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Forget The Pentium, Hack The 68K
Mr. Groove writes: "Hey foo, think your PIII is killer? Imagine running Photoshop on one of these!" Frugal or insane -- only you can decide.
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68k is great.. but unfortunately this article is a little mislabelled. The site in question is all about hacking Mac Color Classics, which came with a 68030, to use a PowerPC.
So, sadly, we're not talking about a true believer in the coolness of 68k's.. but rather a true believer in the coolness of a certain size & shape of all-in-one Mac.. oh well..
As I scroll through the stories, see the mods are on meth
... fool
I take a look at my karma, realize there's none left
'Cause I've been trolling and flaming so long that
Even Trollmastah thinks that my mind is gone
But I ain't never crossed a post that didn't deserve it
Me be modded up at all, you know that's unheard of
You better watch how Katz's talking, courting the masses
If I ever meet his homies I'll kick their asses
I really hate to troll but I gotta say
VA pays the bills, that means Hemos is gay... fool
I'm the kinda troll that script kiddies wanna be like
On Slashdot in the night, trollin' to set this earth right
They been spending most their lives living in a trollin' paradise
They been spending most their lives living in a trollin' paradise
We been spending most our lives living in a trollin' paradise
We been spending most our lives living in a trollin' paradise
They got the moderation, they rule the nation
I can't post a normal post, I tried -- no route to host!
So I gotta be down with the Slashdoterati
Too much videotape watching got me chasing Natalie
I'm an anonymous fool with hot grits on my mind
Got pancakes in my hand and first posts in my eye
I'm an open source caveman from k-stuff-inchfan
And my homies is down so don't even try that ban
First ain't nothing but a heart beat away
I'm owning you left and right, what can I say
I'm -3; never will I whore to hit 25
The way we're going just won't survive
Tell me why are we so blind to see
That the ones we mod aren't just ACs
They been spending most their lives living in a trollin' paradise
They been spending most their lives living in a trollin' paradise
We been spending most our lives living in a trollin' paradise
We been spending most our lives living in a trollin' paradise
Karma and the stories, stories and the karma
Zealot after zealot, dogma after dogma
Everybody's posting, but half of them ain't thinking
What's going on in Andover, something must be stinking
They say I've got to log in; nobody talks to ACs
If they can't even read it, how can they raise me
I guess they can't
I guess they won't
I guess they front
That's why I know my life is out of luck... fool
Tell me why are we so blind to see
That the ones we mod aren't just ACs
Tell me why are we so blind to see
That the ones we mod aren't just ACs
The webpage referenced descibes modifications to the Mac Color Classic (and Color Classic II which was never released in the US) Almost all of the mods are done by replacing the Classic motherboard with one from an All-In-One mac like the educational models. Since the motherboards are similar enough, they can be hacked to fit into the case of the classic. Also, most people tweak the little 9" trinitron to 640x480 so it can actually be used for real work. Some people even go as far as to replace the 603e in the LC motherboard with a G3 upgrade chip, making one crazy fast classic. To me this seems like crazy stuff, but I'm sure some people enjoyed doing it. Looks like a sweet hack.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
You'd be surprised what can run off a 68k chip. They truly are an example of excellent versatile design. These things have been in common use since the 70's when they ran the first Macs. Since then, they've found their way into everything from robots to calculators. They provide an excellent chip for robotists (hobby and professional) as they are highly versatile and can be programmed using Interactive C (designed to be similar to a language most programmers already know). Check out the Rug Warrior for an example of a robot running off a 68k. Now, they run the TI-89 and TI-92(+) graphing calculators. 68k assembly is remarkably capable. Plus, they can be overclocked from the intended 10 mHz up to a whopping 12 mHz very easily (even farther with a little work). Despite the speed limitations of the chip, a good assembly or C programmer can use one of these things for just about anything.
Of course, my calculator is more powerful than those Macs...
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
hey there, power mac,
swinging round the mouse so fancy free
nobody you meet could ever see the source code in there...
inside you
hey there, power mac,
why do most fanatics pass you by?
could it be you just don't try?
or is it the case you wear?
you're always window shopping
but never trying to change
this won't get newer people in range.....
as customers..
hey there, power mac,
there's another OS deep inside
BSD is really neat but darwin it came to be...
the world will see....
a new power mac!
[Fade music out]
So why should we care? As was pointed out in the Slashdot story itself, this seems economical -- why buy a whole new computer when you can just stick some new chips in your old Colour (Color, whatever) Classic? I could easily see some clueless MCSE guy deciding to put "mission critical" data on a hacked Colour (Color) Classic Mac that's liable to burn out at any second -- and I don't know about you, but I'd prefer not to have our airplanes and nuclear missiles being run on overclocked 1990s Macintoshes. Ugh.
Hacks are neat and all, but the danger of "burning out" the chips simply outweighs the cost -- in the long run, the Opportunity Cost of using standardized chips is much less.
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.
I have to admit, I would never have imagined that the person who hacked a Color Classic monitor to run at 640x480 would be a woman! That'll teach me to Think Different!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Thanks, Slashdot, this story made my day. :)
I'm not talking about ten page pastes of the same thing over and over or one word attempts at getting a first post. I'm talking about the intelligent trolls. Anyone who reads the above post without cracking a smile - nay, anyone who reads any such post without cracking a smile - has obviously missed the boat.
Trolling on Slashdot has become its own subculture, much like B1FF on Bitnet. OOG, the Don Knotts guy, they are all a part of Slashdot culture.
Trolling has taken a new meaning with Slashdot. Trolling is not necessarily flamebait. Admit it, you've been had by the Don Knotts guy *at least* once, and you felt pretty silly. It was harmless enough, and nobody but you knows you've been had, but thats part of the charm. The OOG posts and poem or song lyric posts, arguably, require intelligence and a certain amount of cleverness to produce.
Most trolls on Slashdot are like graffiti artists; if you let them grow a little bit, they can paint murals that you're somewhat ashamed to envy, like the above spoof of "Gangsta's Paradise."
although not as cool of the story i once heard of the guy in germany who took a Power Mac and an Apple //gs, removed all the pieces from both, and put all the Power Mac pieces into the //gs.. leaving a power mac in a //gs case :)
i still wonder if that was real. supposedly there are pictures floating around somewhere.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Maybe I'm just spoiled by my 21" Sony, but I can fit almost 9 of those 640x480 desktops on my screen at once...
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I'm not sure this is exactly newsworthy. I mean...it's just a guy who basically gutted an old mac and put new shit in it. What other articles are we going to see??
/. tomorrow. oh well - you heard it first.
Learn how to make your own 500hp Ugo
John Holmes writes: it's the craziest thing...you have to have m4d sk33lz to figure this out. Basically, we put an engine from a Z28 into an old ass Ugo, we put new headers and an exhaust kit on it, as well as a K&R filter and new plugs and wires. A subframe connecter, and a new racing tranny. But the badges are still the same.
Oops - that's going to be posted on
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
For years I had a Quadra 700, which I did tons of graphic design work on. People would ask how fast it was, and were amazed when I told them 25mHz. It was completely stable, and you could work ahead of the processor, as in punch in several keystrokes (Cut, New, Enter, Paste, F11) and it would do all of them, something Windoze won't do. (Does GIMP do this, anyone?)
Granted, it sucked at web browsing, but it produced many beautiful images for years.
Its death came (at 21,000 hours total runtime) because a mouse (the furry, wall-chewing kind) moved into the case, leaving droppings on the motherboard. I've since moved on to multitasking systems with more than one mouse button, but I wish I would have had the foresight to duct tape shut the PCI slot that was open.
...Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.
Does anyone else remember this one? Someone frankensteined an ancient Apple //e into accepting a Powermac 9500 motherboard with a ~200MHz 604e (this was a couple years ago, I think). They actually did a really nice job - the reset key on the //e's keyboard mapped to the power key on the Mac, and a bunch of other things were rather elegantly handled.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Food for thought: The original TI/99-4A could be expanded to 256K of RAM with a box the size of a small bookcase. Today's inch-high laptops can store 256 megs of RAM. That's an increase of 1000-fold. Pretty amazing stuff.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
man, is this old news (look at the dates on the site). but, if you're still interested in 68k, apple hardware, or if you're looking for cool cases and some other really interesting hardware hacks - including links to the power colo(u)r classic among others - take a gander at AppleFritter.com - a site dedicated to apple hacks, prototypes and rarities.
and as for all the rest of you, why do so many of you spell "Mac" "MAC"? what do you think it stands for? Mac is short for Macintosh. not McIntosh or even MacIntosh, and certainly isn't an acronym. those of you in the northern US, where an A.T.M. is sometimes called a M.A.C. i can understand, but these are not cash machines!
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Not often...
Why? Because it's cooler to keep them around! How many of you have old Commodore 64's or ColecoVisions that still work? Would you gut it to get a Pentium III crammed in there? Heck no! It's more froody to show it off in working condition during dinner parties...
My point is, the whole reason this is cool and noteworthy is that the old Mac-in-the-boxes were classics. You could turn it into a two-bottle beer cooler using some copper tubing and an air conditioner pump and people would still stand up and take notice because it's nostalgic.
So, let's all Here-Here! for the Mac-in-the-boxes. But, can we perhaps stop throwing a party everytime someone jams something inside that doesn't belong there?
Notice: Your mouse has been moved. Windows will now restart so this change can take effect.
Doh... thought I had it nailed down.
Like win16it was multitasking. Almost.
The mac os back then was like win16 in that it didn't split the CPU time up fairly among apps. The app that used it all got it all.
The os had to wait for the cpu to catch up with the app so the app would relinquish control to the OS, which would then apply any mouse clicks or keypresses you did while it was busy.
New Macs and Win32 machines can do that, but only if a) the app is lagged, and b) you're really careful, since it's a lot eaiser to jump out to other apps.
One thing that really impressed me about the original Macintosh machinese was that the Apple engineers were really creative about how they built the hardware-- not just what the box itself looked like.
For example, I was really impressed when I learned that the Macintosh SE/30 included custom ICs to accelerate the normal windowing GUI operations. This was YEARS before the PC saw any kind of real 2D acceleration... and it was a great idea. Anybody who ever played with an SE/30 and a PC of the same era would see the awesome performance advantage the SE/30 had.
That being said, I was reading through some of "Inside Macintosh" books circa the SE/30 and these guys looked like they were BEASTS to program-- people really had to write assembly language GUI programs? I guess I'm a spoiled product of the OOPY late 90s, but that seems like a deathwish if ever I heard one.
Another interesting tidbit-- the Apple Macintosh OS is more INfamouse than famous, we all know, but those from around the San Jose area will appreciate the code name Apple engineers had for the OS: Winchester Mystery OS -- signal traps and jumps to null addresses etc... I laughed hard at that one...
I think the Macquarium hack was much cooler. It upgrades a Mac's resolution from b&w to real life. And it runs at the speed of a real aquarium too. If one could figure out how to harness the processing power of a goldfish...
Might even be more secure incase someone breaks into your house. They'll see the old case and thing that it's a piece of crap and take something else. When in fact you have a state of the art pc inside a case from 10years ago.
I guess the saying "It's not on the outside that counts, it's on the inside." really has a point here.
But it has to do with getting rid of - or getting - unwanted computer hardware.
freeboxen.com is a site for people to unload the hardware they don't want for people who do. I just stumbled across it in another thread. It could really use some support. What a great idea!
-- --
Stay Tuned Next Week For...
The Adventures of Open Souce Man!
-- --
Stay Tuned Next Week For...
The Adventures of Open Souce Man!
(with Natalie Portman and her Aibo)
A TI-92 emulator for the macintosh is available here.
I don't think the emulator in question actually works on 68k macintoshes, it claims to requrie a 100Mhz PPC, though a VMWare-style hardware abstraction hack with almost no slowdown would be pretty easy to throw together for a 68k mac i'd imagine. Assuming anyone actually was WILLING to.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Wow, so it's shoehorning a modern motherboard into an older machine. Nothing like the old days of hardware upgrades, when you could upgrade your processor by soldering daughterboards straight on to the original motherboard (which invariably wasn't designed to be upgraded in any way).
:-)
:-/
I know Amiga people got up to loads of stuff (including PowerPC upgrades), but the Atari people did quite a lot too. here is an example of a modern Atari upgrade; there were lots more in the past. One popular example was putting a 32MHz 68030 into an 8MHz 68000 machine (requiring lots of new circuitry), while others included the addition of modern PCI graphics cards, faster serial ports, HD floppy support in older Ataris, switchable OS upgrades, and so on.
My old ST at home has a 4MB memory upgrade (that involved soldering wires on to the surface-mounted MMU, my ST being of a particularly perverse design) and a TOS 2.06 ROM upgrade (great fun that - a daughterboard soldered directly on to the 68000 itself, and a tiny software utility to switch between the old TOS 1.02 ROMS and the new TOS 2.06 ROM, for compatibility with old games etc). It also has a SCSI host adapter (it looks just like a normal cable, except there's a custom chip inside the SCSI plug end).
It gets on my nerves when people say how brave they were coping with, say, a 50MHz machine. I used my old 8MHz ST for useful stuff, and until recently it was being used by my mum for word-processing with Papyrus. By that I mean full page layout, WYSIWYG, a modern, non-modal interface, TrueType/Speedo vector fonts, 300dpi output (usually) keeping up with a DeskJet 600, etc etc etc. And all fast enough to keep up with my mum's very fast typing. If a program was released for Linux which had an identical interface and identical features, I would get it straight away. And imagine a lot of other people would, too.
The ST was only retired because the keyboard doesn't work so well after 12 years of constant use - the space bar's a bit dead.
Ford Prefect
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
It was an interesting architecture. It had plenty of general purpose registers but they were stored off-chip in RAM. The CPU had a Workspace Pointer register that contained the base address of the general purpose registers. This allowed the programmer to switch register sets by reloading the Workspace Pointer register.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I'm working on fitting an entire computing lab inside a converted ENIAC. A whole 3000 cubic feet, baby!
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
What a wonderful service. I've posted four items so far. Medium sized companies like where I'm at have heaps of $0 value stuff that real computer freaks would drool at. I strongly recommend that everyone post their useless crap on this site!
I'd like to see someone upgrade the Compaq Concerto. I've held two in my life - one I upgraded to Win95 (inc the discontinued Pen for Windows) back in 96, the other was a recent virus clense (last year). Great hardware - shame the hinges were broke on both in the same place...
> These things have been in common use since the 70's when they ran the first Macs.
//e and the Apple //c, used a 65C02 cpu. Lots of people put a z80 card in one of the Apple ]['s expansion slots, so you could run cp/m as well (the Apple ][ user could choose DOS 3.3, ProDOS, USCD Pascal and CP/M as an OS).
The first Mac was released in April 1984. In the late 70's ('79 if I'm correct), the Apple ][ (two) and Apple ][+ were very popular machines, the first home computers to have colour graphics. These machines used the 6502 processor.
Later Apples, the Apple
The first Macs used the Motorola 68000, later Macs had 68020, 68030 or 68040 processors. Unfortunately, in lots of late-68K Macs, Apple put 68LC040s, a 68040 without a copro. The problem with early models of the 68LC040 is that copro emulation wouldn't work due to a bug in the cpu that would destroy the stack pointer. a Bad Thing(tm) indeed.
Now if you'll excuse me, I suffer from acute nostalgia. I'm off to do some vintage computing on one of my Apple ]['s.
Erm, the first Mac (the 128k) was released Jan. 24th, 1984.
Its precursor, the Lisa, I believe was introduced the year earlier to little fanfair.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
So a few people who actively visit slashdot could handpick the best trolls so that I can show my future kids just how funny OOG was.
That's not a headline, but an observation. /. has a very complicated moderation scheme in effect. Trolls like this one seem an awfully lot like hackers -- they find creative ways around the moderation system. And they aren't malicious; rather, the way they've found to hack the system is to post stuff that is so entertaining that moderators mod it up, even though it is off-topic.
They've had to get creative because the system is actively hostile to them and to their speech. And that is a good thing too; not only does it keep most visible discussion on-topic and interesting, it makes the filtering process for the best trolls very rigorous, and keeps troll quality (yes, I said that) high. At least, the quality of trolls that get this far are of high quality. (Or maybe the moderators are just high. On life, of course.)
(I even think of it as an artistic commentary of the dynamics of free speech with a low S/N ratio versus controlled (therefore not completely free) speech with a high S/N ratio. But I doubt that argument will go over highly here....)
That's just my little defense of the trolls; they've had to get so entertaining and creative that they deserve a little praise, IMO. Enjoy tearing it to shreds.
phil (hoping he gets a reply from OOG, and, hey, I didn't need my karma anyway)
Isn't *anyone* old enough to remember this stuff?
The 8085 was an 8 bit successor to the 8080, but a *very* week response to the z80 from zilog, an upwards-compatible to the 8080 developed by engineers who left intel.
The 8085 had a little bit of serial i/o on chip, and a couple of extra interrupts. It did *not* implement the extended instruction set of the z80.
CP/M ran on the 8080, and therefore the Z80. Most programs were written to the 8080 so that they could run on both; it tended to be only machine specific code that was written in Z80. The z80 was also 5v instead of needing three supplies.
The 8086 was source compatible with the 8080, not the 8085--it didn't have those extras. You could also cross-compile z80 source to the 8086.
The 8088 came out simultaneously with the 8086; it was the same thing (almost) on an 8 bit buss. ISTR that there was a load you could use t see which you were using because a buffer (?) was a different size onthe two chips, which would yield a different result.
If memory serves, the 8085 was announced at the same time as the 8086, but don't hold me to that.
hawk