test-drb January 2007

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

238 participants
538 discussions

by spc＠conman.org

Found the following page: http://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2007/1/27/2687720.html Wherein Joey deVilla is selling a Symbolics XL1200. All the details are in the link, but some overview: The machine has a hardware fault that prevents it from fully booting, but it does display said diagnostic message. The machine itself is in Toronto. I'm not sure if it's sold yet or not, as the message was put up on Saturday (and I'm just noticing it now). I'm not involved with this in any way, other than just passing on the information. I've bought some books from him before (and he's got a ton of books for sale as well) with no complaints. -spc (He also goes into the story of why he's selling the unit, which is amusing ... )

17 years, 11 months

Re-Introducing the First, and Fully Functional, Lisa Emulator

by ray＠arachelian.com

On January 24th, 1984, the Macintosh announced, but along with that announcement came another that not everyone recalls: The introduction of the Lisa 2. Reflecting the echoes of that date, I'm announcing the availability of The Apple Lisa Emulator. While there are still some flaws and missing features, to address, I've decided that it was more important to honor the Lisa's January introduction. You'll be able to download the emulator from here in a few minutes: http://lisaem.sunder.net/downloads.html Questions about the emulator should be directed here: lisaem at sunder.net Bug reports here: lisaem-bugs at sunder.net To use the emulator you will need a copy of the Lisa Boot ROM (preferably version H) as well as OS software. Please do not ask me to provide these. If you own a Lisa, you already have legal copies of these. The emulator currently runs on the following platforms: * Mac OS X - Intel and G4 PPC. * Linux - since there are too many distros, I'm releasing a statically linked X11 binary for 2.6 kernels, which should run on most distros, but you'll probably want to compile your own version instead. * win32 (w2k and possibly XP) The project will also compile and run wherever wxWidgets runs on a unix like platform (with some tweaks), I'll put up more binaries as time permits. Source code will be released in about a week or two, licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License 2.0. There are parts whose quality of the code isn't as good as I'd want it to be. :-) Known bugs: No documentation, at this time there are hooks in the help menu that point to the website, where I'll fill in documentation. Future releases will have built in docs. The raw keyboard routines aren't quite right. Use the ASCII kb mode for now. Won't run Xenix - it boots but stops before the shell, likely a VIA bug. Printing works, but isn't yet completed (spits out ugly postscript files only at this time, needs wxWidgets integration which I'm currently working on) Win32 LibDC42 routines might not be too stable, may cause trouble with Profiles Sound isn't perfect, although it does beep on most platforms, the "click" is treated incorrectly as a beep. Some of the animation has color issues in some of the BMP's/XPM's - i.e. floppy insertion Mouse movement under certain environments isn't quite right (I've optimized for Lisa Office System.) When the emulator quits, on OS X, it segfaults (crashes.) Won't work with Lisa 1 ROMs as there is little support for Lisa 1 HW emulation at this time. A few tools I intended to write still need to be written. Why a Lisa emulator? There are many reasons to this project, and even more for the decisions that shaped it. The most important goal was to preserve the technology behind the Lisa, and allow future generations to experience a piece of history. If you search the web, you will find lots of articles, pictures, and even videos of Lisa's. But these are second hand information, in that they do not allow you to actually interact with an actual Lisa. Unfortunately it isn't possible to fully emulate the physical aspects of a computer. You cannot experience the almost imperceptible 60Hz flicker of the display, the not-quite paper white, blueish tints of the phosphor, the yellow glow of the power switch, the heat a Lisa computer gives off, nor the feel of its keyboard, mouse, or see the curvature of the CRT on modern LCD and flat CRT displays. But, you can still get close. I hope that long after the last functional Lisa is gone from the face of the earth, that my emulator, as well as the documents that David has collected, would survive and allow future generations to go back in time and experience what it was like, to study it, and understand how and why it was built. In many ways, as I watched Lisa Office System and MacWorks boot up (via trace logs), I saw many glimpses into the software design ideals and practices of the early 80's. I've never been an archaeologist, and don't really know that experience, I can guess at the rush and thrill of discovery. Seeing the machine code of various Lisa OS's fly by has been that experience for me. I could almost understand what the coders that wrote them were thinking, how they designed things, and why. I could easily tell what code was hand written assembly by an expert, or novice, what assembly was generated by compilers. I don't much expect many to spend more than a few hours with the emulator, but perhaps there will be a few like minded folks who remember the Lisa and want more than a stroll down memory lane, or want to learn what it was about and how it worked who will. By releasing this as GPL, I'm guaranteeing its future long after I would loose interest in maintaining it. There are many emulators that are closed source, or shareware, or that are outright sold, and thus locked down. These are less likely to survive the ravages of time, and thus are less valuable in the long view. While I cannot presume that the libraries and API's upon which this emulator was built will still exist, I can at least hope that it will be relatively easy to rewrite or port to future platforms. I purposefully built the emulator on what some would consider exotic hardware. (i.e. DEC Alpha) to force me to write portable code. At various times, I also had it running on the SPARC, PowerPC and Intel chips. (i.e. a range of 32 and 64 bit CPU's with different designs.) Although I cannot vouch for it running on SPARC or Alpha at this moment in time, by building it on varied platforms, I avoided locking myself into a particular CPU with specific endian issues, and thus exposed more bugs. While I've only compiled the emulator under variations of GCC >from 2.x to 4.x, I suspect that it will work with other compilers after some tweaking. There is some history to this emulator. A synopsis for those who aren't yet bored of reading this rant: This project started in February 1998, when one day I attempted to power on one of my two Lisa's, and it no longer turned on. I realized that as with all retro computers, that replacement parts would over time become scarce to obtain and that repairs would be more and more difficult. In the interest of preserving the historical significance of these machines, I thought that an emulator would be one way to preserve them. Having been inspired by projects of the time such as Executor and vMac, I naively assumed that this would be an easy project, taking only perhaps a year or two. The Lisa is a far more complex creature than I imagined. Luckily, I managed to find David Craig's contact information, and obtained a ton of Lisa documentation from him. Most of the Lisa documentation out there on the web exists because David had carefully collected and cataloged it over the years. Without his efforts, neither this emulator, nor any of the spin off emulators would been possible. I would also say that without his efforts a great deal of Apple history would have been lost to the ravages of time. Perhaps a large portion of the remaining Lisas would not be repairable without this type of information information. (This is why I've spent a lot of time distilling David's documentation and the knowledge of LisaList in building the LisaFAQ.) While I was, at best familiar with the C language, and knew some 68000 assembly, there were a lot of things that I had to teach myself. I've learned a lot more than I could possibly list here (C, Unix programming, Xwindows, wxWidgets, deep 68000 coding techniques, low level operating system stuff, postscript, PCL, anti-aliasing, reverse engineering, optimization techniques, and so on.) So there was great benefit to me beyond the emulator itself. There were many wrong turns taken throughout the lifetime of the project. Most notably, I originally wrote my own 68000 CPU core, but scrapped after the generator ( http://squish.net/generator ) core was recommended by Richard Bannister. I originally wrote the emulator directly for the XWindow System. Yes, that's right, raw xlib calls without a toolkit. Writing your own UI in XLib is quite the exercise in masochism. I didn't replace the xlib UI with wxWidgets until late 2006. (In 1998, Motif was the main toolkit out there, but as it was commercial, and since Tk was sort of obsolete, with not too much else was available, or portable to all platforms. Xlib seemed to be the right choice. Over time, I stuck with xlib because I didn't care as much about the UI as much as getting the emulator working.) I must have rewritten the MMU subsystem at least three times. In hind sight, I probably over-engineered the last iteration in an effort to cache the MMU tables, but it works very well. I probably have spent too much time on sysadmin duties (that is setting up environments for myself to develop in.) After all, system administration is my day job. This project was originally born on a DEC Alpha Multia running on OpenBSD 2.3 or such. I moved it to an old SPARC running Solaris 2.5.1, then a sparcbook running 2.6, then Cygwin under w2k, then coLinux under w2k. I now have it running under Ubuntu, coLinux, win32 and OS X. As I'm told, there was talk of a Lisa emulator before 1998, but no actual project had been started. I released my crufty 0.00 version of the source code back in 98, hence "The World's First" is accurate enough. As far as I know, this is the only Lisa emulator that is capable of running the Lisa Office System, hence "fully functional." (Some would argue this because it doesn't yet run Xenix, but that's less important to me.) Of course, all of the documentation I had scanned, and put online attracted others who wanted to build their own emulators. Unsurprisingly, they did have some success, but not with Lisa Office System. I was disappointed with the competing project, but kept quietly on working on my own throughout the years. I hid my actual progress since the emulator wasn't working yet, and besides, it would have only fed the competition valuable information. I thought he had the advantage, since he had the whole of the MESS team and library of code for various devices, while I was writing and rewriting nearly everything from scratch. It surprises me to this day that despite all of my perceived fumbling, that he hasn't overtaken me yet! (I suspect that in a few days, or perhaps weeks, - i.e. sometime after I release my sources, we'll see the other two competing projects gain the capability of running LOS as well.) I intentionally let the website look dead to give the impression of abandonment, while I redoubled my efforts. This became a fun cloak and dagger kind of game: I only decloaked once, when I though that I was very very close. One day in May of 2006, I found the secret magic to make the MMU work. I got the Lisa Office install disk to boot, and everything started falling into place. I then furiously debugged the VIA code, and then the ProFile code, and it started to all work. The SCC came next, along with other fun stuff. I rewrote the imagewriter code twice over. (Once again, this week, for wxWidgets printing/output, which isn't in today's release.) Towards the end of 2006, I purchased the wxWidgets book and reworked the UI. It'll probably be a few more months before the emulator would be perfect in my opinion but that would miss the January 19th announcement anniversary, so early, buggy, release it'll have to be. :-) I would like to thank the following folks for their numerous contributions: David T. Craig for the wealth of Lisa information which he allowed me to scan in, for the many contacts with Lisa developers and faithfully listening to status reports over the ages, James MacPhail for all of the hardware help with the Lisa and many suggestions as to what and how to test, for helping me with the logic analyzer, for the 68000 help, for the schematics help, for helping me repair my dead Lisa, for the help with the ProFile protocol, and many other things I could fill a book with. James Ponder for his wonderful Generator project, one of the better Sega Genesis emulators out there, whose CPU core is the heart of the LisaEm project. Adam Firester for providing the many years of bandwidth for the project website, Steve Hatle for providing Lisa Office documentation, Xenix help, encouragement, and beta testing, Brian Foley for beta testing, profiling, and debugging help with OS X, and fixing nasty display bugs in wxWidgets on OS X, Chris McFall for advice on the Lisa file system, Natalia Portillo whose file system work inspired me to build the Lisa FSH Tool, and later libdc42, Patrick Schaefer for providing the protocol transitions graphs of the Profile, which at a glance proved far clearer to interpret than the official documentation, Andy Hertzfeld for his amazing folklore.org website for the numerous fun stories about the birth of the Lisa and the Mac, The wxWidgets folks, whose project I wish I made use of a lot earlier, who have made my life a lot easier, especially Stefan Csomor who found an early bug in my display routines, Steven Stengel of http://oldcomputers.net for the Lisa image used as the icon in the Mac OS X version. Raphael Nabet, for disassembling and documenting the I/O ROM, which shaved about a month off of reverse engineering on my part, even if he did write a competing emulator. :-) Gilles Fetis for being the third person to use my dc42 routines. :-) (Gilles, If you thought those were cool, wait till you see libdc42!) To all of the folks who have wished for a Lisa emulator, whose requests and encouragement over the years pushed me to complete this project. Most importantly, to all of the people at Apple, who worked on the Lisa over the years, and remember it fondly. Lisa, Lisa Office System, and the Macintosh were trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc, now Apple, Inc. w2k/XP are Microsoft's trademarks, etc. Genesis is trademark of Sega, etc.

17 years, 11 months

Component level repair

by aliensrcooluk＠yahoo.co.uk

--- Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk > wrote: > Bob Bradlee wrote: > > <OT Trivia> > > Douglas Adams day job was working on the DR Who > production staff. > > That's the real Dr. Who, of course... not the > God-awful remake :-) > Hey! I like the remake - I'm a big fan of Rose (Billie Piper) - and there are several things that make it (slightly) on-topic: 1) The computers in the school episode 2) which also happened to have K-9 in it! I was also a fan of Ace from the early 90's when she was Sylvester Mccoys sidekick. Just to make sure this is on-topic though, I just lost my 2nd Amiga 600. I turned it on on Saturday and heard that dreaded click sound I got when i burnt out my 1st A600 :( I can only assume (at present) that the floppy drives are becoming really sensitive. I don't recall hearing it do it's familiar "tick" sound when checking for a disk, but I didn't leave it switched on for more than 2 seconds. I guess I'll get a spare internal A600 floppy drive online somewhere and replace it. I still haven't gotten around to seeing exactly what failed on my 1st A600 yet either.... Been delayed by the arrival of 30 more Amiga CD's - specifically German demo discs and several Aminet discs :) I'll get my CD32 out tomorrow and start going through those discs. Regards, Andrew D. Burton aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

17 years, 11 months

Limited supply of RCA 1802CE Chips

by alhartman＠yahoo.com

Before I list these on eBay, I wanted to offer them to the list. My partner and I have a limited supply of RCA 1802CE 40 Pin DIP Plastic Package chips. These appear to be New, Old stock chips. Never used. Not pulls. We are looking for $18.95 each + $3.00 shipping (add $1.00 for ea add'l chip for shipping). If you're intested, you can contact me off list at: ALHARTMAN_AT_YAHOO.COM I can take pictures of the chips if wanted. The chip has the following legend on it: CDP1802CE RCA 227 R Thanks! Al Hartman

17 years, 11 months

Help with classic Apple powerbook/OS

by blstuart＠bellsouth.net

> From: Tom Uban <uban at ubanproductions.com> > LOL! It took me a few reads of that sentence before it > hit me over the head and now I cannot stop laughing... > > Warren Wolfe wrote: > > On Sun, 2007-01-28 at 08:40 -0600, Tom Uban wrote: > > > >> I bought a Powerbook 150 years ago . . . > > > > Holy Lord.... That's an OLD computer! <rimshot> So we're saying that Babbage's last hoorah was the Powerbook??? Is the Woz really Babbage??? Inquiring minds want to know. BLS

17 years, 11 months

VCF East 4.0 update -- Commodore Pet 30th bday party w/ Chuck Peddle

by evan＠snarc.net

Hi all, Today, Sellam and I confirmed Chuck Peddle as the keynote speaker for VCF East 4.0. There will be other notable early Commodore computer people as well. Just as VCF 9.0 celebrated the 30th anniversary of Apple, at East 4.0 we'll do Commodore! The show is Saturday, June 9, starting at 9:30am. The Commodore panel will be from 10:30-12 followed by Chuck et al signing autographs. We still might expand the show to Sunday, June 10 as well. To be determined. Of course there will be plenty of other cool things and people beside Peddle. For example, we found a guy who worked closely with John Mauchly, and he might be a speaker for us. Talk about being one degree removed from history! - Evan

17 years, 11 months

Looking for UK ESDI drive >= 300Mb

by andy.piercy＠gmail.com

Folks, Does anyone have a spare 5.25" full height ESDI drive >= 300Mb in the UK that they are willing to part with. All the drives on Ebay are in the USA and the cost of shipping and the chance of the drive making it in one piece would be prohibitive. An old Sun drive like "327M Micropolis ESDI drive 370-1133" would be great. Please contact me off list if you have anything available. Thanks, Andy.

17 years, 11 months

Machines I posted as avail last night.

by dave06a＠dunfield.com

I guess I should have been more clear - by "details", I ment details on the machines availability - ie: I will put you in contact with the owner. These are machines that have been offered to me recently, but are too far away and not worth shipping for me to acquire them - I don't know anything more about them than the model information I put in the subject line of the original message - I don't know how big they are, or if they work, or what material comes with them (so please stop asking). So far the machines I posted were: Compaq Portable III available in Brewerton NY, USA Televideo CPM machine available in Canberra Australia NEC APC H03 available in Rhode Island, USA I believe all of them were described as "working when put away years ago" - I know nothing more. I will collect the responses for the next couple of days, and then forward them to the current owners of these machines. Regards, Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

17 years, 11 months

Web site updates

by ggs＠shiresoft.com

I just wanted to let folks know that I've made a few updates to my website. These include a link to a "downloads" area where among other things are the disk images that I've read in so far. I've also included pages that describe the systems in the collection that I consider "operational". Go see! http://www.shiresoft.com. -- TTFN - Guy

17 years, 11 months

need insights on finding big cartons

by SUPRDAVE＠aol.com

If you happen to work in or near any manufacturing facility, get friendly with the person who runs shipping/recieving. All kinds of good packing material gets thrown out daily. At my previous job, I I had access to all the used boxes and packing material I could ever want. The plastic air pillows work good for filling up empty space, and the crimped brown paper that's used is great for padding and seperating items. Most boxes containing computer equipment is double thickness and worth searching out. Amazingly, shipping material is very expensive! Another place to look is near construction areas of strip malls and such. I scored some very large flat cardboard and some large hard foam blocks from behind a fitness center that was opening up. An old nonserrated steak knife cuts hard foam with a minimum of crumbs. In a message dated 1/28/2007 5:38:23 PM Eastern Standard Time, cctech at porky.vax-11.org writes: >Park in front of your local Best Buy/Circuit City today and tommorrow and >grab a big screen TV box from somebody that can't fit TV + box into their >car. You'll have the best luck if you live in the same state as one of the >two superbowl bound teams, but anywhere should work. >Clint >On Sun, 28 Jan 2007, Chris M wrote: >> of course its always preferable to scrounge. I need to >> ship 3 cpus in 1 box. Help. Supermarket aint working... >>

17 years, 11 months

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test-drb January 2007