My First Quadra

[Themk]

I'm just curious, but, why under System 7.1.2P currently, do all of my applications have the generic icon, rather than specific icons? This also happens for some other documents too, for example the System Suitcase, doesn't have the system icon on it.

EDIT: Rebuilding the desktop file fixed that (COMMAND-OPTION at startup).

 

[EvieSigma]

All the tabs (yes, literally all of them) holding the side plastics on my 630 broke so it's only the front and top keeping the sides on, and one of the front tabs broke when I took the front off...

I'm not too worried though, 63x machines are really common so I'll just buy another one if mine becomes too battered.

 

[Themk]

Sorry to hear about that. The plastics on my machine are in good condition.

 

[EvieSigma]

It works like a champ though! Has 36MB of RAM and a Comm Slot Ethernet card.

 

[Themk]

The 136MB ram from the 128MB SIMM, and the 8MB on board is a noticeable upgrade from 36MB. For SSW, 36MB is plenty; for NetBSD, get all the RAM you can have. Being able to accept a 128MB SIMM gives this model a good memory ceiling.

The comm slot card is fast, and well supported, it even works under NetBSD!

 

[Themk]

Haven't gotten around to compiling yet, but I found this document:

https://github.com/cebix/macemu/blob/master/BasiliskII/INSTALL

It specifically talks about Basilisk II Native CPU mode under NetBSD/mac68k, it talks about a kernel bug, as of July 2000, quite a long time ago. I have hope that after 17 years, the bug has been patched in NetBSD. I will try to compile the latest version first, then try an old version if that doesn't work.

Hopefully this works!

 

[Brett B.]

Nice Quadra, now you need a video capture board, TV input, and DOS card

63x have always been high on my like list.  They're easy to max out and surprisingly fast.

 

[Themk]

So NetBSD is now fully installed, YAY! I like it.

Hmm, this is somewhat unfortunate:

Fatal server error:
I don't support color screens!

Is there any way to get NetBSD's X server to work in non 1-bit video mode?
 
 
EDIT: Code BBCode doesn't work, have to use quotes instead....
It shows up fine in the editor....

 

[Themk]

Nice Quadra, now you need a video capture board, TV input, and DOS card

63x have always been high on my like list.  They're easy to max out and surprisingly fast.

I have the video capture card, and the TV input. It's a shame that sine the discontinuation of Analog TV broadcasting in the U.S.A., that the TV Tuner has become somewhat useless, without a converter.

63x is fast because its a good 68040 architecture. I like it too. It can run at 40MHz, if you move two resistors, making it as fast as the 840av!

 

[Macdrone]

Werll with a VCR you can input to it also, along with game systems as you have already shown.

 

[Gorgonops]

It specifically talks about Basilisk II Native CPU mode under NetBSD/mac68k, it talks about a kernel bug, as of July 2000, quite a long time ago.

Hah! I almost called it when I said version 1.6. Although, man, July 2000 puts you into run-up to 1.5... that was actually a very major release compared to 1.4, despite its unassuming version number. I am terribly curious if anyone ever "fixed" whatever may have broken/changed or if it was terminal.

(Ancient history: Around this time I started working for a company who's founding engineers were *deeply* into NetBSD so I ended up becoming intimately familiar with it. 1.5 was the first version that incorporated ELF (on some platforms) and also the first that allowed kernel modules, along with a whole slew of other changes. Learned the hard way early on that cleanly updating a running 1.4 system to 1.5 was *pretty much* mission impossible...

The next major version of NetBSD after that was 2.0, which was essentially alpha/beta quality software for a *long* time. It added SMP, kernel threads, a whole bunch of things. Sort of lost track of development after that but my vague understanding is that they really didn't have a solid "production release" after that until about NetBSD 5.0; not that it was "bad" software during this period, NetBSD would often score the best of the big 3 BSDs in SMP and Networking stack benchmarks, it just tended to be a little... rough around the edges.)

 

[Themk]

I found this FAQ: http://www.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/faq/faq-9.html

Unfortunantly, I don't think the instructions will work with the latest version of NetBSD 7.1. So, I guess that means I'm SOL when it comes to color?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Werll with a VCR you can input to it also, along with game systems as you have already shown.

A cheap (read non-HDMI) DVD player's S-Video works great. I always fount the card's output on a Trinitron monitor a lot sharper than the same media fed to our Trinitron TV, but it was a few years older and only 15" vs. the 630's 17" screen.

 

[Themk]

I still use my Sony DVD player from 1997-1998 to watch ALL of my DVDs, even on my modern flat screen TV! I remember when that player was brand new, its amazing, 20 years later, that it hasn't completely fallen apart. There is just something about it, that makes it play DVDs so well. My blu-ray player (that has HDMI!) doesn't even do as good of a job! My next TV will have one major requirement that will drive the whole purchase: S-VIDEO input! Unfortunately it seems like S-VIDEO inputs are a dying breed. It's too bad, as the output quality is noticeably better than composite. My ancient DVD player even has a 5.1 decoder in it, so if I ever setup surround sound, I could do it! Luckily my projector has S-VIDEO input, so as long as I keep replacing the bulbs, I will have 100-inch S-VIDEO capable "TV" for ever. (Does the projector count as a mac conquest? It came with a DA-15 to VGA adaptor with DIP switches when new; it also plays really nicely with the mac-specific resolutions, and HSYNC/VSYNC combos).

P.S. Anybody got any ideas on Color X server in NetBSD?

 

[Gorgonops]

Unfortunantly, I don't think the instructions will work with the latest version of NetBSD 7.1. So, I guess that means I'm SOL when it comes to color?

No idea whatsover, I'm sorry. (Must say it's impressive how that FAQ talks about 1.2 and 1.3 kernels. That long ago a 68k Mac actually would have made a half-decent X-terminal...) Here's a post on the mailing list from 2002 that points to a color X11 binary that ran on 1.6, I suppose it's conceivable you could do something with that?  I vaguely know (think?) that sometime in the churn from NetBSD 2.0 to 5.0 there was a period of fragmentation in NetBSD between the various platforms thanks to the need to transition from XFree86 to X.org, with some platforms sticking with the Xfree86 codebase while others were walked over... so, yeah, no idea what the state of that is now. Last machine I was running NetBSD on was a Sparc 64, which was a platform with its own problems. (For a long time it didn't have a working X11 at all, which was sort of an embarrassment because Linux on Sparc64 had one for long time; I had it running during the "beta" period.)

I would suggest going through the mailing list traffic as your best shot to see if color support was ever actually committed to the main tree and if you still need to mess with kernel settings to enable it. Just as a sanity check, though: what video mode are you starting in? The Quadra 630 does support 16 bit color ("thousands") in 640x480 and that has zero support even with the color-capable server.

 

[Themk]

I must say for you having "no idea whatsover", that post was very informative.

I am tempted to say its XFree86 in the mac68k port, as it is running X11R6... EDIT: Yup, its XFREE86

 

[Unknown_K]

I keep a Panasonic 27" CRT TV around just for console use (RCA, SVHS input). Actually I still have my old 27" Panasonic TV with SVHS inputs front and back and PnP (was pricey when I got it new) that needs repair (horizontal control went bad).

My DVD player is a Sony HDMI HD upconvert unit I use to watch all my DVDs. My TV is an old 720P model so I won't bother with Blu-ray until I get a new one.

 

[Themk]

Well, I own hardly anything on Bluray. I bought the player mainly because I thought it would be nice to watch DVDs over HDMI input- turns out I was wrong, so I still have my 1990s sony DVD player. That being said, I found that the USB input on the Blu-Ray player was really convenient for playing files on a USB HDD, or USB flash drive. It also has built in WiFi for playing media stored on my NAS.

I swapped out my M0116 keyboard that is visible in pictures posted earlier in this thread for my IIgs keyboard. Ahh, the reclaimed space is so nice.

 

[Cory5412]

The Quadra and '040 machines are great and I'm glad you're having a good time with it. It would be interesting to bench against an 840 to see how much the rest of the platform impacts performance.

My apologies if I missed the conclusion to this, but: to beat the A/UX horse all the way dead, you won't ever get to the installer, the problem with the 475/605 and the 630 series is the GPU. SCSI is hypothetically possible to be overcome, and if the rest of the chipset and memory controller and access to PDS network cards is fine, the place you'll get hung up is that you can't see anything and by default A/UX doesn't try to activate a serial terminal (which is the work-around to GPU issues and linux/bsd on some powermacs.)

It would be interesting to see what you think of BSD performance on them. I've heard of some people using BSD on 630s over the years, but I don't think anybody ever did it with graphics, just as a shellbox/webserver and I don't know what the performance of that ended up being like.

 

[Johnnya101]

Who has an 840av??? This would be a great test....Ive got my 700 too even though that will be a lot slower just to compare.