A Benchracing project from the frustrated Harware hacker.

[barana]

G'day just wanted to write this one down so in at least writing it down gives me an outlet.

I've a project. its a modern retro interpretation of the g4 cube. It will be in snow white-painted with planinum, and as if apple turned back the clock on the g4 cube

The mobo will be a 68000. Probably a Mac classic.I like limiting the game to a 68000+i have a rarely worked on game port that i would use this machine with When its done

I would Install a 68000/68010 accelerator in it - a salivating possibility would be the 50mhz 68000 'zeus68k'

http://awesome.commodore.me/zeus68k/

I would use this as a monitor

It's an apple twopage display, Its grayscale, 16 grays according to apple

I believe it has a display card for a classic/SE

I would use an original square adb mouse

and the keyboard? a IIGS keyboard, still to me the most stylish ADB KB out

the os would be an easy 6.0.8, hands down, with 7.0.1 as a standby for 7 only apps.

the cube would be the most fun

I would either start off with the g4 cube, and reskin it with the plastic and do(yes just do, no other way to describe it) snow white on it - using a 3d scan and modify with a 3d program and print out with a reprap, or something along the lines of a malleable, settable product, bog,kneed-it etc and conventional tools like sanders and routers.

or make up a custom Job using same/similar methods with a custom size but still with a close resemblance to the cube.

there would be 2 media drives up top, a superdrive floppy, and - a slot loading cdrom (burner if I could find one) - I have found an old scsi 1 slotloading pioneer cdrom online, that may work well. its 16x iirc.

The HDD would certainly be a scsi to cf adaptor with a 4GB card. 30mb boot, 2 gb storage partition and other partitions such as prodos and some spare space I can play with.

If you want to shoot me down I wont stop you, I'm not saying this to prove or convince. just using it as a digital diary. anyone who share a common interest gets to see.Bonus for them.

more to follow.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I'm a bit of a 68000 purist. I dont want to upgrade my 68000 machines above a 68000 . . . with a 68000, I think you're stuck with 4mb, yeah?

Sort of, with the right accelerator, you'll have SIMM slots and video out for your 68kCube. Running under Connectix' Compact Virtual, you can have something on the order of 32MB of RAM Disk based Virtual Memory, but you'll have to put up with an '030 and its PMMU to do it, AFAIK.

For over 4MB you'll need to use a PB100 MoBo in there and that will increase the dimensions of you baseline cube a bit, IIRC. I'm assuming here that you're increasing the Cube68000's dimensions to accommodate a Mac Plus, SE or Classic MoBo, correct?

The ADB Peripherals choice further limits you to the SE (by far the easiest for getting a TPD Card) Classic or the PB100, but if you go with the Plus, there are conversion hacks allowing you to choose from a huge selection of PS2 peripherals, some very frogLike.

The Grayscale aspect of the TPD won't matter, you're stuck with single bit, Black & White for a 68000 MoBo.

Be on the lookout for a SCSI->Video solution, they're easier to come by and a lot more versatile than the KillyKlip solutions.

If you're going for Snow White/68000, a cartridge loader would be more in line with period correct hacking than the slotloader. But snap that baby up in any event, they're scarce as hen's teeth.

I've been going over the frogdesign concept Macs for the upcoming 30th Anniversary Mac celebration. I've got some horrible pics available of some concepts that you might find interesting.



Lose the monitor, of course . . .



. . . ditto . . .



. . . left handed Quadra 700/FDD/CD I/O Cube . . . ZIP!

This or the one above might work nicely in your vertical orientation . . .



. . . pop-top I/O door?

NeXT! :lol: Not all that original there, SJ! Seriously, though, did the Steve hire Hartmut's hella crew for the Cube & its peripherals design work?

Any of these could easily be torqued into a Snow White Cube.

Nice hack concept! :approve:

 

[barana]

Nice hack concept! :approve:

Thx trash80! *warm and fuzzies*

The reason I'm frustrated, as I'm currently unemployed - have been for a year. Having said that I've just picked up an apprenticeship!

I also live in a mobile home, with absolutely 0 space for any projects like that.

This new job I have picked up pays reasonable, So I can save for the cheapest block of land in a 5 hr radius - there are a few around, not many.In 2 years I will have one, I recon.But I'll still be taking some time to build on it, tho might be a long while

the powerbook 100 donor looks like a good option, The only thing is, I love the auto inject drives,I know the powerbook 100 external drive uses a _kind_ of pc drive that doesnt have auto anything

Is the port on the powerbook 100 able to drive an autoinject drive:I know it has 20 pins, but is the circuitry behind it able?

they are some good examples of snow white! I have seen the tall monitor grim reaper style design mockup, It honestly creeps me out.

I will be seeking to replicate this

I'd also like to run some speakers, as harmon kardon speakers are present in most g4 cube pix, so a nice snow white speaker -

ill get to build myself,...unfortunately all 68000 macs have mono sound... unless there is a (probably) scsi stereo card so i can belt out some nice tunes, and maybe reroute the system sound to this card.... hmmmm iirc there is a mp3 card project for the apple ][ and there have been a few mp3 cards for the amiga500 that plug into the apple ][ slots and amiga parallel port respectively.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I hate to say it, but the more you explain your aims, the more you're really painting yourself into a corner. Sticking with 68000 if you want to do stereo out is impossible AFAIK. It's bad enough that you're wasting the Grayscale capabilities of your TPD choice by limiting yourself to a B&W platform.

Maybe Commodore or a WorkStation mfr. supported grayscale/color and stereo sound on a 68000 system, but I can't think of one where Apple ever did.

Very cool hack prospect in that Snow White send up of the Cube, but I'm beginning to think you're in dire need of a more capable Proc/ROM combo inside.

68040 would be your sweet spot for sound and Q605/LC475 for your smallest practical outside dimensions for the Snow White Cube. :-/

edit: with one of the variations of the Quadra 630, you'd get the cool, remote controlled CD and TV-Tuner capabilities of the TAM in a 68k Cube.

 

[mcdermd]

NeXT! :lol: Not all that original there, SJ! Seriously, though, did the Steve hire Hartmut's hella crew for the Cube & its peripherals design work?:

Yes, actually. He used FrogDesign at NeXT. Are you sure that's an Apple exercise and not one of Frog's for NeXT?

They also did some work for Sun, IIRC.

 

[barana]

Grayscale tpd cards available for the se30 dunno about the se yet.

Just because no-one did it doesnt mean it cant be done.

Commodore didnt do these hack projects.. Users with hw flair did. Its all possible.

Eg someone made a soundchip module recently for the parallel port of a Commodore pet.

One of the mp3 cards I meantioned was done by users for the apple II.

I'd like to do the project in stages spanning several years, as I learn how to accompish one

Of the non core features I want it will be added.

My project will be based on a 68000, all these other things are ideas that im throwing out are question.

Original b&w quickdraw is actually an 8 colour system, just compact macs were made in b&w.

So the software is there, and at bare minimum the scsi 'scuzzyview' is a grayscale displaycard.

Yeah 8'm looking @ the pb100 as a possibility right now 8mb scsi floppy small mobo and it runs system 6..

And yeah, I might have to use a cube as my guide, because the mobo is slightly bigger.

I've even thought about experimenting with cd burning at the lowest speeds using a sCSI ramdisk of 700mb building the ISO on it and dma'ing the image bit by bit right into the burner's buffer.

Does anyone know what sustained speeds the macplus scsi chip is able to do dma ?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Cool, me likes tilting at windmills. [] ]'>

While you've got grayscale capability in the TPD and SCSI Video solutions, AFAIK that won't give you grayscale on a compact or the PB100. Interesting point about QuickDraw being 3bit from its beginnings, I'd love to see you pull off grayscale output from the PB100.

I wonder if Display Postscript might hold the key, dunno, someone like bbraun will be able to put this kind of thing into perspective.

No grayscale card was available for the SE, AFAIK. That was my main production machine back in the dawn of DTP, so I'd probably have heard or read about it had there been one. The PB100 was my first laptop, the internal video card (RAM based I/O wedge) was the only upgrade I denied to the maxed out BabyPB. I never really bothered with grayscale or color, as my work was vector based and B&W on the Panasonic TPD running off the IIx/Rocket was all I really needed.

The RAM based I/O wedge might be another key to pulling off grayscale output from a B&W Mac. If the drivers are setting up the Video Buffer in system RAM (a la Vampire Video) and stripping it from there to toss up on the screen, a Postscript environment might really work. I imagine there would be a significant performance penalty, but knocking the PB100's performance down to that of an SE would probably be acceptable to achieve grayscale.

I'm typing out my elbow here, someone else will likely shoot down this naive spitballing, but operating outside the bounds of QuickDraw and the PB100s internal display circuitry seems like a reasonable bet on what may be the only game in town.

 

[barana]

http://lowendmac.com/compact/scuzzygraph.html

this is a colour scsi displaycard for b&w macs. it has a greyscale sister the suzzyview, but ive been told it uses the cpu to move data about...

if I use this card on a grayscale monitor, I think I'll get my grey images.

Would be LOADS of fun to copy this large video card.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Very cool, but even better, the TidBITS article covers Second Wave's PDS expansion bays. I remember reading about the one for the SE and Plus now, but I don't remember anything at all about the two SE Card box for the Portable.

I can't imagine we'll find many of these ScuzzyGraph boxen out in the wild. But finding the drivers, even without the box, might be a real eye opener and maybe even a foot in the door!

 

[barana]

What does 'tilting at windmills' mean ?

Our own 'classic mac' user has a scuzzygraphII with drivers and expressed an interest in copying it

As for the scsi bus its a mixed bag of finds ive turned up. ALOT OF 68k macs use the ncr 53c80

Chip, which has a theoretical block write dma data rate of 3mb/s which is plenty for writing cd's. Problem is, to do dma it needs dma circutry in the Mac, bad news is only the IIFX had dma circulty taking advantage of that 3mb/s.

On the mac plus, what we're left with is polled (CPU driven) data rate of 142kb/s theoretical or which may

Work, a semi polled aka pseudo dma rate of 300+ kbs which would in theory ,on a good day... Witha fresh southeast wind blowing be able to sustain a modern large buffered burner using a scsi ramdiskhttp://micha.freeshell.org/ramdisk/index.php at 1x or 150kb/s read/write rate.. altho id make the ramdisk address 700mb with 72pin Simms.

NB the PowerBook 100's scsi chip is supposedly capable of higher speeds than this. Only barely

Otoh, running a scuzzygraph at a polled rate on a mplus of 142kb/s would be taxing on the scsi bus AND on the CPU. Tho, that article I linked you to said the journalist used a scuzzygraph on an accellerated macplus and it was stilll snappy - maybe a 16MHZ 68000 pb100 counts as accellerated.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

What does 'tilting at windmills' mean?

Don Quixote reference:

tilting = jousting = charging full speed at a windmill on horseback with a lance . . .

. . . taking up the quest for the impossible dream.

I'm sure the accelerator had > 68000 CPU & performance, even at the same 16MHz clock . . .

. . . if it was only running at 16MHz, it could easily have been 25 MHz.

They didn't say it was snappy, they said it wasn't any slower than a stock SE . . . they couldn't tell how bad the system hit was . . .

. . . reading between the lines: it was really bad to have brought the SE back down to baseline performance, hence, the accelerator.

 

[barana]

Oh and yeah, the idea of an se bus interests me! Its perfect environment would be in the snow white cube, in the se, its just an extention of the 68000 bus ı don't believe they would bother with a nubus chip. Tho on the Pb100, the 16mhz bus might play havoc with a card meant for a 8mhz bus...

Thho th pb memory map is sufficiently different that a card meant for an se will be trying to memory map its Rom into a place the pb isnt looking ? Dunno if this would phase the 100. Any ideas? .I could boot with an se Rom, but the onboard chips would Still try to map themselves elsewhere?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

No NuBus chipset needed, run TattleTech or SlotInfo from the Gauge series on an SE or other 68000. My guess that one of them might well report that SlotManager is not present (in any of the Compact series) and that would explain why Second Wave never, AFAIK, made a NuBus expansion box for the 68000 series.

Memory mapping info is on the ROM.

The 68000 in any 68000 based system is a 68000/SE/KillyKlip expansion slot.

 

[Gorgonops]

Given all the "I'm going to build this, and this..." in the thread, might not the best way to accomplish your lofty goals to be to discard using original Apple parts entirely and build an all-new system that incorporates as much as you want as possible?

As noted, the system architecture of the original toasters was limited to 4MB full stop because of the wasteful peripheral decoding scheme. The Portable and PB100 and those systems are far cleaner, with all the peripherals crammed into the top 1MB instead, so we know that for your Mac Clone you want to start with the Portable ROM and memory layout. For the prototype, get yourself a *big* protoboard, salvage the SWIM, SCC, 5380, and VIA chips from a late-model SE and start wiring. You should be able to use at least parts of the information reverse-engineered from the various attempts to run a Mac in an FPGA for certain details of the glue logic you'll be putting together. The "video card" in the Portable is actually simpler than the main-memory-stealing unit in the Plus: looks like it's just a simple 32k dedicated framebuffer so you don't need to worry about access contention for main RAM. For that, use a 16MB or bigger 72 pin SIMM: you'll only be using 9MB of it directly but the memory map for the Portable/P100 has a large gap between the top of ROM and the peripheral space. By adding a simple paging unit you could map what's left over into a window in that area and use it for a RAMdisk.

(After writing your own driver, of course. You'll be writing lots of drivers. And probably stripping stuff out of the Portable ROM that you don't need, like the stuff that talks to the Power Manager IC...)

For your goal of a bigger monitor, let's think about the video card issue. The Mac OS actually has a pretty simple system for dealing with linear framebuffers, and well-behaved programs *should* make an OS call to find out where the FB is and how large it is. The PB100 memory map chops out 64k for video but only populates it with 32k, just enough for its 640x400 screen. If you want more than that *in principle* it should be possible to map a larger linear framebuffer somewhere, adjust the pointers in the OS, and go. The 64k window of the original machine limits you to at-best something in the ballpark of 800x600 mono so... pick a secondary frame buffer location somewhere out of the reserved ROM area, the same place you're putting your paged memory. 128k of VRAM will give you enough for 1152x870, the resolution of the Apple Two-Page display at single-bit depth. (Although, heck, 256k could give a full HD 1920x1080 single-bit workspace. There's about 4MB of reserved space so no problem, go for the gold! ... Although you'd better double check what the bounds of that "here is my framebuffer" structure are in the mono Macs.)

Color, on the other hand, is an exercise for the reader. The "color" support in monochrome Quickdraw was there so the Mac could handle generating spot color on an Apple Imagewriter equipped with the 7 color ribbon. The color SCSIgraph leverages that support, but the device only worked on programs that used "well-behaved" Quickdraw calls and it's not true "3 bit color". So far as I know the 68000 machines have no mechanism for directly comprehending a color framebuffer the way they do a monochrome one, and if that's the case assuming you map a multi-bit framebuffer into the reserved space somewhere you'll have to write a driver that does what the SCSIgraph does; IE, grabs Quickdraw commands that reference color, sort and shuffle, and cram into the appropriate memory space. And further worth noting: a "grayscale monitor" is really going to be alien to a mono machine. The colors supported by Quickdraw are specifically named "Red", "Blue", "Yellow", etc, and no way is it an RGB/chroma-luma mapping . If you want software to run in greyscale and dither/shade properly as if it's *real* greyscale you'll probably at the very least be writing a *really* odd driver, if not the whole program. Personally I'd suggest pitching grayscale. It just complicates the video circuitry and DAC you'll be building from scratch already.

Stereo sound: the Portable has it, although it's very primitive. (It's basically the four voices of the mono Macs split into two stereo channels. And of course that support is crammed into a *very* proprietary ASIC.) If that really doesn't satisfy you could certainly grab a random memory address and map in one of those MP3 controller chips if you're up to writing the software to drive it. But I wouldn't strictly call that a "sound card".

Back to the RAMdisk thing: Again, whatever memory above 9MB you don't use from your SIMM you map into some of that unoccupied "ROM Expansion Area". There are some off-the-shelf mapper chips you could use or you can build your own with a small SRAM and a few latches. Set it up to swap reasonably-size pages (64k pages in a 1MB window?) and you shouldn't have much trouble writing a RAMdisk driver. (Another option would be to use it for "Expanded RAM", ala the EMS RAM on DOS machines, but of course you'd be writing your own software to take advantage of it.)

No comment on the idea of trying to use that AVR RAMdisk to burn CDs.

So, there you go. Sounds like a great project for a long weekend to me! (A long, long, LONG weekend...)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

. . . or a decade's worth of weekends!

Now . . . where was it I left my shaving basin? :lol:

 

[barana]

thats.......COOL!

I dont have the skills fro that but understand 99% of it

I would Love ! to do something very similar to that!

I'm building a kit microbee computer atm, so I can get down into the HW and learn!

I'm not to that standard, *yet* I would do a pb100 first, but id really like to do a system like you described

I did find a memory map of the pb100.

less frustrated, more excited Hardware Hacker

 

[Gorgonops]

I'm building a kit microbee computer atm, so I can get down into the HW and learn!

I looked that up, and... it's actually pretty cool they're producing such a thing. The $399 price is a little dear but given what it includes it's probably fair. (The main concern I'd have with using that as a "learning machine" is that a large portion of it comes pre-assembled and the kit-built portion won't function independently of the Coldfire add-on board. That makes it a little complex for a bare-metal testbed.)

I'm not to that standard, *yet* I would do a pb100 first, but id really like to do a system like you described

I was writing *slightly* tongue-in-cheek, but in all seriousness I'd venture that a suitably skilled hacker (which I am *not*) should probably be capable of producing a clone of a Motorola 68000 Mac using "mid-level electronics hobbyist" techniques. (IE, wire wrap/stripboard/homespun two-layer PCB boards.) The only custom chips in the Mac Plus outside the IWM were a few PALs, and the SE and Portable for the most part only add ADB and an interrupt line for the SCSI chip. If they were willing to harvest some chips from a donor Superdrive-equipped SE and invest the time to reverse-engineer the holes in Apple's documentation I'd wager that a competent engineer could fit a "Super 68000" Mac clone based on the Portable memory map onto a PCB about a foot square using discrete glue logic. (Judicious use of PALs/CPLDs could shrink that a lot further, although you're probably still looking at "large postcard" size unless you go more than two layer. Hardest part is going to be the video section.)

Of course, unless you were willing to replicate *all* the hardware of the Portable (or at least comprehensive enough stubs to make it past the boot self-check) you're going to have to patch the ROM image to recognize the extensions you incorporate into your Frankenstein creation and ignore the parts that you didn't include. There are a couple folks on here that are probably capable of doing it so you could always try organizing a group effort, although for that to fly you're probably going to need to come up with a hardware design that doesn't require gutting an old Mac for chips. Something that I like the *idea* of would be to, again, base the hardware roughly on the Portable memory map but take the approach emulators like BasiliskII (almost every device) and vMac (storage) do to hardware, which is to extensively patch the ROM image to replace certain drivers with stubs that don't have to emulate the workings of the physical device. With that approach you could jettison the need for ADB, (S)IWM, and (optionally) even SCSI, and instead incorporate a small microcontroller into the system that drives a USB keyboard, mouse, and an SD memory card. (BasiliskII and vMac replace the "sony" IWM driver with an abstract "storage device" driver. Modify that so it talks to said microcontroller and let the MCU handle the SD card, either as a raw device or pointing the Mac reads and writes to disk image files.) Do that and your system is reduced to a 68000 CPU, RAM, video logic, that microcontroller, and some glue, perfect for a small hobby-board that could be sold minus Mac ROM image for a reasonable price, say the $150 ballpark.

(Throw together a simple pre-boot/debugger/ucLinux environment to package with it and let the buyer cook their own Mac ROM with the help of a downloadable patch program if they're so inclined. Put a bus port/some GPIO headers on the board and you might be able to sell it to people *not* interested in the Mac emulation, particularly if you added an ethernet port to the feature list.)

But hey, if hardware hacking ideas were as easy as ham sandwiches we'd all look like Mama Cass. Even if you were that "suitably skilled hacker" between the hardware and software this would be a very non-trivial amount of work. Making it happen: not easy. But good luck!