A browser for System 6

[commodorejohn]

Regardless I'm gonna pick up Terasic Cyclone V GX board... and give it a go probably won't turn into a Mac accelerator but it might turn into a custom Sparcbook if I can get the code from temlib.org working on it.

Well, there's always that

 

[NJRoadfan]

DSPs were notoriously difficult to program. Its one reason why the AT&T DSPs went mostly unused in the AV Quadras. The proxy solution I posted about in another thread is a good alternative and basically does the same thing. Its generates the page on a modern machine with WebKit and sends a clickable GIF to older machines.

 

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, but that's cheating. A 68k Mac deserves to be more than just a glorified terminal.

 

[markyb86]

To be honest, AOL did just about the same thing as that web rendering proxy. It handled the pages off site, and compressed images (the aol *.art file format) and you got the crappy version over dialup. System 6 and 68k's aren't meant to be on broadband connections, if anything they are supposed to be a terminal.. It's cheating if you build a board with stuff invented way after the computer itself, and use that to handle the rendering too.

 

[olePigeon]

I'm waiting for some entrepreneurial nerd to yell "Challenge accepted!" then have a Quadra 950 with 6 Radius Rockets running a customized browser using distributed computing.

 

[Paralel]

I would love to see that.

 

[cb88]

LOL.... the point is everyone wants to get their mac on the net even the ones running System 6.... more power to em however they do it!  Because regardless its like shoving a square peg into a tiny chamfered hole!

 

[markyb86]

oP, if you taunt them, they will come.. haha. 

Also, I have no problem with cheating lol. I have plans for a rasPi powered wifi connection sitting inside my macSE that also renders the web. 

 

[uniserver]

marky  -- i like that idea

 

[techknight]

Including accelerator support doesn't mean it couldn't run on most all 68k Macs - you can support hardware without requiring it.

The difference is that the AV Mac DSPs are something 68k Mac users might actually have. Unless there's already an FPGA-based 68k Mac add-on out there to target (is there? I haven't heard of such a thing,) doing that would require not only overhauling the browser project to take advantage of it, but also designing and manufacturing the requisite hardware (and interfacing it with NuBus or one of the multiple different, mostly-incompatible PDS standards.) That's a lot of effort to go to just for a novelty Web browser.

(That said, I do wonder exactly how useful a DSP would be for the purpose, since they're usually heavily-oriented towards stream processing rather than general-purpose code. I suppose it could help image decoding.)

Thats the beauty of fpga. The device can be reflashed to support any pin standard there is. Only thing you would need to design for is multiple different ground/power pins. I/o is reconfigurable.

 

[commodorejohn]

You'd still need to go to the trouble of building the thing, and that seems like a lot of bother just for a novelty web browser.

 

[olePigeon]

Could make a device that screenshots a website, then creates a very simple HTML with an image map of the webpage.

 

[markyb86]

Could make a device that screenshots a website, then creates a very simple HTML with an image map of the webpage.

http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3910 

and it works very well too. I made a quick howto for anyone interested.  http://markyb.applefool.com/?p=184

 

[IPalindromeI]

Your best bet is a page distiller like Copperweb.

 

[cb88]

Copperweb seems self defeating... the webkit to gif convert seems way better.

 

[IPalindromeI]

Then nothing except a gif is being rendered, which renders your Mac a terminal to another machine, which commodorejohn says he wants to avoid, and to humour him, I'm suggesting things that wouldn't.

 

[cb88]

IPanindromel I agree its not quite in the spirit of things ... for any browser than can render gifs and links half decently though it would be an option regardless since its the least ammount of work... it might even be nice to have a button to switch quickly between local rendering and the gif/html-proxy for sites that don't load properly otherwise. Sort of as a fallback.

 

[cb88]

Apparently a nice snazzy icon is needed!

https://github.com/clehner/Browsy/issues/1

 

[cel]

Yes, an icon would be cool. Unless you all are content with the one I made.
 
Some more updates since my last post here:

• The project is ported to the Retro68 dev environment. I am building with gcc on my Linux machine and testing in Mini vMac (System 6.0.8 ) and BasiliskII (System 7.5.5).
• Networking is implemented. I made an asynchronous stream abstraction for file and network IO, which along with an http parser library, allows us to make HTTP requests and handle the responses (mostly). http:// and file:/// URLs work.
• There is still not yet actual rendering of HTML taking place. For implementing that, I am thinking of making it text-based (e.g. using a styled TextEdit field), like how WannaBe does it.
• I could release another dev build if people want to test it out so far.

 

[mactjaap]

What a fantastic job you did Charles! I would really like to try it on my System 6 boxes! Could you provide a link to the program ( execuable) in .zip or .sit format?

If you see my postings I'm always interested in connecting old Mac's with TCP/IP on the Net. I have made some efforts to make this simple for not to technical people with a virtual machine you can use very simple to connect your old mac to the Internet. See:

http://www.macip.net

But what then....what to do.... Browsy is an excellent way of enjoying a System 6 Mac connected to the Internet.

In an other tread I have showed what my other "dream" is for System 6. A web server. See:

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/21029-help-with-tcpexample-in-pascal/?hl=tcpexample

It is immediately what I think. Will it be possible to rebuild Browsy in Websy?

A web server for System 6.