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Never have used a Soundscape. I do have an old Ensoniq OPUS card I've been meaning to plug into something, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I do like those old soundcards (back when MIDI wasn't just that same damn cheapo mangled Sound Canvas patch set!)

I've never had a USB keyboard or mouse fail to work under OS9, but on the Blue & White G3 I had to use an ADB keyboard with OpenFirmware as it wouldn't recognize the (non-Apple) USB keyboard I was using.

Hell, even the laptop P4s were terrible in the thermal department. The P4m laptop I used to own got hot enough that when the power supply went nova and actually melted the plastic tip on the plug in the process, I didn't actually notice for about ten minutes.

If it's "illusive" I hope you didn't pay much for it... ;)

Yeah, that looks a lot like a SOG signal that the monitor isn't filtering out of the picture.

Hah, I remember Nanosaur.

Well, if nothing else, you can boot it with the Option key down and get the partition-select menu. Takes forever for the damn thing to actually finish sniffing around for partitions, but it does work. Just remember to re-select it in the Startup Disk control panel on OS9 or it won't stay selected.

Have you tried picking it up and dropping it? ;)

How does QuickDraw acceleration factor in? I can't imagine that Apple with their "do everything in software" philosophy implemented that on the Quadras' built-in video, did they?

I don't know about the exact percentages, but yes, memory access time is a major bottleneck on the 68000, particularly as A. it's primarily a 32-bit processor, but only has a 16-bit bus, so all 32-bit memory accesses take two cycles, and B. it has no cache on-chip, so any time it needs to access...

It would be a fun trick to run Mac software on the X68000, though :D

Ooh, jealous. If you ever get bored with the programming or MIDI books, I'll happily offer them a good home ;)

Even if we take that at face value (yes, there are window-manager themes that replicate the OS9 look very nicely, but good luck getting anything else to look all that Mac-like,) the key point is that it's not how classic Mac OS looks, it's how it feels. It's a pleasant user experience not just...

Quite a bit, yes. Aside from a couple oddities like the division between address and data registers, it basically looks like a 32-bit PDP-11 as designed by someone who hadn't seen the VAX.

Heh, I'd like to try my hand at a homebrew CPU sometime, but I'd need to brush up on my low-level electronics knowledge a good deal first...

Yeah, but those components cost money, and if compact Mac users were already content with 1bpp video, why spend the extra $0.x/unit?

Yeah, that's the Micron Xceed mentioned earlier in the thread.

Say you bumped it up from 1bpp (black & white) to 2bpp (four shades of gray, same as the Powerbook 150.) That doubles the amount of memory required for the framebuffer from ~21KB to ~43KB - considering that the machine originally shipped with 1MB, that's not really a huge amount. Double it...

I've got a 50MHz '030 in my Amiga, and it's pretty zippy, but not by as much as you'd think - I presume because it only has 1KB total L1 cache (512B instruction/512B data.) I don't know what's on this card, but my observation is that if you're not going to go to an '040, you really want some...

I believe the IIGS uses Mac-style mini-DIN serial, correct? If it's much like the Mac internally you could probably use a Mac serial-to-MIDI breakout box, since the UARTs there were flexible enough to talk at MIDI rates. No idea what the selection of IIGS MIDI software looks like, though.