The classic console corner's CRT changeover

In the corner of the rear Floodgap lab sits a pile of classic game consoles. It used to look like this:

The centrepiece is the 20" Panasonic cathode ray tube TV-VCR on the cart (and a DVD player balanced on top), because with the exception of the Sega Dreamcast all the consoles here only came with NTSC RF output and date from the pre-flat panel TV era. That includes multiple Atari consoles (including the inevitable VCS, here a Darth Vader 2600), several Pong machines — including two Commodore units — with various chipsets, an Intellivision (as the rebadged Tandyvision One, my first) and a Bally Astrocade with lots of upgrades. It seems wrong to use them with a flat panel, and CRTs lag less. Plus, games with a light gun (here the Dreamcast and one of the Pong consoles) often rely on the CRT's rapidly scanning beam to know where they're pointed.

So what do you do when the CRT TV goes bad?

You track down another one, and then labouriously redo all the connections so you can still play the games. Yes, this article is basically just a big bubbling ball of nostalgia. My consoles — let me show you them.

MacOS Extensions pack for the Apple Network Server v1.0

By now regular readers of this blog are quite familiar with my affection for the 1996 Apple Network Server, Apple's Unix-through-and-through $10,000+ server that only shipped with, and only officially ran, Harpoon, its unique superset of IBM AIX. An ANS 500, the lower tier of this dorm fridge-sized computer, was the first server I ever personally owned, a nearly-new hand-me-down after Steve Jobs convinced Gil Amelio to cancel the machine and the bookstore's vendor at the University I worked for wouldn't support it anymore. There are several fascinating features present in Harpoon that were never implemented in any other Apple product. Currently I have three, that original ANS 500, this ANS 700 here which I use for testing, and a battery-bombed EVT prototype (a so-called "Shiner ESB" that used to be at Netscape).

The ANS was strongly based on the Power Macintosh 9500 and Apple was known to have demonstrated the ANS with Mac OS during development, but this confused potential buyers, causing the ability to boot Mac OS to be stripped from production systems. While then-CTO Ellen Hancock claimed in 1997 a ROM swap would enable the ANS to boot Mac OS again and Windows NT, these ROMs were believed to be vapourware until a former Apple employee presented a working dump of both the preproduction ROM and the later ANS Mac OS ROM. A prototype Windows NT ROM also emerged from another former employee, though there are pieces missing and booting Windows NT natively on the ANS is still a work in progress (hopefully to be the subject of a future article).

It turned out I had one of the preproduction ROMs myself and didn't realize what it was. Because the later Mac OS ROM was apparently unfinished, it doesn't properly support the L2 cache and consequently runs substantially slower, and it can't boot AIX. The preproduction ROM does boot both operating systems and does support the cache. On the other hand, in MacOS it doesn't support the on-board video or the front Fast Wide SCSI-2 controller, the on-board MACE Ethernet doesn't work there either, and after MacOS first boots, the next restart without zapping the PRAM will come up with a black screen.

The good news is, many of the issues with the preproduction ROM in Mac OS can be fixed or worked around in software. So I've fixed or worked around many of them in software: the MACE Ethernet is fixed, the on-board video is now supported, and the ANS can restart properly back into Mac OS. Plus, because it's the preproduction ROM, you can still boot AIX, thus preserving the entire historical reason for Shiner's existence. Here's the first cut of that software and how it was developed.

Refurb weekend II: Alpha Micro Eagle 300 and friends

This Refurb Weekend is a sequel in two ways.

Six years ago I fixed the power supply and case fan in my 68EC030-based Alpha Microsystems Eagle 300, a more modernized and substantially faster Alpha Micro running AMOS, their unique DEC-inspired multiuser operating system. These blue-collar boxes were very common in many vertical markets due to their tightly integrated business-specific software packages, and are especially unusual for running their big-endian 68000-series processors little-endian (for data file backwards compatibility with their WD-16 ancestors). The 1990s-era Alpha Micro Eagle family improves on the originals with later 68K and even ColdFire CPUs, plus Ethernet and faster SCSI.

The second way it's a sequel is to our previous Alpha Micro refurb weekend, a double header restoring an Alpha Micro AM-1000 and AM-1200, two members of Alpha Micro's most popular series of computers and some of the closest things they made in the early '80s to desktop workstations.

From the outside, the Eagle comes in a PC-style case, but it's not a PC:

This particular Eagle 300, with a 40MHz 68EC030 CPU, runs ampm.floodgap.com using the webserver provided with AlphaTCP — yes, Alpha Micros can be networked — and its own on-board Ethernet. At the time the cooling fan failure was putting a lot of strain on the hard disk because it was overheating, and since this was my first Alpha Micro and I wanted to keep it in good nick, I decided I would put a SCSI2SD in it after the repair and get rid of the spinning disk entirely. Fast-forward to last fall, a little over a year ago, when I tried to do exactly that with a ZuluSCSI.

And then it wouldn't start.

It would power on, but it wouldn't enter the boot sequence, not even with the old hard disk back in it, not even to run the internal self-test. I was worried I'd negligently blown one of its two main system boards and that meant I needed another. This entry took as long as it did to come to fruition because Eagles in general aren't easy to find, and on top of that I was looking for a specific one. Through a couple of referrals I managed to get what I thought was a replacement unit I could raid for parts, but it turned out to be something rather more special — and then I was even more fortunate when I got the Eagle 300 back out of storage to make one last attempt at reviving it.

To cap it off we'll go stick ZuluSCSIs in everybody else, including my Motorola ColdFire-based Eagle 450, the first ColdFire server ever produced and what used to be the fastest Eagle in the house until the new hotness came. I even converted the external BlueSCSI the AM-1200 was using to an internal ZuluSCSI too. Now nearly everybody's got a solid-state boot disk and they're all a good bit more zippy, so we'll gawk at the internals, compare 68K CPU and storage benchmarks and most importantly learn from my mistakes, because as my late father always said, "I'd rather be lucky than good." On a more solemn note, we'll also observe a moment of silence for one of the line's creators who passed away last year. It's time for a Refurb Multi-Weekend Sequel.

A Dick Smith VZ200 without the Dick Smith (but with a serial port)

Australians! They walk among us! Do not be deceived by those charming faces!

They might be your parent! They might sleep in the same bed as you at night! A half-breed might write the very blog you read!

For the preservation of our precious bodily fluids, we must remove the scurrilous larrikin influence of Australia upon our American home computers, and I know exactly where to start! Why allow Dick Smith's name (even though he'd already sold Dick Smith Electronics' controlling interest to Woolies by then but stop ruining my intro) to corrupt this, um, rubber-keyed diminutive beige home computer when we can return it to its prior, pristine, plasticky state as it once rolled out from a glorious Asian factory?

Let us restore it to its purest virginal roots! Let this American, possibly sold in Canada, original of a Hong Kong-manufactured super-cheap home computer that was also sold in Europe but never mind that flourish once more!

... after, of course, we compare this seppo VTech VZ200 with the Dick Smith units and the bumper crop of crap American home computers in 1983, and fix the keyboard and video. Then, to avoid wrecking it with a botched logic board repair, we'll bolt on a USB serial port using the very latest peripherals from down under, write cycle-counted Z80 assembly language to blast data to it at 57.6kbps, and hack a few games. Because only this will make the VZ200 great again!

UPS finally refunded the overcharged tariff

Last November UPS mistakenly charged me a $684 tariff on $355 worth of computer parts shipped from Europe. It was shortly afterwards reduced to $51.30, but I had prepaid the tariff to avoid warehouse fees, so UPS owed me $632.70. They finally issued the refund in July after repeatedly E-mailing their accounting office in India approximately monthly. (Phone number? Ha ha ha.)

I don't know if these overcharges are still happening, but I've basically stopped importing anything from outside the United States unless they pay the tariff for you, or until there is more clarity. I'd also like to get that $51.30 back — especially since they were Apple parts, and one of the parts even said "MADE IN USA." Until then, any new Australian computer exploration is staying local to the in laws' in regional New South Wales, and it will be awhile before we get any new Japanese systems to play with.

MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150

As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Workgroup Server line and older cousin to our beloved Apple Network Server. And then I just had to pimp it out for MkLinux.

Before the sui generis IBM AIX-based Apple Network Server, one of our favourite machines here at Floodgap, there were the WGSes, the Workgroup Servers, Apple's well-intentioned but conflictingly received line of Macintosh rebadges hopped up with high-spec options and special server software. While certain users had long repurposed desktop Macs as ad-hoc servers, these computers were the first Apple systems explicitly positioned and sold as such, and the first generation was even advertised with A/UX, Apple's own hybrid System V UNIX implementation.

A/UX ultimately didn't survive the 1994 68K transition to PowerPC, but in 1996 Apple publicly offered another option: run Linux, using the Mach microkernel. Although MkLinux emerged after the 9150's discontinuation, it's still just an overgrown NuBus Power Mac, so between more RAM, a beefier CPU upgrade and various video cards, by the end of this article we ought to have a configuration that gives us the best of two worlds — classic MacOS and MkLinux — in one server.

But first we're going to have to rebuild it. And these plastics definitely don't want to stay in one piece.

John C. Dvorak has died

Reports coming in of the death of John C. Dvorak, apparently passed away on Monday (July 20th) from complications of heart bypass surgery. Dvorak started in wine and moved to silicon as an early columnist at InfoWorld, one of the pillar references for this particular blog because of its studious regular reporting, and most notably for PC Magazine where he had no less than two columns since at least 1986. In addition to this and other tech journalism credits, he was on the flagship CNET Central cable TV program in the mid 1990's with his "Buy It, Try It, Skip It" reviews, plus other shows hosted on NPR and then-ZDTV. He was also a regular guest on Leo LaPorte's syndicated radio program and podcasts, and joined former MTV veejay Adam Curry (well known to us in Gopherspace for MTV Networks v. Curry, and an early user of TTYtter before Twitter started to suck) in 2007 as co-host of the No Agenda podcast, a role he maintained until his death. Dvorak hailed from a different generation of tech journalists, far more personal and yet far more technical, and even his detractors (given his political views, which we won't talk about here, there are many) would admit he was at least entertaining. He was 80. Rest in peace.