so I was excited to try this protoweb thing!

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mjd -protoweb

I saw this video and I was like sold! I have this PowerMac 6400/180 so I figured this would be good. The problem was my network card was acting up so I figured instead of troubleshooting it I’ll just format it and go from there.

the machine is very much an Old World Macintosh, so that limits me from OS X. It’s 603ev CPU it’s not all that advanced either. I have an 8.1 ISO that I’ve been using under 68k emulation but the limit it has is old multimedia stuff ins t 68k compatible as nobody would imagine emulation putting 68k at speeds above a gigahertz.

I went looking for a 8.6 ISO, and that is where the fun hit me again that many so-called ISO images aren’t. Rather they are giant floppy disk images with the media headers and/or partition tables being obliterated. As an ISO they don’t detect at all, and as a giant floppy, of course they don’t boot as MacOS checks if it is on read-only media.

This ISO isn’t an ISO

very annoying

I did manage to finally find one that does work however!

working ISO

I forgot where I found it though. I did save it to archive.org, since I have another 5 versions of this downloaded, none of which will boot. https://archive.org/details/mac-os-8.6-working-iso

I should also add the MacOS 8.1 CD-ROM image Ive been using as again,l I have the same issue where so many are headderless ‘floppies’ and not actual CD-ROM’s that don’t work in Cockatrice III or an actual Mac using BlueSCSI.

MacOS 8.1 CD-ROM on Cockatrice III

Sorry the image shows in black & white, but as you can see from the CD-ROM background it is in fact booted from the CD-ROM. You can download it from here: https://archive.org/details/mac-os-8.1-iso_202401

In no time, I was able to get online only to find that the power Mac plugin’s seem to be unavailable for anything and unsupported.

old netscape website

but the rendition of the old Netscape page was a treat!

Now I do have a Windows Surface RT tablet, and sure enough pluggin the proxy values, and YES the video site does work!

Warpstream on Windows RT

Very cool! So it turns out Protoweb can actually save all those old devices that work fine enough, but not fine enough for ‘Modern platforms’.

3 thoughts on “so I was excited to try this protoweb thing!”

  1. The most intriguing thing to me is how it can provide a number of YouTube videos in windows media or RealPlayer formats… I did have this idea in the past but never got around to writing something to put it all together.

    You can find RealServer on the internet archive – it’s interesting to play with, that’s for sure! I’d love to try and get some proper pnm / rtsp links working and not just plain old http streams.

    • I was fascinated as well! I would assume ffmpeg would be in there somewhere, along with yt-dlp?

      I really need to setup RealServer. I know it came with UnixWare but I never tried to setup/use it. This might be a good excuse to do so!

      • Yeah it’d have to be FFMPEG.

        I worked on something similar years ago https://github.com/pgodwin/68kTube – target was 68K/486 class machines – which pretty much meant Cinepak – and FFMPEG’s Cinepak encoder is s-l-o-w. So I used Quicktime’s encoder which worked fairly well.

        Ideally, you’d do proper RTSP and set up a separate session for each stream so you don’t have to sit and wait for transcoding to complete….

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