if you want to mess with Mac ROMs now, I think Ghidra is a nicer experience than most of the vintage tools, and you can use QEMU with GDB (at least for the Q800 ROM).

I used MacNosy extensively in the Mac 68k era. Though I haven’t used Ghidra, reading about it reminded me of the fun (and frustration) I had with MacNosy.

I have no doubt Ghidra has a superior overall user interface. But, as memory serves, Nosy had many features specifically for the classic MacOS and ROM that I assume Ghidra lacks.

numalink, 1.6GB/s in 2003!

there's an altix 3000 on ebay that I'm kinda tempted by https://www.ebay.com/itm/174917876903

it only runs like one specific version of suse or red hat

I've always wanted an Indy or an O2,but other than running the demos, I don't know what I'd do with them. Also, high-end kit is also interesting, but again, I kind of want an Altix (or Origin 2000/3000), or .AS/400 or a Tandem Cyclone.. just because it's neat.

Do you have anything specific you'd do with an Altix 3000?

(I don't mean to sound snooty)

I've had an Iris and an O2, and the sad fact is that your telephone is a faster computer than 100 O2's.

They're fun if you want to run the demos or load fsn and tell everyone in earshot "this is a Unix system! I know this!" But they're not even useful as X consoles to a Linux box these days, because of the compilation nightmare of getting recent network tools installed.

>Do you have anything specific you'd do with an Altix 3000?

nope, I just like weird computers and distributed systems, itanium is possibly the weirdest CPU architecture that modern linux can run on, and SGI is an interesting part of computer history.

I have various SGI machines and while they are cool, they are pretty much useless except for toying around on. And extremely noisy. The O2 is the only one that's usable like a normal PC, except the plastics tend to break during shipping.

The rackmount Tezros and Origin 350s sound like they belong at the airport.

I have also used a Tandem (probaby even a couple of years before the Cyclone came). But I wouldn't want one today before someone ports Linux to it :)

I've never used a Tandem (or as/400 or sgi) myself. Just find all of them interesting.

I assume Porting Linux to the pre-MIPS Tandem line would be a challenge. The Proprietary CPU was 'stack based' and very different from x86. Also, I don't know if Tandem ever sold compilers to do the sort of 'low level' system stuff to port another OS..

I was looking at my qube 3 this morning and thinking I should sell it; I never got around to hacking it up as a compact PC case

send me an email (this username at cy384.com) if you're interested!

thanks, I had fun making it!

there's full design for a box and a floppy label that I've made for the upcoming 1.0 release

Are you going to do an actual release on floppy? You should. I will buy it.

yes, I think I'm going to make a dozen or so copies, just to make it feel real

the GUI code for the earliest macs was absolutely a great feat of engineering

by getting my hands dirty with the system, I'm impressed by the way things were designed for the wimpiest processors (and also getting a lot of insight into the flaws of the OS that were exposed as machines became more powerful)

They really managed to find ways to make it work despite the hardware of the day. There was a lot of hand coded assembly until the mid 90s.

I, and I’m sure a lot of others here, would love to read about that.

I’m aware of folklore.org, thanks. I’ve read it through and through.

more specifically, I should say that re-rendering everything is kinda slow, the DrawText function which, uh, draws text, seems very heavy

blitting from a buffer onto the screen is, indeed, pretty fast, I've been experimenting with it and have some ideas for speeding things up

For real. I’ve tried porting several modern UI libraries to classic Mac, such as Nuklear, uGUI, and a couple of others. And I’ve succeeded in getting them working, but as soon as you start doing something with text, they fall on their face. Just having a text input is nearly impossible on an 8MHz 68000!

Proper text rendering is hard.

unfortunately, file transfer isn't in yet, but it's the next feature I'm working on, probably within a week or two

the crypto code actually has some 68020 assembly (credit to the mbedtls devs), it could probably be made faster, but I would need to sharpen my assembly skills a lot

doing the initial key exchange before timeout is barely possible for a 68030 at 16MHz, takes the better part of a minute!

of course, on the later PPC machines it's a complete non-issue

A g4 with Altivec can play 720p video...

oh hey everyone, author here, ssheven is still beta quality, so I wasn't really posting about it anywhere yet, but it's usable and has the core functionality working ok

I plan to do a writeup about it, and the experience of developing for old macs, once I finish the 1.0 release

edit: btw, this is my first project for the classic Mac OS, I hope to inspire others to also jump in, retro68 is a very usable toolchain (big thanks to Wolfgang Thaller/autc04)

So far it's working well on my LC III (68030 with 36mb ram)!

I'm writing this comment from the LC III using w3m over ssh :)

36mb ram? that is a like a power house!

LC III is a real sleeper. It's much better than the previous in the series. The case is great to work with, it's small, runs cool (if you replace the hard drive it should be no problem to remove the fan), and is faster than any compact. And it takes the 36MB RAM.

It's maxed out, 4MB onboard + a single 32MB SIMM.

I think my own LC III has either 12MB or 20MB.

Sorry for posting it before you were ready! I just thought it was really cool, and I thought getting you some more eyeshare might be useful in helping you find more folks wanting to work on it.

it's no problem, the killer feature (that it works at all, and can connect to modern servers with default configs) is solid, and more people using it will help flush out bugs

This is so cool. I've been wanting to pick up an older mac for the sole purpose of doing some programming on classic MacOS myself. I actually have a Macintosh SE, but it's a bit too underpowered for my tastes. Anyway, I was hoping you might be willing to share what your development environment looks like. Language, editor, etc. Thanks!

Edit: I think I started to reply before your edit. Retro68 sounds amazing!

if you want to go period-appropriate, you can run Macintosh Programmer's Workshop or CodeWarrior natively

I use retro68 on linux, which is a modern GCC toolchain, so it's just like developing any other C/C++ (well, without some nice debugging tools, and with the added complexity of the mac OS resource stuff)

https://github.com/autc04/Retro68/

I would love to read your writeup if you get around to it.

Cool project! I installed it onto my SE/30 with 16 megs of RAM. The machine is mostly a museum piece but its neat to be able to connect to modern systems from it.

I’d love to hear more about retro68, your experience finding documentation for the various APIs. Stackoverlow didn’t exist when these APIs were in use.

Apple used to produce good paper documentation, my stack of Inside Macintosh is on the floor behind me.

bike tires have a manufacturer's specified width, but it's very common for the actual width of any given model to be 1-3mm wider

for competition purposes, there may be maximum widths (depending on the exact rules, more like 33-38mm), not based on the label but measured directly

Also the measured width of the tire will depend on the width of the rim it is installed on.