Dreamcast-Talk.com

What I'm using isnt a line voltage simulator. Its a Phone Line Simulator, a Teltone TLS 3 see here: http://www.teltone.com/products/simulat ... 3/home.htm

It simulates an actual phone line. Thus it supplys the line voltage, dial tone, ringing, etc. So for all intensive purposes just think of it as the normal phone network you connect your phone to but all in a small box. When you dial a number the other line will ring. Without it the 56k LAN Modem will not automatically answer the phone call. And also therefore, the model of the modem doesn't matter.

The 56k LAN Modem is essentially a 3COM router and a US Robotics v92 modem combined. Again, the 56k lan modem can't connect to the cable modem because the WAN would be going in both directions. The 56k lan modem itself is a WAN as strange as that sounds. It is the WAN for both its LAN clients as well as its dial up client. This allows the LAN clients to communicate with the remote dial up client. So if i connect it to my cable modem nothing will happen because what you will have is this:

Dreamcast---WAN--->56k LAN Modem<---WAN--->Cable Modem

See between lan modem and the cable modem the WAN is going in both directions which doesnt make sense. It won't do anything. THe lan modem operates kind of strangely. It basically puts your network in reverse. So i need to translate that portion of my network setup into data traffic with a device in between that will connect to both WAN simultaneously and use like ICS or something.

A client bridge on the the lan modem? Its very limited in functionality. I can bridge on my netgear router but not lan modem.

The only time the 56k lan modem has a WAN is when its being used for "Dial out" where you connect to a dial up ISP. When used for "Dial in" it IS the WAN. There is no WAN function through the rj-45 ports and theres no vlan or anything like that.

The lan modem itself is not going to be able to resolve this situation. I need another device to do that. Whether it be my netgear router or some other networking device.

Ok, but if i put the remote lan ip (Dreamcast) on the same network as the 56k lan modem it won't do anything because its on a sub-network created by NAT connection i believe. In that scenario i cannot even access the lan modem from dreamcast.

I don't have a wireless network bridge to test with. I could get one, but i would want to be sure that it will fix this before i go out and spend money on it.

Actually I think just figured it out. After reading through the dial in configuration documentation again. In order to ping Dreamcast from one of my PC's i need the 56k LAN Modem to be its default gateway. So with my desktop's gateway set to 192.168.1.2 i can ping dreamcast now at 192.168.2.151 (shows 151ms). So what I'm thinking is I need some sort of network device that will connect to 2 different gateways and pair them together, kind of like how one could share an internet connection between 2 NIC's on a PC. Since I don't think any data is transferring between clients on my LAN and the 56k LAN Modem's "Remote 56k client" unless the LAN Modem is their gateway.

Would a network bridge fix this?

I'm pretty sure you have tried this already but in windows if you have two Ethernet ports on your pc. Plug the Lan adapter into one and in the TC/IP settings put in a manual setting instead of dhcp and set the gateway to: 192.168.1.2 so you can ping your DC. Then setup the port that you get internet from as either DHCP or manual so you can access the internet on it. Then bridge the connections. I have a bridge on my ubuntu setup but have little experience with that on ubuntu so i don't know about that.

I haven't really updated this since my last post. I can already ping DC from the PCs on my network as well as my router. I had to use a static route from my router to the Dreamcast subnet with the lan modem set as the gateway for the Destination network. I can now access both my router and the 56k lan modem configuration pages from the Dreamcast web browser at 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.2 respectively.

However I cannot get internet. For some reason Dreamcast doesn't have access to my WAN, but it can access the router. I find this kind of puzzling and as a result I'm at kind of a standstill with this. If anyone has some suggestions or would like me to elaborate further let me know.

Using a computer to set this up would defeat the purpose. I'm pretty sure I can already get a computer to automatically answer Dreamcast with the phone line simulator hooked up. This is intended to be "always on" and completely seamless in connecting Dreamcast with no user interaction whatsoever.

My only guess would be that you may need to port forward if you can access your routers page.

I ditched the 3com because it was lacking in features and got a netopia router which I was able to get working as a dedicated dial in server. I'll be doing a write up on how to set it up soon if anyone is interested. Preliminary testing shows all is going well. I'm able to play pso online at essentially dial up speeds. Latency is about 144ms.