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  1. stepleton

    Announcing RetroChallenge 2024/10!

    I've never tried it myself, but the docs say it works with Mono on Linux etc. Very interesting --- I hope to learn more about this stuff once I get the thing working! It would also be interesting to compare PERQ Pascal to the Pascal dialect used for the Lisa (even without the Clascal parts)...
  2. stepleton

    Announcing RetroChallenge 2024/10!

    There's PERQemu! https://github.com/skeezicsb/PERQemu ICL was indeed very involved. More here: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_history/overview.htm (mouse over "Further reading" at top left to see all of the chapters) PERQ had programmable microcode, but the more Pascal-ly...
  3. stepleton

    Announcing RetroChallenge 2024/10!

    It's not fully Mac-related, but slightly Mac-ancestral maybe: here's my RetroChallenge 2024 writeup on Mastodon or BlueSky, concerning efforts to revive an early graphical workstation. Hope others got a chance to do some fun projects!
  4. stepleton

    StarTalk: a new LocalTalk hub

    Cool! Maybe a lot of people know, but what are the BNCs for?
  5. stepleton

    IIc with checkboard

    Try searching the web (not jut here) for "checkerboard" instead of "checkboard" --- this seems to turn up some discussion threads that might help.
  6. stepleton

    So, this is cool:)

    I wonder if it would make sense to dump its firmware as well. I can't imagine it's very fast, but of course LocalTalk file sharing went over the serial port too.
  7. stepleton

    Recently Found Lisa - I.D. Needed

    Good luck! We'll be here when you're ready.
  8. stepleton

    MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

    This isn't correct... The CHM has only been able to negotiate fairly restrictive terms for publishing old Apple source code; the Lisa Office System is the same way and may be even more locked down. But you don't have to take my word for it...
  9. stepleton

    Recapping Floppy Drives?

    To expand on this: these values are a lot more likely, and you'll see them all over in low-voltage electronics equipment like this. 4700uf and 2200uf is a relatively large value. I would look for caps with this rating in things like power supplies and CRTs and the like.
  10. stepleton

    RP2350: Raspberry PI PICO-2 with 520kB of RAM

    I've never programmed the RPi chips, but the PIO devices seem like they would be helpful for dealing with this. The 2350 has 12 of them, and maybe that's enough for a lot of the FPU control signals? Of course they'd have to be coordinated somehow, and I don't know how that works.
  11. stepleton

    Did classic MacOS officially support other character encodings for AppleTalk's Name Binding Protocol?

    That's my expectation! I meant to suggest though that it probably wasn't too unusual. People probably just tolerated it or fell back on whatever least-common denominator solution could get you to the files you needed.
  12. stepleton

    Apple Lisa tech doc: "Lisa Video Board Level II"

    From a discusson over on LisaList2: someone found some Twiggy disks that belonged to an Apple employee once upon a time. One of them had a detailed technical manual for troubleshooting and repairing Apple Lisa video boards. I used my Lisa to "print" the manual materials to my laptop and turned...
  13. stepleton

    Did classic MacOS officially support other character encodings for AppleTalk's Name Binding Protocol?

    I dunno --- consider an institution like CERN, where you have academics and specialists from all over the world. I can imagine there being a research group in the early '90s with a couple dozen researchers and technicians dedicated to a single experiment, everyone using an AppleTalk network for...
  14. stepleton

    PPC DOS compatibility card in a Quadra 700

    Ha, I'd tried driving my Portrait display with the DOS card in my 6100 back in college. Out of the box, I obtained the result you've shown. So I thought, "I know what I'll do" which was to install a Unix-alike on the DOS card that could run XFree86. In those days, this variant of the X Window...
  15. stepleton

    Cloning the AsantéTalk, or not

    I think the aforementioned overlayfs is the usual way to do it with modern linux.
  16. stepleton

    Cloning the AsantéTalk, or not

    There are loads of appliance computers running Linux that can essentially tolerate being shut down via power-cord yank. I think that one of them is the Lisa hard drive emulator I made, and for this one I can tell you how I did it. It's not based on RPi but instead on a (sadly now essentially...
  17. stepleton

    Lisa 1.8a PSU clone by Warmech

    Those are for video focus and contrast. The Lisa PSU does not make them --- those voltages just go into the PSU, pass through a pair of potentiometers that stick out the back of the Lisa so that the user can make an adjustment, and then they go right back out of the PSU. It's wholly unrelated to...
  18. stepleton

    Lisa Widget Drive Repair -- Errors 81, 82, 85 and one successful boot

    It sounds to me like improving the probe-to-pin connectivity may be the main factor here. Since your controller swap yielded the same behaviour you saw earlier, I'm inclined to suspect that the controller is OK overall and that the problem lies elsewhere. To my mind, really conclusively...
  19. stepleton

    Lisa Widget Drive Repair -- Errors 81, 82, 85 and one successful boot

    That's interesting ... what are you triggering on here? It looks like there's some serial line traffic and some attempt to decode it; does the bytestream have any resemblance to what ROM source code says? The traffic does look somewhat dubious to me. Would love to delve deeper but the workday...
  20. stepleton

    Lisa Widget Drive Repair -- Errors 81, 82, 85 and one successful boot

    IIRC I've observed a hot Darlington array on a drive that wouldn't start turning on its own. After an attempt or two at "push-starting" the spindle (like the "prodding" you were doing, it sounds like), it would spin, but it seems like a stuck spindle just means a lot of current through the array...
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