Hi David, thanks for the reply and apologies in the delay in responding - it's been very busy at work and it was my son's birthday at the weekend.
It does indeed sound like a bit of a mission to get it up and running, and I may just be completely out of luck. It's a shame that's the case, as it's a nice piece of kit, but sadly the money men have sought to limit it for a quick buck. As it stands, I've had to put my Emailer in storage for a few weeks as I'm having a re-jig of my man cave, but I hope to get it out again when I have some time in the autumn. Thanks again for your advice, Adam ======== > On 2019-07-21 20:08, David Given wrote: > Some models can be reflashed with stock Linux using various poorly > documented and largely forgotten tools; the Linux distribution is > here: http://the.earth.li/pub/e3/ and there's some writeup on it here: > https://www.earth.li/~noodles/hardware-e3.html > The downside is that that Linux distribution is actually built with > OpenEmbedded and won't run binaries built anywhere else, which is > irritating. I have successfully run Debian on an E3 via a USB hub with > a hard drive attached by simply cross-installing the userland from a > PC and then configuring u-boot on the emailer to boot from it. However > the emailer's only got 32MB of RAM so whatever you do it's going to > have to be very lightweight. Finding a sufficiently old userland might > be hard, too --- it'll need to work with a 2.6.19 kernel. > Also, Amstrad eventually locked down the bootloader and later versions > can't be flashed. If you have one of those, you may be out of luck. > You'll also need to build a serial cable. The signals are TTL 5V, > except _inverted_, so 0V = logic 1 and 5V = logic 0 (it's intended to > be passed directly to a level shifter). > The best thing you can probably do with one of these is to use it as a > dumb terminal --- USB ethernet devices work just fine with the > OpenEmbedded distribution, so you may be able to telnet into (or out > of) it. The phone's supported as an ordinary modem but I don't think I > ever got it to work. > I'd suggest building the cable, trying to install the OpenEmbedded > distribution above, and seeing what happens. It's not like you can > make it less useful... > On Sun, 21 Jul 2019 at 11:28, Adam Ainsworth > <adam.ainswo...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi all, >> Came across this list while looking for hacking info on the Emailer. >> It's a bit out of my usual area of interest, normally I'm playing >> with 8-bit computers and old PC-alikes. >> I got an Emailer Plus in new condition about a while back, but >> forgot about it until recently when I picked up a Pocket Dockit to >> go with it. I just fired it up to see what it could do, and that >> turned out to be...nothing! I watched the Chinnyvision video on it, >> and he came to the same conclusion. >> https://youtu.be/aY6R72nWJsU >> I did find a couple of articles, although one (where the author >> appeared to have Linux running on it) is presumably by someone on >> this list, given the URL. There was also mention of hooking up a >> Raspberry Pi to it. I'm also wondering if a wifi modem would do the >> trick, although presumably we'd need to know how the server software >> worked if it did connect. >> Without me going through all of the list archives, can someone just >> give me a quick update on the current status of hacking it? Has >> someone found a way in, or have I wasted £12 or so on the hardware? >> Thanks very much! >> Adam >> ========_______________________________________________ >> e3-hacking mailing list >> e3-hacking@earth.li >> https://www.earth.li/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking > -- > ┌─── http://www.cowlark.com ─── > │ "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my > │ telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure > out > │ how to use my telephone." --- Bjarne Stroustrup > _______________________________________________ > e3-hacking mailing list > e3-hacking@earth.li > https://www.earth.li/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking _______________________________________________ e3-hacking mailing list e3-hacking@earth.li https://www.earth.li/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking
