As I have mentioned before the channel is so underrated it really deserves millions of views! I’d watched it before but missed it, but yeah I got a thanks! Sweet!
It’s time for a new video! Much to my shock I got a thanks at the end!
Totally worth the wait
I got a question the other day about how to easily move files in and out of Cockatrice III, especially since as part of my ‘try to make it stable by cutting features out’ approach I removed the ability to mount foreign directories under Basilisk II.
For my personal use, I have an AppleTalk LAN, and I just use a Windows NT 4.0 server with AppleTalk, as a file server/proxy and that works pretty good for me, so much so that I didn’t even think of any other way of doing this.
One of the quickest and easiest is HFV Explorer, however the ‘catch’ being it doesn’t read SCSI disk images (aka things with partition maps). But for the ‘massive floppy’ images it’s more than fine.
HFSUtils is another approach, it’s like the old ‘MS-DOS utils’ of ancient Unix days, allowing you to ‘mount’ a disk image, and copy files in and out. I thought I’d give this a spin to copy Marathon into my virtual OS 8.1 image. It’s pretty straight forward first ‘mount’ the disk image:
C:\Cockatrice>hmount.exe scsi0.dsk
C:\Cockatrice/scsi0.dsk: contains 1 HFS partition
Volume name is "SCSI0"
Volume was created on Sat May 19 14:04:04 2018
Volume was last modified on Mon Nov 16 14:59:02 2020
Volume has 1056545280 bytes freeNow make a directory:
C:\Cockatrice>hmkdir scsi0:xfer:And then copy in the file:
C:\Cockatrice>hcopy marathon.sit scsi0:xfer:
C:\Cockatrice>hdir scsi0:xfer:
f ????/UNIX 0 5627676 Nov 16 15:34 scsi0:xfer:
C:\Cockatrice>And just like that it’s there!
And yes it unstuffs!
And just like that we have downloaded a game from the garden, copied it into a virtual SCSI disk, and gotten it to run, from the painful CLI.
Wasn’t that great!?
Well this is a ‘small’ update, but with a big change, the audio is for the most part working great now thanks to this fix from rakslice. Namely changing SDL to MSB:
desired.format = AUDIO_S16MSB;
And another MinGW tweak, and yeah it’s GREAT!
Even stuff like RealAudio work now! I’ll add some self hosted video later as it’d just get struck from anything public.
Also since the RealAudio player is timebombed for installing, I added some lazy offset to remove however many billions of ticks from the clock letting you jump in some random point in the past when it won’t care.
I guess the final if any justification for a bump would be rebuilding with GCC 8.1.0 on MinGW. I somehow butchered the slirp.h to make it too MinGW’ish so it won’t clean build on Linux or OS X, but I have re-butchered a private branch and it works.. I just need to merge and clean but I’m not in the mood at the moment.
I could be crazy but it “feels” faster.
At any rate, I found that System 7 is more agreeable to running Return to Zork, just use some toast image mounter from within MacOS, and it’ll run!
Also there is some ULONGLONG weirdness going on, so I had to backout Peter’s changes for larger disks. No doubt some standard type thing change in GCC 8.
You can download binaries/source from Sourceforge.
And well it’s a Mac. I did the Windows Key + R to boot into recovery mode and install some old version of OS X over the internet. Nice.
I updated to Catalina and kind of forgot about the break with the ‘awesome world of home 32bit computing’ as it’s all 64bit now.
Needless to say none of my favourite stuff runs.
I’ve been maintaining a subscription to Crossover for a while, as I really like to support the future of Wine. I know a while back they too had the 64bit freakout, but they apparently found some shim to keep on running Win32 apps. And sure enough I loaded up my old Fortran Power Station bottle and it actually run!
Sadly SQL Server 4.21 seems to lock up, but it has been doing that under Wine when I last gave up on OS X a few years back. I tried some Win16 games (SimCity) and it bombed out. Looks like there is no support for Win16 apps. Pitty.
Steam is 64bit now, however none of Valve’s hits that have 64bit versions for Windows have made the 64bit leap for OS X. I have a feeling it’ll never happen as OS X users are so few and far between they are literally outnumbered by Linux users.
I did fire-up Subnautica, and of course the PC with the RTX 2070 blows this thing away. Although it’s hardly a fare competition. But who wants to play fare?
It’s far too early to really tell, and who knows I might just wipe this thing and install Windows. In my opinion OS X 10.6 was the greatest release ever bridging the divide from PowerPC to x86, just as 10.2.7 on the G5 was the greatest PowerPC version to bridge that 68000 divide. I still have that G5, but now my 2006 machine is dead. I’ve seen them in the used stores for around $100 USD. Although I don’t know if I can be bothered as they are incredibly heavy. And I’m pretty sure 10.6 will run on VMWare thanks to hackintosh efforts.
Also I should add as a personal note, my 2006 MacPro 1,1 died. I let someone else use it, and she broke it in one day. I’ve had it for years, several moves in the USA, then to Canada, then to Hong Kong. It died with only one day on the job. Sad.
As someone who’s owned a few G5’s over the years, and 2 intel ‘cheese grater/Mac Pros’ this is like exciting news! Although I don’t see why this machine took YEARS to churn out after the trashcan fire, but here we go!
Somehow the aesthetic is even more cheese grater than the prior G5/Pro’s. Almost a desperate call back to pros saying you missed the grater, so here it is again! Now with more grating action, and like the iPhone now with rounded corners!
One thing I’ve heard time and time again is that XNU really struggles with multiprocessor setups. And I guess we’ve hit that peak as that 2013 Mac Pro was single processor, and the new Mac Pro continues in this trend with a single processor, a Xeon from the ‘W’ or workstation lineup. Which I guess isn’t all that surprising.
The real great thing is expandibility is back! SLOTS SLOTS SLOTS! Although there is no front 3.5mm RCA audio (lol remember that?!) there is 2 USB-C on the top of the case for somewhat accessible ports. Still not too bad.
Another quick to open and upgrade machine. Just like the good old days of the cheese grater!
Although many were hoping for an end to the NVIDIA embargo, bringing CUDA to the table, there was no such luck. Instead the whole ‘dual GPU’ thing was doubled down on.
Bundled is the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo card, featuring dual GPU’s on the same card. Although the case is now large enough for two of these cards giving you 4 GPUs in the box.
So far, so good right?!
And then there is the expected MSRP. $5,999 USD. For the cheapest ‘base’ model featuring a bare 8 core, 16 threaded processor clocking in at 3.5Ghz.
However this does mean for people who want to collect old Mac stuff, the trashcans are no doubt going to crash in price. If you enjoy having a stack of external peripherals, and wires and cables everywhere. Kind of like the old Power Mac G4 Cube.
So I bit the bullet and updated to Windows 10 build 1903. And then the fun started on my glorious 2006 MacPro. It finished the update, and on reboot I get the login screen, and then almost immediately a blue screen.
Naturally the QR code is useless as it doesn’t specify any stop codes, and the minidump… Well that requires gigabytes and gigabytes of crap to download to get a tool to read it. (I still haven’t finished that rabbit hole, like COME ON! why isn’t it included?!).
However after hitting F8 a million times, I found that safe mode & networking work just great. Searching online was basically useless as there was no specific stop code to go with this WDF_VIOLATION. Further looking around I did notice one thing, and that it was all Macintosh machines that crash out to this WDF_VIOLATION error. It must be something specific to the Apple hardware running Windows 10!?
Armed with this (dis)information, I went ahead and disabled all the Apple specific drivers & startup items.
From MSCONFIG.EXE I disabled the following services:
And in the task manager, I disabled the following startup items:
I had the other VMWare serial & USB hook previously disabled, as I just don’t want them at all on my setup. The big upshot is that after rebooting out of safe mode, I’m now up and running on Windows build 1903.
Considering the BootCamp stuff was so woefully out of date, don’t expect Apple to fix this anytime soon. And since I’m on a MacPro 2006, I certainly won’t be getting any updates from Apple. But at least I can struggle to keep this thing up to date otherwise.
Now I can enjoy that ‘new command prompt’ everyone keeps telling me about.
***UPDATE***
I went through this on another Bootcamp Mac, and what I had to do was uninstall the “Boot Camp Services”. It’s startup component triggers the bluescreen as it’s doing some nonsensical inventory, banging around on the drivers in a not friendly way. I had version 4.0.4033 of the Boot Camp Services installed.
Removing this kept all the old drivers, which continue to work just fine.
I’ve had this 2006 MacPro for quite a while. I’ve taken it home as didn’t have a ‘good’ home machine as I have my better stuff in the office. Anyways the machine is far obsolete with 10.7 being the last official release supported, and although you can treat it like a hackintosh and go much further, Apple is making their binaries tuned heavy enough that all the spectre/meltdown patches broke the old Xeons.
So I installed Windows 10, and found I can go all the way to 1809 without any issues. I put in a GT 1030 with DDR5 RAM and it can even game to extent, although the 13 year old 2Ghz processors were certainly holding it down. Upgrade processors have always been available when I had this machine but they were expensive, and I wasn’t sure if they’d work. Well I picked up a pair of Xeon x5365 for $88 RMB each and pulled the plug.
Supported features of the old Xeon 5130’s:
I thought the thing to do was a quick benchmark of before and after. I was getting a whopping 167! That means if Cinebench scales to 100% efficiency I get a core score of 41. While my ‘newer’ machine’s E5-2620 v2 was scoring 52, and the current E5-2667 v2 is scoring 77.
It took two hours, but I finally got these 2 Xeon x5365’s installed giving me a score of 560, or a score of 70 per core. Nice!
And here is the CPU features of the Xeon 5365:
If you are expecting to run new and exciting software that requires SSE4/SSE4.1/SSE4.2 and the infamous POPCNT and LZCNT instructions you will be disappointed. Sorry Apex Legends fans. This also means that VMware Player is capped to version 12.
Also, while there is a POPCNT Emulator, it will trigger anti-cheat software, and you will get perma banned. Pitty.
Another thing worth noting is that it’s worth looking at the TDP of the various sSPEC of Xeons. I was lucky and I was able to source the SLAED variation which has half the idle TDP of the SLAC3 variant.
So yeah, this is basically as far as this thing can go CPU wise. Although I have 16GB of RAM, apparently it can go to 32GB, which means buying all new memory modules. I guess I can do a better video card. I’m hoping that I can run more stuff at once, I was hitting a point with all 4 cores were maxed to 100% way too much.
I was going to show off the new CPU’s but apparently the pictures didn’t come out and I wanted to get this upgrade over with, as I had mentioned it did take 2 hours. The plastic retainer in the memory cage, and that stupid cover for the processors was the hardest PITA to remove. I probably spent at least 30 minutes pulling that damned thing off. I never removed the CPU shield before and 13 years, 3 nations, 2 continents worth of dust was unreal. Maybe it’s just as well the pictures didn’t come out, as it was pretty disgusting in there. It’s also no wonder the old CPU’s were running hot.
I wonder if this machine counts as being vintage now? Apple’s sliding scale of support is a weird thing.
So I have this 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 that I’ve had laying around and I wanted to put my old Nvidia 1030 into it, along with Windows 10 for a newer (stronger?) home machine.
So I burnt the downloadable ISO from Microsoft onto a DVD, tried to boot it up and got this:
I got stuck at this “Select CD-ROM Boot Type : ” prompt, which you can’t type anything into. Apparently it’s a common and known issue with 64bit boot code, as the older Intel Apple Mac’s are of course 32bit only. So there is a fix, you have to use something called “oscdimg” to rebuild the ISO with a 32bit friendly loader.
So first I just used 7zip to extract the downloaded ISO, and then create the new 32bit ISO with the following:
oscdimg -n -m -bc:\temp\Windows10\boot\etfsboot.com c:\temp\Windows10 c:\temp\LegacyBootWindows10dvd.iso
And yes, it boots!
Now what about those special ‘bootcamp’ drivers? Obviously under Windows 10 there is no nice way to get the ones you want. And what about which model/download package to get?
Then I found Brigadier!
It’ll probe your hardware type and grab the drivers for you!
The LC isn’t a strong Macintosh. It is after all, a low cost model. And what I’m doing isn’t even slightly fair to it.
Since it has a mere 68020 running at a blazing 16Mhz with no 68881 nor any MMU running something like A/UX is simply out of the question. However MMU less Mac’s can run MachTen.
Although I did make a backup of the disk to find out that this thing had been in Harvard of all places, apparently once belonging to Mark Saroyan.
Although there was nothing even slightly academic or useful on the disk. I wonder if the software was even pirated as the last owner sure enjoyed all the various SIM games (city/earth/life/ant) it seems more than anything else.
I formatted the massive 50MB SCSI disk, put on a fresh copy of MacOS 7.0.1 along with the network driver and MachTen 2.2.
And as far as LC’s go, this one isn’t too bad, it’s loaded up with the maximum 10MB of RAM, although it seems the VRAM is pretty sparse as it’ll only go to 16 colours. But since we are playing UNIX here, I didn’t see any need for that, and set it to mono.
I thought it’d be fun to install a gopherd server onto this machine, and that is where the fun started.
Granted it’s been a long time since I used a machine with no real L2 cache, let alone running at a whopping 16Mhz, and using a compiler like GCC is just incredibly slow.
So I thought I could just ‘cheat’ the system by taking the source code to GCC-1.42 and tweaking the SUN3-Mach configuration into a SUN2-Mach configuration but keeping it targeting a BSD like OS, along with setting it to compile to a 68020 without a 68881. Oddly enough getting a cross compiler wasn’t so difficult, but the assembler on the LC, a modified GAS wouldn’t assembler the files. So I went ahead and built a68 from GAS 1.38 and now I can cross assemble from Windows. However I couldn’t get the linker ld from binutils-1.9 working. I guess it was an endian issue somewhere, but my attempt at byte swapping files it was reading just led to further confusion. And I figured linking on the target host wouldn’t be the end of the world, as compiling sure feels like it is.
I can’t see like anyone would care, but here it is:
MachTen-crossgcc-1.42-nolinker.7z
So fighting the source and in a matter of a 30 minutes of on/off work I had it compiled. All I needed to do then was FTP the objects to the machine, link and run. Surprisingly this proved to be pretty simple.
I managed to get a few pages out of it, and suddenly my telnet sessions dropped. Looking over at the console and MacOS was busy being MacOS.
And that was that.
I tried another program to cross compile and upload phoon!
It took a while to set the clock to the right year, as my minimal System 7 install doesn’t have the time control panel, and advancing 1 year at a time from 1999 takes time, by advancing the date to New Years Eve every minute 19 times to get us to 2018 with the old date syntax:
date 12312359
Obviously if I want to do something like this, I’m going to need a better Macintosh. Or just not do things like this….
I’m kind of on the fence as to whither 68k Unix is really all that useful in the age of Ghz x86.
I came across this hefty box, “the easy way bundle”, as it bills itself, the easy way to save over $1,000 on four popular software packages for your new Macintosh computer. Clearly the box has seen better days over the last 27 years but amazingly the contents are just fine.
It’s amazing how much more cheaper software has gotten over the years. Software used to be super expensive on the PC level, it really wasn’t until the office bundling with new machines that drove the price down. Back in the 80’s and early 90’s it wasn’t uncommon to pay upwards of $500 USD for a single application, like a spreadsheet or word processor.
Inside the box is more boxes, and inside those boxes is a rare sight, manuals! Actual printed manuals! That is how you know this is something of near museum quality. I kind of like being able to read a physical book from time to time, and it’s really great.
Oh and incidentally the disks all worked, much to my amazement. I just needed to get a working Macintosh with a drive that can read 800kb disks and an Ethernet card.
Although it does list four packages, it really is 3, featuring:
AccessPC is simply a FAT driver for MacOS to read MS-DOS floppies & removable media.
So let’s take a quick look!
I haven’t seen something like this in a long while, an actual license printed on nice stock certificate stock paper (remember those?!), with a hologram tag. Does WordPerfect even exist anymore? Can I mail this in for an upgrade? Does it even matter?
While the install options give the impression that WordPefect is a really full featured word processor once loaded up for some reason it really felt barren.
Although it does have the important proofing tools, don’t expect a dictionary or thesaurus to have anything more than the words, no definitions or anything like a style guide. It did ship on floppy and I guess I’ve just become so spoiled living in the future with terabytes of storage and an overwhelming supply of deference media.
Going back to 1992 is a real trip to not only how clean some of the UI elements feel, but just how seemingly feature sparse the more advanced applications feel.
Personally I never really liked WordPerfect so I more so installed it as a curiosity, much like when I had WordPerfect for Unix. I’m the crazy one that likes MS Word.
With that said, I went ahead and installed Lotus 1-2-3, and I was really surprised, that the installer was not only really appallingly bad, requiring you to copy the contents to the HD before installing it (so you need a lot of free space), but there was no copy protection at all either on the disks, or in the form of a certificate/serial code. In school I did start with 1-2-3, but with the onslaught of Microsoft Office had quickly moved to Excel, and after 30+ years I really don’t remember much of the slash commands, let alone how to use if effectively. Luckily the menu is okay to walk through, and of course there is Macintosh style menus so you don’t even have to deal with the slash menu if you don’t want to.
SoftPC didn’t come with a box within the box, just the two manual sets & the disks shoved into the manuals. I doubt it came like that, but this is all I have.
Compared to the WordPerfect certificate, the stickers hidden in the folds of the SoftPC manual just feel cheap. And the years have not been kind as you can see with the discoloration, and the cheap adhesive on them has completely dried off. After I had scanned this they have all fallen off the backing paper. Although I also have version 3.1, I didn’t want to lose this so I’ll just save it for prosperity.
And SoftPC is a great program, although it really is an absolute crutch, allowing you to run PC software on your Mac. Flash forward 30 years, and the industry continues with VMware & Parallels. What is more amazing is how so many leaders in PC emulation completely missed the virtualization market. But most people would think you were a little strange to run a PC on a PC. Or more than one at the same time.
SoftPC emulates a really barebones PC, it only supports a maximum of 640kb of RAM, and the CGA graphics adapter. For anything more advanced you really need to get SoftAT, which supports more options. Or even better, get a copy of SoftPC 3.1, which not only allows more memory but bundles a copy of MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1
I found the emulation of the CGA kind of lacking when compared to version 3.1Â Although some games like BattleTech render just fine, Space Quest just looks horrible in version 2.52.
Although to be fair it doesn’t look so much better in version 3.1 either. However 3.1 emulates both EGA & VGA (along with expanded & extended memory) giving a far more richer 286 based emulation solution
As you can see there really is no comparison to the EGA version.
Although there are far more better solutions today to do PC emulation, for some reason there is always something cool to have an emulator running an emulator.. Sadly the 80386 based emulation didn’t come to the 68000 based platform, instead the later generation emulation was only available to the PowerPC.
I guess it goes to show, but of all the applications I have for MacOS, I enjoy SoftPC the most. I suppose I need better softwares.