12" PC Compatibility Card in a Beige G3

[Phipli]

I'll have to move out of my bedroom and sleep in the under stairs cupboard.


Wow, and the PC cards were probably more powerful than the host Mac

The 7200/120 is sort of interesting - only it and the 9150 got the 120MHz 601. Also the 8200, but that is just a 7200.

I keep meaning to benchmark a 120 601 against a 120 604, but never quite find the time.

 

[Snial]

I do actually have a few 7200s.. so.. the theat is real, @croissantking

Macs were quite popular in the Amulet Research group at Manchester Uni in the late 1990s. Steve Furber had a Duo 230 which he upgraded to a Duo 270c or 280c, but my supervisor, Doug Edwards bought a PowerMac 7200/75/16MB (or maybe 90) in late 1996, a bit before I bought my PM4400/160/32MB. So, oddly enough I felt his was the more serious machine even though mine was higher performance and just as expandable (and OF outputted to video, whereas I believe it outputted to serial on the early PM7200).

 

[Phipli]

(and OF outputted to video, whereas I believe it outputted to serial on the early PM7200)

Unusual - all of the macs I've tried default to the serial port, although you can override it.

Using keyboard and screen does tend to be slightly unreliable in the beige era. If you type too fast it misses characters and you can't delete without it getting confused.

If I'm really fed up I use a USB to 422 adapter from my modern Linux laptop, but truth be told, I mostly just use OF in screen+keyboard mode and think about every keypress to get it right.

 

[Snial]

Unusual - all of the macs I've tried default to the serial port, although you can override it.

I never even tried to use it from the serial port on the PM4400. But if I did, I would have had to use my Sinclair QL to interact with Open Firmware :-D !

Using keyboard and screen does tend to be slightly unreliable in the beige era. If you type too fast it misses characters and you can't delete without it getting confused.

Curious, again, I don't remember OF being too slow on the keyboard. For me the experience was a lot like the Sun boot prompt.

If I'm really fed up I use a USB to 422 adapter from my modern Linux laptop, but truth be told, I mostly just use OF in screen+keyboard mode and think about every keypress to get it right.

Maybe I'm a slower typist ;-) . But also I rarely try to do anything clever with OF, so maybe I'm never in a position where I'm rattling off commands like @joevt !

 

[Phipli]

Curious, again, I don't remember OF being too slow on the keyboard. For me the experience was a lot like the Sun boot prompt.

It just drops characters if you touch type fairly quickly, but because deleting doesn't work properly it is more of an issue that it should be. Most of my experience is with a 6500 which should be pretty similar to the 4400.

 

[joevt]

Open Firmware has a weird input behaviour for serial on Old World Macs (and telnet on New World Macs). Maybe it affects keyboard input as well. If you paste more than 14 characters at a time, it will throw away characters. I haven't traced the execution path that causes this. It would be pretty easy to do using my fork of DingusPPC - it has code to dump an Open Firmware stack trace. I could make it do that whenever it's trying to read a character to see where it is throwing away the characters.

For serial input, Open Firmware has a dl command which is a super tight serial port input loop that does not waste time echoing characters to output so you can paste a lot of text without using text pacing options in your terminal app to slow down the paste.

Open Firmware output to screen is slow when it comes to scrolling.

I believe New World Macs defaulted Open Firmware input / output to keyboard / screen.

The 4400 ROM appears to default Open Firmware input / output to ttya like most Old World Macs.