• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Recent content by Spidey01

  1. Spidey01

    Not much space ? Vintage laptops are the solution !

    Sweet collection. I love how you've got them slotted into shelving instead of simply stacked. That must make it so much nicer to fetch one out, and not fear the juggling.
  2. Spidey01

    Powerbook 100 / 180 : Serial to RS232

    On the PowerBook side: Aladdin’s SITcom, which I think is based on Apple’s Communications Toolkit. But fewer floppies and less confusing to install. On the Linux side: told systemd to run getty on my USB COM port. SITcom can even be setup to robo login without much effort. I assume Debian still...
  3. Spidey01

    Powerbook 100 / 180 : Serial to RS232

    My solution was this cable and a copy of SITcom. Worked well enough to getty into my unix machine using one of the generic USB to RS232 dongles we have at work.
  4. Spidey01

    PowerBook G3 PDQ won't start

    Mine periodically refuses to start, typically locking the HDD LED on or turning itself off. When that happens I just reseat the RAM module and it’ll usually come alive with the force power on keystrokes. Also very slow to put anything on screen, but the chime helps ease the tension.
  5. Spidey01

    How many floppy drives can a SWIM chip control? (just curious)

    In the TechNote for my Duo, I see there's a chip select in the pin out but don't see any real detail about the SWIM II itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_II#:~:text=Up%20to%2014%20drives%20could,seven%20usable%20slots%20per%20computer. Going to hazard a wild guess of 2 depending on...
  6. Spidey01

    Blue SCSI and getting started...

    I've been mainly using https://www.macintoshrepository.org/ and occasionally https://macintoshgarden.org/ for my old PowerBooks, one of which is running off a BlueSCSI for its internal drive. Not sure about 512K compat' though, that's a bit tricker.
  7. Spidey01

    PowerBook Duo 210 Best way to get software/data onto it

    I don’t think Long File Names was supported in non Mac file systems until MacOS 8, not sure about the various forms of “Standard” CD-ROM. Separate extensions came into being for PC LFN, Unix file attributes + LFN, and Mac resource forks as CD-ROM took over. It’s kind of a mine field that modern...
  8. Spidey01

    StuffIt 5.5 doesn't always extract .sit files fully

    There in lay the distinction between an archiver and a compressor: it's just we rarely care any more. ZIP and StuffIt formats are both. By contrast archive formats like Unix's tar only really serve to pack up multiple items into one archive and leave the compression to be someone else's problem...
  9. Spidey01

    System memory use between 24-bit and 32-bit addressing

    Sweet, seems to work perfectly @cheesestraws
  10. Spidey01

    System memory use between 24-bit and 32-bit addressing

    I think some kind of marker would be nice and far more intuitive. But to be fair a /!\ icon or something would have alarmed customers and at the time compatibility was probably a bigger deal than progress. IIRC, the tech note for the duo said Apple was only offering 4MB and 8MB modules for this...
  11. Spidey01

    PowerBook Duo 210 Best way to get software/data onto it

    SCSI Disk Mode is a great idea, although may need to watch out from HFS / HFS+. The papers that came with my Wallstreet series seemed to suggest SCSI Disk Mode wouldn’t work with my Duo’s OS. I presume because it came with MacOS on an HFS+ and System 7 doesn’t have a driver for the newer file...
  12. Spidey01

    System memory use between 24-bit and 32-bit addressing

    Now that would make sense. Running the math, a 24-bit address space can’t naturally address 24MB. Everything I’ve come across seems to suggest that classic Macs tend to memory map hardware into a relatively flat memory model which would constrain it further. Doesn’t seem like Apple was heavily...
  13. Spidey01

    System memory use between 24-bit and 32-bit addressing

    When my Duo 230 boots up, I've noticed this reported in the About screen: 24-bit addressing => System 7.5.5 uses about 18~19 MB of RAM. 32-bit addressing =>System 7.5.5 uses about 2.5~2.6 MB of RAM. This machine has 24 MB of memory between onboard and expansion module. So this makes a pretty...
  14. Spidey01

    StuffIt 5.5 doesn't always extract .sit files fully

    Looks like the library unArchiver uses has files for several form of StuffIt: https://github.com/MacPaw/XADMaster
  15. Spidey01

    PowerBook Duo 210 Best way to get software/data onto it

    For what it's worth, I got a Duo 230 about a month ago and here's my two cents. Bare in mind however, I don't have the Mac background most here do. I've found three methods the easiest for getting software on my Duo 230: Floppy disk Zip disk A younger Mac My PC can access both floppy and zip...
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