Just yesterday I wrote a whole thing about how I feel bad for sounding like I'm trashing this monitor, when in reality I haven't actually used it as a monitor for more than a few minutes total. I really want to express my admiration for Steve and his project.
After spending a day with the CheckMate I have decided that it's going to change my workflow in a big way and reminded me of the Real Use Case for this thing.
Holy cow did I have a good couple of hours in HengeWorld.
When I got home from lunch around 3 my wife handed me the NuIO board we ordered for the NeXT machine. This was a very welcome surprise. I expected just a board and it came in a very nice 3D printed case. I cabled it up and plugged it into the CheckMate IPS monitor I've been doing battle with for a year.
With extremely low expectations, I hit the soft-power button on the keyboard.
Fired right up, straight to a desktop, looked FRIGGIN' gorgeous. Sharp. This machine, while frustrating to assemble due to the "unique" decisions of Team NeXT in 1989, has been remarkably reliable. Once I understood exactly what I needed (non-ADB keyboard / mouse), spent a bunch of money, it all just worked great. Even worked great on my 4:3 Eyoyo monitor though it's understandably not as nice is the 17" CheckMate.
I ported GOB's Program to csh
So this spurred me to try some ST stuff I've had in mind too. I wanted to try and wire straight into a Mono/Color ST switchbox with a sacrificial VGA cable and see if I can just make a color/Mono VGA switcher. I don't know if the switch is going to work but I just soldered straight onto the pins from the inbound ST cable and...
The ST looks great, there's interference like if there's nothing on the screen, but once programs were running I didn't notice it at all. It all feels very much as I remember.
I chalk that noise up to my test setup:
Turns out the $5 or whatever Exxos (* I can't recall if Exxos actually made this or not) ST->VGA dingus I got was the culprit all along for years now. Oh well. Maybe I can rescue one or both of the 13 pin DIN and female VGA connector off of it.
After the OSSC thing didn't work out I started really bumming pretty hard on this whole project. Then Youtube recommended this awesome BackOfficeChannel video from 8 years ago which made it click in my brain that I can just straight up solder a VGA cable to an Atari cable and any SVGA monitor should work with it. And I remembered that Len had this Mono/Color switchbox and I decided I want to try to recreate that workflow and keep this machine as original feeling as I can.
It took me an hour to map out which conductors went to which pin on the ST and VGA cables and how the diagrams I was looking at are oriented. But man that looks nice even on the garbage cable I hacked together.
I'm trying to lay out some projects that I want to do "when I have the time". I'm considering streaming / recording these as I go if anyone wants to see them and/or help live. I'm at least going to document all of this so it's available to anyone who needs it.
I'm going to update this page as more things come up and I start completing tasks.
Pimp my Atari ST
Get video working. I have an SC1224 which isn't /super/ reliable. I have a Checkpoint monitor that I'm trying to get working for color + mono. I need to get that thing figured out and order whatever I need to make it go
Get a BlueSCSI working as a novelty oversized hard drive with tons of partitions and everything on there. This will involve removing the RIFA caps and getting Len's ICD enclosure working and learning how to install drivers and stuff.
Get my ST talking to Linux machines over serial. This could either be the Pi inside the CheckPoint monitor, or ideally hooked up through the Avocent serial console switch so I could address other ports
Use the serial terminal to manage software transfers from my PC to ST eliminating using aging physical floppy disks and drives or new things like GoTek
Use this method to make images of Len's stuff and transfer to the PC. I think that will be the easiest way to archive these disks
Build the AdaFruit project to use the NeXT non-ADB keyboard on a PC with USB
Use that knowledge to gauge how hard it might be to go the other direction? Using USB stuff on NeXT would be way more useful
Try to get the service manual for that printer or an equivalent Canon model
MiSTer Cabinet
Remove that front door. I keep banging my knees on this idiot door
While the cabinet is apart, extend all the ports from the TV inside with like pigtail connectors including power (C14 -> C15), HDMI and anything else like RF and stuff to hook up Ataris
Earlier this year we were introduced to Gypsy: The Computer Oracle, a Mac game from 1985. This started a whole Thing and I immediately set about making this work in a display that could be exposed to the public with as little friction as possible for people to play with.
This is how that turned out.
For the machine I just used a brand-new Raspberry Pi 3B+ mounted to the back of an Eyoyo 4:3 monitor and added grommets to some Velcro straps for securing the HDMI, power and mouse cables.
This is very much a 1-weekend hack job project and is not anyone's idea of "secure", but it's also not meant to be connected to a network or a keyboard. At some point I might compile out the standard hotkeys for management of Mini vMac, but for now it's fine. If someone yoinks a keyboard out of their pants and inconspicuously plugs it in and starts hammering away, well now they've got access to a single-function Linux machine with no network. Congrats.
I have to admit though, I have been toying with linking multiple web-based Ouija boards together so different locations can send messages back and forth, or to a (non-ai, more Eliza-level) chatbot if there's no one on the other end at the moment.
A couple of months ago the Salem Witchboard Museum got a copy of Gypsy: The Computer Oracle for the Mac from 1985. We got to play with the game on original hardware and took some photos for their site in our livingroom:
I immediately copied the software and started trying to make an image that I could play in emulation. But a 400k GCR Mac floppy, while I could easily copy it with Copy II it turned out to be more difficult to image and there don't seem to be any archived anywhere that I was able to find. An image just fell in my lap today and has now been uploaded to Macintosh Garden for preservation!
I've quickly bashed up a menu listing in my auto-booting Raspberry Pi emulation machine. Ultimately this will automatically boot to the game and hopefully be used in an interactive display in the museum.
Note: This ugly disjointed ramble has been in my "Notes to myself that I'm never going to post" queue for a couple of weeks. But JWZ has recently tried to finally engage the enemy and released XScreenSaver 6.11.
I've been running Linux with XScreenSaver since the very early days of KDEs usable existence on my daily driver machines as a senior sysadmin, network admin, tools hacker. Overall this has been the correct choice even though for several years there in the 2000s sysadminning my workstation seemed to be like 60% of my job. At the end of the day, I'm just some guy. I'm not a developer, and I'm not part of The Community of circle jerking Thought Leaders and Influencers. Just a worker bee with 30 years of workflow and tools I want to keep working. Most of my personal productivity tooling has survived migration to Wayland, but several things I rely on, such as Synergy (copy buffer sync) are major blockers. XScreenSaver is a pretty major blocker for me too.
However in their utter dismissal of tools like XScreenSaver, Big Desktop (Wayland, KDE, and I assume GNOME) are really pissing me off as a user and pushing me back off the platform. It's just emblematic of how emphasis is moving away from users being able to define their own environment to their needs and toward more control from RH et al.
I don't know why Wayland and/or DE projects don't even entertain the opinions of the developer who's been consistently locking screens on Unix for over 30 years. I don't hear Jamie even really wanting to handle locking the screen necessarily, only that there's no framework to work within the existing locking mechanisms to show hacks at lock time. XScreenSaver works (with hurdles of course since nothing can ever be painless in JWZ-world) just fine on MacOS with Apple handling the locker as far as I can tell.
It baffles me to see responses from leaders of distros that boil down to in a post-CRT world your use case is irrelevant, your machine should be asleep to save power, Consumer. Screensavers are not a RedHat approved use of electricity. So no one should play video games because it's a gluttonous waste of energy. Nevermind the fact that with modern monitors and SSDs a NUC can run for days on screensaver before you approach my power draw for 5 minutes in 2000, with my 3x 21" Trinitrons and spinning drives grinding away. Man, the heat that used to come off of all that shit. The power consumption argument is as dismissive as it gets.
Wayland and DE people talk "security", and I get that things such as KMag can't work because windows shouldn't be able to know what is being displayed by other windows. Get it. But my security profile isn't "I'm on an NSA workstation on an airgapped network". My systems are all inside my house. I habitually lock screens out of A: Good Security Practice and B: keyboard-typo-safety. If I get up to pat my cat or get a snack, I want my machine to be Hacking the Gibson when I get back in 5 minutes. I do not want my machine to sleep since I probably have 30 RDP / SSH sessions open to other hosts. If someone needs to sit at my terminal to get the Secret Missile Codes I've got bigger problems. They've probably already killed me and my cat.
Microsoft and Apple figured out how to securely let a third party display a screensaver while the OS handles locking decades ago.
It should be embarrassing to Big Desktop that XScreenSaver works better on my goddamn phone as a live background than it does on Wayland.
"What never was cannot be broken" / "Works well and as designed" -- Guy Who Isn't The Whole of the Problem.
I guess someone needs to write "Why Cooperation With Wayland is Impossible".
I can't fucking wait until ssh forwarding breaks with applications I care about. I'm sure it'll happen one day and just make my systems that little bit less useful. Remote Display / Tunneling is a Worthless Legacy Feature. You should use RDP now or VNC or whatever...
It seems like I really don't write very much, but that's kind of a massive misconception. I don't write "much", but I had a bunch of blog entries that were at least 60% written and were missing like, screenshots or links or tags or I need to make new tags for things like XScreensaver and BSDs. Haiku. Shit lots of stuff.
I'm a KDE user. I like having my ultimate control over look & feel, even though in almost every sense I'm a "leave it default" guy. But I have a nice MacOS-ey theme, handily and easily-ish customized for the proper Green on Black color scheme which is one of 1.25 acceptable palettes (amber on black):
PICTURE
Note things like the Strawberry media player window and the Dolphin windows, these will be important at probably some future date.
My mom has a Mac, and occasionally something will fuck up in a way that is best fixed by me having some control over her machine. I had one of those cases last week and it was embarrassing that there was no good way for me to get remote access. Google Meet doesn't cut it, but there's a whole other Chrome Remote Desktop app, but that was a lot of hoops to install and gave up any hope of walking my mother through the install process.
I've been testing Haiku OS pretty regularly as they'd release a new beta, but I hadn't ever really given it a fair shake. I saw it simply as a way to make old computers run somewhat modern software and load a wikipedia page or something. But with the release of Beta 4 I decided to give it a real chance and installed on an i7 laptop with 16GB of memory. Pretty much the same as my main Linux laptop.
