I bought a USB, Wacom Graphite, A6 pad back in the candy-coloured iMac era under the pretence that it might improve my unenviable artistic skills. Then cleverly I lost it when I moved from Manchester to Birmingham in 2010, leaving most of my stuff back at my parents' in Nottinghamshire. Over the next 16 years I kept coming across parts of the tablet/pen and strange tablet-mouse at their house and then lose them during attic reorganisations while I was away.
More recently (i.e. over the past several years); I made more of an effort to collect them in a sensible place whenever I came across any of it: first the pad; later the pen and finally the 'mouse', at which point I'd managed to lose the pen again and no matter where I looked I couldn't find it.
However, this Saturday I found the pen again! I'm slowly re-homing the remaining retro-stuff from Nottingham and I decided that I'd move the Oric-1 (and Psion Netbook) from the wardrobe in the bedroom where I stay over on occasion. Lo-and behold, the pen was on the floor of the wardrobe, which meant I could take the lot back. Hurrah!
Obviously, the next thing to do was hook it up to my Blue And White G3, since it ran Mac OS 9.1; download the driver and the copy of Painter Classic it originally shipped with and try it out! What could be simpler than that?
Wrong! It was a tortuous rabbit-hole that's wasted over a day of fiddling around with the B&W! Here's how it went. The first issue was that Mac OS 9.1 kept hanging when I booted from the primary partition (which is Classic Mac OS). I kinda thought this was because of my hacky install of Mac OS 9.1. So, I tried booting from Mac OS X 10.3 (on the secondary partition) and then running it from Classic. Unfortunately, Mac OS X kept complaining about 9.1 being out of date. So, then I embarked upon a marathon of classic Mac OS reinstalls. I could mostly install Mac OS 9.0 via Mac OS X, except the installer complained about the "Parts" folder missing on Internet Access and MRJ . Booting directly into Mac OS 9.0 fixed that, but it still kept hanging after a few minutes (which wasn't happening on Mac OS X). Then I updated to Mac OS 9.1 via the multi-part installer (from MacHut.net) which I could run from Classic mode on Mac OS X. And again, Mac OS 9.1 kept crashing when I booted directly from it. Not always immediately, but usually after a few minutes, and if I rebooted it'd frequently hang during booting.
I had an idea. @Phipli had kindly provided me with 192MB of DIMMs so that I'd have a decent amount of RAM for Mac OS X (320MB instead of a tight 160MB). But I knew that in a native boot of classic Mac OS, the System Heap would be in low physical memory and applications at the top. What if one of the DIMMs wasn't reliable? Then Mac OS X might be OK (because everything including Classic might not touch a dodge DIMM), but Classic wouldn't be. So, I removed the last DIMM (the 128MB) and found...
That Mac OS 9.1 now booted reliably and stayed up! But of course, it might not have been the RAM, it could have been the DIMM socket. I installed Mac OS 9.2.1 (and 9.2.2) updaters via Mac OS X, because 9.2.1 is on an .iso which only Mac OS X natively opened (without fiddling with TYPE/Creator codes). Then I swapped the 128MB of RAM into the 3rd DIMM and rebooted into classic Mac OS; whereupon, part way through the boot, Mac OS 9.2.1 told me there was a RAM fault! So, that was it. I swapped the 3rd DIMM back to 64MB; and added the 32MB in the 4th DIMM. Now I have 224MB of RAM, which is going to be OK for my immediate needs (which might include iMovie 3.0.3). To make things clear, I'm not complaining at all about the dodgy 128MB, the remaining free RAM has made a wonderful difference! Thanks!
So, now I could install Painter Classic and show you my amazing artistic creation...
The tablet is fairly amazing I must say. I love the sensitivity and being able to hold the pen just above the tablet and see it moving the cursor is mightily reassuring that it won't start drawing anything until I want it to.
To make this whole write-up even more retro, I'm doing this yet again on my MacBook C2D. It was invaluable for creating the CDs and transferring data on HFS+ with the B&W G3. It's just new enough and fast enough to write a post on the 68KMLA, without using the Classic mode (though I think I could try that, along with NetSurf). But also it's old enough to use with my old 4 Megapixel Canon Ixusi and its tiny, tiny LCD screen...
(Stock image is the first one). My Ixusi has been through the wars.. entirely due to me thinking I could throw it down 5m from the top of a boulder in Derbyshire and even if my friend didn't catch it, it would survive. In fact, it got badly bust up and getting the lens to pop out took a lot of gentle leverage!
Still it's far easier to hook this thing up to the MacBook and have it transfer data at lowly USB 1.1 rates than getting it to talk to my iPhone 16 over Bluetooth!
More recently (i.e. over the past several years); I made more of an effort to collect them in a sensible place whenever I came across any of it: first the pad; later the pen and finally the 'mouse', at which point I'd managed to lose the pen again and no matter where I looked I couldn't find it.
However, this Saturday I found the pen again! I'm slowly re-homing the remaining retro-stuff from Nottingham and I decided that I'd move the Oric-1 (and Psion Netbook) from the wardrobe in the bedroom where I stay over on occasion. Lo-and behold, the pen was on the floor of the wardrobe, which meant I could take the lot back. Hurrah!
Obviously, the next thing to do was hook it up to my Blue And White G3, since it ran Mac OS 9.1; download the driver and the copy of Painter Classic it originally shipped with and try it out! What could be simpler than that?
Wrong! It was a tortuous rabbit-hole that's wasted over a day of fiddling around with the B&W! Here's how it went. The first issue was that Mac OS 9.1 kept hanging when I booted from the primary partition (which is Classic Mac OS). I kinda thought this was because of my hacky install of Mac OS 9.1. So, I tried booting from Mac OS X 10.3 (on the secondary partition) and then running it from Classic. Unfortunately, Mac OS X kept complaining about 9.1 being out of date. So, then I embarked upon a marathon of classic Mac OS reinstalls. I could mostly install Mac OS 9.0 via Mac OS X, except the installer complained about the "Parts" folder missing on Internet Access and MRJ . Booting directly into Mac OS 9.0 fixed that, but it still kept hanging after a few minutes (which wasn't happening on Mac OS X). Then I updated to Mac OS 9.1 via the multi-part installer (from MacHut.net) which I could run from Classic mode on Mac OS X. And again, Mac OS 9.1 kept crashing when I booted directly from it. Not always immediately, but usually after a few minutes, and if I rebooted it'd frequently hang during booting.
I had an idea. @Phipli had kindly provided me with 192MB of DIMMs so that I'd have a decent amount of RAM for Mac OS X (320MB instead of a tight 160MB). But I knew that in a native boot of classic Mac OS, the System Heap would be in low physical memory and applications at the top. What if one of the DIMMs wasn't reliable? Then Mac OS X might be OK (because everything including Classic might not touch a dodge DIMM), but Classic wouldn't be. So, I removed the last DIMM (the 128MB) and found...
That Mac OS 9.1 now booted reliably and stayed up! But of course, it might not have been the RAM, it could have been the DIMM socket. I installed Mac OS 9.2.1 (and 9.2.2) updaters via Mac OS X, because 9.2.1 is on an .iso which only Mac OS X natively opened (without fiddling with TYPE/Creator codes). Then I swapped the 128MB of RAM into the 3rd DIMM and rebooted into classic Mac OS; whereupon, part way through the boot, Mac OS 9.2.1 told me there was a RAM fault! So, that was it. I swapped the 3rd DIMM back to 64MB; and added the 32MB in the 4th DIMM. Now I have 224MB of RAM, which is going to be OK for my immediate needs (which might include iMovie 3.0.3). To make things clear, I'm not complaining at all about the dodgy 128MB, the remaining free RAM has made a wonderful difference! Thanks!
So, now I could install Painter Classic and show you my amazing artistic creation...
The tablet is fairly amazing I must say. I love the sensitivity and being able to hold the pen just above the tablet and see it moving the cursor is mightily reassuring that it won't start drawing anything until I want it to.
To make this whole write-up even more retro, I'm doing this yet again on my MacBook C2D. It was invaluable for creating the CDs and transferring data on HFS+ with the B&W G3. It's just new enough and fast enough to write a post on the 68KMLA, without using the Classic mode (though I think I could try that, along with NetSurf). But also it's old enough to use with my old 4 Megapixel Canon Ixusi and its tiny, tiny LCD screen...
(Stock image is the first one). My Ixusi has been through the wars.. entirely due to me thinking I could throw it down 5m from the top of a boulder in Derbyshire and even if my friend didn't catch it, it would survive. In fact, it got badly bust up and getting the lens to pop out took a lot of gentle leverage!
Still it's far easier to hook this thing up to the MacBook and have it transfer data at lowly USB 1.1 rates than getting it to talk to my iPhone 16 over Bluetooth!
