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I've been using the Sonnet 8.5 enabler to run 8.5 on my Power PC upgraded Quadra, and it seems to run well enough. So I figured I'd give 8.6 a try, but after running the upgrade installer and rebooting the machine just dies with an "illegal instruction" on boot. Quickly, and even with no...

The SuperMac cards (particularly I've looked at Thunders) appear they may support HDTV output from references in the ROMs and various documentation. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any manuals for the Thunder series. Does anyone know if it's possible to activate HDTV modes, and what triggers the...

I'm continuing my old disc spelunking (can you tell?) and found another oddity on the 1992 Nordic support disc: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/apple-nordic-support-cd-1992 This might be old news, but I wasn't aware there's an official (unofficial) extension to add HD20 support back to machines...

I've long wondered, why doesn't a ROM-in-RAM utility for the Quadras exist? It was common for 030 and 040 accelerators, and the 68k AV machines had it natively (enabled with a PRAM switch, which AV Turbo ROM can flip for you). (I know you're thinking -- is it because performance changes are...

Hey folks, I got a little distracted from regular ROM mods by some interesting quirks of the Radius Rocket. I ended up writing...a lot, so the full post is on my personal site, but I'll summarize things here: https://eharmon.net/retro/radius/rom_extraction/ TL;DR: The Rocket's Macintosh ROMs...

A companion to my RocketWare thread, but separating out RocketShare cause it's a whole different beast: RocketWare 2.0 or Betas? I've finally got a Rocket in my Wombat system to play with, and while probing around I've generated some questions: Does anyone have the RocketShare manuals? I can't...

The RocketWare 1.3.2 readme makes the following note: Some of this was added to the 1.5 release, however it's readme notes: Which makes me wonder if there's any 2.0 betas floating around out there with some more features.

I've tried LisaEm but it's been a struggle: - 1.2.7 RC4 and RC3 seem totally broken as they crash when the Lisa boots. That seems to be confirmed by posts on the LisaList2 forums. - But I haven't had luck with earlier 1.2.7 RCs either, on macOS or Windows. - I gave 1.2.6 a try, and it's a total...

I recently determined the Classic's built-in ROM Disk uses the same driver and format as the Portable's extensible ROM Disk, and added support for examining them in my ROM template...

In order to flesh out device support in my DeclROM parser (ROM Fiend: A DeclROM, Extended DeclROM, and System ROM parser), I'm interested in testing and validating any and all DeclROMs you have! For testing I've already collected quite a few, but I'm interested in unique versions not already...

Hey folks, I've been digging into Mac ROMs pretty extensively lately, and I've created a file template for Hex Fiend that can help you introspect and examine all types of Mac ROMs. https://github.com/eharmon/rom_fiend From the README: Most interestingly, I think this might be the first...

I think Apple published an example for this as well, but I ran into this patent filing with fairly extensive source listings for a Sonic-based Ethernet card's BOM, DeclROM, and utilities. Could be handy for someone...

I much prefer EEPROMs over EPROMs; when tinkering the constant cycle of waiting for some chips in the UV eraser just gets annoying. But every time I need more chips I forget what the equivalents are, so I finally took my random notes and compiled it into a single page you can use to find what...

Everything seems right for the SuperMac Thunder II GX 1360 to successfully run at 1600x1200: Like it's 1600 peer it has: - 6MiB of memory - 3x 135MHz RAMDACs So I took a look at modifying the ROM and/or extension to enable 1600x1200 resolutions. The bad news: doesn't work yet. The good news...

I've been testing a SuperMac Thunder II GX 1360, and at certain resolutions the screen becomes scrollable. As you move the mouse to the bottom right, it begins to scroll through a larger framebuffer than is being output over the video cable. Like modern accessibility zoom. Neat feature if you...

Picking up from this thread: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/supermac-pdq-spectrum-8-24-thunder-roms.42656/post-505422 Aaaaah. I didn't realize they switched RAMDACs. Looking at the reference though (https://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/video/DAFBII_ACDC.pdf): And: Unfortunately OCR...

Any opinions on the best ramdisk for System 6/7/8, each? I'm curious. There's so many options and I don't think I've ever seen a shootout. There's varying features (reboot support, sync-to-disk, compression, speed), besides the obvious stability and OS version support.

The *nix forum didn't have enough Linux in it, so I figured I'd give it a swing. I've got Debian 12 (yes, 12, the latest revision) running on my Quadra 650: And shockingly, running pretty well! The boot process is a bit painful (5+ minutes), even running on a 68040 at 42MHz, but once it's...

I'm running my Q650 overclocked (40-50MHz, depending), and I noticed something curious: newer Ethernet drivers seem deeply unstable, at least with an overclock. - The 8.1 System File ships with driver 1.1.1 for all Sonic chips (built-in ethernet and nubus cards). - It also ships with extensions...

I've been futzing with A/ROSE and while I've found some of the development utilities on the general Apple development CDs, a bunch are missing. Documentation references content "included on the Developer Essentials disc" and "included on the A/ROSE distribution disks", but I've never seen any...