November 25, 2025
Dial‑up vibes, crypto jibes
BebboSSH: SSH2 implementation for Amiga systems (68000, GPLv3)
Retro Amiga gets secure logins — hype vs headaches as fans test BebboSSH
TLDR: BebboSSH brings secure remote access to vintage Amigas, promising modern encryption on 30-year-old machines. Commenters split between excitement over the upgrade and frustration over connection delays, errors on real hardware, and no clear bug tracker — with extra side-eye at the dev’s “not the best” random generator note.
The retro crowd just got a new toy: BebboSSH, a modern secure login suite for classic Amiga computers. Think “remote control for your old computer,” but with today’s encryption. The drop had the comments buzzing — part excitement, part exasperation, and a whole lot of “does this actually work on my setup?”
One camp came in hot with cautious hype. “Sweet,” cheered one user, then immediately asked the million‑dollar question: will it feel laggy once it finally connects? The dev notes say it can take about a minute to handshake on an unaccelerated Amiga, which turned into a running joke: the “brew-a-coffee handshake.” Meanwhile, the speed charts looked surprisingly decent for 30-year-old hardware, and people loved the option to use newer ciphers like ChaCha20 and AES-GCM.
But the other camp hit the brakes fast. A tester on an Amiga 1200 said it “doesn’t seem to work” and couldn’t find an issue tracker to report logs, dropping a wall of errors and asking where to file bugs. That lit up the thread with a classic open-source melodrama: shiny release, missing support channel. And then there’s the eyebrow-raising dev aside that the random number generator “is not the best” — cue the side-eye and nervous laughter.
Verdict? Nostalgia meets modern security — with a sprinkle of chaos, comedy, and bug reports. Repo’s here if you’re brave: source.
Key Points
- •BebboSSH v1.40 is an SSH2 suite for Amiga (68000+) providing client, server daemon, SFTP, SCP, and an Ed25519 key generator.
- •It requires bsdsocket.library (e.g., AmiTCP) and replaces AmigaSSH; source code is available and most components are GPLv3+.
- •Supported algorithms include curve25519-sha256, ssh-ed25519, aes128-gcm@openssh.com, chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com, hmac-sha2-256, and sha512.
- •Performance data shows ~1 minute connection setup on unaccelerated Amiga, X25519 keygen ~0.9s, verification ~1.2s, and SCP speeds up to ~396 kB/s with the 020 library on 68080.
- •Some crypto routines are derived from SUPERCOP and are public domain; recent history includes AES rewrites and ChaCha20-Poly1305 improvements.