Success. Today we (Mainly Natalie), recapped the high voltage board and after a couple of long waits starts, it boots straight up off the 40MB hard drive into System 7.01!
Of course, there's nothing on this machine. It's got Word, Hypercard, and that's about it. No Mac Paint! No Oregon Trail! So the next step on this adventure is obviously going to be to figure out how to get some software onto the machine.
Here are a lot of words about what's essentially a one-line CMD + Powershell script...
I've recently run into a situation where a trusted root certificate authority certificate was missing from several Windows systems in multiple locations and domains. This was causing an issue with automation which reached out to a site which had a certificate signed by that CA. I can see a good use case for this if an organization has their own CA and needs to verify that all endpoints have that CA certificate in their trust store for example.
Note: I say "We" a lot. Natalie has been doing at least as much of this work as me. She has a whole method that she likes for the tantalum caps so she pretty much installed all of those. She even discharged the CRT. We learned later that the Classic seems to bleed the CRT automatically which is nice. I'm still sticking a screwdriver back there every time though just to make sure.
Good and bad news on the Mac Classic front.
If you read in part one, we over-paid a princely sum for a Mac which "Works as intended", but which should really have been "For parts or repair" for 1/3 what we paid.
So I'm personally beholden to make this fucker run regardless of personal cost in blood or treasure at this point.
"Rookies do very tidy job and rightfully feel pleased"
We recapped the motherboard on the Mac Classic. We got a heat gun, generous with the tape all around to make sure we didn't mess up any other components, and quickly and easily got the old parts off, we cleaned the pads up with solder wick, tinned them with new solder and put in the replacement tantalum caps, applying a bit of flux and cleaning regularly along the way. No damaged pads, everything went extremely smoothly regardless of which of us held the iron. Natalie really did most of the installation of the new parts.
Before:
After:
"Rookie makes Rookie Mistake"
The eagle-eyed among you already see why my office smelled like shit all day last Saturday. Of course, tantalums don't note polarity the same way any electrolytic I've dealt with has. So we installed them all backwards.
I know I have seen at least one person mention that while doing a recap and replacing electrolytics with tantalums. In fact, in the box from the company we ordered the replacements from:
So it's not like there weren't ample people trying to get this information into my head. Oh well, happens. Here's the before & after, after the second recap:
I also took the cardboard shield off the high voltage board and saw sticky burnt electrolyte gack on the back of the board. That gack was the smell that took this machine beyond just "nicotine soaked" when you turned it on.
We've removed the high voltage board and will re-cap that in Part 3.
I'm in no position to recommend the hot air station we got, but it was just "not quite the cheapest one on Amazon". Came with some extras like a pair of side cutters and a couple pairs of tweezers, so that was helpful.
Unless Craigslist Guy was using a sharpie to play tic-tac-toe on the wavy checkerboard screen, we have different definitions of "intended".
Of course if the intention is that we have a project now, well then Mission Accomplished. Replacement caps are on the way. The board itself looks totally clean aside from the standard nicotine layer gooped everywhere, but no visible corrosion or damage.
The OS on the laptop I'm typing on goes back probably at least 3 years and spans a couple of different laptops that I've swapped between. I've done dist-upgrades on it and kept it current, and use it for hours a day. A couple of things stand out to show how little "work work" I do on this.
I tried to traceroute something and traceroute wasn't installed.
I was looking in my terminal config and the scrollback is only 1000 lines and not unlimited.
Like every other moderately Vintage / Retro Computing person,
not to mention my whole job being what it is, I immediately bought one of those
12" IPS 16:9 Eyoyo monitors when I started seeing them pop up on some YouTube channels. Thing works great as a bench monitor, but it's kind of a weird size for use with 1980s OSes that expect 4:3. I found that Eyoyo also makes a 4:3 12" 800x600 monitor with all the same inputs so I grabbed one. Since the Atari branded monitors for the ST were 12", and I never saw any of these machines on anything much bigger than a 13" TV back in the day, this looks pretty much exactly as I remember and the correct aspect ratio makes everything feel "bigger" in the right way.
The Pi 3 seems to be completely sufficient for emulating a stock 8Mhz 68000, it just needs enough power, swapping a 750ma power supply for 2.5A made a huge speed difference in emulation. I'm not trying to make this a "modern" experience like PiMiga or anything that requires any more horespower. For software, I started with RetroPie for their package management and the fact that they've already done the work of building all their packages to run from the command line with SDL/framebuffer, plus the ease of tweaking things like the boot splash screen, etc.
Aside from that, it's really just Hatari and Amiberry. I found a 1GB ACSI disk image for the ST which is split into thirds and had a bunch of preloaded software. I've not added anything to it yet, but apparently the hero at 8bitchip has also archived over 1500 ST games and has patched them to run from a hard disk so I won't need to sort through a bunch of disk images which is great. I already spotted Oxyd in the list.
That all makes me want to get NeoDesk running, which I gather is possible though it didn't immediately work in the 5 minutes I had to spend on it. Like I said, for this machine I'm not interested in running a "modern" take like PiMiga. But "nostalgia", well, while I'd certainly love to have original ST or Amiga hardware, I really am more nostalgic for the content and getting in front of Vroom or Nebulus for 10 minutes every 2 months, and it's awesome that it's using the same desktop I spent so much time in front of.
The little boot menu I wrote just replaces the RetroPie autostart.sh file at /opt/retropie/configs/all/ with one that shows the user a menu to select the boot OS or shutdown. Windows 3.11 is a menu option, that's kind of TBD. DosBox is installed but I haven't done the full Windows install yet but it'll be fun to play Solitaire on this thing.
Little tweaks I made to RetroPie
I used RetroPie as my base rather than regular Raspbian because of their great packaging and basic customization tools. I just installed Hatari and Amiberry from the retropie_setup installer and they worked immediately at the command line. The retropie_setup tool also lets you swap out the default boot splash screen. I was expecting to just find the location of the file and swap in an Atari Fuji logo and be done with it. But they've built the tool into their setup utility, and even let you assign an MP4 so I was able to use an animated rainbow Fuji logo so it just looks awesome.
I made one edit to /boot/cmdline.txt to suppress the bootup log output, so cmdline.txt looks like this now:
I copied /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh out of the way and replaced it with:
#!/bin/bash
/home/pi/bin/menu
That's pointing to the boot menu screen. It's really simple but really what am I trying to do here? I did add a countdown timer so it will automatically boot to an ST desktop after 20 seconds:
Natalie got me a cool nixie clock project for Christmas. We've split duties putting it all together and we just finally got it all worked out and on the shelf.
Overall the project was pretty easy, though you can see there's one pretty badly folded in place resistor that wasn't in the directions so we had to cram it in last minute. And we had a couple of issues with certain numbers on certain tubes, but it looks great in the end.
I've been playing recently with different unix OS's, trying to resurrect some old hardware and see if I can't make some of these old machines useful again. Like at least have one as an XScreensaver-only machine to keep Natalie amused.
February: Given until Sept 1 to vacate Atlanta datacenter and move to new facility. At the time, I thought that was crazy aggressive and unlikely. That was cute
February: Painful breathing led to shallow breathing led to collapsed lung. This turns out to be a chronic problem with the cartilage in my chest, chostochondritis.
March: Given 6 weeks to vacate our corporate offices. The only way this was achieved was to move all our datacenter items to our ISP's hosting facility over a weekend.
