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That's good news about the system booting! Here's a trick you might be able to try now. The ///'s video RAM occupies two chips: 2114 SRAMs that together offer a kilobyte of memory. Are they in sockets? Try swapping them and seeing if the display changes. If the problem moves along with the...

It's good to change out old RIFAs, but they don't cause this kind of problem you see on the screen. RIFAs sit on the input ("primary") side of the power supply and help the computer be a good citizen on the power grid. A power supply has two sides, usually: the side that takes in the AC mains...

In the Portable, the keyboard and mouse are interchangeable: you can swap their locations. Each one plugs into a large header connector over a ribbon cable. Open your Portable's case (carefully!) and swap the locations of your KB and mouse and see if the problem is the same. If it isn't, then...

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)...

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...

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!

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

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

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...