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.

Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

Behold: the Guru of GNU! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.)

True enlightment only comes from a truly free computing experience, probably! And while there is no nerd who lacks an opinion on Richard Stallman personally, likewise let none claim he does not practice what he preaches. Why, the very laptop in front of him was selected deliberately because it can operate with no binary blobs and no firmware you couldn't examine or replace with your own, and runs his choice of fully libre operating systems. The fact it has a Chinese MIPS64 derivative in it was undoubtedly just more compound on the heat spreader.

Now, in my case, the fact that it is a MIPS-family system meant I certainly needed one in my unusual laptop collection. And since it can run OpenBSD ...

... it seemed like a good way to get nerdsniped in two ways by one computer: since I mostly run NetBSD as my BSD and server operating system of choice, I figured this was also a good way to learn OpenBSD on a highly portable netbook using an unusual platform. As usual, of course, the whole shooting match turned out to be a much longer journey than I'd anticipated, and my typical insistence on deviating from the beaten path (such as forcing it to run from the SD card slot and trying to build a browser from source) made it more so. But before we embark upon it, let's talk about why there's a Chinese MIPS derivative in this thing in the first place.

Bobby Prince has died

Bobby Prince, '90s FPS game musician extraordinare and longtime id Software associate, has died at 81. Now, early on, there were things like Commander Keen and Eat Your Vegetables, which were cute and amusing yet almost completely orthogonal to his later output. Correspondingly, his transitional work in Wolfenstein 3D was fine (especially The Ultimate Challenge) but clearly all of a particular genre, and his otherwise solid contributions to Duke Nukem 3D and Rise of the Triad ended up overshadowed by Lee Jackson's (exhibit A: Grabbag; exhibit B: Prince's main theme but Jackson's KISS OFF).

Doom, on the other hand ... well. It's not just that these were solid gamer tracks, it's that they sounded good on just about anybody's sound card. We had high quality MIDI on Mac while you schlubs struggled with Sound Blaster Pros and it still didn't sound like a$$. That's talent. While everybody will name At Doom's Gate (E1M1) as his best, I claim it is only merely his most memorable, and solely because everyone on the whole stinking planet has played it at least once. Instead, I proffer I Sawed The Demons (E2M1), Untitled (E3M1), and the reworked Wolf 3D holdover Evil Incarnate (Doom II MAP31) as his heaviest and meatiest, Donna To The Rescue (E3M2) as his funkiest, The Demons from Adrian's Pen (E2M2) and They're Going To Get You (E2M4) as his creepiest (I love the "car going out of control" feel to E2M2, as Prince himself called it), and Sign of Evil (E1M8) as the first track that legitimately had me scared as the doors slide open and the Bruiser Brothers emerge to kill. If that one didn't make you wet your pants back in the day, maybe this remix will. The Doom port for PlayStation didn't want to pay him royalties so they cheaped out and brought in Aubrey Hodges. Good music but hardly worthy of the Master, and to an otherwise excellent port's detriment.

I'd say rest in peace, but given the infernal subject matter that just doesn't seem adequate.