68k Greets App

The Overview

Well, it took several days longer that I expected, but I've finished my RetroChallenge "Greets" app. I've tested it on System 6 & 9. All the app does is display a list of participants and let you see the equipment they reported they would use in the challenge.

RetroChallenge-2008.hqx

The Hiccup

The worst thing is when one's code builds and runs fine within the development environment, but when you compile the application and run it on it's own: shit hits the fan.

I know what kinds of things cause this behavior, but that doesn't mean it's easy to track down. In this case it was an un-initialized Cell type passed to LGetSelect(). I just don't understand why it worked in the first place within Think Pascal.

TextToSTR#

This was an interesting find (found at Merlin's Cavern)... It's an application that takes a tab delimited file and creates a STR# of each row of data for each row in the text file. I thought this would be very useful, but it was only moderately useful as it truncates the data even shorter than the limits of an STR# string.

On the upside, it comes with Think Pascal and CodeWarrior sources so one can modify it for their needs. Anyway, I can see it being very useful, and I post it here with a thumbs up...

texttostr.hqx [2]

Thoughts

What I have now is the basic structure of a simply useful user-interface. This model, a list and window, can fit many needs for simple applications. While by no means revolutionary, it does scream very "Macintosh".

With a grasp of LDEFs, I think I'll revisit my MPD client and add playlist functionality.

Let me know if you run it. Especially if you have any problems or catch a bug. Thanks.

Very Active, Nothing Accomplished

How to make this interesting to anybody? Here goes...

The Mac Plus mod is on hiatus. I didn't kill the Plus, but it now has a switch hanging out the back that when activated gives it a bad attitude. Fun.

Some of the things I've been poking around with: LDEFs, Think Pascal, TransSkel, Vice (commodore 64 emu), Basilisk II, MPW.

All of the Z80 chatter on the BBS prodded me to install a Sinclair Spectrum emulator. I went with spectemu, downloaded all of the Spectrum games from the 2007 MiniGame Compo which I found through the Retrobits Podcast. I was a bit confused on how to load the games, so for anyone looking: Press "J" to get LOAD, then type to double quotes, hit return, start tape...

LOAD ""
{press play}

"Amazing" is a 1k game that I found particularly impressive.

I pieced together a nice LCIII out of two LCIIIs that I collected 5 or 6 months ago. The ethernet didn't seem to work, but that's because it has a jumper that was set to BNC instead of the 10BaseT jack. I'm not used to pre-auto-sensing hardware anymore, so that stumped me. Also the fact that one of the cards *was* bad, and then I got confused as to which one was which.

So now I'm still trudging forward, trying to get something produced I can show off. Several of the other RetroChallenge participants have really impressed me, and it's motivated me to find some focus soon. Of course, I don't really mind meandering through the land of retro-computing either.

Mac Plus Goes Under the Iron

In order to leave no suspense, let me say that so far it's not working. You can follow the story here.

Photos here:
http://www.retards.org/projects/retrochallenge/2008/Gallery/index.html

Hopefully Mr. Lee will have an idea, but for now I think I'll spend the next few days in the secure comfort of pascal as I'm in over my head with analog circuits.

Stock Mac Plus Temperature and Power Readings

Before I modify my Mac Plus, I wanted to get some baseline readings from the machine so that I would have something to compare the modified Mac against. Here are the results.

Power

This was pretty easy. A watt meter showed an average of 31 Watts (.44 amps) spiking up to 34W and .46 amps when accessing the floppy drive.

Over 2 hours (non-idle, but no disk access) the power stayed at 31 Watts until the very last reading at which it rose to 32 Watts.

Turning down the screen brightness had very little impact. At full brightness my Plus used .44 amps, and at full darkness it used .42 amps.

Temperature Test

4 digital thermometers were used to monitor the Mac Plus. None were inside the mac. None were the same brand. An indoor thermometer sat near the Mac Plus, monitoring the ambient temperature of the room. The second thermometer sat on top of the mac, but it doesn't have a probe, just holes on the top meant to read indoor room temperature. I used this one to also get an idea of the temperature around the Mac. Third was a digital cooking thermometer with the probe laid across the vents on top of the Plus. Last, another cooking probe was inserted under the Mac (between case and desk).

Is this the best setup I could have used? Obviously better sensors could have been used... A thermometer inside the Mac would give a more accurate reading... But that's not all... Air-conditioning was starting and stopping during the test, and an oscillating fan was running.

I decided to go forward with the used method for a few reasons. One, and most important, it's what I could do, but in addition, I wanted to measure the success of the modification, and to me that meant results good enough to be detectable in a real world environment. If the modification's results aren't detectable with the used method, then it's not a successful modification in my mind.

Temperature Results

Included with this post is a graph of the temperature results. The graph was created with Cricket Graph (1987) on a Mac SE running System 6.0.5. The PICT image was converted to a PNG using Graphic Converter 3.8.1 on an iMac using System 9.

The results show a 13 - 20 degree (F) increase in temperature over 2 hours. The Mac Plus was running a simple screen-saver during the test.

Thoughts

With the baseline tests done, I can move forward with the modification. I would really like to see significant results in power usage and temperature. Fingers crossed.

I might see if I can get the next graph published without using the iMac, Graphic Converter 3.8.1, or System 9; all of which are newer than 10 years old. Maybe I will, maybe I won't.

2008 RetroChallenge Preamble

• Project 1 (hardware): Modify a Mac Plus so that it is better suited for 24/7 operation. The idea is to generate less heat/power and prevent burn in by turning off the video circuit. I'll be using an approach suggested by Tom Lee on the 68kmla forum.
• Project 2 (software): Create another RetroChallenge participant list app that uses an LDEF so that I can learn how they work.
• Project 3 (software): We'll see.
  

Participant List App w/ Pascal Code

I shouldn't be surprised at how hard early Macintosh programming can be, but I almost always am. It is elegant, and I enjoy it, but sometimes it's very difficult to figure out how something is 'supposed' to be done.

Wanting to explore the TransSkel framework (circa 1987) for Macintosh application development, I decided to follow the lead of Wgoodf and MacTV with a RetroChallenge participant list project.

What was learned in bullet points...

* Think Pascal 4.5 and TransSkel 2.5 play well together.
* Think Pascal and BasiliskII running 7.5.5 play together well.
* TextEdit Records aren't the best choice for animated text.

I tried getting the text (composed of two TE records) to bounce around the screen. It did, but the flicker was bad, and I abandoned the idea pretty quickly. I was exploring the use of TE records for future app development, and didn't want to get off track.

So here is a link to the almost completely unexciting macintosh app that displays the RetroChallenge Winter Warm-up 2008 participants. Source code is included...

http://www.retards.org/projects/retrochallenge/2008-winter/RCWW2008.sit

It has a few display/update bugs, nothing serious. It was tested on 7.5.5 (BasiliskII), 6.0.5 (SE) and 9.1 (iMac).

In the end I'm very happy with TransSkel. It's a simple framework that doesn't get in the way, or require an outlandish frame of reference. I'll keep using it, and at 20 years old, it's very retro-computing.

Winter Warm-up 2/3 Over and Nothing to Show?

Ok, so the Winter Warm-up is 2/3 over, and I haven't made a post. What have I been up to? A nasty cold accounts for a missing week of January.

I spent a few days looking into the viability of coding a Blogger app for 68k macs...

I think a blogger browsing app would be possible, but I decided to shelve it. The original idea was to have an app that would let someone read all of the retro-challenge blogs hosted by blogger. There are 4 or 5 of us using blogspot.com, so it could be fun. Of course, after thinking about it, it seems like it'd be infinitely better if we could *post* to our Blogger blogs. No-brainer there. Well, the blogger api requires the use of https for authentication -- and SSL is a bit daunting -- but I decided to look into it anyway, just in case there's some easy library sitting out there.

Well, source code for MacSSH may or may not exist, but I was unable to find it. Even with a plug & play SSL library (which I doubt exists), it looks very unrealistic to get SSL working usably for a simple Blogger app. According to Raymond Ingles from the vintage-mac mailing list, it takes 30 seconds for SSH to make a connection on his SE/30 running NetBSD. Since I'm developing for an SE with MacTCP, I'd imagine it's pretty killer to wait a minute or more just to log into your Blogger account.

Obviously a Blogger *reader* would still be possible, and there's a 50% I might go for it. In the meantime I'm playing with the Macintosh application framework TransSkel, and will post more about it soon.