my first Lisa

[Schafeman]

Wow, awesome job with your Lisa!  When I originally got both of mine, I was determined to 'convert' one of them back to a standard Lisa Office capable system.  There is actually no downside to doing this, since you can still boot MacWorks (screen is stretched, who cares ).  You need to source an 'H' ROM or below for the CPU card (yours may already have it).  If thats the case, track down a working Widget or ProFile... ORRR spend the big bucks and get an X/Profile, which is the CompactFlash/IDE drive for the Lisa.  Either way, enjoy!  My Lisa is sad right now, as I attempted to replace all of the keyboard foam caps with new ones I bought from an eBay auction, and none of them work.  So I have an almost completely non-functional keyboard now

 

[falen5]

H roms are whats in mine schafeman

have to get a hard drive and do the keyboard

any idea what happened to your keyboard? , if no keys are working it sounds like a chip gone or something

 

[Themk]

Its the foam pads. They wear out and break. In his case, he bought the wrong pads, so none of the keys work. Be thankful the mechanical switches used in Mac keyboards are much easier to repair, and more durable.

 

[Schafeman]

The seller of the pads told me many times they would work in the Lisa Keytronics keyboard, but they are too dense foam and don't work at all.  Luckily I got a complete refund, but damaged the rest of the pads getting the old ones out, so now my keyboard is out of order until I find more of the pads (or make my own).

 

[MarNo84]

Hey falen5,

I love that LISA OS just so simple as is and THATS the way to use a LISA - but to be true - MacOS runs so smooth on the LISA. Sometimes I just grab my MacWorks Disks and let the Mac live on that machine - playing MacOS Games is fun on the LISA. Since I only installed anfresh copy of LOS (Lisa Office System) on my ProFile Drive(s) - I think it should be possible to install multiple Operating Systems on that drive? For what I remember, it asks for the Dualboot option while initialization the Harddrive...

Marcus

 

[CC_333]

Well, the 68000 in the Lisa is clocked at 5 MHz, so technically the Mac is faster.

But, the fact that it has more RAM and probably better video (and a hard disk option!) could allow it to works more smoothly than a "real" Mac, I suppose.

c

 

[CelGen]

Well, the 68000 in the Lisa is clocked at 5 MHz, so technically the Mac is faster.

But, the fact that it has more RAM and probably better video (and a hard disk option!) could allow it to works more smoothly than a "real" Mac, I suppose.

c

The Lisas inability to lookup graphics routines in ROM blew the legs and one arm off the video performance.

 

[stepleton]

The Lisas inability to lookup graphics routines in ROM blew the legs and one arm off the video performance.

I don't think this makes a lot of sense.

It's true that the Lisa doesn't have anything like the Toolkit in ROM. This said, I don't think ROM on the Lisa (or the Mac) is really much faster than RAM, so if the software designers had wanted to, they could have made the graphics routines memory-resident for access that was as fast as possible.

In fact, I think MacWorks actually worked in essentially this way: it loaded a patched Mac ROM image into RAM, then used the Lisa's MMU to map that RAM region to the same memory addresses reserved for the ROM in a real Mac. So, effectively the same speed for access to graphics routines (and other toolkit stuff) as you would get with a ROM.

The slower clock speed is more to blame, I think. Additionally, I don't think the Lisa software engineers were coding for speed and efficiency in the same way that the Mac engineers did. They had a whole megabyte to work with, after all!

 

[CC_333]

Yeah, and a megabyte was considered absolutely *huge* at the time.

c