Due to the speed limitation of the Serial interface, I wonder if you could run the 3com card with low enough resources to do the emulation. Not real networking,

Due to the speed limitation of the Serial interface, I wonder if you could run the 3com card with low enough resources to do the emulation. Not real networking, I am thinking more of embedding requests into raw ethernet packets with a direct ethernet link to a Raspberry Pi, and some stuff on the RPi? Alternatively the Printer port supported 8bit parallel transfers are was much much faster. Potentially a USB -> Parallel interface on the Pi. I remember using a Parallel to Parallel cable between 2 486s with the lap link software and getting MUCH faster then serial connection. Pretty cool.