Blogs

And it's mine! All mine!

This monster is the first computer that I worked on professionally. It was purchased by my employer back in 1989 or 1990, reportedly for around $40,000 (though I never saw the purchase order.) It is essentially a modded IIfx in a giant steel case with oodles of space for disk drives and cooling gear. I haven't weighed it, but it must tip the scales at well over 50lbs.

We dropped by http://www.microcenter.com today. I picked up the Speck Products 3pk Skin Tight iPod case and MacAlly 3-in-1 Laptop Kit (Optical scroll mouse, USB 2.0 hub, retractable FW cable) which originally retailed for $28.99 and $59.99.

I have sucessfully emulated the Apple IIE text mode and I have coded the GR and HGR. This was the easy part. I am pretty sure Woz did not design the DHGR mode. I believe the Devil had a big hand in it's development. What I wanted to do was add a monochrome mode where I could get 560x192 mode to emulate a monochrome monitor. I also wanted close to the true individual dot color. On the Apple IIE emulator, when you write a 85 into location 8192, it displays differently depending on which monitor you setup. On a monochrome monitor, it appears as 4 monochrome dots. But on a color monitor, it appers as a solid gray line. This conforms to the way it is displayed on a composite monitor. Also, it conforms to Tech Note #3. But this tech note was written before high resolution VGA monitors were on everyones desk.

I've got the mobo from the iMac 400 running in the 350 shell. It runs fine, it's got 256MB RAM and a 10GB drive. I partitioned it to have OS X sitting on the last 4.5GB (SL iMacs don't care about the 8.4GB thing like TLs and Beige G3s) and left the space between it and the Driver and Patch partitions marked as "Free Space". Then I installed OS X and ran all the updates. Deleted IE too. Then I loaded the Ubuntu 5.04 CD and tried to start from it. The iMac flat refused. No 'C" working here. Tried OF. boot cdrom gave me issues with XCOFF crap and stopped. Then I remembered a trick: boot OF, type mac-boot as if you wanted to boot OS X and hold down 'C' right after you press Return. Bingo! Booted right up from the CD. It seems sometimes OS X plays with the system and things don't want to boot as they should. This iMac would boot from the Ubuntu CD fine w/o OS X on the HDD. Odd.