[Question] Dial Up "Emulator"

[jebug29]

Okay, so the modem in the only possible computer I could use to connect my DC to the web isn't a voice modem (or whatever you call it; in other words, it doesn't make the beeps and boops of dial up). However, I do have an old phone that does make the dialing sound coming from the DC. With this being the case, I may very well make a makeshift modem by dialing into a free isp using Google Voice (or another recommended free service).

Before I do this, is there any type of software that can just use my own computer's connection and convert back and forth the beeps into data and data into beeps rather than dialing in to some ISP? If not, is there any possible/easy way this type of software could be made (possibly for easy configuration with the DC).

Thanks!

[brourke228]

Funny you should mention this. I was just trying to see if I could get a dial up connection to work over google voice a couple weeks ago. I only had partial success with it though. I was using one of these obi100 devices http://www.amazon.com/OBi100-Telephone- ... B004LO098O . I actually bought it so I could have a second line to use for my resume so people wouldn't be calling my mobile phone. I wanted to see what else I could do with it though. At my house I actually have another landline and the first thing I tried was hooking up my netopia r2020 to my landline and I tried calling it from Dreamcast using the obi100 over GV. And that actually worked surprisingly. I wouldn't say it was a very solid connection though because when I pinged dreamcast from my LAN the latency was about 800ms and there was about 50-70% packet loss. I didn't try out any games, but the web browser worked without any issues. After that worked though, I wanted to see if I could get DC to connect to a free dial up ISP over Google Voice instead of dialing to my house. I sometimes use the ISP at the top the list here http://dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtop ... f=3&t=3175 freedialup.org for testing. It works without any problems over my landline. So it should have worked in theory, but every time I tried connecting to it DC failed to negotiate the call. I checked my configuration settings several times and everything is definately right. If I had to guess I think what the problem is, is the Netopia router I use negotiates the dial up call at a lower bandwidth because it just uses an analog modem. So the maximum bandwidth allowed over the connection is about 33k. If you use a normal dial up ISP with a v90 modem, which DC has, it will use 53 to 56k though. I don't think the voip call has enough bandwidth for this. G.711 which is the normal codec used, is only about 64Kbps. If you take into account the combined bandwidth of the simultaneous upstream and downstream bandwidth of a normal 56k connection you have probably about 53Kbps down and 33 to 48Kbps up. One way that might work is to use a modem init string on dreamcast to disable v90 mode so that it connects at a lower bandwidth. I haven't tried this though. All in all, I wouldn't recommend going this route even if it did work though because at least with the connection that I was able to establish to my netopia router I don't think it would work very well for gameplay. Your best bet if you're trying to save money is probably to just get a different dial up modem if the one you have doesn't work and do a PC-DC server.