> From: Tony Duell <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
> But surely, if you link up a different keyboard (good idea as the Zx81
> keyboard is unusable IMHO), and then use an LCD display then there's not
> much of the original ZX81 left.
Sure there is. If you change the keyboard and monitor on a PC it's still a
PC -- same for the ZX81. In most cases we're just adding peripheral i/o
devices, RAM, and beefier PSUs and mounting the whole mess in a larger
enclosure.
OTOH I saw plenty of plain black ZX81s at this year's meeting, used to
demonstrate software.
> > Sure, some of these operations are slow, but the point is that we're
doing
> > a *lot* with "obsolete" hardware. If we can get this kind of
functionality
>
> That applies to a number of serious old-computer user groups, actually...
Yup, it's great that there are so many people out there still fanatically
hacking so many different machines . . .
Glen
0/0
> From: Pete Turnbull <pete(a)dunnington.u-net.com>
> > Wasn't the ZX81 board already prepared to use a 6116 instead ?
>
> Yes, it was. I put 6116's in several.
Pete, what modifications to the board are required in order to use a 6116?
Thanks,
Glen
0/0
Hi,
this was my first 5 hours trying to do just some useful work
with the VAX 6460 (phicus) under Ultrix 4.5, now that the
worries are beyond getting it booted and getting free from
VMS, I remember again how hard UNIX can be in terms of
compatibility (of course that's all nothing as compared to
how hard it would be on VMS :-).
I was going to build the essentials of the amenities of the
modern times, like gzip, GNU tar, bash and less, and Emacs
and gcc and GNU make.
All I did accomplish was to make Ultrix's date(1) Y2K complient
warping my system time from 1976 up to 2002 :-). The patch
is attached for those who have the sources. That was easy.
Now gzip would build and install without remaking everything
all the time because of my system time being decades behind :-).
Gzip was easy too.
Next was tar, and here came the first problems. The fact that
Ultrix' cc is a k&r compiler and cpp is somehow not up to date
is causing great pains. Lots of stuff fails because of this.
I did try the VAX C compiler (vcc), which supposedly is ANSI-C,
but it made the confusion worse.
Some locale stuff was a common theme of stuff failing, which
of course I hate. I never cared for locales, and I get
upset if some locale crap goes in the way of getting things
to work. But I figured, I needed to fast-forward my build-
efforts to GCC.
I have GCC-2.9x.3 (latest before 3.0) with an eye on making
NetBSD from that platform. First I had to make GNU make,
because the GCC installation procedure has become more
sophisticated. Building make almost failed too had I not
applied some broad strokes to make cpp and the locale stuff
happy.
Now with GNU make, that GCC build would still fail quite early
for some strange syntax errors reported by cpp.
I could actually build cpp and cpp0 without all the rest,
but putting GNU cpp in front of Ultrix cc didn't do much good
at all. Of course there may be lots of other things wrong, for
I doubt anyone at GNU/Cygnus has tested the autoconf process
on Ultrix/VAX lately :-).
So, I decided I have to get some super old version of GCC,
like 1.42 or earlier, that has a chance of having been tested
on Ultrix back then. From that platform I might be able to
move on to a more recent GCC version.
Tried to build at least bash, but once again cpp woes in
the lib/readline build (and readline is really my main reason
for wanting bash!)`That's where I gave up on GNU stuff for
today.
Tried some kernel making again, on Ultrix, both 4.5 binary
and 4.2 source. I think config(8) is indeed doing the symlinks
to the BINARY objects, so doconfig should not be required
indeed.
However, I cannot seem to be able to bump up my MAXUSERS
variable effectively. I have set maxusers to 128 but when
I try my 3rd telnet connection I am being sent away. I
somewhere read that Ultrix had some hard restriction to
cut more money out of per-user licenses. Any idea what I
might be doing wrong in terms of maxusers?
Tried to build the Ultrix-4.2 kernel from sources. Need to
supply the -s option to the config(8) command (to use
sources instead of binary symlinks.) However, the 4.2
sources seem to be incomplete!!! I am missing at least
sys/kern_lmf.c. Has anyone here ever built successfully
>from the Ultrix-4.2 sources? kern_lmf.c seems critical
and cannot be optioned out.
Tried to play with 4.3BSD sources, Tahoe and Quasijarus.
I must have FTPed the Quasijarus files in ASCII mode or
Michael is using a strange compress format, as neither
Ultrix compress nor gzip recognizes it as theirs. Noticed
that the TUHS archive's Tahoe version has some broken
files (as noted in BROKEN) that's sad. Tried to un-tar
the src.tar.gz of Tahoe to get to 4.3BSD's config(8)
tool (it's a good idea of Ultrix to put the config(8)
tool into the sys/ tree rather than the usr.(s)bin/
tree.) That's where I noticed that the src.tar.gz
is broken very early in the process. May be with GNU
tar it could find a point to continue after the error,
but then I need to build GNU tar first.
Ah, the worries of UNIX. But it was always fun and never
so frustrating as to make me want to throw hammers
like I want to when I am stuck with VMS. Of course I
appreciate tips as to how modern GNU stuff is built
on Ultrix.
regards,
-Gunther
--
Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D. gschadow(a)regenstrief.org
Medical Information Scientist Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
Adjunct Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine
tel:1(317)630-7960 http://aurora.regenstrief.org
Hi,
Does anyone here have any info on this old hard
drive I bought at "Weird Stuff"?
It's a Memorex model 214 - weighs about 50 lbs, has
4 6" platters I think.
I'm interested in it origin, use, size, etc.
Thanks!
Steve.
pics here:
http://68.5.43.239:8000/amigapics/hd1.jpghttp://68.5.43.239:8000/amigapics/2.jpg
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - live college hoops coverage
http://sports.yahoo.com/
I know there is going to be a catch to this...
But which interface card will I need to add a TS05
(Cipher streamer 9-track drive) to a PDP-11/23?
Like "which version of the 11/23", and there's an
11/23+ too, isn't there?
I'm not sure of which it might be; I have a photo,
but it's not very high-res.
tia,
-doug q
On March 20, Doc wrote:
> > > 1 -- Build an interface for every device under the sun, including the
> > > toilet seat.
> >
> > That is easy -- a micro switch ... now how do you tell if the ROLL is
> > almost empty ?
>
> Ummm, an infrared laser & sensor array at the crucial point?
Hmm, what about buffer overflow detection?
Excessive packet...erm...length?
UDP...User Droppings Protocol.
Eeew.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire "Watch those lateral G's man,
St. Petersburg, FL I've got sandwiches in my lap!" -Sridhar
Almost two years ago I received a VAX 4000 100 on "long term loan"
>from a local university.
It has served faithfully, building three OpenBSD/vax releases and many
snapshots between then and now, but... last night it quit!
Luckily, it appears to be only the power supply at fault. Results of
two attempts at firing the machine up:
: KA52-A V1.1, VMB 2.14
: Performing normal system tests.
: 72..71..70..69..68..67..66..65..64..63..62..61..60..59..
: KA52-A V1.1, VMB 2.14
: Performing normal system tests.
: 72..71..70..69..68..67..66..65..64..
It runs for a bit, and powers off.
I've isolated the power supply from the machine, and nothing is
obviously burned out, but it still only runs for a second or two.
So I find myself in need of a replacement PSU. I believe that even an
older MicroVAX 3100 system can donate a compatible unit, and if you have
such hardware you can raid, please find a screwdriver and let me know.
It's important this machine or its successor be back building soon, and
if desired I will pay for shipping of suitable hardware from anywhere in
North America to here, Vancouver, Canada.
BTW, if you happen to be in South America or Western Europe, and have a
VAX you don't know what to do with, let me hear about this as well. We
have developers in Argentina and France who are eager to obtain machines
of their own to hack on.
Thanks folks,
/Hugh
With all this talk about making a LK201 work on a PC or vice versa - and
this moderately-broken Amiga keyboard I have laying around - I was
wondering if anyone could give me some info so I design/build an adaptor
to make a PC (perhaps mac or some other KB) work with an Amiga? With the
lack of a surplus of Amiga kb's on the eBay market, I was thinking it
might be a worthwhile hack.
Mostly I guess I just want a source of info about the Amiga keyboard (this
is for an A2000 btw) so I could think about how I might design it.
Thanks
-- Pat
>Let me check... I have half a dozen of these in various states of repair and
>probably, IIRC, have one extra legal tray. I can probably part with that if
>it will do someone some good.
Yes... I am still on the hunt for a legal tray for that printer engine (I
don't care specifically which model it comes from, as long as it fits the
SX engine that is used in the HP LJ 2, and Apple LW IINT among other
printers that use it)
I do have enough letter trays, so I am only in need of a legal size tray
(and if anyone has it, an envelope tray might come in handy as well)
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>
