RIHAHN.COM

Category: Retro Computing

My adventures with old hardware

  • Change of plan

    A couple of years ago I early-adopted a cloud-based computing platform called “Shadow“.

    Shadow is interesting because it’s not really a cloud-based gaming platform, it just pretends to be one really well… It’s more aimed at creating dedicated remote-access high-performance computing platforms. Think of it like a modern, low-latency terminal services / RDP setup for people using 3d modelers and video production pipelines.

    This has two main effects for the end-user; there is no pre-installed library of games so you’re free to install literally anything you want, and because of this it’s a little bit more involved to do some gaming than something like Geforce Now.

    Unfortunately the first iteration of Shadow didn’t fare well financially and when they filed for bankruptcy I bailed. But the company was purchased and they’re trying again – so I signed back up.

    What this means for me is I now have access to a server in Utah with a quarter of an AMD Epyc 7543P CPU (8 cores), 28 gigs of ram, 512G of server-class storage, a dedicated RTX A4500 video card, and a gigabit network connection…

    Of course the first thing I did was load the Secondlife client “Firestorm” on it to see how it would handle virtual world graphical sludge…

    Around 100fps at 4K ultra-settings pretty much everywhere with 4 avatars. It’ll hold well over 50fps at those settings with ~40 avatars around in really hard to render places as well, so running vsync at 30Hz to my huge OLED screen is totally doable. And if I turn off shadows it’ll jump back up to 80-90fps in those situations letting me bump up the monitor to 60Hz.

    And while it’s doing this, it’s in a datacenter using someone else’s power and cooling.

    There is a cost for this, of course, and it’s about $50 a month ($40 a month if you pay in 6-month chunks) – which is about what my old Windows workstation with similar specs cost in electricity per month… So for me it works out.

    Now, this sort of thing only really works for the kinds of games I enjoy; things that aren’t horribly twitchy like turn-based RPGs, simulations, or Secondlife. Something like a competitive shooter where 144fps and sub-10ms peripheral response time is the difference between life and death isn’t a good use case for Shadow.

    Don’t get me wrong though, on the desktop and in something like Secondlife you don’t even notice you’re on a remote system. Average desktop granularity is 28-30ms on a system sitting right in front of you, and Shadow on my networks at home and work seems to average about 35-38ms.

    Anyway, with a couple of days of testing from the Mac Pro 5,1, my i3 Macbook Air, my M2 Max laptop, and even my iPhone (yes there’s a smartphone client for Shadow), I decided to change things up computer-wise.

    Going forward I’ll be using the 2013 trashcan at home and will move the 2012 Mac Pro to the office.

    The reason for this is basically utility costs… The 2013 Mac Pro uses far less wattage and therefore makes far less heat than the 2012 Mac Pro does. The 2013 is also much, much quieter than the 2012 because the 2012 needs nine fans to compensate for all the heat.

    I’d initially decided on using the 2012 cheese grater at home because I could upgrade the GPU in it for gaming, but with Shadow this is no longer a point of contention. At work I can leverage commercial power and cooling in a three story building full of computers, so the 2012’s thirst for electricity and air-conditioning isn’t a big deal here.

    There’s also the fact that while the 2012 will run MacOS Monterey with some fiddling, it isn’t without some hassles and loss of features. The 2013 natively supports Monterey so all of the OS features just work… Which is a ‘nice to have’ on a personal system you’re using every day.

    I guess can also skip my yearly tithe to Parallels being as I have ready access to a Windows machine with Shadow… So no need for a virtual Windows instance on every computer I use, and another savings.

    Listening to "Fallout" by Mantus

  • Update

    It’s been about a week now of using a 2011 computer in 2023, and things are still going well. The only real noticeable difference between decades is that the Mac Pro takes a second or two longer to open an application – and some of the fancy “AI” things in Photoshop take 10 seconds or so to process.

    The only real “game” I play is Secondlife (SL for short), and the 2012 Mac Pro does okay with that as well. Though I also own the new Baldur’s Gate III game, but it won’t be out for Mac until the 6th… But I expect the Mac Pro will do okay with that as well.

    As for Secondlife, it is, well, old – so it’s not exactly a speed demon even on pinnacle hardware. The client that is used to connect to the service is generally single-threaded and therefore mostly CPU-bound. And in SL the entire visible world can be changed on a whim, with user generated content, and this makes for a decidedly unoptimized render pipeline. This means that even on things like my old Windows workstation (Xeon 6312U / Nvidia 3090) I would generally get 20-30 FPS at “ultra” settings, in a 4K window, in busy areas with lots of people in them.

    The Mac Pro gets 20-30 FPS in the same areas with the same number of people, but with slightly reduced graphics settings and a 1440p window size – which isn’t bad for what it is.

    You may have noticed that I mentioned ‘fancy AI things in Photoshop’ up above; yes – I paid for another year of Creative Cloud.

    Fortunately, I’ve already made that money back… See, I sell some stuff I make on the Secondlife marketplace and I also completed some custom texture work for a couple of folks. And this netted enough to cover another year of Adobe Mafia protection.

    Basically I work to afford the tools I use to to do work to afford the tools… But with the cost covered I was able to spend a few days working on some stuff for myself, which was fun.

    Other than that, everything is mostly okay – or at least as okay as is possible here in 2023. Everything is crazy expensive so I don’t really leave the house save to get supplies, which means my car isn’t getting very many miles put on it and all of my entertainment is on the computer… I have managed to catch a few new(er) movies though, and the other day I binge-watched the entire second season of “Strange New Worlds” which wasn’t bad.

    Listening to "Lightbeams" by MJ Cook

  • And scene…

    It’s been quite the journey to get to this point; sketchy mining cards, shipping complications, undocumented third-party utilities, and a distinct lack of modern-ish Windows hardware at my disposal.

    That latter kept me at the office until 8pm last night as I tried valiantly to reflash the new RX 6600 XT with random scraps of PC hardware running Windows 8.1. But I kept getting a GDI32.dll error with the open sorcery VBIOS write tool and eventually had to stop for the night.

    Bright and early this morning I started the update process to Win10, assuming that would probably fix it, and got to deal with the usual spate of Windows-isms… Like this one:

    Yes, that really is a Razer “driver” attempting to install while Win10 is still installing…

    But, after a half dozen restarts to do yet more updates that totaled about an hour of downtime, I was finally able to flash the new RX 6600 XT for use in the 2012 Mac Pro.

    About an hour after this FedEx dropped off the new CPU tray in the gravel next to my garage, so I came home, unboxed the tray, loaded CPUs and ram, and shoved everything into the 2012 Mac Pro…

    The installation of the CPU tray and video card were literally the least effort part of this whole ordeal – and the Mac Pro fired right up with the new hardware.

    And with that I’m free to sell off my MacBook Pro M2 Max…

    To be honest? I’m not sure I’ll miss the laptop. The 11 year old machine I’m daily driving now is actually more powerful where the rubber meets the road; mostly because I don’t use any of the handful of apps tailored to use the fancy bits of Apple Silicon.

    Apple Silicon does definitely win when it comes to power efficiency though, and I expect the Mac Pro will wind up costing me a few bucks each month in electricity… But I think it’ll be worth it.

    Listening to "Rabbit Hole Chasing You (2023 Live)" by morgan willis

  • Life in the crypto-mines

    The RX 6600 XT I ordered off of Amazon for the 2012 Mac Pro arrived last night, and a few minutes later I had it installed in the PC I prepped for video card flashing… I use an older Intel Desktop Board for this because of the amount of info it gives when messing with hardware…

    That’s an old HD 6970 I was testing…

    The board has two sets of firmware in case you mangle one while fiddling, has power and reset right on the board because it’s test hardware, shows the boot process on the green 7-segments next to the ram, and the row of green LEDs at the bottom show the status of major components (the one in the middle shows the status of the video card), and most importantly it has an LED skull with blinking eyes for hard drive read/write!

    Anyway, the machine wouldn’t boot with the RX 6600 XT in the system. Everything halted with post code EB which is where the system looks for video BIOS / firmware on the bus – and it found nothing.

    This usually means the card has been reflashed with mining firmware, which doesn’t require video output so it’s disabled. In fact anything not associated with compute is usually disabled for crypto mining.

    Crypto mining essentially turns electricity and video cards into imaginary money, so getting a used mining card is generally more miss than hit as it’s been run harder than it was designed to, 24 / 7, until it either had a problem or was replaced with something faster.

    Now, while I could most likely fix this card by flashing the original firmware back onto it, the fact that the seller clearly didn’t even test it before slapping it into a used static bag and chucking it into a box didn’t leave me with much confidence.

    So I just requested a refund, put the card back in the used static bag and the box, and headed over to the local UPS store to send it back… The UPS Store closes at 19:00, and while I got there at 18:34 they were already closed for the day, unfortunately.

    So I’ll send it back after work today.

    And I ordered another RX 6600 XT from Amazon. A brand new, never been used one… Of course it was a hundred bucks more than the used mining card – but at least it will work.

    Hopefully.

    Nothing is guaranteed with Amazon… I’ll probably get some cheap Chinese knockoff card. :/

    Listening to "Taste Like Venom" by GUNSHIP

  • 20 years…

    Back on the 5th I quietly celebrated twenty years of this journal.

    I started this ongoing chronicle of my so called life on August 5th 2003 over on LiveJournal, and I had planned to post something about in on the day – but things were busy with running all over Denver to pick up the MacPro and whatnot.

    Oddly enough, I set up this domain in August of ’99 – so the domain has been running for 24 years now as well… I should plan some sort of 25th year anniversary thing for next year.

    In other news I’ve finished moving into the 2012 Mac Pro, which as of this afternoon is acting as my daily driver in preparation for selling my M2 Max MacBook Pro.

    It was a bit weird to disconnect everything from my laptop, unplug the power adapter, and set it all aside…

    The 2012 is still running on a single 6-core Xeon, but that should be fixed some time next week once the new tray arrives and I get a chance to fully populate it with two top-end 6-core Xeons and 128gigs of ram… The ram will come from my big box o’ server ram that a friend sent me, because all of the servers at his datacenter that have been replaced used the same DDR3 ECC as the 2012 – so the memory upgrade will be free…

    About seven pounds of 8 and 16 gig DDR3 ECC sticks…

    But everything else has been updated; macOS Monterey, OWC 1TB Accelsior 1M2 M.2 PCIe card, USB 3.1 / USB-C PCIe card, and an 8gig Radeon RX 580 video card.

    The RX 580 is also temporary… I got a really good deal on it – $80 with cables! – but I have a Radeon RX 6600 XT on the way as well.

    I have been pleasantly surprised at how well this machine runs. It’s an 11 year old computer I got for free with an $80 six year old video card in it and about $100 in new parts – and it does day-to-day stuff pretty much on-par with my $4000 M2 Max MacBook Pro.

    It’s a bit slower in 3D things, like I’m doing good right now to pull 15fps in busy areas of SecondLife where the M2 Max will do 25fps – but the new card, which is about 2x faster in pretty much everything, should fix that.

    The ‘secret sauce’ to getting this machine on-par with a $6000 2019 Mac Pro boiled down to massaging the system’s firmware a bit, creating a custom EFI boot loader, and once the new video card gets here, fixing a bug in its firmware… Once I took care of those few things, macOS Monterey – which is last year’s OS – runs just fine on it.

    Like I mentioned in the previous post; it’s not that these fancy new Apple operating systems can’t run on this machine – it’s that Apple really doesn’t want them to.

    Listening to "Inhale" by New Arcades

  • MacPro 5,1 – round two

    I got a chance to mess with the cheese grater a bit last night in my ongoing attempts to make it a daily driver.

    See, here at work I have a potential client who wants to test on an M2 Max laptop, and we don’t really keep $3200 laptops just laying around for testing – so they’re okay with us purchasing one, doing the testing, and then just sending it to them after the project.

    I happen to have an M2 Max laptop, so I’m seeing this as an opportunity to make a quick $3200 which will offset Bidenomics a bit. And afterward I’ll just use the cheese grater as my personal machine until the economy gets better.

    Sure, the 5,1 is eleven years old at this point, but there’s a reason they were $3000 back in the day – they have an amazing industrial design and used a lot of bleeding edge technology for 2012, so they were quite a bit ahead of their PC relatives at the time…

    That and technology has stagnated a bit in the last decade… Sure, things are smaller and faster, but in the ways that count all that speed is generally wasted; the OS has become bigger, more boated, and slower and most of the SPEEEEED stuff in hardware is just marketing.

    For example, PCIe 4.0 is all the rage and yes, it’s mindblowingly fast – so fast in fact that high-end video cards – the ones that cost like a thousand bucks – only use 8 lanes in the PCIe x16 slot they sit in. New CPUs are pretty incredible, and M.2 storage is stupidfast – so fast that the processors and drives spend 50-75 percent of their time idle because there’s just no real need for that kind of speed on the average user’s desktop.

    And this is a problem if you’re a company that makes their money off of hardware sales, so over the last decade there’s been a marked increase in ‘planned obsolescence’ – where the hardware is artificially limited or the software is specifically instructed to stop supporting things to drive sales.

    Apple does this a lot more than companies on the PC side of things, mostly because Apple is a hardware company. If no one bought a new computer for over a decade, Apple wouldn’t be a trillion dollar company.

    So the MacPro 5,1 and MacOS in general has a lot of little time-bombs in them that artificially age the hardware, but we can fix this with some hackery… And what this means is that with a little massaging, the MacPro 5,1 can still hold its own as a home computer.

    Some of this massaging requires some pretty in-depth fiddling with the machine’s internals, like recoding the boot rom, reprogramming the EFI, and hacking the power supply… Not something the average user is willing to do, but stuff I do before breakfast.

    Literally. This morning I was pushing some changes to the EFI on the 5,1 before I made breakfast…

    Anyway.

    The biggest issues with using the 5,1 as a daily driver are:

    • Apple dropped OS support for it after Mojave (MacOS 10.14). Mojave came out in 2018 and was EoL’d in 2021.
    • Doesn’t understand things like NVME without a boot rom update from Apple.
    • Can only use certain video cards for certain OS versions because Apple bakes the drivers into each OS release. Was also a transition model between OpenGL and Metal, so Mojave won’t even install without a video card upgrade that most likely won’t show preboot graphics.
    • Uses 2012 peripheral technology like PCIe 2.0, USB 2.0, and Firewire 800.
    • Uses 2012 server CPUs that are more dump truck than race car.

    The last two aren’t really issues outside of “speed bias”. By this I mean that, yes, PCIe 2.0 is a smaller number than PCIe 4.0 and decade old Xeon processors don’t have big numbers like “13700” after their names – but as mentioned above, this isn’t really as big of a deal as hardware manufacturers would like you to think.

    PCIe 4.0 is really fast, but ‘big numbers’ don’t tell the whole story… For example, here’s a quick video showing what the real-world difference is between PCIe 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 is using the same higher-end video card:

    Neat huh? This is the reality that exists outside of synthetic benchmarks.

    On the CPU side of things, the most installed CPU on the planet as of this post is the 2021 Ryzen 5 5600X – and it’s about 50% faster than the X5690 Xeon’s in the 5,1 in a CPU benchmark – though the 5,1 has two CPUs…

    If you need to do some work, the Xeon’s still hold their own. But this is again a benchmark and not a real slice-of-life for the average user. For all intents and purposes the average user will be hard pressed to spot the difference between these two CPUs on the desktop… And if you do notice, the delta will be a few milliseconds at worst.

    The other items on the list above can be fixed with boot rom / EFI tweaks that fool newer MacOS versions into continuing to support the 5,1. Even the baked-in drivers can be overcome by injecting them into other OS versions.

    And Apple even threw all of the 5,1 owners a bone by releasing a new boot rom (144.0.0.0) in 2019 that taught the old dog how to boot from NVME! Though that was probably a slight apology for both the trashcan MacPro and the lunatic pricing of the 2019 MacPro (a $6000 base model!?)…

    Now I’m not saying the 5,1 is the ultimate machine by any stretch, and in a couple more years it will probably be just another relic of a bygone computer era – but until then, like a classic car, it’s a perfectly serviceable daily-driver as long as you don’t mind rolling up your sleeves and getting a little dirty under the hood.

    In the end, my 5,1 will have two X5690 6-core Xeons, 128gigs of DDR3 ram, DVD and blu-ray burners, 1.2TB Intel 750 NVME boot drive, USB3, and an ATI RX 6600 XT video card… I definitely won’t be hurting for a few years until I move to whatever the new hotness Mac is in 2025.

    Listening to "Never Surrender" by Triumph

  • Cheese Grater…

    You know how I mentioned that I was pondering picking up a 2012 Mac Pro when I tripped over the 2013 Trashcan Mac Pro – but for various reasons decided not to?

    Well, forget all of that…

    Over breakfast with a friend of mine we got onto the subject of old hardware, and he mentioned that he still had the 2012 Mac Pro I used to have at work – and that he wasn’t doing anything with it and I could have it back if I wanted it…

    I said sure – and I’d trade him for the 2013 trashcan, because it’ll run the next-to-latest MacOS natively and will run the latest, Ventura, with a little elbow grease.

    So, after a quick trip down to Castlerock and back I had a new machine to put on the bench…

    Funny thing – that’s my old external Firewire 800 drive that I had on my personal 2012 back in … 2012. I had given it to my roommate when I gave him my 2012, and he had apparently given it to this friend of mine.

    That’s a BTO mid-2012 that came with the single 3.33Ghz 6-core Xeon, 6 gigs of ram, a Radeon HD5770 (in the above photo), and a 1TB HD for the low, low price of about $3500… At work this sat in the server room and was essentially life support for Rumpus (A Mac FTP server) that was used as a secure upload facility for console game builds.

    These days the machine has the same W3680 CPU, but now has 32gigs of ram, a GTX 770 video card, and no HD…

    So I got up on the bench, opened up, evicted the dust-bunnies, and decided to install my 1.2TB Intel 750 PCIE card for primary storage.

    This also meant I needed to install an OS from scratch – and that’s where my entire evening went. See, there are some complications to this machine which make it kind of a deep magic thing to get one running.

    The big complication is that it needs the video card to have custom firmware to be able to display anything before the OS comes up fully, which that Radeon HD5770 has but the GTX 770 does not. So while the GTX 770 is installed, you just kinda stare at a black screen until the login prompt – there’s no Apple logo or progress bars to indicate things are okay.

    To add to this complication, when MacOS went from ‘High Sierra’ to ‘Mojave’, the OS started requiring a ‘Metal‘ capable video card. Metal is an Apple system similar to Microsoft’s DirectX – and the HD5770 does not support this while the GTX 770 does. So to use a relatively recent OS you kinda need to use a video card that doesn’t show you anything until the OS is fully up…

    This becomes frustrating when you’re trying to load an OS from scratch.

    The next complication comes in the form of Apple simply refusing to acknowledge that anything older than OS11 (Big Sur), which came out in 2020, even exists. So to get an installer for MacOS 10.15 and older requires equal parts hackery and hardware…

    For example, you need to go to the “App Store” to download MacOS versions, but if you’re running the current OS (Ventura), when you click “get” the machine pops up the update panel, thinks for a minute, and then tells you that the OS you want to download is older than what you have and doesn’t download.

    And this update error only happens on an Intel-based Mac. If you try it on Apple Silicon hardware, the App Store page for the older OS simply grays out the “get” button and has a banner that tells you the OS won’t run on your hardware.

    So the solution for this was to write a script to downloaded the .PKG files for the installer and then combines them all into the appropriate app container. No biggie – and now I had the old OS I needed – but this was just the beginning.

    The OS installer apps have the facility to create installer media by way of a few terminal commands such as:

    sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume

    And this evening I discovered that if you try to do this on an Apple Silicon machine, the OS simply kills the process without any explanation as to why… You just can’t create an old OS installer on Apple Silicon.

    Luckily I have a 13″ Macbook Air with an i3 in it that I use as a television – and it was able to create the USB installer – which is when I had to suss out the next complication…

    I ran into an issue where the Mojave installer would load from USB, but then report that it couldn’t find a Metal-capable card in the system… It turns out that there is a long-standing bug with the older OS installers in that they won’t recognize certain Nvidia cards – but only if you install from USB.

    So I dig out my USB-C to SATA adapter, grab an old 160G SSD, and using the i3 Macbook Air create another installer on the SSD. Then install this SSD on one of the four SATA ports in the Mac Pro and turn it on.

    This time, after a half an hour of waiting and not getting anything on the monitor (remember, I can’t see progress bars or error messages), I decide the Mojave installer isn’t working…

    So – back to the Macbook Air, redo the download script to get ‘High Sierra’, create an SSD installer out of it, stick it in the 2012, and turn it on…

    Presto! I can haz OS!

    And with High Sierra loaded, I was able to do an in-place update to Mojave – which is the last OS before Apple stopped supporting 32-bit applications.

    10.14.6 – as far as I can go and still have Adobe CS6 run…

    And once all of the updates for 10.14 were done, I was able to install and re-key my copy of CS6…

    So – back to where I was a few days ago with the Trashcan, but with a much larger, more power hungry machine… But unlike the Trashcan it’s a machine I actually used to own – like literally. 🙂

    Listening to "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey

  • Vidya Games

    I’ve kinda orbited around the video games industry since video games were a thing, and accordingly I have quite a few interesting tidbits of hardware laying around – and stories to go with them.

    For example, here is the complete lifecycle of the early XBOX game:

    The clear machine is a DVT-4 development kit, the green one is a debug kit, and the black one is a retail machine. At work we have probably 30 of the green debug kits from back when we did console certification, but there was only one dev kit – and I used it to help clients work out kernel level issues.

    Using that dev kit I’ve written a few things that run on the Xbox, but they are just personal project things for the entertainment value.

    Ages ago I got into programming, computer graphics, music production and sound design, and other such hobbies with the intent of being a one stop shop for game development… It was nice to put all of those skills to use and see the end result run on a console. 🙂

    Here’s another setup from back in the day:

    That’s the old Nintendo development setup. There’s an NDEV and debug (RVT Reader) Wii for Wii games, and an IS Nitro writer and emulator for DS titles. The red PC was the Wii dev box that ran the two RVT burners and the black one was for DS development.

    All in all it was a lot of fun working on early consoles – mostly because anyone could. But as the amount of money in the segment increased so did exclusivity – and eventually you had to be a “name” or owned by Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony to get the tools to write things. I got out of the business after Playstation 3, because Sony started wanting six digits for dev/debug hardware – if they deigned to even talk to me.

    And Microsoft had gotten just as bad…

    So I kinda moved on to other things, but I keep the hardware around to remember how it used to be. 🙂

    Listening to "Deacon Blues" by Steely Dan

  • Adobe

    I finally got my copy of CS6 Master Collection to run on something – and have just cancelled my Creative Cloud subscription – saving me $600! Which I’ve already spent on a 2013 MacPro and some parts – because of course I did…

    Anyway, getting to this point wasn’t easy…

    I mentioned in the last entry that I’d found a way to get Mojave to install in a VM in Monterey – which takes some trickery because for Apple the existence of 32-bit applications it right up there with Bigfoot and Flat Earth theories.

    So what you do is download the installer for Mojave, disconnect the Mac from the internet (wired and wireless), and then drop to a command line and enter:

    sudo date 1013083200

    This convinces your mac that it’s high noon on February 7th, 2002, which is far enough back in time that it stops caring (briefly) about your mad desire to run a 32-bit application…

    Now you can get Parallels to make a VM out of the downloaded Mojave installer, and once Mojave is hidden in said VM the host OS is none the wiser when you access it.

    So now I could install CS6!

    But I couldn’t…

    See, the thing we all said would happen when software companies went to online copy protection using accounts and client / server key systems – happened. Adobe turned off the authentication server that all of the pre-CC software used, which instantly rendered my $2500 software package completely useless.

    CS6 simply would not install – even though I have the big-ass box the software came in, all of the media it contains, and a physical copy of the key that activates it…

    Fortunately, with a little digging around, I discovered that Adobe still has the offline keygen running. So you can have CS6 generate a challenge key based on your software key, and you can put that and your software key into a form on a dusty webpage, and it will generate the response key that will enable your software.

    Or, at least until someone at Adobe notices it’s still running I’m sure…

    To get to this offline keygen you need an Adobe account, which I have because I’m a CC subscriber. I’m guessing this is so they can pin someone down if the key they use in the offline keygen is fake – and also gather an email address for marketing spam reasons.

    Anyway, I managed to get CS6 to install and fired up Photoshop – which immediately complained about the lack of 3D acceleration in the virtual machine.

    Sigh…

    Ok – make a USB installer out of the Mojave installer I downloaded:

    sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/UNTITLED

    Reboot the trashcan with option, boot the USB installer, wipe everything out and install Mojave natively on the machine.

    Thirty minutes later I’m back to using the offline keygen for Adobe and expecting to have an issue because I just used it 45 minutes ago – but it faithfully spits out another response key and CS6 activates.

    Photoshop runs really nice on the trashcan!

    And I now have a non-SaaS way to do art stuff. Go me.

    Listening to "Jacob's Ladder" by Huey Lewis & The News

  • And done

    The parts I ordered for the trashcan arrived right after I got home from work, so instead of eating dinner like a sane person – I tore down a 2013 MacPro to its thermal core…

    Initial observation: “Did you have to use six different sizes of Torx bits to assemble this, Apple?”

    Overall the 2013 MacPro is pretty easy to take apart – it’s a crap-ton of screws holding an aluminum Jenga tower together… But the engineering of it all is really a sight to behold. Simply amazing.

    The CPU swap was a bit more difficult than it needed to be due to the studs in the heatsink for the CPU board coming loose before the CPU board screws did… So there was some tense time with a pair of vice-grips to get everything apart and then the studs back into the heatsink and tightened down.

    And getting the CPU retainer back together without the CPU slipping in the socket or the spring tension flinging a screw across the room, with only two hands, is nightmarish… But I managed that as well.

    Ultimately the 4-core CPU was removed, all of the dried out and caked on thermal grease was cleaned up, the new 6-core CPU was installed, and I used a little more of my precious Arctic Silver MX4 to make sure the interface between heatsink and CPU was as good as it could be.

    All in all, it was about a half an hour to disassemble, swap the CPU, and reassemble. And then another ten minutes or so to pull out the old ram and M.2 SSD, install 64gigs of new ram and a new 1TB M.2 SSD…

    The teardown was also a good opportunity to evict all of the previous owner dirt from the machine… There are a lot of tight radius ribbon cables and daughter boards in there, and they all cake with dust over time. So the inside of the trashcan is now as clean as the outside.

    Anyway, once I got the outside of the can I place and everything plugged back in I hit the power button to see if I got boot or smoke…

    Boot!

    With the system running once again, I started another online install of Monterey – which took about a half an hour or so to complete – and then got screen shots of the new config for posterity:

    As for Monterey and 32-bit Photoshop – it turns out that with some under the hood fiddling to temporarily make the machine think it’s in the past, I can get my copy of Parallels to run Mojave in a VM. And with a 6-core xeon and gobs of ram in the system, the VM should run just as well as a similar period iMac.

    Should… I’ll find out this weekend.

    If the VM version of Mojave doesn’t pan out, I’ll just wipe and reload Mojave native and call it done.

    Listening to "More Than This" by Roxy Music

  • Progress Report

    The BlueSCSI hardware I ordered back on the 17th arrived last night, so the evening was spent futzing with the 8100…

    The BlueSCSI device itself is pretty interesting. It’s entirely open source so I’ve spent a few days poking around it in its innards code-wise, and might take the time to add a few features I want – like an OLED display of bus traffic…

    I have the latest incarnation of the BlueSCSI, which utilizes a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) microcontroller versus the old ‘blue pill’ STM32 MCU – so it can saturate a late 90’s 10mbit SCSI bus pretty easily. Which is nice to have in an late 90’s computer…

    The initial setup was pretty easy. I picked up a couple of high endurance 32G microSD cards at Microcenter for like $7 each, formatted them EXfat on my Mac, and then whipped up a couple of blank 1024MB HFS files to put on the cards with good old DD…

    dd if=/dev/zero of="HD10_512 Power Macintosh 8100-80 1024MB.hda" bs=1M count=500

    The BlueSCSI uses the filenames of the drive containers to determine how to present the image, so “HD10_512 Power Macintosh 8100-80 1024MB.hda” translates to “Use HD emulation (versus CD, MO, etc) and make it look like SCSI ID1, LUN0 with a 512 byte sector size”, and all of the text between that and the .hda is ignored and is just for identification.

    From here it was a simple matter to add the BlueSCSI to the chain in my 8100, boot it, and then format the .hda image HFS when the Mac popped up the Unrecognized Drive dialog…

    And presto – a new 1G SCSI drive appears on the desktop.

    To test the full implementation, I set up the BlueSCSI as ID1:0, pulled the original 2G HD out of the 8100, and did an install of 8.6 from one of my G3 iMac restore CDs…

    That little black square in the center of the PCB has more processing power than the 8100…
    (2xCortex M0+ @ 133Mhz : 240MIPS / PPC601 @ 80Mhz : 158 MIPS)

    The BlueSCSI worked just fine and the 8100 had no idea it was talking to 21st century solid state storage that was the equivalent of 16 of the largest hard drives you could get back in the day.

    And has no moving parts.

    And is half the size of a postage stamp…

    Das blinkenlights!

    Being as everything was working, I went ahead and installed the SCSI adapter in its 3.5″ adapter and then onto the 8100’s drive adapter… So now the 8100 has RGB lighting, because all computers need RGB lighting here in the future. 🙂

    Next up was getting the external BlueSCSI setup and formatted, which was about the same as the internal one save that it’s not clear which way the contacts on the microSD go in the holder – so there was a moment of USB connecter flipping to get it installed… But it was eventually seen on the external SCSI bus and formatted as well.

    And with both drives accessible, it was time to get a bunch of OS8 PPC utilities off of macintosh repository, get them unstuffed / unzipped, and copied onto the external drive in preparation for reloading the 8100 again.

    As you can see in the above image, I happen to like LaCie’s “SilverLining” SCSI tools, and one of the nicer parts of SilverLining is the updated SCSI drivers it installs on the various drives in the system – but it can’t do this on a running system drive. So I need to set up the external with Silverlining, make it bootable with an OS, put all of the tools I want to install on it for simplicity, and then boot off of it to set up the internal.

    And thats about where I ran out of time last evening.

    The external SSD is the blue box behind the power cord.

    I also ordered a bunch of upgrades for the trashcan from OWC yesterday; 64gigs of ram, a new 1TB SSD, and a slightly upgraded CPU… Those parts should arrive today, so I’ll disassemble the trashcan some time this weekend and get it tuned up.

    Oh, and I’ll have to reload it with an older OS… CS6, as it turns out, has a lot of 32-bit code in it and Apple phased out 32-bit support after 10.14 (Mojave). Which is fine really, the trashcan came with 10.9 (Mavericks) and 10.15 (Catalina) was really the last decent MacOS…

    I’ve not been overly impressed with the MacOS since the transition to 11, 12, and 13 – since the transition everything has been entirely too iPhone-like for my tastes.

    Listening to "Amberina Sun" by mitch murder

  • MacPro6,1

    Being an ‘old fart’ I’m not super enthusiastic about SaaS models.

    I mean, I’ve done things like buy a magazine to get a game I had to type into the computer to run, drive twenty miles to the local Amiga store to purchase applications on floppies that came in a ziplock bag, and even camped out at CompUSA to buy a game on CD the midnight it released…

    In each of those instances I was purchasing a thing that I could continue to use as long as I wanted… In some cases I still use them thirty years later. So this “renting” your software thing doesn’t sit well with me. Doubly so when it’s hundreds of dollars per year for an application suite that doesn’t really improve in ways I use – they just move the buttons around on occasion from my point of view.

    I’m looking at you, Creative Cloud.

    As I’ve mentioned here previously, I’ve purchased copies of Adobe Photoshop (and Illustrator, Premier, Acrobat, etc.) pretty much since they came out. But since 2016 I’ve been on the subscription plan, which is about $600 a year… Or roughly $4200 spent since I bought that $2600 license for CS6 Master Collection in 2013.

    My current CC subscription comes due in August, and I think I’ve given Adobe enough money over the years.

    Now, while I could just go back to using CS6 (which does everything I need it to do), it won’t run on Apple Silicon machines as it was written in 2012 for the Intel Macs of the day… And Apple Silicon machines won’t emulate the old Intel architectures either – so if I want to use my CS6 license I need an Intel based Mac.

    The problem there is Macs tend to hold their value really well, so getting a previous generation machine would cost as much as a year or two of Adobe subscription and that just didn’t make sense financially.

    But retro-computing people rarely make sense financially… So maybe something slightly older than the previous generation?

    I have a personal rule for my retro-computing habit in that I won’t seriously consider owning anything I’ve not owned in the past… I’m not into old computers for the sake of old computers as much as I like to have bits and pieces of my past accessible in the present – so I collect machines (and parts) for architectures I’ve actually used, mostly to maintain access to the things I’ve created on those systems.

    So, being as I owned a “cheese grater” MacPro5,1 back in the early 2010’s (I gave it to my roommate in 2013 after I acquired that year’s 27″ iMac), I was thinking I would simply acquire another one and that would solve the Intel Mac need…

    Then I thought about the fact they still go for $500+ in a condition I would be interested in owning, and then there’s the thousand watt power supply in the things that’s needed to run the Xeons that lead to the moniker of ‘iHeater’ – and I live in “Modern Times” with “modern utility bills”, so I shelved that idea.

    But, as fate would have it, I was visiting a new (to me) Mac repair place yesterday… It’s over where the Cinderella City Mall used to be back in the 80’s, and I was there to look over their retro collection seeing if there were any parts I could use when I spotted a lonely Mac Pro Trashcan…

    Back in 2013 when the MacPro6,1 came out I really wanted one, but they were “Pro” and due to this rather expensive at $4000 for the entry level model. The iMac was the better machine for what I was doing, and cost half as much even though it came with an amazing 27″ screen – so thats the direction I went.

    Eyeballing the machine’s identifiers printed on the bottom I determined it was was a BTO 2013 base-model, so it had the 4-core Xeon in it but had the dual D500 video cards – which is perfect for CS6. And the MacPro6,1 can pull off a max of about 500 watts, which is half as much as the 5,1’s peak use and averages about 80watts to the 5,1’s 200watts.

    So, two criteria met; a decent intel machine in nice condition, and fairly cheap to feed both electrically and cooling wise… All it needed was to be less than the cost of next year’s Adobe subscription and I was in business.

    After talking to the store owner for a bit about old macs and recounting some tales of stone age computing for him, I asked about the Trashcan:

    Me: “So, that trashcan over there – what are you asking for it?”

    Him: “That? Those were weird; too limited for the professionals they were meant for, and too expensive for general users…”

    Me: “Yeah. Apple actually wrote an apology for the mistake they made with those – but I need an Intel mac for my old CS6 license because I’m tired of paying the Adobe Mafia to make art…”

    Him: “Oh!? You can actually put it to use? How about $300?”

    Me: “Sold!”

    And ten minutes later I was on my way home with a new trashcan…

    The 2013 MacPro6,1

    First things first – wipe it out and reload it… I got it onto my wifi and started the online restore, going with the latest OS it will run: MacOS 12.6.8 “Monterey”.

    This took about a half an hour, and then once I hit the desktop I discovered the HDMI on the trashcan is only good for 30Hz @ 4K, so my ginormous LG OLED was flickering… But a quick run over to Microcenter for a $30 mini-displayport / thunderbolt-2 to 4k/60 HDMI cable fixed that right up.

    And the rest of the evening was spent moving in; loading apps, configuring things the way I like, etc.

    I did get a chance to fire up SecondLife on the trashcan and head over to a popular hangout to see how it fared; a solid 15FPS in the default graphics settings. So, not bad for a collector’s item. 🙂

    After work today I will break out the huge box of CS6 and install it all, make sure everything still works as it used to – and then cancel my CC subscription… Which will pay for the trashcan twice over.

    Maybe I’ll take some of that CC savings and upgrade the RAM and SSD in the trashcan in the next month or two…

    Listening to "Risky Fulfillment" by Neon Nox

  • The Elder Nerd

    I’ve been doing this computer thing for a while now, so I get the privilege of being able to pipe up on various forums and social media posts when someone is looking for some esoteric bit of technical information from “the good old days” of computers and / or the Internet… Which right now is essentially anything before 2010.

    I do find it interesting how the recollections of us ‘old timers’ are becoming more valuable over time – mostly because of bit-rot… Every year the collective brain-trust of the Internet looses another few thousand web sites from the early days as servers are turned down, storage deteriorates, hosting bills stop being paid, ISPs are absorbed and cannibalized, or modern tech simply loses the ability to access information more than a decade or two old.

    Take my recent posts about having to use my circa 2007 XPS M1710 laptop to do some pretty basic things with web-enabled hardware that is a mere five years old because of a simple TLS change. Now expand that timeframe out to the early 90’s when the Internet as we know it was just beginning.

    I have copies of old websites I built in the mid to late 90’s for both myself and clients that are essentially impossible to view without resorting to antique hardware and software – simply because they use deprecated javascript and Flash components… Macromedia / Adobe Flash, as you should know, was the biggest thing on the Internet in the late 90’s and early 2000’s – but the ability to view that entire decade of content was essentially deleted from everything in 2011…

    I also have things I created in the 80’s that are in formats that simply cannot be opened unless you have the right forty year old software that runs on dinosaur hardware you can only find in a museum.

    Needless to say, if enthusiasts can’t get to the content without going to great lengths the chances of it ending up in an Internet search are essentially zero… Not that the Internet is much more than a context driven ad placement engine at this point; if someone didn’t pay to show it to you, you probably won’t see it.

    As for me, I try to keep the torch lit with a smattering of old computer systems – but I’m pretty picky with my retro-computing habit and tend to only acquire hardware that I’ve actually owned in the past… This is mostly so that I can continue to access and / or modern-format-archive the stuff I’ve created on various computers since the early 80’s.

    My current system catalog looks like this:

    DateComputerStatus
    1977TRS-80 Model-1 (Z-80)Software Emulation
    1978Ohio Scientific C1P (6502)Software Emulation
    1981Sinclair ZX-81 (Z-80)Software Emulation
    1982Commodore VIC-20 (6502)Software Emulation
    1985Atari 800XL (6502)The 400 Mini
    1987Macintosh Plus (68000)Physical Machine
    1989Amiga 500 (68000)MiniMig
    1993PowerBook 165c (68030)Physical Machine
    1994SGI Indy (R4400)Physical Machine
    1995PowerMac 8100 (PPC 601)Physical Machine
    1999PowerBook G3 “Pismo” (PPC G3)Physical Machine
    2000Presario 1400 (Pentium-III)Physical Machine
    2004PowerBook G4 17″ (PPC G4)Physical Machine
    2007XPS M1710 (Core 2 Duo)Physical Machine
    2012MacPro 5,1 (Dual Xeon X5690)Physical Machine
    2013MacPro 6,1 (Xeon E5)Physical Machine
    2020MacBook Air 13″ (10th gen i3)Physical Machine
    2023Gaming Rig (Ryzen 7950X3D)Physical Machine

    Once it’s all put into table form, we can see where computers got boring in the mid 2000’s.

    Prior to the mid 2000’s new architectures and new operating systems kept me going after the latest hardware. But once Apple went Intel in 2005, it was a bit of a slog for about fifteen years until something truly new happened: Apple Silicon.

    Listening to "My Life" by FM Attack

  • 8100, part 4

    The rest of the parts I ordered / had made for the 8100 came in this afternoon – save for the BlueSCSI boxes which haven’t shipped yet – so the evening was spent creating the most upgraded 8100/80 in human history… At least as far as I know.

    The first things to do were put the new pram battery in the holder, stick the mainboard back in the case, and then max out the video card…

    I left one of the VRAM simms flipped over for posterity.

    Everything reassembled and the video card snug in its PDS slot.

    Once again I was successful in manipulating all of the brittle plastic pieces to snap everything back together, so it was time to press the keyboard’s power button and see if I got a successful boot – or if I would let all of the magic smoke out…

    264MB of ram…
    And 1024×768 @ 75Hz with millions of colors…

    I was apparently successful – go me! Though there was one tiny error:

    I have exceeded RAM Doubler’s ability to double RAM…

    That line in the photos is the scan line of the monitor being picked up by my iPhone – you can’t see these normally, but the iPhone doesn’t have persistence of vision so there they are… Just ignore them. 🙂

    Anyway, the operation was a success – so the next thing to do was set the clock…

    Macintoshes back in the day were generally immune to the Y2K bug, but the engineers and programmers working on OS8 in 1997 seemed to be of the mind that no sane person would be using the OS after 2019… So while the actual clock is good until 2040, the date picker rolls over on December 31, 2019 to the mid 1900’s.

    This is actually a pretty easy fix though; just get the 8100 onto the internet so it can see an NTP (time) server.

    Getting the machine on the Internet was a simple matter of hooking up the Farallon AAUI adapter, stringing cat-5 across my office, and then configuring TCP/IP in a machine and operating system from when TCP-IP was still in diapers… Luckily I did this a lot back in the 90’s – so getting the machine networked was essentially muscle memory.

    So, now I had an IP address and a route to the Internet, the date was now showing 2023, and the machine came with Netscape 3.0.something from ’97… Let’s do this!

    …

    In short, almost nothing on the modern world wide weird will talk to such an old browser. While there was SSL back in 1997, it was pretty primitive and doesn’t apply to modern TLS encryption, and nothing really does plain old HTTP anymore – and even if something did, Netscape 3 simply doesn’t understand modern HTML, scripts, or even graphic standards.

    There is ‘frog find‘ though, which is a modern web to ancient computer search engine translator that one can at least use to verify connectivity. And there are Macintosh software archive sites like macintoshrepository.org where you can get cool old abandonware… Said site even congratulates you for using an actual old Mac when using an actual old Mac – but the site is too new for Netscape 3 to figure out…

    What I needed was a newer browser – something like Classilla, the unofficial last-gasp of Mozilla compiled for MacOS 8.6 – 9.2 machines. This was child’s play to download with Safari on my M2 laptop but impossible for Netscape 3 on the 8100, so what I needed was a really basic web server on my laptop that Netscape 3 would understand and be able to use…

    Ten minutes later and I had Netscape 3 downloading Classilla_9.3.3.sit from Apache on my laptop – which took about three minutes, and then required another three minutes to unstuff. But once that was done it was possible to get the old 8100 onto the information superhighway! (Albeit really slow, in the breakdown lane, with the hazards on…)

    The internet is really really great. I got a fast connection so I didn’t have to wait. There’s always some new site. I browse all day and night. It’s like I’m surfing at the speed of light!

    Fortunately I maxed out the ram in the 8100, because Classilla – being ‘new’ code from an era where size doesn’t matter – eats up a lot of system memory…

    Here’s Classilla using more system memory than the entire MacOS 8.6 operating system…

    Anyway, once I got the ability to peruse and download stuff, I spent the evening filling the old SCSI HD with period correct games and apps, and hanging out in late 1995. 🙂

    Listening to "Youth" by The Midnight

  • 8100, part three

    Some of the parts I ordered for the 8100 came in today, so it was time to take the machine apart…

    Old ram on the left, new ram installed.

    To get to this part requires some careful fiddling as there are a lot of plastic tabs you need to carefully bend to remove board retainers and brackets. And as I mentioned previously, the plastics in this machine have reached an almost chalk-like consistency and are very fragile… But after some extremely careful bending I got everything disconnected without breaking anything and the board flipped out to do some work.

    First up was the judicious use of some canned air to remove the lint buildup on the CPU heatsink, around the rom and L2 cache simm, and the power supply. Otherwise the system was really clean; someone took good care of it.

    Next on the agenda was removing the 30 year old thermal paste and redoing it with Arctic Silver MX4… Which is overkill on a CPU that dissipates less than 10 watts worst-case – but I might as well take advantage of 21st century chemistry while I’m in here…

    All cleaned up and ready for a new coat of thermal grease.

    Next up was swapping out the ram… I gingerly pried out the two new(er) sticks of TechWorks FPM 32meg and four sticks of Motorola FPM 8meg ram, and replaced the lot with new (as in made in July of 2023) 32meg 60ns EDO ram.

    I then pulled out the old pram battery in preparation for the new one that will arrive tomorrow.

    Being as these batteries only last about 5 years and the computer currently forgets what day it is every time I turn it off, it was time for a new one. What was interesting is this is an aftermarket battery made by NewerTech (now owned by OWC), but NewerTech hasn’t made these batteries since mid-2015… At least it wasn’t the battery it came with in 1994 – which would have leaked motherboard destroying goo all over everything by now.

    This is an all too common occurrence these days.

    And that’s where I have to stop for now as the rest of the parts didn’t come in today, and I want to limit the manhandling the plastics receive… So I’ll install the battery tomorrow and then put the board back in the case.

    In theory the vram for the video card will also arrive tomorrow and I’ll be able to install that before putting the card back in the system. Once that is done, the 8100 will be as maxed out as humanly possible system-wise. I still have the two BlueSCSI devices coming as well, but they won’t even ship until Saturday.

    Oh, there is one more device that came in today…

    A Farallon AAUI to 10base-t adapter.

    Back in ’94 everyone was still working out what the One True Standard would be for computer networking, and each competing standard had a different media type and connector set – so it was kind of a mess… Because of this, Apple in their wisdom decided that the new PowerPC machines would just have an AUI (Attachment Unit Interface) on them, and the user could get a media converter for whatever network flavor they wanted… So Apple only needed one port instead of 2-3.

    But! AUI ports used 15-pin D-Sub connectors, which is the exact same connector Apple used for their monitors… So to prevent confusion Apple came up with AAUI – a proprietary connector for proprietary network dongles.

    Anyway, that’s the update for today – more tomorrow!

    Listening to "The Equalizer (Not Alone)" by The Midnight

  • 8100, part two

    Signs you may be taking this whole retro computer thing too seriously: you have a guy in Ohio hand-making custom high-speed VRAM for a very unique PDS video card that only works in one model of computer from thirty years ago…

    Yep. That’s me…

    The PDS-based HPV (High Performance Video) card that the 8100 came with in 1995 had 2megs of VRAM and would do 832×624 in 24 bit color – which was somewhat crazy for a time when PCs were still 640×480 in 16 colors… But the HPV card was expandable to 4megs using 80ns 68-pin VRAM simms that cost a small fortune back in the day and accordingly weren’t super prevalent – hence needing to have it made here in the 21st century.

    When this new VRAM gets here and I max out the HPV card, the 8100 will support 1152×870 in 24-bit color – which back in ’95 would have essentially been alien technology. I mean, the “web” didn’t make the transition to 1024×768 until 2002 – 7 years later.

    I should also mention that the Apple “Multiple Scan” 17-inch monitor I have on the 8100 was released at the same time in 1994 for a bit over $1000, supports up to 1024×768 at 75Hz, and was just as far ahead of its time as the computer…

    Anyway – I’ve also ordered both an internal 50-pin and an external 25-pin BlueSCSI v.2 adapter. The latter will be used to make a backup of the existing 640meg HD which will eventually be replaced by the former. Once this is done, the original drive will be archived and the system will operate off of the internal adapter as it’s faster and pulls less power from the 30 year old power supply.

    I also ordered eight 32meg EDO 72-pin SIMMs to max out the ram in the 8100. The new ram is 60ns instead of the stock 80ns because I might pick up a Sonnet 500Mhz G3 upgrade card for it, and that will require faster ram.

    Oh, and I have a Farallon AAUI to 10baseT adapter coming – so I can put the 8100 on the LAN at the house, mostly for the giggles.

    Listening to "Be Good to Yourself" by Journey

  • 1995

    Back in early 1995 my living room / computer lab looked a bit like this:

    Back in the days when we still used film… And you can see the 10base2 coax running everywhere…

    In the above photo you can see my IBM Model 330-P75 on the left, which had a Pentium 75 in it. It was my BBS / MUCK dialup box… That’s probably FurryMUCK on the screen.

    In the middle (sitting on top of the monitor) is an HP Vectra VL series 3 5/90. This had a hotrod Pentium 90 in it and was the server for my Major BBS setup – “Silicon Psychosis”.

    And on the right side of the desk is my Apple Power Macintosh 8100/100AV, which was the machine I was using for all of my web stuff and graphic work.

    That Mac is the first computer I ever purchased for myself with the intention of using it for actual work, and accordingly it’s the first machine I owned that I actually made money with… I can attribute that old Mac with getting me really going in internet technology, graphic design, and all of the other things I still do to this day.

    And since the mid 2000’s I’ve been looking for another 8100 to complete my collection of all the old Macs I’ve owned.

    But they are rarer than hen’s teeth because they were like $4500 in 1995 – or about $9000 in 2023 money – for the 100Mhz model, they were only around for six months before the PowerPC 604-based machines came on the scene, and they were insanely fragile… So there weren’t many of them to begin with and most of them have self-destructed or simply fallen apart over the years.

    These are also Apple’s first PowerPC machine, so they are a collection of weirdness internally… The 100 and 110Mhz machines used a Peltier Junction cooling system that was generally more trouble than it was worth, they used “NuBus” for expansion cards, and the video card is interfaced on the processor bus using a PDS (processor direct slot). PDS was problematic because if someone removed the card and didn’t install a terminator board bad things happened – and being as every other computer on the planet that had cards didn’t have such a setup, there were a lot of blown machines.

    But for all the hassles of this new RISC platform you got some bonuses: MacOS was lightyears ahead of Windows, the PPC 601 ran circles around Pentium-based machines, it was all SCSI inside which left old ATA in the dust, the new PPC machines came with 2-meg video which offered 1152 x 870 resolutions and thousands of colors at the same time, and the machine would address 264megs of ram in a time where most people were running 32megs or so.

    Anyway, roll the clock forward almost 30 years and I finally found an 8100 that met my specifications: fully functional and as close to ‘new’ as possible…

    Just after I put the 2meg PDS card (on the right) back in the machine…

    The complete setup running MacOS 8.6!

    So this is my new 8100/80, which while not exactly the same as my circa ’94 8100/100AV, it’s close enough to the original that I spent the afternoon back in 1995.

    Overall the 8100/80 is pretty much exactly the same as the 8100/100 performance wise, mostly because the 80 is a clock-doubled CPU on a 40Mhz bus while the 100 is a clock-tripled CPU on a 33Mhz bus – so it essentially runs all of my old OS8 software just like the original.

    Those who know these machines will probably be agog at the fact all of the faceplates are intact, and while the plastics are a little yellow they’re still in amazingly good shape… The face plates and the front of the machine are held on with plastic tabs, and the plastics on these machines after 30 years has essentially turned into powder. So if you look at the bezels the wrong way they break off…

    I also have the original Apple Multiple Scan 17″ monitor and the keyboard and mouse the system came with – also in pristine condition… Save for the control door on the monitor – the little plastic tab that holds the door closed snapped off – but I think I can use the baking soda and superglue trick to fix it.

    Like I said, the plastics are really brittle now.

    I picked this all up from Tammy over at Apple Rescue of Denver for a song… It’s got 112megs of RAM in it (72-pin 80ns simms) and a 640meg SCSI HD – and now has its original PDS video card in it.

    Everything runs great and I’ve been loading old software on it all day.

    I think, like the rest of my functional Apple time-capsules, I’ll max it out as much as possible and get it running on an SSD. This means I’ll need to order a BlueSCSI, more ram, more video ram, an AAUI to ethernet adapter, and other sundry items – all of which are available online for relatively cheap.

    Should keep me entertained for good long while. 🙂

    Listening to "As the Days Go By" by Marvel83'

  • OS v.old

    Welp, today Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2012 and 2012 r2 will be EoS (End of Support) on October 10th.

    These EoS announcements always make me feel my age, because it seems like just a few weeks ago I was testing 2012 to replace my 2008 r2 systems – and being irked at the Windows 8 UI they used for it…

    But that was a decade ago.

    I remember when I first got on the Windows Server train back in 1995. Windows NT 3.51 for workstations had just been released and I wanted to see what all the hubbub was about. At that time I was running Solaris and Novell systems at work, which were the big dogs in the workstation / network arena, but Windows was the big dog in the home market – so I was curious.

    The big thing that NT 3.51 did that got me onboard was to support RISC architectures like PPC, Alpha, and MIPS – because my systems at home at the time were PPC, Alpha, and MIPS machines. I did have a few IA-32 based machines laying around too, but mostly for games and BBS duty (MajorBBS at the time used DOS and phar lap). But most of my day-to-day computing was on RISC machines running things like MacOS, DEC OSF/1 AXP, or IRIX.

    Anyway, I got NT 3.51 running on my DEC AlphaStation 200 with only a few issues, and after some initial grumbling about it I decided to keep it around…

    Then a year later, in ’96, came NT 4…

    NT 4 SP1 marked the end of MIPS support, SP2 the end of PPC support, and SP6 the end of Alpha support – but by then I’d picked up enough expertise with NT that I stuck with it on x86 and x64 hardware.

    My entire career has been keynoted by my use of non-standard architectures and operating systems though, and even in the most Windows-based organization I still manage to do things with Linux running on oddball hardware… Like when I set up Marianapolis’ servers, labs, and student area computers – everything was Apple; Xserves and eMacs everywhere. Or at work today; my Active Directory and file servers are Windows because my user-base is Windows, but everything else is either Linux or MacOS.

    And even here in 2023, 40+ years since my first computer, I still tend to gravitate to “weird” systems; I’ve been puttering about with RISC-V for several years now and a lot of my spare time entertainment is futzing with core designs to run on a Terasic DE-10 nano running a Cyclone-V ARM-based FPGA.

    It’s all been a really fun ride, and even as I type this on a bleeding edge ARM-based Apple Silicon M2 Max RISC machine I’m looking forward to the next weird architecture to sink my teeth into. 🙂

    Listening to "New Horizons" by Timecop1983

  • History in computers

    My company has been in business since 1999, and one of the services we used to provide was hardware compatibility testing. What hardware compatibility testing is, is seeing how a given piece of software operates on various hardware platforms – CPU, north/south bridge, video card, sound card, etc.

    In 2018 we stopped offering this sort of testing; it had fallen to the wayside as hardware homologation and better driver models had appeared in more modern operating systems. But we still have a lab full of antiques from when we did this sort of thing, and I keep it around because I’m into old computers…

    The above photo shows some of the test machines we used for compat testing back in the day. The age of the system increases as you go from the upper shelf (8th gen Core i7) to the lower left (Pentium II 350Mhz). In between are K6-IIs and IIIs, Pentium IIIs and Pentium 4s, Pentium Ds, Core 2 Duos and Quads, Celerons, Durons, Semprons, Athlons, Phenoms, and a few other CPU architectures of bygone days in various sockets and Slot 1 / Slot A configurations.

    These machines are basically frames without side panels or, in some instances, case plastics. They were intended to be life support for a motherboard / CPU combination that various peripherals would be plugged into to fill out a compatibility test matrix.

    We used a lot of drive imaging to make this go… Early on it was done with Norton “Ghost” images on CD – which is why all of the machines have a rom drive in them, but in early 2010 I switched things over to Clonezilla pushing images from a central server… Which is why all of the test boxes also have a NIC in them.

    And yes, I still have all of the drive images. If you know someone who needs a period-correct Win98 install for a K6-II, I can hook you up. 🙂

    You’ll probbaly notice the piles of video cards on top of the rack… Most of the compat testing we did was for video games so we always had the latest chipsets on-hand, and those cards on the top shelf are cards I pulled out of the various test systems we last used in 2018.

    I also have a cabinet in that lab full of video cards ranging back to the dawn of PC gaming…

    These are all numbered to correlate to a spreadsheet of make, model, chipset, and in some cases firmware versions. The cards start in the upper left with a couple of Voodoo 3 2000s, and eventually get to a GTX 1080 at the bottom.

    Sadly, when taking this photo, I noticed a couple of cards with failed caps… I need to figure out if that’s something I want to fix I guess. These are cards that will probably never see electricity again – and probably not worth the effort.

    My personal collection of old PC hardware contains a couple Canopus Pure 3D II cards that I used back in my EverQuest days, and a “Diamond Stealth 24” from all the way back in 1993 – which predates the collection here by a couple of years. But between this cabinet and my own collection – it’s pretty complete. 🙂

    Listening to "Saved by the Bell" by Miami Nights 1984

  • Exhibit A

    Right after the last post, I had to break out the old Dell laptop again – so I figured I’d do a quick post that kind of illustrates a typical day for the Wizard…

    I have a client here at work that makes an internet connected thingy – which really narrows it down I know – and they do a lot of their app-to-device QA over in one of my labs. Normally this QA is sanity checking on various mobile devices to make sure the UI works at whatever the new screen resolution is or that the app works as intended in whatever the new OS version happens to be.

    But occasionally we help them recreate problematic scenarios reported by their customer service, and the current problem is a couple of specific home routers that aren’t working for their onboarding process.

    One of these routers is the base model Eero, which is Amazon’s in-house wifi router and isn’t a big deal to replicate – other than the Eero setup wanting your location, email, phone number, blood type, and a copy of your family tree to set up the mandatory online account to activate the damn thing…

    The other two are proprietary “Technicolor” wifi routers commonly supplied by Comcast for their broadband service – and that’s the reason I’m involved…

    The two proprietary routers were fairly cheap on ebay, but aren’t real happy about operating outside of Comcast’s network and expect their WAN side to be supplied by coax.

    I was getting ready to build a DOCSIS test network using an old Arris C3 and a selection of open sorcery (DHCP, TFTP, NTP, Syslog, and this), but I was eventually able to convince these routers that their WAN connection was being provided on an ethernet port by ONT (Optical Network Terminal) instead of coax.

    This still requires a lot of hand-holding to get the routers to understand what they are talking to, and due to these requirements a separate test network was needed…

    To set up this test network I needed a local router to talk to my edge router, and for small scale test networks that aren’t doing performance testing I like to use the venerable Cisco RV042 because it’s rock solid and super flexible, and lets me do things like supply custom DCHP flags… But once again no modern browser will talk to the web server in the RV042 because it’s more than two years old.

    So I had to drag out the Dell XPS again, and ten minutes later had reverse engineered Comcast’s provisioning strategy well enough to sufficiently emulate it for these two routers… And tomorrow we’ll do the testing to try and determine if it’s the router, wifi, or Comcast that shuts down the client’s onboarding.

    And that’s why they pay me the big bucks. 🙂

    Listening to "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins