a trucker and is never home. I'm going to introduce retro MP gaming to my kids and my girlfriend, but I will have to look to the internet to find other players.

I remember playing games with my friends via modem it was good times. We would play doom, quake 1&2, age of empires 1&2, C&C, Star Craft. Man those were the good days.

56k dial up internet and quakeworld consumed two years of my life..

I know 56k were the fastest on the sticker, but going forward, there does not seem much point in a "56k or nothing" approach to obtaining a modem to work with in future, whether for retro or crap hits the fan. The copper is rotting, it's not getting replaced, it's getting superseded. Even "landlines" many places are implemented as VoIP over fibre for new installs. Even if you've got copper, and your pal down in Florida has copper, if you call him long distance you're gonna be going over a VoIP trunk in between now. So that leaves 56k useful for phone lines where you know you've got copper, to call an ISP class 56k modem on the same exchange... got any very local ISPs or BBSes that have 56k modems of the type that are hardwired in? 56k P2P, consumer to consumer was never a thing. 33.6 is the fastest you ever got. Okay, I know I know, if you get a 56k it should be backwards compatible with every other standard. 33.6 may be do-able copper to copper on the same or close by exchanges. So 33.6k is the most modem you're ever likely to make use of, and line quality determines whether it can hit 33.6 or not, which is mostly going to be at shorter range than longer range... which means if you're going out of your area... and still managing to stay on copper, 28.8 is probably more like what you'd connect at, and the difference in experience between that and 33.6 is more like between 10 in the morning and noon rather than night and day.....

But you wanna connect to these cool retro BBSes that people are still or just started running, across the current telephone network that has VoIP trunks in it for longer distance. Now they might be fairly high quality VoIP trunks but in general they only have to meet the standards for Class II fax transmissions so 14.4k uncompressed line speed. And this also might be where you are if you've got a land line, even from the historic monopoly "Telephone company" and it's VoIP either at a box in your house or converted on the pole. I have heard reports that 14.4k is theoretical and the most you really rely on is 9600 🙁

Anyhoo... everything should be backward compatible to lower standards, but today now, a 56k doesn't get you much more than a 33k does, and that only in ideal non-digital line conditions, which more likely favor a 28.8, but with anything digital in the way it doesn't even beat a 14.4k. It's your money to waste on chasing the lump of hardware with the best numbers on the sticker, but if you really want to use it, don't pass up decent 14.4 to 33.6 modems for peanuts.

Also a note that line connection speed of the modem and serial port speed are not connected... you should be able to establish a 33.6k connection with a 38,400bps 16450 or 8250 uart... you just won't get much advantage from compression, or keep the pipe filled as it were... for P2P gaming, you might even want compression completely off to remove some latency... however, you can still get 4:1 compression on a 14.4 connection, so you might want to ensure you have the 16550A to use 57,600bps for best throughput. (Mostly applicable to external)

I highly doubt the state of the copper will improve after a crap hits the fan scenario, and the VoIP in between could well be dead, in which case looking to run mesh networks on WRT54Gs or other hackable routers seems much more viable.

Man I wish I could get fiber here but it'll be copper forever as it's a rather rural area with the houses fairly spread out And tons of farm land. But I will say our copper lines are in fantastic shape now. Our Mayor really turned the screws on Verizon when out state really dropped the ball. He threatened to pull there franchise agreement if they didn't fix and replace the copper and since 2016 they have done a ton of work and our land line is now crystal clear and our DSL is rock solid I can't even remember the last time we had a line drop or had to restart the modem. I would love fiber but the Pinelands commission won't allow the build out of a fiber network in fear of them killing and pine trees. But as long as they keep our copper maintained it'll be fine.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-05-21, 14:43:

I know 56k were the fastest on the sticker, but going forward, there does not seem much point in a "56k or nothing" approach to […]
Show full quote

I know 56k were the fastest on the sticker, but going forward, there does not seem much point in a "56k or nothing" approach to obtaining a modem to work with in future, whether for retro or crap hits the fan. The copper is rotting, it's not getting replaced, it's getting superseded. Even "landlines" many places are implemented as VoIP over fibre for new installs. Even if you've got copper, and your pal down in Florida has copper, if you call him long distance you're gonna be going over a VoIP trunk in between now. So that leaves 56k useful for phone lines where you know you've got copper, to call an ISP class 56k modem on the same exchange... got any very local ISPs or BBSes that have 56k modems of the type that are hardwired in? 56k P2P, consumer to consumer was never a thing. 33.6 is the fastest you ever got. Okay, I know I know, if you get a 56k it should be backwards compatible with every other standard. 33.6 may be do-able copper to copper on the same or close by exchanges. So 33.6k is the most modem you're ever likely to make use of, and line quality determines whether it can hit 33.6 or not, which is mostly going to be at shorter range than longer range... which means if you're going out of your area... and still managing to stay on copper, 28.8 is probably more like what you'd connect at, and the difference in experience between that and 33.6 is more like between 10 in the morning and noon rather than night and day.....

But you wanna connect to these cool retro BBSes that people are still or just started running, across the current telephone network that has VoIP trunks in it for longer distance. Now they might be fairly high quality VoIP trunks but in general they only have to meet the standards for Class II fax transmissions so 14.4k uncompressed line speed. And this also might be where you are if you've got a land line, even from the historic monopoly "Telephone company" and it's VoIP either at a box in your house or converted on the pole. I have heard reports that 14.4k is theoretical and the most you really rely on is 9600 🙁

Anyhoo... everything should be backward compatible to lower standards, but today now, a 56k doesn't get you much more than a 33k does, and that only in ideal non-digital line conditions, which more likely favor a 28.8, but with anything digital in the way it doesn't even beat a 14.4k. It's your money to waste on chasing the lump of hardware with the best numbers on the sticker, but if you really want to use it, don't pass up decent 14.4 to 33.6 modems for peanuts.

Also a note that line connection speed of the modem and serial port speed are not connected... you should be able to establish a 33.6k connection with a 38,400bps 16450 or 8250 uart... you just won't get much advantage from compression, or keep the pipe filled as it were... for P2P gaming, you might even want compression completely off to remove some latency... however, you can still get 4:1 compression on a 14.4 connection, so you might want to ensure you have the 16550A to use 57,600bps for best throughput. (Mostly applicable to external)

I highly doubt the state of the copper will improve after a crap hits the fan scenario, and the VoIP in between could well be dead, in which case looking to run mesh networks on WRT54Gs or other hackable routers seems much more viable.

There is logic and wisdom in your post, though part of the project is to have the "best of everything" in the builds. It is why I will eventually replace my P2b and P3 550 with something that will allow me to use a 1.4Ghz Tualatin, just to have a maxed out P3 build. I do know that DSL still exists in my area, so maybe they are maintaining the copper lines here, and that there are areas of the country that still rely on dial up in remote areas. I know that people can connect to a BBS over the internet, though part of why I want to create a dial-in capable BBS is because I miss calling them in the 90's (I remember calling a BBS with a 1200baud modem on my Commodore 64!) and I missed out on having my own BBS due to my age and lack of resources at the time. Plus, life is a constant stream of "you never know." If because of the chip shortage and economic woes, I don't for see governments and municipalities throwing their arms up in the air and saying we can't go back to the old ways of doing things just because we enjoyed better tech since then. People will need to communicate. I also envision a decentralized mech of networked BBSs (I have been looking into open source BBS software) as a haven from the current state of the internet.

Having a 56k external modem helps to ensure a "fast" connection, and the U.S. Robotics external white modem will look really cool with the all beige/white set up on my vintage PC desk. I plan on making a thread with pics of these two (or more, depending on what I can get done) retro rigs. Since I have a Gateway case and found a Gateway Tabor II board in my shed, it is looking like I may be including a recreated Gateway in the pics, once I get more drives.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-05-21, 14:59:

Man I wish I could get fiber here but it'll be copper forever as it's a rather rural area with the houses fairly spread out And tons of farm land. But I will say our copper lines are in fantastic shape now. Our Mayor really turned the screws on Verizon when out state really dropped the ball. He threatened to pull there franchise agreement if they didn't fix and replace the copper and since 2016 they have done a ton of work and our land line is now crystal clear and our DSL is rock solid I can't even remember the last time we had a line drop or had to restart the modem. I would love fiber but the Pinelands commission won't allow the build out of a fiber network in fear of them killing and pine trees. But as long as they keep our copper maintained it'll be fine.

This! Plus, I have to imagine that copper is cheaper to maintain than it is to install fiber. Though fiber everywhere would be nice... Some towns in my area have crappy copper lines, and other towns are great. I had a pizza shop for three years, and I had to switch to cable internet/phone because the landlines were terrible for people calling in orders.

Scythifuge wrote on 2021-05-21, 15:04:

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-05-21, 14:43:

I know 56k were the fastest on the sticker, but going forward, there does not seem much point in a "56k or nothing" approach to obtaining a modem to work with in future,

There is logic and wisdom in your post,

Indeed a very in depth reply, although do 56k modems really attract premiums anymore?
Just checking BIN on ebay I can get a 3Com USRobotics 56k Message Modem for £8 although is missing power pack.
But it is good point, if you find a stunning looking 28.8 or 33.6k modem I'd also probably prioritise that over its top speed, as lets face it if you actually need to do anything for real online your going to jump to what ever broadband you have.

Scythifuge wrote on 2021-05-21, 12:11:

One of my friends used to bring his PC over and we would play games with a serial cable with a null modem adapter that we procured from the local Radio Shack, back when things were better (all the Radio Shack stores in my area have since closed down.) Sometimes, I would have multiple friends come over, and we would play "winners." Talking about this brings back a lot of fond memories of better times! I remember mastering the throwing of dynamite in Blood, and would chuck it from a long distance into my best friend's head, hehehe! Another friend thought he had me in a game of Warcraft, until I sent a pack of wizards to the north of his settlement and start inching towards him with those ice shard storm spells or whatever they were. He stopped playing for a little bit, hehe! While I am hoping to set up a network with a few retro PCs and get modems for them all, all of my friends form the 90's have moved all over the country, and my one friend who lives close by is a trucker and is never home. I'm going to introduce retro MP gaming to my kids and my girlfriend, but I will have to look to the internet to find other players.

Indeed good memories, one of the last games we played over null modem was Diablo. Our "rich" friend had the game and a Pentium, That other mate had a Dx4/100 and I had a Dx2/66 and the spawn installs.
Catch was I was the only one with a PS2 mouse therefore 2 spare serial ports. This meant the slowest PC had to act as the server as well! We tried but didn't do that again and ended up getting teh hardware needed for a coax network for future game days.

Funny enough last month that mate with the DX4, my brother and I relived those days. Every Anzac day we would have a memorial C&C Lan party. This year we did it for the first time in over 15 years thanks to C&C Remastered and steam and all 3 of us living towns (or in my case country) non of us are into online gaming but it was just as much fun now as it was then even though we were all terrible

chinny22 wrote on 2021-05-21, 15:48:

Indeed a very in depth reply, although do 56k modems really attract premiums anymore? Just checking BIN on ebay I can get a 3Co […]
Show full quote

Scythifuge wrote on 2021-05-21, 15:04:

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-05-21, 14:43:

I know 56k were the fastest on the sticker, but going forward, there does not seem much point in a "56k or nothing" approach to obtaining a modem to work with in future,

There is logic and wisdom in your post,

Indeed a very in depth reply, although do 56k modems really attract premiums anymore?
Just checking BIN on ebay I can get a 3Com USRobotics 56k Message Modem for £8 although is missing power pack.
But it is good point, if you find a stunning looking 28.8 or 33.6k modem I'd also probably prioritise that over its top speed, as lets face it if you actually need to do anything for real online your going to jump to what ever broadband you have.

Scythifuge wrote on 2021-05-21, 12:11:

One of my friends used to bring his PC over and we would play games with a serial cable with a null modem adapter that we procured from the local Radio Shack, back when things were better (all the Radio Shack stores in my area have since closed down.) Sometimes, I would have multiple friends come over, and we would play "winners." Talking about this brings back a lot of fond memories of better times! I remember mastering the throwing of dynamite in Blood, and would chuck it from a long distance into my best friend's head, hehehe! Another friend thought he had me in a game of Warcraft, until I sent a pack of wizards to the north of his settlement and start inching towards him with those ice shard storm spells or whatever they were. He stopped playing for a little bit, hehe! While I am hoping to set up a network with a few retro PCs and get modems for them all, all of my friends form the 90's have moved all over the country, and my one friend who lives close by is a trucker and is never home. I'm going to introduce retro MP gaming to my kids and my girlfriend, but I will have to look to the internet to find other players.

Indeed good memories, one of the last games we played over null modem was Diablo. Our "rich" friend had the game and a Pentium, That other mate had a Dx4/100 and I had a Dx2/66 and the spawn installs.
Catch was I was the only one with a PS2 mouse therefore 2 spare serial ports. This meant the slowest PC had to act as the server as well! We tried but didn't do that again and ended up getting teh hardware needed for a coax network for future game days.

Funny enough last month that mate with the DX4, my brother and I relived those days. Every Anzac day we would have a memorial C&C Lan party. This year we did it for the first time in over 15 years thanks to C&C Remastered and steam and all 3 of us living towns (or in my case country) non of us are into online gaming but it was just as much fun now as it was then even though we were all terrible

Nice! I love the surge of retro love with games, hardware, and other projects. Many people are looking back on the older days.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-05-21, 14:59:

Man I wish I could get fiber here but it'll be copper forever as it's a rather rural area with the houses fairly spread out And tons of farm land. But I will say our copper lines are in fantastic shape now. Our Mayor really turned the screws on Verizon when out state really dropped the ball. He threatened to pull there franchise agreement if they didn't fix and replace the copper and since 2016 they have done a ton of work and our land line is now crystal clear and our DSL is rock solid I can't even remember the last time we had a line drop or had to restart the modem. I would love fiber but the Pinelands commission won't allow the build out of a fiber network in fear of them killing and pine trees. But as long as they keep our copper maintained it'll be fine.

That's a pretty good situation there then. DSL here was dire, in a city, had to go back to cable when it wouldn't even stay above a megabit and they weren't doing anything about it. Analog handset on the line sounded like a bowl of rice krispies, snap, crackle and pop. "The" phone company has finally got round everywhere local with the fiber but they have it at premium pricing still. Cable co is barely any better. "You eider deals wid us, or youse deals wid de udder guy, and he don't even have de coitussy to garotte youse before de concrete shoes fitting."

chinny22 wrote on 2021-05-21, 15:48:

Indeed a very in depth reply, although do 56k modems really attract premiums anymore?
Just checking BIN on ebay I can get a 3Com USRobotics 56k Message Modem for £8 although is missing power pack.

Yeah, that's not bad, I was maybe looking last year sometime when prices seemed whack, maybe there were ppl scooping them up during the first wave of work from home, maybe it's just if you put "vintage" in front of the model number 🤣

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-05-21, 18:03:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-05-21, 14:59:

Man I wish I could get fiber here but it'll be copper forever as it's a rather rural area with the houses fairly spread out And tons of farm land. But I will say our copper lines are in fantastic shape now. Our Mayor really turned the screws on Verizon when out state really dropped the ball. He threatened to pull there franchise agreement if they didn't fix and replace the copper and since 2016 they have done a ton of work and our land line is now crystal clear and our DSL is rock solid I can't even remember the last time we had a line drop or had to restart the modem. I would love fiber but the Pinelands commission won't allow the build out of a fiber network in fear of them killing and pine trees. But as long as they keep our copper maintained it'll be fine.

That's a pretty good situation there then. DSL here was dire, in a city, had to go back to cable when it wouldn't even stay above a megabit and they weren't doing anything about it. Analog handset on the line sounded like a bowl of rice krispies, snap, crackle and pop. "The" phone company has finally got round everywhere local with the fiber but they have it at premium pricing still. Cable co is barely any better. "You eider deals wid us, or youse deals wid de udder guy, and he don't even have de coitussy to garotte youse before de concrete shoes fitting."

Oh yeah it was really really bad before the mayor had to get involved cause the state didn't care enough to do anything. Thankfully everything is still great and the line techs are doing a great job at maintenance now. What's really nice is our ping times playing games. Me and my wife both play Guild Wars 2 and when were both playing we sit in the mid 30ms.

In the rural area I just moved from (outskirts of an unincorporated area with about 2000+ homes), Cable was chronically awful. Cable was randomly losing service for hours every other day, sometimes for entire days, and then had a 2+ week long outage which is when many people (including us) finally ditched them. Their phone system had an automated message telling us they were aware, working on it, blah blah. They gave no opportunity to talk to a real person, and I don't think they cared if the whole town left.

The local phone company, who offered DSL, turned out to be way better. 10-30X faster (depending what you wanted to spend) and never dropped. In 9 months I think we had one outage that lasted 10 minutes. Connection speed was always pegged at the service limit, no traffic issues no matter the time of day. It wasn't as fast or cheap as the suburban areas, but it was plenty fast enough IMO and the reliability made it my favorite ISP experience to date.

I think a big part of why DSL was such a good experience there was simply because it was the *local* phone company, not a distant national corporation with millions of customers. Being local, there wasn't any feeling of bureaucratic nonsense. I don't think there were many links in the chain between the guy who answered the phone, the guys who did the installation, and the owner of the company. Everything was tight and efficient, the equipment was good and everything just worked the whole time. It reminded me of how nice the local dialup ISP had been to deal with 15-20 years prior.

But as far as dialup phone line performance, going back ~15 years to our dialup days at the same location it was always in the range of about 24-28K in that area. I don't know if the problem was bad lines or just the distance. Today I think a lot of the length of the run is fiber now, which is why they were able to offer a good DSL service.

Is it impossible to use a modem over VoIP? Does the compression completely kill it?

I suspect the compression artifacts would play havoc with the frequencies used by modems to encode the carrier wave of the signal.

But, there's a challenge for someone - tunnel an analogue modem signal over a VOIP connection 😀

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-05-24, 08:25:

I suspect the compression artifacts would play havoc with the frequencies used by modems to encode the carrier wave of the signal.

But, there's a challenge for someone - tunnel an analogue modem signal over a VOIP connection 😀

Well, VoIP quality varies greatly so there's that as well. Sometimes I may as well be speaking to an ape on the other end.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-05-24, 08:18:

Is it impossible to use a modem over VoIP? Does the compression completely kill it?

I'm going to attempt it when I get my external modem. We have cable internet and phone. If it doesn't work, I'll have to consider contacting the local phone company for a landline number.