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Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net is now in OPEN BETA! That means if you're reading this, you've either filled out our signup page and gotten sent an email, or stumbled across this page on the Wiki.

Either way, welcome!

So. To get ON Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net (hereby referred to as CGHMN for easier reference) you'll need a few things.

1. A retro computer/virtual machine or a device that can be ultimately terminated via ethernet. Using other networking standards like 802.11, Token Ring, AUI, BNC or others is totally fine, but you'll need to ultimately bridge them to Ethernet to talk to the device running Wireguard
2. A device that can run the Wireguard and (optionally) Gretap protocols. Wireguard is a VPN stack that is used to encrypt traffic and connect your retro devices securely to the network over the internet. Gretap is used for tunneling "non TCP/IP" protocols, like IPX. Useful if you want to play DOOM or run other non-TCP/IP software, but not required!
3. To have fun! Seriously. This project is meant to bring back the joy of the web as it existed in the 90's and 2000's. If you aren't having fun, we need to fix that.

For Step 2 you can use any kind of device that runs Linux/BSD such as a Raspberry Pi or others. Virtual Machines (such as Proxmox) are absolutely supported and encouraged!

For users looking to connect physical machines, you will need a hardware device. We recommend something like the GL.iNet Shadow. This device retails for around $30~ US dollars on retailers such as Amazon and can push 40 megabits of bandwidth to CGHMN over Wireguard. This is more than sufficient for a significant number of retro machines. This device has been deployed by Cursed Silicon and other users and has been successfully tested at-scale hosting 15 simultaneous users at the Seattle Interim Computer Festival retro computing event.

Another option (if you have one) is the Raspberry Pi. Every Pi version through the original Pi 1 to the current Pi 5 is supported by OpenWRT. Adding a cheap USB LAN adapter makes this an attractive option if you have a spare "old Ras Pi laying around"

The third option is to run a virtual machine as your CGHMN gateway. We provide support primarily for Proxmox but other virtualization stacks such as VMware, Virtualbox and Hyper-V will work, but may require manual configuration by the user. This option is best suited for users wanting to run servers (websites, old game servers etc) as running old OSes in Proxmox comes with a significant graphics performance penalty

We recommend running the OpenWRT router distribution regardless of which above option you choose. This supports an enormous array of hardware (including running as a VM) and even comes with a ready-made script written by our network architect, Snep. This script can be run on a device running OpenWRT to configure it directly for access to CGHMN.

Once installed in either a VM or on a physical device such as the GL.iNet Shadow, the device can be SSH'd into and the following commands can be run to begin configuration for CGHMN access.

1. wget https://cghmn.snep.zip/connect.sh
2. ash setup-cghmn.sh
3. Follow the prompts
4. Send us your Wireguard Public Key on the signup page so we can add you to the network!

Finally if you're particularly proficient with Linux or Networking (or both) you can opt to run your own hardware configured to your specifications. We don't directly provide support for vendors like Microtik, Unifi or others, but during the closed testing we've done in past, users have been able to set these vendor devices up and successfully connect. Example configurations are available here however are untested except by the user who submitted them. Please reach out to the committer for assistance if the configuration scripts do not work.

Once again, to clarify: CGHMN does not specifically require using "real" vintage hardware as doing so can be impractical for a number of reasons. A lot of users (including Cursed Silicon and others) use virtualization, particularly to run services on the network efficiently or to quickly test out applications and features. Connecting a modern computer (EG a Windows 10 or 11 PC) to the network while not disallowed will encounter a lot of issues due to the age of the servers and services it is communicating with and is discouraged