modelrail.otenko Trains, computers, vintage, retro, model railways… the lot…

TurboLinux 1.1 on a PowerCenter 180

I've been meaning to try this for a long time, after getting BeOS to work on the PowerCenter. Actually, I now realise I haven't even posted about that... I promise to do that later. Anyway, I'd recently been scouring the vintage column on eBay and trundled across a beautiful jewel-cased 2-CD version of TurboLinux 1.1 for PowerPC (original site). There was absolutely no one bidding on it, so I took that and a camera for a Raspberry Pi, of which I'll tinker with later.

For those who want a copy of the ISOs, I've dumped them via the instructions here. Of course, if you're inside TurboLinux (Inception?) then you can't use isoinfo as it doesn't exist. Instead, I loaded into Mac OS 9 and loaded up Adaptec Toast to get the data. Actually, I loaded up Toast to make a toast-formatted ISO. But instead, toast just 'stopped' when I asked it to save a disc image. Either way, dd worked with the parameters that Toast provided and I even managed to use a burnt copy to run the final install... how else to test?

A note on the images above, they were built with dd on ppc linux (TurboLinux 1.1 at that!) and they failed to burn with PowerISO. Somehow ImgBurn succeeded.

To get this up-and-running, I needed to put my PowerCenter 180 back together. I'd recently scavenged a few parts to get the AV Power Mac 6400 running (oh crap, that's another post that never happened) and so slapped RAM back in this machine and a second spare 50-pin SCSI drive.

Note that there's already some great tutorials online. This LinuxPPC Installation Guide by Jérôme Cornet helped me tremendously.

Preparing the SCSI drive

I could've/should've changed the order of this post... but for those playing at home who just want to get this installed and working, you'll want to set up your drive correctly first! When I was first tinkering, I happened to do it in the reverse order: slap the drive in and start the Linux install... I don't recommend this as the partitioning tool doesn't really like 'weird' disks. I had issues when trying to re-write the partition tables on PC formatted drives, to the point where some would prevent the machine from even booting.

To get started, you'll need a totally separate SCSI HDD from your Macintosh install (if you have one) to get TurboLinux going in a PowerCenter. On my specific machine, the OpenFirmware boot screen stays black, so I actually don't know if there are options there, or if the quik bootloader (installed at the end of the process) actually work. If they do, then you may be able to get away with one HDD, if the bootloader let's you back into Mac OS. Or maybe Boot-X will work, I'll test that at the end of the article.

Anyway, I grabbed a spare Seagate 2.1gb drive and installed it as SCSI ID 0. I then downloaded FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 4.5.2 and formatted it. Finally, the drive was partitioned with one 2gb root partition and one swap partition. I found that there are errors if the root partition is over 2gb, so please make it no larger. Note that you cannot use the LinuxPPC partition type. I tried this first and TurboLinux will just tell you that your drive isn't prepared. Instead, you have to choose custom and then type in Apple_UNIX_SVR2 as the partition type, for your swap partition also! The installer then distinguishes the partition by name, so make sure, as above, you call them root and swap!

Note that I didn't low-level format the drive the first time and managed to muck up the whole drive when attempting my first install. This was because I'd created a 4gb root partition and the system reported that it was out of space!? I then used pdisk in the installer and somehow whacked the drive to the point where it started reporting that it was only 1gb in size. Because of all this, I can only recommend that you simply start fresh with a low-level-formatted clean disk.

Grab your Linux CD

TurboLinux requires a 1.44mb floppy to boot the installer. Make sure you have a clean Macintosh-formatted floppy available. Note that during the install, it managed to fail when copying installer.coff file over to the floppy. I Ok'd out of the error and just copied the file manually. In hindsight, you should eject the floppy now! I then re-ran the installer, skipping the copy-to-floppy, and it turns out the final step afterwards is 'double-clicking' on the Install Linux icon that it's put on the desktop...

So, that Install Linux icon just loads up a preset into the Boot Variables control panel. This was installed by the TurboLinux installer and is just a GUI to manipulate OpenFirmware's settings. The preset it loads is to boot installer.coff file from the floppy drive. Double-click the link on the desktop and then choose Write & Reboot. It'll ask if you're ready to reboot. Eject the floppy now (if you haven't followed the above advice) and hit Yes. As soon as you press the button, slap that floppy disk back in. I took my time to do this the first time and got nothing but a black screen! Turns out my machine was sitting at the OpenFirmware prompt, but I couldn't see it and had no idea what was going on. At this point, as that I hadn't ejected the floppy, it got ejected as part of the reboot process (without me noticing), and OpenFirmware just baulked at a command to boot from a floppy disk when there was nothing in the drive.

What to do? Either reboot again with the disk in the drive, or just slap the disk back in, blindly type boot and hit enter.

Nostalgique RedHat 2.0 (I mean TurboLinux) Installation Process!

If you've made it this far, then you're doing well! My gosh... I remember sitting on the floor of a friend's house (Hi Nathan!) back in maybe 1997 installing RedHat 5.x and running through these screens. Back then the IP configuration confused the crap outta me... doesn't this come with a DHCP client? Anyway, this time around it was entirely painless... just follow the usual prompts...

Next up, partitioning! Make sure to highlight the correct SCSI device in the top list... use the tab key to get up there and select with up/down arrows.

If you skipped the partitioning step above, then you'll need to hit Edit and follow the next block. If you have already partitioned your disk, then hit Done and skip it with gleeeeeee...!

Partitioning with pdisk

Yeah, not fdisk, pdisk! Note that fdisk is also on the distro, but pdisk is a wrapper for PowerPC-style partitioning which knows how to create Apple Partition Maps.

If you've really keen to do it this way, then I'll assume that the installer has listed your drive and you've tabbed over and chosen Edit. From here, you're thrown to a console prompt at the bottom of the screen and you'll need to navigate pdisk carefully. Please make sure to chose the correct partition first, before hitting Edit!

Disregard that it tells you you've chosen one device in the /dev folder and that its actually loaded the same device from the /tmp folder. This is just the way it seems to work and you'll need to find the device in /tmp later if you want to switch to another console and hack behind-the-scenes.

Anyway, pdisk accepts most of the fdisk commands, such as p to list the partition table. If you want to mangle it yourself, then use d # to delete individual partitions or i to completely re-write the partition map and start fresh.

Once you've got space to create your root and swap partitions, you'll want to use the command c to create them. If you're feeling professional, then split everything up into usr/home/root into partitions (this stops one of them from stealing all of the disk space from another and causing system failure). But, if you're lazy like me, then you only need to create a 64mb swap partition and then another partition for root, filling up the rest of the drive.

The basic structure to create a partition is as follows:

c 2p 64m swap

The command above will create a 64mb partition with the name swap at position 2. You can then type p and hit enter to see the new listing. Specifically you can see how much space is left on the disk. I had 1.9g available, so I then created root:

c 3p 1900m root

As opposed to fdisk, you don't need to specify the partition types here. You just need to name them accordingly: swap for swap, root for root. After creating the root partition, I went ahead and checked out the table via the command: p.I was happy with it and wrote the changes to disk via w. Finally, q took me back to the installer and tabbing in a loop back to OK allowed me to proceed to the formatting stage.

Formatting and Package Selection

From here, if you haven't low-level formatted your drive, then I'd recommend bad-block checking on both formatting runs.

You'll then be asked the packages you want to install. Choose what you feel is relevant. You can always mount the CD-ROM at a later stage and individually install RPMS at a later date.

If you've chosen a miriad of groups, then there might be dependencies that need to be installed... please consider and then accept... otherwise your packages will fail to install.

The install will then make the filesystem on the root partition and install the selected packages. If you selected Everything, then expect the following errors during installaion! The packages seem to be corrupt on both the original CD and my copy!

Aww... no Mahjongg!? Note that the packages aren't really important... the machine still worked fine afterwards.

Finally it'll ask a few questions about mice, networking, printers and boot parameters. You really should take a photo of the final window to record the boot-device and boot-file settings required for OpenFirmware!

Once all is done, the machine will reboot, ejecting the floppy. I'd installed TurboLinux around 6 times by the time I'd gotten to this part of writing this article and every-so-often one wouldn't boot at this point... the machine would restart, chime and hang at a black screen. I had to use the magic 4-finger-salute: Option+Command+P+R to get back to Mac OS and then re-enter the boot params from the final step of the installation process back into the Boot Variables control panel and Write & Reboot. It would then boot without fail!

TurboLinux is starting for the first time...

Shit, it booted! But I got a lot of crappy errors in the boot log.. which zoomed past and landed me at the boot prompt.

I logged in as root (as the installer didn't let me create any other users) and checked dmesg...

Not good.. seems that anything network-related just crashed?

Let's check X-Windows: startx got me to a very mustard-flavoured OpenStep desktop, but the Netscape icon from the launcher did nothing... I then tried netscape from xterm and got a segfault! Why is all network-related code throwing exceptions? Oh wait, I have two PCI cards installed in this system doing nothing. One is a 'bootable' Sonnet IDE card and another is a Kingston KNE100TX LAN card. Maybe TurboLinux can't work out if it should be using the onboard LAN or PCI LAN? Let's remove both cards...

A clean boot! I can even ping!

Netscape then even wanted to load... but got sad when it couldn't phone home. Poor thing... a few decades too late!

Screen Resolution

TurboLinux will use the resolution that you had Mac OS configured to. That value is store as a mode-number in PRAM and, unless you've reset it recently, should therefore display how you expect. If you want to override this, then choose a value from the list below...

#    1   512 x  386  60Hz (interlaced, NTSC)
#    2   512 x  386  60Hz
#    3   640 x  480  50Hz (interlaced, PAL)
#    4   640 x  480  60Hz (interlaced, NTSC)
#    5   640 x  480  60Hz
#    6   640 x  480  67Hz
#    7   640 x  870  75Hz (portrait)
#    8   768 x  576  50Hz (interlaced, PAL)
#    9   800 x  600  56Hz
#   10   800 x  600  60Hz
#   11   800 x  600  72Hz
#   12   800 x  600  75Hz
#   13   832 x  624  75Hz
#   14  1024 x  768  60Hz
#   15  1024 x  768  72Hz
#   16  1024 x  768  75Hz
#   17  1024 x  768  75Hz
#   18  1152 x  870  75Hz
#   19  1280 x  960  75Hz
#   20  1280 x 1024  75Hz

And replace the value '20' in the command below...

startx -- -mode 20

You'll then get the resolution you desire... as long as you have a monitor that supports what get's output. And maybe as long as you have the VRAM? This unit is decked out, so mode 20 worked fine. You can also pass -DEPTH with the value 8, 16 or 24.

Mounting HFS Extended Partitions

No-can-do out of the box! hfsutils can't mound HFS Extended partitions. Instead you'll just get the HFS shim with the Where_have_all_my_files_gone? file explaining that your data is still on the drive, but your current software is perfectly rubbish. I haven't found a solution to this yet... it seems that hfsprogs is open-source from Apple, but this OS may be way too old to compile it.

Getting back into Mac OS

There's a Linux tool called nvsetenv that will allow you to set the OpenFirmware boot-device setting inside Linux so that you can get back to MacOS on the next reboot:

nvsetenv boot-device "/AAPL,ROM"

Using BootX?

BootX (download it here) got installed whilst I was mucking around with Linux 1999 (mentioned below, and I'll write up a HOWTO on that also) during failed installs of TurboLinux. Just like BeOS, it throws a system extension in Mac OS with a symbol as the first character of its name to make it get loaded first. It then pops up a cute boot dialog to let you choose Mac OS or Linux with a configurable default. This is much nicer than the OpenFirmware prompt as it actually displays!

Unfortunately, there's an issue when you want to try and use it for TurboLinux. We'd need a vmlinux bootstrap kernel available for it to boot that matches the 2.1.x kernel in TurboLinux 1.1, otherwise there'll be a version mismatch. I tried all vmlinux files I could find on the CD; I even copied the exact file from the root partition... but BootX would just display a black screen each time I tried to boot it! Just for fun, I then used the 'Standard LinuxPPC' kernel with /dev/sda4 as the root and the bloody thing booted! But there was no sound and I had no idea what other damage might occur with a mismatched body vs. head.

So this is a really old version of Linux....

I went a'googlin and tried to find something newer, but there doesn't seem to be one! That site also doesn't have these ISOs, so I'll contribute those in due course. PowerISO on Win10 just threw a CRC error reading them? I might try Toast on the actual Mac. And then? Let's try LinuxPPC 1999 or LinuxPPC 2000.

But does it run OpenTTD?

There's no un-emulated version of A-Train to get running on here, so let's aim for OpenTTD. I've actually made this topic a new post as I nearly tripled the draft of this one with my moaning as to how hard it is to find a correct collection of libraries to build anything!

Farallon EtherMac Mac/PB Adapter

This was another lesson in failure. I'd recently picked up a PowerMac 6400 (more about that later) from an impulsive eBay auction and then this item came across the Vintage feed. I couldn't resist and no one else cared for it. The basic idea is that you can route Ethernet over LocalTalk to get a Macintosh, which doesn't have standard Ethernet capability, connected to an Ethernet network. This unit plugs into the Serial port (either Printer or Modem) and hijacks power from an ADB port. The piggy-back adapter is nice as most users still want to plug their keyboard/mouse in!

Most forum posts indicate that these units need no drivers installed. I was happy with this and went ahead and connected the unit to my LAN. Most lights came on, but I couldn't get anything to work. If you do have this unit, then you need to use MacTCP (this unit is not compatible with OpenTransport!) and set up your unit to have hard-coded IPs via a static MacIP setup. From there, everything should just work. As that you're using an older System 7.5.3 (or lower), you don't get to search for Servers by IP address in Chooser, so make sure you have a real Mac on the network to test with. A2Server might also help.

Anyway, whatever I tried... nothing worked. I'd plug the unit in to the Mac and the power light would illuminate. I'd open up Chooser and the next light from power (orange) would start to blink... but the final light, the Ethernet Link Light, would just be flashing quickly. I initially thought this was ethernet traffic, but then realised that this light should actually be a solid green and that the 4th light should indicate traffic. You really only had to flip the unit over to work this out, Steven. So, my unit wasn't even getting link! Easily confirmed by no link light on a hub I managed to power up and then doubly-confirmed by the diagnostic software provided in the v2.22 of the Farallon Software.

So, I popped the unit and started replacing capacitors. I then tried replacing the chips that seemed identical to an ethernet card that I had spare... and in the end? Killed two cards and ended up with zero connectivity! Fortunately the PM6400 accepted an RTL3189, although not under System 7.5.5.

Lesson learnt? A Farallon EtherMac Mac/PB Adapter that has a flashing ethernet link light is dead. Don't even bother trying to use it. Make sure you see a link light at the other end of the ethernet cable before trying to troubleshoot any further.

In hindsight: I wonder if the unit just couldn't negotiate the 100mbit hub? Maybe it only works with 10mbit devices. Too late to test now!

Apple G4 iBook

After a lovely drive into the Dandenong Ranges to check out some tulips (and eat oliebollen) (thanks Mum!), it was time to venture home... but who could resist not visiting the tip-shop along the way? After a quick look around the shop, it felt like they'd stopped stocking electrical components... but then I stumbled across this, sitting in the wrong area, but looking in really-great condition!

Check out that keyboard! It's still in perfect condition and clean? How on earth... anyway, I took it to the counter and asked for the price. The checkout-chick had to flip through a book of standard prices before responding with AUD$10. I giggled and kept shopping, hoping to find the power supply... no luck there though!

DIY Power Supply

These iBooks need a 24v DC power supply. The plug is a little adventurous on Apple's behalf. Initially it looks like an RCA composite plug, but then you realise that the central pin is actually a 2.5mm stereo jack. Without the outer shield, I can imagine it would be very easy to short the plug. Either way, it's a bit of a lets-take-two-things-off-the-shelf and combine them to make a proprietary socket that no one else can copy. Or can we? (alternative source)

Turns out that you only really need to apply VCC and GND to a standard 2.5mm jack and it'll work. The very tip is not connected, the middle band is GND and the base, closest to the wiring, is +24v DC.

Jaycar didn't have any full-metal-casing plugs, so I had to live with the cheap plastic plugs. Soldered up, I got the following...

The next morning, at the local flea market, I found this cheap and nasty power supply. It says it produces 21-24v? Seems to have a 4-pin plug, so hopefully one of the wires is the full 24v.

Oh right, that's just a two-wire cable split into pairs. So the 4-pin is a double-adaptor. Not handy... and the voltage is hardly at 22v. Will the PowerBook survive?

Sure did! And the battery even started charging!

Mac Mini 1,1 Upgrade!

I was browsing randomly to see if my newly acquired Mac Mini 1,1 had any upgradable components. I was actually pretty shocked to read Jethro Carr's post on Upcycling 32-bit Mac Minis detailing how the CPU is housed in a socket!? He then goes on to describe the best CPU available. I therefore bought a T7300 pretty damn quickly. Turns out there's a step faster though... so make sure you purchase the T7600!

First Step: CPU

Follow iFixit's teardown to open the little beast. It's pretty straight-forward, but give yourself time! Just getting to step 6 was hard enough.. it's pretty scary trying to pry the thing open. Don't forget to clean the underside of the heatsink. Whilst you're there, replace the HDD and battery with newer/faster/better/more-chargier models!

Finally, when replacing the motherboard, watch out for the metal ground tag above the power socket. You'll need to make sure you slide the board in under it!

Can you see it in that above photo? It's the little tag above the power socket.

Second Step: OSX Lion

OSX Lion was the first version of OSX to drop support for 32-bit CPUs. Therefore, it's hardcoded to prevent installation on any machines that are expected to be 32-bit. Of course, we've meddled with that, so we can safely remove the block for our system and let the OS try to boot! The following steps are based loosely on this forum.

1. Get a copy of OSX Lion
2. Open the DVD/DMG and find BaseSystem.dmg then burn it to a USB drive or other bootable partition. Anything ~6gb. Call it LionInstaller
3. Delete a symlink: /Volumes/LionInstaller/System/Installation/Packages
4. Copy the actual packages from "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install ESD/Packages" to "/Volumes/LionInstaller/System/Installation/Packages"
5. Delete "/Volumes/LionInstaller/System/Library/CoreServices/com.apple.recovery.boot/PlatformSupport.plist"
6. Copy "/Volumes/LionInstaller/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg" to a temporary folder
7. Go to that folder and unzip it: xar -x -v -f ~/Desktop/OSInstall.mpkg (more details here)
8. Edit Distribution: I had to add "Mac-F4208EC8" to the block of supported platforms up the top
9. Delete the OSInstall.mpkg that should be in the same folder, that's the old one
10. Re-compress it to the new file: xar -c ./ -v -f OSInstall.mpkg
11. Send it to the right folder: "/Volumes/LionInstaller/System/Installation/Packages/"
12. Reboot and install!
13. When Installation is complete, whilst it's prompting to reboot, open Terminal from the Utilities Menu
14. Browse to /Volumes/[DISK_YOU_INSTALLED_TO]/System/Library/CoreServices/ and Delete PlatformSupport.plist
15. Quit terminal and reboot the machine

Third Step: Firmware

I had mucked around with rEFInd initially to have multi-boot, but my metal apple keyboard wouldn't work with the interface. Turns out it won't even trigger bootup options (CD selection, etc...) as the Mac Mini doesn't like USB 2.0 keyboards at startup! This can all be fixed via a Firmware Upgrade. You even then get the option of installing 4gb of RAM. More information can be found in this thread.

1. Grab the firmware and extract it somewhere.
2. Open Terminal and go to that somewhere.
3. Copy both files to /System/Library/CoreServices/Firmware Updates.
4. Run the following:

   sudo bless -mount / -firmware /System/Library/CoreServices/Firmware\ Updates/EFIUpdaterApp.efi -payload /System/Library/CoreServices/Firmware\ Updates/LOCKED_MM11_0055_08B.fd -options "-x efi-apple-payload0-data" --verbose

   EFI found at IODeviceTree:/efi
   GPT detected
   No auxiliary booter partition required
   System partition found
   Returning booter information dictionary:
   <CFBasicHash 0x7f8343d02fe0 [0x7fff78e37ea0]>{type = mutable dict, count = 3,
   entries =>
   	0 : <CFString 0x10aa4afb0 [0x7fff78e37ea0]>{contents = "System Partitions"} = (
       disk0s1
   )
   	1 : <CFString 0x10aa4af70 [0x7fff78e37ea0]>{contents = "Data Partitions"} = (
       disk0s2
   )
   	2 : <CFString 0x10aa4af50 [0x7fff78e37ea0]>{contents = "Auxiliary Partitions"} = (
   )
   }
   
   Substituting ESP disk0s1
   Mounting at /Volumes/bless.y5CS
   Executing "/sbin/mount"
   Returned 0
   Creating /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE if needed
   Deleting previous contents of /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE
   Deleting /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE/EFIUpdaterApp.efi (33888 bytes)
   Deleting /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE/LOCKED_MM11_0055_08B.fd (2097152 bytes)
   Opened dest at /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE//EFIUpdaterApp.efi for writing
   preallocation not supported on this filesystem for /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE//EFIUpdaterApp.efi
   
   Type/creator set to     /     for /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE//EFIUpdaterApp.efi
   /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE//EFIUpdaterApp.efi created successfully
   Relative path of /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE//EFIUpdaterApp.efi is \EFI\APPLE\FIRMWARE\EFIUpdaterApp.efi
   IOMedia disk0s1 has UUID F6A85C4B-BDBA-4127-ADB9-7B4D07AA40E4
   Opened dest at /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE//LOCKED_MM11_0055_08B.fd for writing
   preallocation not supported on this filesystem for /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE//LOCKED_MM11_0055_08B.fd
   
   Type/creator set to     /     for /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE//LOCKED_MM11_0055_08B.fd
   /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE//LOCKED_MM11_0055_08B.fd created successfully
   Relative path of /Volumes/bless.y5CS//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE//LOCKED_MM11_0055_08B.fd is \EFI\APPLE\FIRMWARE\LOCKED_MM11_0055_08B.fd
   IOMedia disk0s1 has UUID F6A85C4B-BDBA-4127-ADB9-7B4D07AA40E4
   Setting EFI NVRAM:
   <CFBasicHash 0x7f8343d02fe0 [0x7fff78e37ea0]>{type = mutable dict, count = 2,
   entries =>
   	1 : <CFString 0x10aa4afd0 [0x7fff78e37ea0]>{contents = "efi-boot-next"} = <CFString 0x10ab1a930 [0x7fff78e37ea0]>{contents = "<array><dict><key>IOMatch</key><dict><key>IOProviderClass</key><string>IOMedia</string><key>IOPropertyMatch</key><dict><key>UUID</key><string>F6A85C4B-BDBA-4127-ADB9-7B4D07AA40E4</string></dict></dict><key>BLLastBSDName</key><string>disk0s1</string></dict><dict><key>IOEFIDevicePathType</key><string>MediaFilePath</string><key>Path</key><string>\EFI\APPLE\FIRMWARE\EFIUpdaterApp.efi</string></dict><dict><key>IOEFIBootOption</key><string>-x efi-apple-payload0-data</string></dict></array>"}
   	2 : <CFString 0x10ab1add0 [0x7fff78e37ea0]>{contents = "efi-apple-payload0"} = <CFString 0x7f8343d03430 [0x7fff78e37ea0]>{contents = "<array><dict><key>IOMatch</key><dict><key>IOProviderClass</key><string>IOMedia</string><key>IOPropertyMatch</key><dict><key>UUID</key><string>F6A85C4B-BDBA-4127-ADB9-7B4D07AA40E4</string></dict></dict><key>BLLastBSDName</key><string>disk0s1</string></dict><dict><key>IOEFIDevicePathType</key><string>MediaFilePath</string><key>Path</key><string>\EFI\APPLE\FIRMWARE\LOCKED_MM11_0055_08B.fd</string></dict></array>"}
   }
   
   Executing "/sbin/umount"
   Returned 0

5. Shut Down
6. Press and hold your power button until you see your Mini's power light flash repeatedly, and then release. You should hear a strange boot sound from your Mac.
7. You may-or-may-not see a grey screen with a progress bar loading. I did, but others report they do not, so it will vary. If you do encounter this screen, just let the progress bar complete, and don't touch anything.
8. You now may-or-may-not get a corrupt screen - Let it get to the desktop and then hold down the power button.
9. Reboot, but this time do a PRAM reset (Command + Option + P + R)
10. Listen to that lovely chime... it's actually the first time my Mac Mini ever made the startup chime since purchase!!
11. Profit.

Yessss... we now have a MacMini2,1!

Fourth Step: RAM

Easy enough, but only after the firmware update! Grab two 2GB DDR2 PC2-5300S 200-pin SODIMMS and install them in the two available slots in the motherboard. Yes, you'll have to rip the entire unit apart again, so it's probably beneficial to buy these at the start and do it all in one hit!

Fifth Step: Why is the CPU fan always maxed out?

Turns out, that if you leave things disconnected, then the poor little Mac Mini can't monitor it's system performance and will default to a full-speed fan. There's a wire at the front near the power light that you need to disconnect as one of the first steps... I'd forgotten to reconnect this and, well, the result is max-tilt on the cooling fan.

Make sure you plug everything back together!

Sixth Step: Alternative Operating Systems

Just for fun I decided to install rEFInd and then toy with the other 80gb I still had on the HDD. Installation was as simple as opening Terminal, switching to the Downloads directory, unzip refind*.zip, switching to the extracted directory and then finally: ./refind-install. It copied over the default configuration and then, upon reboot...

Nice. Now, off to Linux Mint to download an ISO. I chose Mate, I don't know why... I don't think I like the black of Cinnamon. It turns out my internal CD drive is toast... it just tries to read and read anything I put in there and then spits it back out again. So, thankfully my external CD drive just-worked!

Of course, the bootloader didn't. The picture above shows as far as it wanted to get... it then just freezes. It turns out all 64-bit ISOs need 64-bit EFI BIOS' and our machine doesn't have this! It has a 32-bit EFI with a 64-bit CPU. So... you need to hack the ISOs. Thankfully, Matt Gadient has already done this for us.

Apple IIc – Floppy via Serial

I've recently acquired an Apple IIc and it's time to play games! As previously mentioned, the best way to do this is to hook up the Apple to a PC and transfer data via serial cable. This is all done via the aid of a software program known as ADTPro.

Building the serial cable

You'll find the required information on the connection page of ADTPro. Back to Jaycar we go to get the required components. Needed was a DB-9 female serial connector and a DIN-5 male plug. Some 6-core wire helped also.

Soldering it all together is very straight forward. Firstly, bridge pins 1 and 5 on the DIN side, then solder up pins 2-4.

Next, on the DB-9 port, join pins 1,4,6 together. Then join pins 7 and 8 together. That's two separate groups, not all 5 in one join! Finally, wire through (DIN-DB9) the three wires, 4-3, 2-2, 3-5.

Bootstrapping the software

Everything you need to know is on the ADTPro bootstrapping page. Java is required, so grab a JRE and install it on your platform of choice. Make sure your hardware has a functioning serial port! A USB->Serial adapter will work fine here. Download ADTPro from sourceforge and the RXTX Java Libraries. If you don't install the libraries, the application will remind you anyway...

To install RXTX, unzip the downloaded archive and move RXTXcomm.jar to \jre\lib\ext (under java) and rxtxSerial.dll to \jre\bin. Open the program once you've got it all installed. It'll be asking what serial port and what speed to use. Leave the speed as default and then choose the correct port.

At this point, you'll want to copy your disk image files into the disks subdirectory inside the ADTPro folder. Once you're ready to go, turn on your Apple IIc, holding down CTRL-RESET to get to the prompt. Expect ugly characters on the screen... it's no issue.

Once up (disregard that I already typed the first step above!), go back to ADTPRO and choose Bootstrapping -> ProDOS -> Speediboot.

Follow the instructions and type out the commands on the Apple. Note: Replace the # with the pound sign on UK keyboards! From here, you'll hopefully load into the main menu.

Hit R for Receive File and then make sure you are in the correct 'working directory'... i.e. where you copied your disk images to! I found Frogger, renamed it as frgr.dsk and copied it into the ADTPro disks folder. I was about run the floppy disk image from RAM... but why? I have spare floppies... lets use this thing as a floppy image writer!

It took a good amount of time... sounding REALLY unhealthy. Those Xs didn't look too good either. Turns out this was because I was trying to use PC formatted high-density disks... and that would never work! Regardless, due to the sounds, I wanted to open up the drive to check if it need maintenance.

For its age, it was in perfect condition. Dusty, yes... and the top padded head was deteriorating... but nothing a little cleanup with alcohol wipes wouldn't fix! I then remembered I had a 'disposable' 360k disk in my repertoire. Using this, I finally had a bit of success... it read the disk header!

Frogger then burnt, but wouldn't boot :( As that I had no idea if this version of Frogger was for my machine, or if it was even a bootable disk, I thought I'd try the actual images that come with ADTPro. I therefore chose the first image and wrote it to the disk. TADA! It booted!! Very different menu from the remote version when loaded over the wire.

What next? Oh yeah, Police Quest 1. Turns out this is in NIB disk image format, but it seems ADTPro can handle this. There was a warning of file size mismatch, but I went ahead and burnt it anyway... I didn't bother burning the second side. Once cooked, I turned the machine off.. counted to 10... held breath... crossed fingers... powered on...

Hahahaha! It worked! But I can't flip the disk without repeating the whole process and writing the other side. I don't think I'll bother as the game loaded so bloody slowly. I'd probably never end up actually playing or using this machine... so it's now on eBay. What a perfect unit if you loved these old games!?

Introducing the Apple IIc

I suppose I should be using italics there, but the heading doesn't allow it. The Apple IIc is an all-in-one (apart from the monitor) unit from Apple, built in 1984. Amazingly, this model was released at the same time that the original Macintoshes were hitting the market, directly competing with their own graphical systems?

I happened to stumble across one recently at the Camberwell Markets and haggled it down to a price I was comfortable with.

Design

This thing is like a cute little suitcase. It has a fold-out handle at the back which actually makes it really portable. What doesn't make it portable is the power supply! It's huge and heavy and really does ruin the whole 'portable' aspect.

The keyboard is relatively clicky, but a little sluggish. From what I read, they fixed this in later versions which came out with 'alps' switches. Note that you can determine your model by typing PRINT PEEK(64447) at the BASIC prompt...

Mine is a 255... the earliest revision.

ROM Upgrades

Fortunately, the ROM is a socketed EPROM and therefore easy to upgrade. Big Mess O' Wires has a great blog post on upgrading the ROM. Turns out that my version of the motherboard has a 16k ROM in it, but the board has provisions to support a 32k (27256) ROM. A 64k ROM is also usable, if you burn the image to the 'second half' of the chip. See my old post here on burning EPROMs if you need a hand to do so.

Firstly, download the ROMs. I'd recommend ROM 5x as it is a modified ROM with extra features. Unfortunately, they don't provide a direct link, so you'll have to follow the instructions there to create it. There's another link here.

I spent a bit of time trying to see if I could use Windows 10 to burn... short answer is that I couldn't. I booted up the old IBM NetVista which had a fresh install of XP, but that was also troublesome. So I threw in a spare HDD and re-installed 98se. Note, make sure you set your parallel port to just ECP. I'll try XP again as this setting made the burning work under 98se. Also make sure your EPROMs are blank!

Next, pop the thing open. Firstly, undo the top two and bottom 4 screws. The 4 middle screws are for the floppy drive and aren't required to remove the case lid. Once you've popped the lid off... and be very careful, there's clips all around that just need manipulating, you can disconnect the data cable to both the floppy and the keyboard.

You'll then have the mainboard totally exposed. One thing to note is the Integrated Wozniak Machine, used to drive the floppy.

The ROM is the bottom-middle IC. Hahaha... look at that copyright requirement... it says MICROSOFT '77!

From here, pop out the old chip and slap in yours. You'll need to break W1 and bridge W2 (as per the instructions in the link above) if you're not replacing with a 27128.

First boot and I got the following...

Oh bullocks... but hey, if you actually plug the keyboard in, then it'll actually work!

Niccceeee....

Colour Video

I was a little disappointed that this only had monochrome composite output. Fortunately, Kaput(?) has created a schematic for a Apple II Colour Demodulator. The inline images seem to be dead, but just click the first link for the circuit. My main issue is that I found that shitty little TV above, as it nicely matched the IIc. It's monochrome also... so... I'm not overly fussed if the unit stays mono.

Software

Turns out there's a whole lot of popular games on this unit! Here's the list, thanks to Wikipedia.. And what!?!?... Police Quest 1? I wonder how hard it is to write a 5 1/2" floppy for this thing. Here's Frogger. A little googling tells me that writing floppies needs to be done via ADTPro and a serial cable. That'll be another post!

Power Mac 7220 – PC Compatibility Card

I'd recently picked up a PC Compatibility Card for my Power Mac 7220 and thought I'd see if it worked. It seems to be the P166 variant and, unfortunately, didn't come with the required monitor cabling.

The card itself is huge. Being an entire PC on a card, you'll find graphics, RAM, sound and, of course, the main CPU all crammed on-board.

Basic Installation

It fits neatly into the 7220 case and has a metal tab at the far end that may well need to be adjusted to allow a secure fit.

You'll see in the first two shots above that the metal tab was in the wrong spot and didn't slot into the case. I had to shift it to the other position to provide a proper fit. Otherwise the weight of the card actually allowed it to start bending down!

There's also a CD Audio cable that needs to be fitted. Previously the 7220 simply had the audio from the CD drive plugged straight into the motherboard. Now, the audio runs from the CD drive to the PC card, then another CD Audio cable runs between the card and the motherboard. This effectively means that the PC Card is mixing its own audio output with anything from the CD drive and sending that to the Macintosh hardware.

Note that you'll need to set your input device to the internal CD Drive to have the sound come through!

Software is simple enough, see my post here for all the relevant downloads. Install PC Setup 1.6 prior to 2.14. The disks from that post work fine as well!

Hacking a cable together

I expected that the 26-pin 3-row D-sub plug required for this would be apple-proprietary, but it turns out that it's available on eBay! I purchased one, along with two 15-pin already-cabled plugs to hack up.

Nothing like buying in bulk in case of emergency! The wiring information can be found here, but I've provided it below for safe-keeping.

3-row 26-pin Compatibility plug	Macintosh Video Out (male)	Monitor Plug (female)	Purpose	Direction
Pin 1	Pin 15		Horizontal Sync	In
Pin 2	Pin 11		C & VSync Ground	In
Pin 3	Pin 9		Blue Signal	In
Pin 4	Pin 13		Blue Ground	In
Pin 5	Pin 4	Pin 4	Sense 0	In/Out
Pin 6		Pin 13	Blue Ground	Out
Pin 7		Pin 9	Blue Signal	Out
Pin 8		Pin 14	HSync Ground	Out
Pin 9		Pin 15	HSync	Out
Pin 10	Pin 3		CSync	In
Pin 11	Pin 11		C & VSync Ground	In
Pin 12	Pin 5		Green Signal	In
Pin 13	Pin 6		Green Ground	In
Pin 14	Pin 7	Pin 7	Sense1	In/Out
Pin 15		Pin 6	Green Ground	Out
Pin 16		Pin 5	Green Signal	Out
Pin 17		Pin 11	C & VSync Ground	Out
Pin 18		Pin 3	CSync	Out
Pin 19	Pin 12		VSync	In
Pin 20	Pin 2		Red Signal	In
Pin 21	Pin 1		Red Ground	In
Pin 22	Pin 14		Cable Detect	In
Pin 23	Pin 10	Pin 10	Sense2	In/Out
Pin 24		Pin 1	Red Ground	Out
Pin 25		Pin 2	Red Signal	Out
Pin 26		Pin 12	VSync	Out

I cut the cable between the two 14-pin plugs and stripped the wires back. Intially, I started soldering these onto the main 3-row plug, but this became tedious and my soldering was unreliable. The requirement of joined pins also meant that I had to create intentional bridges and wasn't quite happy with this.

Instead, I found some spare 'tough' copper wiring and soldered 5cm leads onto the 3-row plug. From here, I then joined and soldered the correct wires and heat-shrinked it all together.

Resolutions were a little weird. There's notes in the PC Compatibility Card FAQ here that mention how you should install correct drivers and use a proper multi-sync monitor. I initially used my hack-job wiring and attempted to switch to the proper MAC to VGA adapter...

With the adapter in place, the resolution was mapped correctly. I then 'solidified' the cabling... hahahaha...

Installing Windows

I'd previously done this via the 7" Card on my 7200. Unfortunately things weren't to go as easy this time. In that post, you can find the Tiny Boot Disk hard-drive file that has a nicely bootable Windows 98 SE drive. Windows isn't installed on that, but it'll at least get you a booted 50mb harddisk. From here (or so I thought) you can then build another D: drive and make that bootable.

The goal was simple: Mount another hard-file, format it and copy the contents over. FDISK was used, format d:/s worked and then the full copy was done. On a reboot (after switching the disks so that the new drive file was C:), I was presented with NO ROM BASIC. I've never seen this error before! I switched the disks back and realised that the partition wasn't set as active. Unfortunately, DOS 6.22 FDISK can only set active partitions on the primary drive!

I therefore had to borrow FDISK from FreeDos. The best part of the PC Compatibility on Apple is that you can mount the hard-files on the Macintosh desktop! Make sure your PC side is shut down and just double-click the hard-file. After extracting FDISK, I copied it over to the DOS drive. I then unmounted the drive (drag it to the trash, as scary as that may seem) and then booted the PC side back up.

I now had an FDISK folder. Switching to this and starting FDISK gave me an error on line 2 trying to read FDISK.INI. Turns out that the file has UNIX line-breaks and DOS 6.22 hates this. I could've converted these on the Macintosh side and re-copied... but instead I took a punt and deleted the INI file. It worked! I could now set the active partition on D:.

And then... it booted... from here I copied the WIN98 folder off the CD to the HD as an installer folder and then brought Windows 98 SE to life! I still wanted to make sure CD Audio was correct, so I tested out Screamer which uses the CD for its soundtrack.

It then froze... each time... the entire machine... couldn't even get to the main menu!