Today was rather good retro-wise. When I returned last night from a trip to the Heelands I discovered that a package had arrived for me. A friend of mine down South phoned the other day and said that he had found a bunch of old Mac 30 pin SIMMs in his attic and he asked whether I would like them. When he mentioned that the anti-static bags they were in said they were 4MB I instantly said "Yes"! I received eight of them through the mail and I decided to put them in my SE/30 which was lumbered with a mediocre total of 8MB. After putting the new chips in I booted the SE/30 and checked "About This Macintosh", to find that it said there was only 8MB installed instead of the expected 32MB. Strange as I had Mode 32 installed and 32-bit addressing turned on in the control panel. After trying a few things and a bit of head-scratching I still couldn't see any more than 8MB. Suddenly I realised something - my friend's father used to have a Macintosh IIci which has now been disposed of and he must have bought some 4MB SIMMs to upgrade it with. After installing them he put the old 1MB SIMMs that used to be in the IIci into the anti-static bags that had held the 4MB chips, and there they remained. I contacted him and he agreed this must have been the case. The IIci was thrown away a while ago but he thinks they pulled the RAM, cards and drives from it so he'll have a look. Basically I had "upgraded" my SE/30 to the same specs as before and was rather dissappointed. 32MB would have been nice but for the time being I'm stuck with 8MB.
Also today I built a cable for linking the BBC Master to Macs. Mac serial ports and BBC RS-423 serial ports use the same communications standard as the once-popular RS-232 and are therefore compatible. The only issue lies in the fact that the Mac uses an 8-pin mini-DIN socket and the BBC uses a larger, 5 pin DIN socket. After a quick search online I found theZ Productions website that describes how to build a cable to link the two ports. Fortunately I had a spare RS-423 plug available but no 8-pin mini-DIN plugs. However, I have loads of Mac Localtalk cables for printers so I took one of those and chopped the plug off of one end (shock horror)! Then it was a case of painstakingly soldering the internal wires to the right contacts on the RS-423 plug. This took a while as the contacts are very close together and it is very easy to accidentally bridge them with solder. That done it was time to move onto the next part. Incidentally, I didn't chop the cable directly at the plug, I left a few inches of cable on it so I can use the spare plug for future serial link projects.
Fortunately for me the school I used to go to had linked BBCs to Macs at some point in the past and amongst a load of disks, manuals etc they had given me was a program called "File>>Mac". This is basically an application that runs on the Macintosh and allows the Mac to use the BBC's Disk Filing System (DFS) as though it was a disk on the Mac. The interface is similar to Fetch in that it has a list of files on the "remote" BBC disk and a list of files on the Mac disk. It establishes the link to the BBC through the serial port by asking the user to execute a couple of *FX commands on the BBC. The BBC disk drive then springs into action and the contents appear in the file list on the Mac. It is then possible to select files on the BBC disk and transfer them to the Mac, and vice-versa.
Now I had to find a Mac to communicate with the BBC. The File>>Mac program will run under System 6 up so I decided to dig out my Macintosh Classic because I hadn't used it for a while, but also because the desk the BBC sits on is so small it couldn't take anything larger than a compact Mac in addition to the pile of BBC equipment! I linked them both together, started the File>>Mac program and success- it worked! I had fun moving things between systems and watched in amazement as the Classic (very slowly) transferred files from the BBC's 5.25" floppy drives. The Classic has a BBC BASIC emulator already on it so I was able to run the BBC programs on the Classic with no problems whatsoever.
This is a major step in my "RetroChallenge" as I am now able to get stuff off the BBC and eventually onto the internet. I also have an application called "Screen>>Mac", which presumably can take screen-grabs from the BBC but I haven't tried it yet. Depending on what I create on the BBC I will use one or other of these applications.
As far as I know "File>>Mac" is freeware/abandonware as I have never seen it anywhere else other than the floppy disk it is on. I will try to make it available to download at some point along with BBC emulators that can run on System 6 Macs. I have given these applications to a few people in the past via email and it would be much easier if it was available permanently for download. Hopefully I'll get round to this soon and will let you know once I've gotten them online.
There was even more retro-fun today as I played a few old Mac games. I discovered "MacMan Classic 2.0", (which is a derivative of PacMan), on my Classic and played it for ages. As you can probably tell it was this game that inspired my RetroChallenge / 68KMLA nickname. My Classic was an ex-school machine that was previously used in a teacher's office. However it was apparantly used very little and as a result it is in mint condition with the brightest, most crisp black and white CRT I have ever seen in a compact. The CRT on my Plus is good too but the one on my SE/30 has a bit of burn-in and is a wee bit out of focus. The focus issue is due to motherboard capacitor leakage which I will have to get round to sorting at some point. Other games I played today were "Stuntcopter", "Spectre" and the old favourite, "Crystal Quest". Ah memories!