💾 Archived View for gem.kirigiri.me › gemlog › 2023-09-12.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 15:44:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Soooo, I mentioned that I was into dial-up stuff. This is a recent adventure that I've gone on, actually picking up a separate modem to connect to my desktop so I can dial into bulletin board systems over the phone line.
Because I want to, and I am a very financially irresponsible person! I missed way too much stuff and was born into the internet age, only a few years before Twitter hit the scene in 2007. By the time I was aware of it social media was everywhere, and honestly even though I have left Twitter and switched to the Fediverse almost exclusively now, I still find it pretty exhausting sometimes. Text on a screen with ASCII graphics / art too is just really nice and refreshing.
That, and I kind of have a limited amount of time to get the authentic dial-up experience instead of just connecting via telnet. More on that soon.
Dial-up was most popular before broadband came about in the early 2000s. It uses your analogue phone line to send and receive data, with a modem on each end. Modem means 'modulator-demodulator', and in this case it's just modulating the data coming from the serial port into audio which can be sent down a phone line and not be filtered out by the phone company. It then reaches the modem on the other end and is demodulated into data to be sent straight back through the serial port and to the system.
This method of connecting to something was basically using your phone line as an extremely long, extremely bad serial cable. But it worked. And speeds got up to 56 kilobits per second, or 7 kilobytes per second. Quite respectable for how it worked. However, most people never got close to 56k while dial-up was still popular, since ISPs probably didn't upgrade their hardware from 33.6Kbit/sec to 56k until DSL started to become a thing.
It's still used in very rural areas where some people can't even get DSL, though this seems to be more in North America than Europe. However, dial-up is extremely obsolete and the only acceptable uses for it these days really are just novelty (like me) or genuinely needing to use it because there's nothing better around to use.
So, it's modem time. What did I pick up? Well as the title suggests, I picked up a boxed Creative Modem Blaster USB (model DE5771) on a whim. Here it is:
The Modem Blaster itself (top view)
It's a delightfully tiny little thing! USB too, which meant I didn't have to get a USB to serial adapter to use it.
It's capable of 56Kbit/sec speeds and can use the V.90 and V.92 standards, and is also fax capable... not that I'll be using that feature. It came with the original driver disc, USB and phone cables too - the latter two were ziptied up and I had to hunt for my wire cutters to undo the USB cable.
The modem itself looks decently sleek for something from the early 2000s, with a black matte casing and a black glossy front/top piece, which makes a semicircle on the top. The Modem Blaster logo is on the top of the glossy part, stylised like the Sound Blaster logo. It has 'USB' in bold italics on the bottom right of the logo. On the front part of the glossy piece you have the Modem Blaster logo, but in one straight line without the box around it. The words 'Modem' and 'Blaster' are still stylised like they are in the Sound Blaster logo, with 'Modem' in a bold font and 'Blaster' stylised like Creative's logo. There is also a registered trademark symbol at the end of 'Blaster' that's quite small. In the middle there are a word and two acronyms. The first one, DATA, denotes the presence of a green LED behind the front faceplate that flashes when data is being sent to and from the modem. OH means 'Off Hook' - it denotes the presence of an orangey-yellow LED that stays lit the entire time the modem holds the line open. The third one, MR, means 'Modem Ready', and is permanently lit up red when the device drivers have initialised successfully to signify that it's ready to dial a number. These go in order from the middle to nearer the right hand side. Finally, the Creative logo is in the bottom right of the glossy front piece, in the classic 1990s blue and yellow-orange Creative style.
Around back it's dead simple. Two ports - USB type B 1.1 and an RJ11 phone jack. On the bottom there's an info sticker listing the model number as DE5771 and also has the serial number. On the bottom are three screws to remove if you want to open the modem up.
First, I wanted to test it. So I pulled out my HP Compaq 6910p running Windows XP, installed the drivers, and plugged the modem in via USB. It sprang to life, lighting up the 'modem ready' LED happily, but also squealing a little bit from its internal speaker, for some reason.
Next, I fired up PuTTY, opened COM5 (the port the drivers chose) and told it to dial a gateway number that provides access to a few BBSes. And it worked perfectly! This was excellent news, as it meant I hadn't bought a brick. After this, I put it on my desk on top of my Behringer audio interface, where it sits comfortably now. However, I was waiting on the arrival of a 6 metre RJ11 cable to plug in the modem to the nearest phone jack, which was across the room. Me being impatient, I used the front panel USB ports and an extension cable to get the modem connected to my computer and the phone line in advance. However... the modem ready LED stubbornly stayed off.
This was because there were no drivers. Seeing as the CD only had drivers for Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP, I scoured the internet for Linux drivers... and only found old ones meant for kernels 2.4 to 2.6. I was out of luck with using it on bare metal easily. This meant I turned to virtual machines.
My Windows XP VM seemed to work with it at first, installing the drivers fine and it initialised the modem seemingly successfully, as the modem ready LED was lit. However, I soon discovered it was *not* working correctly, and in fact refused to dial out at all. It misreported ROM versions and only replied with 'ERROR' whenever I tried to use ATDT to dial a number, no matter the program.
So, great, I was SOL with XP. I then decided to try Windows 2000 as a last ditch attempt, and lo and behold... it worked. I was astounded, as Windows 2000 is not that dissimilar from XP - but clearly something, somewhere had changed just enough that the drivers worked *perfectly* every single time. I was baffled, but moved on and started looking for a suitable terminal program for Win2k. PuTTY refused to even install initially, the installer getting confused and thinking it wasn't being installed to a local drive, which it was. After I used MSIEXEC to force an install, it then told me it was not a valid Win32 application. Shit.
Having used ZOC on my PowerBook G4 only a few days before, I decided to hunt down an older version for Windows 2000 - ZOC 5 worked a treat and installed just fine. After this I was able to dial out to wherever I wanted!
Now that it's all working, I decided to poke around Magnum BBS, which is running Synchronet. Dialling the gateway number again, I created an account and started having a look. The text and ASCII was just so much more refreshing to me, having sat and looked at bloated websites for years and years by this point.
Initially I was rather confused by the interface but got accustomed to it pretty quickly. I hopped around message areas, looking around RetroNet, FidoNet and WhisperNet, and found that there were still a decent number of people active! I was surprised but actually happy that bulletin boards were still alive and kicking.
I basically lurked around as I'm rather shy when talking to other people that I don't know, but saw that the community was alive and well and there were a bunch of topics available to talk about in FidoNet and WhisperNet.
Due to being really limited to dialling within the UK and not wanting to create many accounts on many BBSes, I have stuck with Magnum as the only UK based BBS for now.
Dial-up is very different to the modern connections we have today. Its main disadvantage is its cost, *especially* in 2023 and if you're in the UK. While the gateway numbers do exist to let you connect to a few BBSes via telnet, you only have a choice of four, including Magnum. This is a major problem, as if you dial out to an international number you incur international call charges if you don't have a plan that includes international calling. Unfortunately, I fall into the area of not having an international landline plan.
My phone company charges a £0.25 connection fee per call, and £0.18 per minute in the daytime to call out to the US, where almost all of the BBSes still accessible via dial-up are located. This means it is VERY expensive to dial out to one of my favourite BBSes, Level 29, which is located in California. Just making two calls to Level 29 using my PowerBook racked up an extra £1.52 to the monthly bill, which is quite frankly terrifying as the combined connection time was only about 5 minutes. So I have to be very careful to not add much extra on, which kinda sucks when you really want to use dial-up for that authenticity.
Speaking of authenticity, I think that's its main advantage. The speed may be slow, but that's part of its character! That's how it was in the 1990s and early 2000s, and experiencing it that way is how I want to experience BBSes. The sounds the modem makes while speed training is basically music to my ears too.
Another disadvantage is that it requires a modem, and old hardware does not last forever. One last disadvantage is that it *requires* you to have a phone line, whether PSTN or VoIP. Not everyone has them these days.
This is a fact I did not know prior to a few days ago. Turns out there are two different types of modems. Hardware and software.
Hardware modems are the original and best type to use, as they have the controller and everything inside to work on their own without any device drivers, and only need a suitable terminal program, a serial port and your fingers on the keyboard to enter Hayes-compatible AT commands to dial out.
Software modems meanwhile have extremely little in the way of internal circuitry, and often only have one or two chips onboard. The host system is then responsible for doing almost everything, such as modulating and demodulating the data. These are the modems that require device drivers before they will even show signs of life in some cases.
Noting that I had to install drivers to get anything to happen with this particular modem, I knew I had a software modem - or a 'softmodem' for short. This was the source of my weird problems. They often have compatibility issues.
So it was time to break the warranty seal (now 21 years expired) and take a look inside. The three screws came out just fine but it stubbornly refused to completely separate until I popped two hidden clips on the sides near the front.
Damn, it's looking pretty bare in here as far as modems go, which matches with the fact it's a softmodem. Just two chips, some electrolytic capacitors, a relay, a tiny transformer and a piezo beeper being the most stand-out components.
Let's zoom in to the two chips on the board:
Both are made by Conexant, formerly Rockwell Semiconductor Systems. The first is a chip with the model RHP56D - this is a controllerless HCF modem chip that doesn't do all that much compared to hardware modem controllers. The second is its accompanying USB interface controller, and it seems these two come as a pair.
Honestly, that's basically all there is to see inside it. Though as a side note, the piezo speaker being on the side of the board where the speaker cutout *isn't* present is why it's so damn quiet. Creative definitely used the same casing for the RS232 serial version, they just swapped out the front faceplate for one with more information - it's possible they may have had a real speaker in the serial version, but I can't confirm that.
The RHP56D was the source of my driver woes. Conexant/Rockwell's HCF modem chips were not well supported on Linux, and I can't find updated drivers for Windows due to Synaptics consuming Conexant in 2016 and nuking their website forever. This sucks, but it's the reality with modems in 2023, as unless it's a DSL modem it's been forgotten forever, and most modems (unless they're 3G or 4G) don't plug directly into computers via USB or serial anymore.
I like dial-up. It's a fun way to travel back to the past and enjoy some BBS fun - and if you've got an ISP that still offers dial-up access, you can even browse the heavily bloated modern internet with it... not that you'd want to, probably, since even MSN probably takes like 3-5 minutes to load these days.
Unfortunately with the shutdown of the UK PSTN I won't have a chance of ever getting 56k again, much rather at an absolute maximum 33.6k. In my case it will also require more equipment, since when the switch to VoIP happens the nearest phone jack will become as dead as a dodo, and I'll have to figure out some way to not use the ISP modem for phone access due to it being in another room.
You can connect much easier to BBSes using Telnet with terminals like PuTTY, ZOC and even the bog standard GNOME Terminal program since it includes the Telnet program by default. But if you want to try dial-up for yourself, no matter if your line is analogue or VoIP, I say give it a try.
That's all for now.
Vael
