Monthly Archives: April 2008

Some 5400/12 – Performa 200 restoration notes

Posted on by
Reply
(Image from Wikipedia) I never took a picture of mine.

(Image from Wikipedia) I never took a picture of mine.

I’ll throw out a little tidbit about the Power Macintosh 5400/120, otherwise known as the Performa 200. If you do not have any Mac OS CD’s this will be *VERY* hard to get going with nothing. The good news is that there are boot floppies available out there.

The bad news is that they are encoded in a method in which you’ll have to get access to a working Mac. If there was somewhere I could post these files forever I would.

Anyways the boot disk is this one:

5400-6400_Disk_Tools.img.bin

Which I currently see online here:

http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/apple/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/CPU_Specific_Updates/6360-64xx-54xx/5400-6400_Disk_Tools.img.bin

Now it’s a diskcopy 6.4 image. Which you’ll need a Mac. I was able to finagle one from a Mac, however I’m wondering now if it’s possible to do this via emulation. During this whole resurrect my $12 Mac I’ve come across vMac, Basilisk II & SheepShaver.

I plan on doing some serious review, however it is worth noting that while both do run fine, they are actually buggy on weird stuff vs the real iron.

From what I gather with the boot disk, you can boot your Mac up, partition & format it, and install this super small bootable System 7.6 onto the hard disk. It will complain about you doing it this way, but it will work, allowing you to get the box up & running somewhat, to let you try some methods of getting the install disk for 7.6 onto your Mac.

It is worth noting that the 7.5.3 on Apple’s download site that is provided for FREE does *NOT* work on the 5400! I did at one point try it, and I got some wonderful message :

The System Software 7.5.3 Installer script does not recognize this Macintosh. Please use the original disks that came with your computer.

Sadly all information I see is that this thing shipped with 7.5.3 Oh well. I eventually found a boot floppy!

The site I gleaned this boot disk from was this:

http://home.earthlink.net/~gamba2/bootdisks.html

If anyone does anything MacOS for a living or is going to play with a Mac you ought to save the whole thing! It’s VERY useful, more so than Apple’s documentation.

Anyways I’ve tweaked up a copy of the SIMH PDP-11 to compile and do a small test under MiNT/MacOS. Tomorrow we shall see if it’s usable.

More fun with MiNT

Posted on by
Reply

So I was building a simple program, and I noticed that -lm (linking in the math library) doesn’t work. Well it appears that MiNT doesn’t have a normal math library, it’s called pml. I guess it’s a “portable math library”?

At any rate simply copying the /usr/lib/pml.olb to /usr/lib/m.olb allows you to keep on trucking.
More fun later.

MacMiNT

Posted on by
3
MacMint

MacMint

Recently I came across a Power Macintosh 5400/120 at a garage sale for the bargain price of $12! I couldn’t believe my luck, for under $20 I had a fully working computer!

Except that it won’t run OS X 1.0
And it only has 8Mb of ram.

Because of its memory restrictions it can only run Mac OS 7.6

What to do….

MacMINT!

MINT back in the day for AtariST’s was a UNIX like layer that ran on top of TOS (The Atari MS-DOS like OS) and provided basic Unix services. With the program aptly called JET (Just Enough TOS), the Macintosh 68000’s can setup a TOS compatible interrupt vector table, and run TOS procedure emulation to run the MINT binaries under MacOS!

So, it’s UNIX!

Sort of.

First you need to disable Virtual Memory… That’s bad.
Next it doesn’t support TCP/IP so it’s like being on Unix v6. But it’s fun at any rate.

You can find the binaries at my mirror of sra.co.jp here.

It includes gcc 2.5.8, and a somewhat basic environment. It does have lots of potential, but the biggest gripe is that 8Mb of ram just isn’t enough to do any serious compiling, and yes it will crash with virtual memory enabled. Also since it is 68000 programs it is running under emulation.. I have to admit that I am tempted to buy some kind of 68000 based Macintosh to run MacMiNT.

I know this may not be terribly useful to people, but then again someone has to do something fun/weird on a $12 machine. I fully expect to either get a ‘bigger’ 68000 box, or more ram and run something like simh on it. I can only wonder how usable the PDP11 or the Interdata32 are.

And for anyone, like me wants a ‘clear’ program, just because, here is a simple one, just remember to link with -ltermcap.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <termcap.h>

void main()

{

char buf[1024];
char buf2[30];
char *ap;
char *clearstr;

ap=buf2;
tgetent(buf,getenv(“TERM”));
clearstr=tgetstr(“cl”,&ap);
fputs(clearstr,stdout);

}

Anonet

Posted on by
5

Ok, this isn’t emulation, exactly but it does involve virtual networking…

I’m talking about Anonet! it’s an internet style network that is encapsulated over OpenVPN.

From the site:

In early 2005, a few people fed up with the way the Internet was heading, began in earnest to create a large wide area network that was secure and lived in its own space. On this new network anyone would be free to do as they saw fit – roam about, host services, or just be social without fear of being monitored or even worse censored. The first step to bring this network to fruition was to encrypt the information that normally travels across the Internet. What they ended up with is known as anoNet.This network was inspired by MetaNet, another “dark” network on the Internet, that used similar techniques to reach their goals. A few “core” members of anoNet were once a part of MetaNet but due to their strict nature, peering with MetaNet was lost and they became an “island”. anoNet has already surpassed what MetaNet had in membership, and is on its way to being a viable alternative to the “Internet” you currently know, whether you love it or hate it. If you are feeling adventurous check it out. If you are feeling really adventurous you can help; there is still lots to be done.

http://anonet.org/

So how does it work? Basically each ‘node’ runs OpenVPN connections to other peers, and they redistribute all networks over BGP. It’s very much in the same style as the real internet. I’d recommend checking it out. As for getting on the Anonet, it’s pretty simple. Just follow the instructions here:

http://anonet.org/quickstart/index.html

It will run on any platform that runs OpenVPN. I’m using Windows 2000 Pro in a VirtualPC VM. I hang out on the anonet IRC server from time to time ( 1.0.9.1 #anonet) if you are feeling brave, load up openvpn, retreive the client configuration and drop by!

If you are feeling real brave, try to become a peer onto the network!