Scott Small 🇨🇦

#Macstodon now runs in the latest bleeding-edge build of the Snow emulator! And if you use Snow's built-in HTTPS stripping, then you don't have to configure WebOne or another proxy, just install Macstodon and start using it 😎

Thanks @twvd@mastodon.social for the FPU fixes and all the other hard work you put into Snow! This is the kick-in-the-pants I need to get the next version of Macstodon out the door 🙂

#RetroComputing #RetroProgramming #VintageMac #68K #PowerPC #Apple #Mac #MacOS #ClassicMac

#Macstodon now runs in the latest bleeding-edge build of the Snow emulator! And if you use Snow's built-in HTTPS stripping, then you don't have to configure WebOne or another proxy, just install Macstodon and start using it 😎

Thanks @twvd@mastodon.social for the FPU fixes and all the other hard work you put into Snow! This is the kick-in-the-pants I need to get the next version of Macstodon out the door 🙂

#RetroComputing #RetroProgramming #VintageMac #68K #PowerPC #Apple #Mac #MacOS #ClassicMac

Belated #MARCHintosh project #1 completed (mostly): I made a CatMac SE!

The motherboard is my spare/parts SE board - I cannibalized the ROM chips a while back to swap with my other SE in order to use a SuperDrive, so this one's got the original ROMs in it. It's also missing a battery and a speaker. But otherwise, the electronic bits all work great. I'm using the PicoPSU and SE-Combo board that I purchased from Joe's Computer Museum a couple months ago.

The case itself is a 7/10 for me. It's decent, but flimsy in places. That's not so much a problem with the model itself as what I used to print it - basic & matte PLA on a Bambu X1C. I'd probably use PETG if I were to do it again. Removing the supports from inside the drive slots was an absolute nightmare, even when using a dedicated support filament. And when I close it up, the BlueSCSI SD card slot is a bit askew, so right now I have to have the cover off to insert/remove the SD card - going to see if I can use a wad of tape or paper to adjust the positioning.

But other than those relatively minor complaints, it's a beautiful design reminiscent of the Apple's 80's frogdesign aesthetic. I opted for a black case, blue LED & translucent light pipe and red reset/interrupt buttons to give a bit of a retro-futuristic touch (and it'll match my Amiga 500’s new case). And it's completely quiet, just like my IIfx.

So I think what I'm going to do is swap out the motherboard with the one from my other SE, so this one will get the recapped board with the 030 accelerator on it. I'll move the floppy drive over to this machine as well, and then it'll move over to my Tower of Power. Since the BlueSCSI V2 on this machine also supports Wifi, it means I can put away the Asante EN/SC and save even more space (and power outlets) on the Tower.

As for the other SE, I think I'll give the case a good cleaning and then move it to my living room where it will become a "working" display piece (like my 30's Minerva radio).

#RetroComputing #VintageMac

Watching @ActionRetro@bitbang.social 's latest video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiy5MIl03tY) this morning on building a router from an ancient PC hit me like whiplash because I did nearly the exact same thing, with the exact same machine, 25 years ago.

By the year 2000, our house had a whole bunch of computers in it:
- Dad's Power Mac G3 in our living room, which was the former family computer before the rest of us got our own
- my Mac Centris 610 and Intel Celeron 366 PC, in my bedroom
- my brother's 486 PC, in his bedroom
- my mom's 486 PC, in my parent's bedroom

Dad had run Ethernet cabling throughout the house the year before (Wi-Fi wasn't really a thing yet), terminating at a patch panel in the living room next to the G3. That panel connected to a 10/100 switch, which connected to the G3. Dad had installed a second Ethernet card in the G3, and we ran the VICOM Internet Gateway software on it to bring Internet access to the rest of the computers in our home.

But this setup had two problems - first, the G3 had to be on if we wanted to use the Internet from any other machine. And second, running the Internet Gateway software on it slowed it down quite a bit, to the point where Dad was getting frustrated when he was trying to, you know, actually _use_ the computer.

Meanwhile, I'd been reading online about these “linux servers" and decided we needed one to dedicate as our Internet gateway. And so one day, after school, I got a ride to a mom-and-pop computer shop in town and picked up an old Packard Bell tower - the same model in Action Retro's video - and brought it home with me. I think I only paid around 25 or 50 bucks for it, no monitor or peripherals, just the tower.

I settled on a Linux distribution called "ClarkConnect” (https://web.archive.org/web/20010204025700/http://www.clarkconnect.org/) - downloading the ISO, burning a CD, and installing it onto the Packard Bell machine. I moved the second Ethernet card from the G3 into the new system, and put it under Dad's desk in the living room.

It had some pretty cool features including a web server (where I put family photos up so the relatives could see them), and both Samba and Netatalk servers for file sharing support, making it really easy to transfer files between all the machines on our home network. I'm sure it was terribly insecure though - I didn't really know anything about Linux server adminstration, I mainly just followed tutorials that I read online.

And it ran, pretty reliably, all the way until 2004 when it got replaced by a Belkin Wi-Fi router. We took it to electronics recycling. And like all the old systems we had at the time, I wish I still had it today. Always loved the design of that case.

#RetroComputing

RE: @smallsco@oldbytes.space

#MARCHintosh retrospective 2026…

…I'll be honest, I didn't achieve any of my goals this year, mostly due to illness (a week of covid followed by a couple weeks of congestion and sluggishness). And while I'm finally feeling better, I won't be able to work on the CatMac project I had planned until next month (and I'll probably do the 6500 fan swap then as well).

As for the Mac-on-Amiga emulation work, I briefly started looking into that but ran into some hiccups, I'll revisit that later in the year (maybe for AMAYga?)

I did accomplish a bunch of unplanned "side quests” though… 🤣
- reinstalled the OS on my 6500 _twice_, settling on a patched 9.2.2 which seems to be more stable than both 8.6 and 9.1
- figured out how to print ANSI art in colour to imagewriters without making the text look terrible
- tracked down what was causing custom icons on my shared netatalk volumes to not show up on System 7
- built a portable GlobalTalk volume browsing station using an old PC laptop, a WiFi bridge, and SheepShaver

That said it was still a great event as always. I've enjoyed seeing everyone's posts and projects (I'm still a week behind on the timeline, so apologies if I haven't seen yours yet), browsing all the GlobalTalk volumes, and receiving printouts from all over the world. Thanks again everyone (too many to list!) for making this such a fun event to be a part of!

Hot off the press! Thanks @jack68k@mastodon.social for the #GlobalTalk print job, which may be the last one of the year? Only 2-3 more hours to get your prints in, I'm turning off public access to the printer tonight.

So now that #MARCHintosh is over, I spent the day doing some network reconfiguration.

Can folks still see and connect to my #GlobalTalk shared volumes? Any performance improvement?

I've switched from the QEMU VM running AIR in Mac System 7.1, over to a modern Debian Linux VM running the LToUDP fork of jrouter.

It was a bit of a pain to get everything going again - what finally made everything work was sticking to a VM on my Mac Mini instead of trying to run it all on the Pi or my NAS. There's junk that gets appended to the end of my AppleTalk packets when they cross over my Wifi bridges, and so the routing needs to happen behind one of them in order for everything to work correctly.

I'm not committing to this new setup yet, but I'll probably leave it running for a week or so and see how stable things are compared to the previous AIR setup.

Anyway, now that I have LToUDP working, it means I can access GlobalTalk volumes from my laptop without the need for a Wifi bridge (or a separate laptop), as long as I'm using Mini vMac or Snow.