Add networking support (is this even possible?)

[adespoton]

Mini vMac core has Tun/Tap support. Since Tor works on iOS, some sort of network proxying is possible, but I'm not sure if something as low level as tun/tap is possible without jailbreaking. It might just need a device management profile or a VPN profile to enable networking, however.

[zydeco]

From the Mini vMac FAQ:

Networking?

Mini vMac does not currently support networking. A real Mac Plus can use TCP/IP over a modem. All that software will work in Mini vMac, but there is no modem emulation. Mini vMac emulates the serial ports with nothing attached. In the future, I’m thinking there could be a replacement of the Mac Plus TCP/IP software to run inside Mini vMac, that could use the Mini vMac extension mechanism to talk to the TCP/IP API of the host operating system. But that is likely quite some way away. Meanwhile, you could try Basilisk II.

I've seen it done here, by connecting the emulated serial port to an instance of slirp.
I want to implement this rather sooner than later, although for (non-jailbroken) iOS it will have to run slirp in a thread in the same application, which may be troublesome.

[adespoton]

The FAQ is actually outdated however. The source code now includes a Tun/Tap shim, although I'm not sure how complete Paul has made that code at this point.

I think the easier method is as you say, using a virtual null-modem connector from the RS-422 port and running either SLiRP or PPP over it.

Back in the day, I did this with actual machines, by hooking up the RS-422 port on a Plus to the modem port on an iMac using a null modem cable, setting the modem off hook, and setting the iMac to share internet over the modem port. I think I was using Mac PPP (or a third party PPP) and network sharing instead of SLiRP to do it.

Probably simpler to create a virtual interface though.

[zydeco]

I haven't seen anything about tun/tap, there is support for LocalTalk over Ethernet, but it requires full access to the network card (/dev/bpf*), which is not possible on iOS.

[adespoton]

Hmm. Maybe SLiRP is the best way then. That link is to someone using a Pi to run SLiRP, and has links to the documentation on how to set it all up. So we'd need to set up SLiRP inside a thread in the same application as you said, with a virtual interface to serial on one side and exposed to the iOS network interface on the other.

[ryandesign]

there is support for LocalTalk over Ethernet

In my experience, it is buggy. I was able to get two instances of Mini vMac to talk to each other for a minute or two before the connection stopped working. Three instances could talk to each other only briefly. Four instances couldn't talk to each other at all.

[zydeco]

I experimented a bit with the LocalTalk support and SLiRP some time ago, and while a MacIP connection would work for a while, soon the TCP checksums generated by the Mac would become corrupted.

[RolandJuno]

Sorry for adding to an old thread but I wanted to mention that LocalTalk over UDP (LToUDP) has matured to the point there's several other apps that support it, including soft routers. Could LToUDP be incorporated into minivmac4ios for networking?

[zydeco]

Unfortunately since somewhere between iOS 14 and 16, using UDP multicast or broadcast requires permission from Apple through an entitlement, so it's not possible to use LToUDP on an iOS device (confusingly, none of this is required on the iOS simulator).

If Apple approves Mini vMac for third party distribution, I can look into getting the entitlement to enable the functionality on builds distributed on AltStore.

I've experimented doing LocalTalk over TCP instead with a modified version of multitalk, it works but requires running a server that all instances can connect to. Multitalk can also be used to connect to physical appletalk networks and bridged to GlobalTalk. You can find this on the localtalk-over-tcp branch, it's a proof of concept and won't try to reconnect if it loses the connection.