Last weekend marked the end of “BBS Week V” over at r/Retrobattlestations. For my part in this competition, I brought out the eMate 300, which I found new-in-box on eBay back in 2004. Here it can be seen logged into the Level 29 BBS.
The eMate has a proper eight pin micro-DIN RS-422 serial / AppleTalk port, driven by a Zilog SCC serial chip. To this port, I attached a serial cable leading into a Keyspan USB-to-serial adapter, itself plugged into a USB port on the Raspberry Pi 2 I keep in my D.C. office to (usually) connect my desktop Apple //c (via a similar serial link) to the net. The //c was my machine of choice for the last r/Retrobattlestations competition, “Not x86 Week.” The RPi 2 has a USB-based WiFi connector that keeps it linked to the guest WiFi network at the university.
