Napabar and I have been talking via PM, but I now I want to take our private discussion public so as to benefit others who come after and want to know the same things I did.
First of all, I was told that an Ethernet to LocalTalk bridge would be a feasible solution on PPC Macs that lack serial ports for LocalTalk networking. It seems that Asante still sells their
AsanteTalk Bridge device too:
http://www.asante.com/shop/shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=16&cat=+AsanteTalk
Now, for those of you who missed it,
Napabar posted the following
download link to RUMPUS 3.5.6 here:
http://ftp.maxum.com/DownloadPackages/RumpusClassic.sit
Napabar points out that version 3.5.6 of RUMPUS is
PPC-only, which means you cannot use a 68k Mac like an SE/30 to be the bridge Mac between say a Mac 512k and an OS 10.7 Lion Intel iMac. However, being curious about the PPC-only version Rumpus, I Googled up this today about a
68k version of Rumpus:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dkFRqjtgEC8J:tfbbs.com/rumpus/R03About.html+rumpus+68k+version&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk
It seems that version 1.3 (and earlier, obviously) was 68k & PPC. So I now have a question for
Napabar. Did you try version 1.3 on a 68k Mac because you couldn't find 1.3, or because it lacks some functionality necessary to make the connection to the 512ke work properly?
The main reason I am thinking about this is because if Rumpus version 1.3 does work, then we could use an SE/30 to do the job of the bridge computer, eliminating the need for a PPC G4 Cube (running OS 9) or the PowerBook G3 (running OS 8.x or 9).
I was also told that the
512ke is the oldest Mac I can use for AppleShare because of the HFS disk requirement. However, the original Mac 512k with 64k ROMs (not the 128k/HFS ROMs of the 512ke and Plus) could use the
HD20 INIT to gain access to HFS floppies (including 800k disks) and the HD20 serial hard drive. You cannot boot from an HFS disk on a Mac512 with 64k ROMs even if it has the HD20 INIT (you need an MFS boot floppy), but that limitation wouldn't matter in the AppleShare experiment we are discussing in this thread. So what would prevent a Mac512 with 64k ROMs and the HD20 INIT (and HD20 hard disk and/or 800k external floppy drive) from working in this Rumpus-networked setup?
Thanks.