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New video update, showing latest performance tweaks and a demonstration on a Macintosh LC II I borrowed from a friend:

Hi all, I just made a video demonstration:

Hello, I have made the first official release of a new remote desktop server for Vintage Macs! https://github.com/marciot/mac-minivnc This has already been discussed in this thread, but I've finally polished it up enough that I feel it is more than a "hack" and deserves a shout out here...

The source code is now on GitHub, along with the first release! One major improvement is that it is no longer necessary to use a specific executable for each display size or video mode. It now supports whatever resolution or color Mac the machine is running at...

Okay, so I've spent an ungodly amount of time rewriting a lot of this in 68020 assembly language and implementing various encoding strategies for color Macintosh computers. This project has become an unhealthy obsession 🤕. Much to my dismay, it still performs poorly in Basillisk II, but I am...

@Nixontheknight: This is the corrected upload that runs at 640x480 at 256 colors.

@Nixontheknight: Here is a new version that runs in 640x480 resolution at 256 colors. It's fairly slow, but this version is written in C and I still haven't rewritten it in optimized assembly language. Today I picked up a 68020 assembly manual and there are a lot of new instructions on the 68020...

This is incredible! I've been teaching myself 68x assembly lately, so I should be able to tweak this or at least learn from it!

I had the similar idea of building a game streaming client for the Mac Plus, then blow people's minds on YouTube or Twitch by pretending to play modern games like Crysis or Grand Theft Auto on a vintage Mac 😁 Anyhow, currently I am occupied with my VNC server, but this might be a fun idea for...

@Nixontheknight Right now, I send the screen data entirely uncompressed, but the VNC protocol provides many compression options. Those would vastly conserve bandwidth on the 256 or thousands of color modes (and maybe even the 16 color mode), but the CPU has to do work to compress a particular...

@Nixontheknight: I've been working on this a bit. Here is the first try of a version that runs at 640x480x16. Under Basillisk II emulation, it was sluggish but usable enough for me to complete the System 8.0 Jigsaw app remotely from my smartphone. Let me know how it performs on your LC II.

At first I tried a plain XOR with interesting results on menu items. I then tried a plain ADD in the mistaken assumption it would be better than XOR. It actually is, but only because it means the carry causes the sum of one column to spill into the next, so effectively 32 columns are treated as...

What processor does your accelerator use? While 40MHz is very, very quick I also suspect an instruction cache and data cache will make a huge difference. One of the tricks I use in this VNC server is that instead of duplicating the frame buffer to detect changes in the screen, I use checksums...

My implementation isn't exactly standards compliant, I cut several corners to make it more efficient, so this is not entirely surprising. But I might implement password authentication in a future version, that shouldn't be too hard, and at that point it would be nice to see how it performs...

I did come across another reference to the Journaling mechanism in tech note 1104, recently, which pretty much confirms this: "TickCount and GetKeys are not interrupt safe. This is because they support the Journaling Mechanism, as described in Inside Macintosh I , page 261. While the Journaling...

That looks great! Does it ever hang the system for you? I have a theory that on the Mac Plus MacTCP is freezes the computer occasionally simply because it can't keep up and likely has some sort of race condition somewhere related to that. It would be nice if it were more stable on faster systems.

@Crutch and @cheesestraws since you guys seem to be enjoying my deeds of Mac derring-do, let me tell you about my ordeal with the Journaling driver, for therein lies a tale... So while I was pulling my hair out over the MBState issue, I came across those two pages in the ancient scriptures...

@MacKilRoy: VNC uses TCP, while Timbuktu uses UDP. So, big win there. Eventually, it may make sense to abandon VNC compatibility and simply come up with a new protocol. The biggest problem is having clients for various platforms, but I think maybe one solution is to implement a WebSockets...

It would be pretty amazing if someone could track down the protocol specification. The VNC protocol isn't exactly optimized for low-color or low-performance devices, so I would imagine Timbuktu would perform better than my solution -- after all they've had years to perfect it. But the only way...

@MacKilRoy: Nevermind, I see Timbuktu 1.0 works on 68k, so it would be an interesting comparison. Thanks for sharing. Is there a Windows PC client for it? Has the protocol been documented anywhere?