Now that my Mac is back I wanted to address another issue- lack of USB 3.1 and also general lack of USB. I’ve found that i’m using most of the available USB ports (many for multiple serial interfaces I use to connect to my SGI consoles). I also have a external drive that is USB…
MacPro 5,1 Firmware Problems
Recently my MacPro 5,1 (still running High Sierra) starting crashing on an OSX Update of some kind. It started mid-April and I’m not sure which one it was, but the Mac wouldn’t boot as it ended up in the crash screen for the installer with some sort of error on finding a file that wasn’t…
Dive into IRIX
I’ve been diving into IRIX lately, setting up both 5.3 on my Personal Iris and 6.5.22 on my Indigo. It’s been interesting unlearning 20 years of Linuxisms and embracing the IRIX. There is an interesting project going on called irisware which aims to resurrect a modern pool of open-source software for IRIX. Which is not…
Sparcbook 3
The Tadpole Sparcbook3 was dug up out of storage in time to submit it for the Reddit Portable Battlestation contest. Â This one came from a Craigslist buy at least a decade ago, and I promptly just stuck the whole box in storage. It came with a couple of CDROMS, batteries and accessories (scsi cable, 2…
SGI Indigo Elan
I’m in the middle of this one, but it’s booting from the SCSI2SD v6 and a totally minimal install of Irix is installed. More to come.  It’s a eBay surprise as it was listed as a R3K Indigo, but turned out to be a R4k with Elan Graphics installed. Not bad.    …
RISC Workstations of the 1990s
Inspired by the amazing system collection and blog of Sophie Haskins aka cronmom I’ve been trying to figure out what workstations I have (and what I want) from the classic RISC workstation era. I have a couple of them from the Nextslab all the way to the svelte DEC Alpha XP1000. My recently acquired SGI…
1088XEL The Missing Manual
I’ve been diving deeper into the 1088XEL and the U1MB Firmware that drives all it’s pieces and it’s a fascinating system. It’s primarily three parts: the 1088 itself, which collects all the new hardware bits (CF drives, PS/2 keyboard, DVI out, stereo sound) into one platform, the U1MB BIOS which drives, configures and boots the…
Atari 1088XEL
The Atari 1088XEL is an amazing beast which truly brings your Atari 8bit into the modern world. Using the actual, original 8bit chips it provides a modern hardware platform to not only run Atari without emulation but connect and enjoy modern peripherals and upgrades which can transform the 8bit use into a entirely different experience…
Syncing Apple Archaeology
The first post to my Syncing Apple blog was 14 years ago. It was about my G5 desktop rebooting on me. Not incredibly long ago for many people, but looking back at many of my postings the time from 2004-2010 was filled with many exciting advances in both OS and device introductions. A lot happened…
GamePad fail on MacOS
Update: May 2nd – I’m happy to say that a super cheap pair (you get two) of USB gamepads from Amazon did the trick. $ ./start-old.sh DonkeyKong.v2.atr Using Atari800 config file: atari800-80.cfg Created by Atari 800 Emulator, Version 3.1.0 joystick 0 found! joystick 1 not found Now I can enjoy games with sound and joystick…
Wireless Image transfer for iOS and MacOS
Today, while taking some shots of items for a post with my iPhone I needed to transfer them across to my Mac for some sizing, scaling, and prep for loading up to this blog. My goto app is ImageCapture.app on the Mac which lets me quickly see my iOS photos, select what I want to…
Atari 8bit on OSX
atari800 – emulator of Atari 8-bit computers and the 5200 console That’s the tag line for the man page for the atari800 emulator. It’s maintained by a group of contributors on Github – specifically Mark Grebe has done the work for OSX. The emulator is based on the seminal work done by David Firth in…
Amiga Uplift Part 2: The Extra Amiga
It turns out the best thing you can buy to help restoring an Amiga 500 is a second one for parts. My first issue was while I had pulled the A500 from its resting place out of the attic (where it has been sitting for the past 20 years) I didn’t find the power-supply. I…
Amiga Uplift 1.1 – HC508 Case
A quick update- I found a great case on Ebay from finchball. The original creators of the HC508 don’t yet have one available so I purchased this one. It fits perfectly and makes the HC508 look much nicer on the side of the A500. The construction is good, with 4 screws on the bottom holding…
Amiga Uplift Part 1: Accelerator
Looking around today in 2018 there are many choices for accelerating your Amiga 500. At one point in the far past the A500 was my primary computer and I had purchased the GVP A530 in order to run programs like NewTek’s Lightwave on the A500. The A530 was marvelous piece of kit for the Amiga…
Amiga 500 2018 Uplift Project
I’ve started a project to pull my Amiga 500 out of the attic where it’s been for 18 years and try to use it again for fun (with the floppies that I’ve also saved for years) and to try and get it on the Internet. To do that I’m willing to spend some money on…
Macbook Air 11 – The Last Ones
I’ve had a MBA 11″ since 2011 (MacBookAir4,1) and I’ve never been able to find any other laptop that had such an unbeatable combination of size, speed, flexibility, and utility. My 11 has been amazing and my go-to mac (I also have a 13 and 15 MBPs between work and home) for most things, but…
WOMBAT
I spent some good money and time getting my SE/30 uplifted and retrofitted for modern use. Both the motherboard, analog board and power-supply have been recapped, it has 32M RAM installed and a SCSI to CF adapter to ensure quiet operation and no surprise disk failures. The one failure I encountered was the keyboard and…
DEC Professional 350: Booting
I found the DEC Professional 350 in Ebay for just $150 and I considered a nice way to get a PDP-11 system that could at the very least run BSD— for a decent price. PDP-11s are not only expense but the peripherals are also expensive prone to issues and it’s difficult system to bootstrap let…
Lost and Found Again: VT102
No good retro setup involving Unix can be legit without one. I had actually found a new-in-the-box VT102 once back in the 90s in Maryland at some recycling center. I used it for years but lost in moves around MD NJ and PA. I’ve been watching eBay for years trying to justify getting one again…
More Equipment
It’s been a while since I last posted and I’ve gotten some new things to work on. I’ll be documenting some of them here soon.  …
Lenovo Cheap Laptops for fun
I can’t pass up an interesting, cheap and small laptop. I’ll always have a use for them somewhere. Recently I’ve managed to pick up two Lenovos, and it’s interesting to see how varied and strange the laptops are from one another. They are both from the same manufacture, yet might as well be from completely…
In Search of Part 2: Linux on the Acer Switch 10 with Fedora 23
The amazing Fedlet release put together by AdamW let people easily install Linux Fedora on their BayTrail 32/64 tablets (64 bit CPUs but with 32bit FW). It was still somewhat buggy on my Acer Switch 10. Now that Fedora 23 is out I bit the bullet and did the upgrade to the latest packages… and…
Macbook
The MacBook is an incredible piece of engineering technology. This one is sitting on the MacBook Pro it’s replacing- after three years. 13†vs 12†and it’s more powerful and has more storage. The same amount of ram however. The size difference is astonishing…
PDP-11/70 CPU core and SoC :: Overview :: OpenCores
Fig D-1: A PDP-11/70 Console. These display and switch consoles were the hallmark of the PDP-11 computers in the 70ties. Picture courtesy of Henk Gooijen, see also Henk’s PDP-11 collection. The project contains a complete DEC PDP-11 system: a PDP-11/70 CPU with memory management unit, but without floating pointunit, a complete set of mass storage…
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