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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.
- A retro computer or device that can be terminated via ethernet. Using other networking standards like 802.11, Token Ring, AUI and others is totally fine, but you'll need to bridge them to ethernet!
- 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 esoteric software, but not required!
- 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 Part 2 you can use any kind of device that runs Linux/BSD such as a Raspberry Pi or others. Virtual Machines are also absolutely supported!
For hardware, 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 event.
Another option (if you have one) is the Raspberry Pi. Every Pi version through the original Pi 1 to the current Pi 5 are supported. Adding a cheap USB LAN adapter makes this an attractive option if you have a spare Pi laying around.
The third option is to run a virtual machine as your CGHMN gateway. We support Proxmox, VMware, Virtualbox, Hyper-V and others. Using CGHMN does not necessarily require using vintage hardware and doing so can be impractical for a number of reasons. A lot of users (including Cursed Silicon and others) use virtualization to run services on the network efficiently
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.
We recommend running the OpenWRT router distribution regardless of which 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.
The commands to run the script are as follows.
- Install OpenWRT and SSH into the device
wget https://cghmn.snep.zip/connect.shash setup-cghmn.sh- Follow the prompts!