Hello, cyberpals.
It's been, like, a year since my last video, which was right after
Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 17. And so
I've just been to VCF Midwest 18 a couple of
weekends ago where I picked up COVID for the first time.
So I'm still recovering
from it, but I didn't really get it that bad. But at least,
like, a dozen people I know from the show got COVID, too.
So that was no fun.
But, yeah, super crowded event this year.
Just many thousands of people, very loud.
I feel like it's difficult to have a conversation over
your table with somebody that's walking by. You're kind of,
like, leaning over the table, like, struggling to hear them and shout over other
people. So it's hard to have an actual conversation
back and forth about stuff.
And so I don't know, I feel like that might-- if I get a table
next year-- it might influence what my table
has on it.
Anyway, so this is my table from this year.
My theme was kind of a portable Macintosh
lineup from the early 90s. So I had a backlit
Macintosh Portable, had a PowerBook 100,
an Outbound Notebook 2030, which is actually like,
a semi-authorized Mac clone.
It just uses ROMs from a
Macintosh Plus. I've read,
like, competing things about whether they were authorized
or not. I think the first Outbound laptop,
which looks different from that one, you had to source
your own donor ROMs from a machine.
But I think this newer one, the Outbound Notebook, they actually
licensed the ROMs from Apple, and then they went out of business after Apple stopped
licensing them. But some people came up to me at the show and
were trying to say that they knew about it and that they weren't ever authorized,
but I don't know.
And then next to that, I had my PowerBook 180 hooked up to
a StyleWriter II printer. So the idea was,
like, you could make something in Print Shop Deluxe and print
it out. But that PowerBook ended
up dying on Sunday. It wouldn't stay on
for more than 20 minutes. Just, like, lock up or
something. I don't know. Anyway, so, yeah, I had kind of a boring
table this year. I didn't really want to bring all of my
Macintosh Plus stuff or any of the brochures and stuff because I
was worried about them getting stolen like they were from last year.
But it's probably also good because it's
so crowded at the event. I don't really want to leave my table
because I don't want to miss out talking to somebody or
these machines are all so temperamental that you kind of have to babysit them.
So I feel like I didn't want to leave my table and
have anything get stolen.
Yeah. So I had a table next to Sean from
Action Retro. And then my friend Peter had a table on
the other side of me with a bunch of kind of newer Mac stuff.
He had like a Duo Dock set up with a
big monitor and a Color StyleWriter with KidPix
running on the Duo Dock, I think. So you can print out whatever you
drew in KidPix.
So, yeah, decent show. Kind of
overwhelming though. Feel like I didn't really get to talk to
a lot of people and have actual conversations about
my machines and stuff. Kind of just like shouting over
the table. And so one of the things that
I've been working on in the past year since the last
VCF was adding Wi-Fi
support to the BlueSCSI
SCSI emulator. So I was talking to Eric Helgeson
at the last event who maintains BlueSCSI
about-- because the newer design that
they were working on was going to use the Raspberry Pi
Pico. And the Raspberry Pi Pico W had
just-- come out at that time with Wi-Fi
support. So I was talking to Eric about
adding the SCSI code, the firmware code
to the BlueSCSI so that it could take advantage of the Wi-Fi and
emulate like a Daynaport ethernet
device,
which I have the real Daynaport devices on my
Mac Plus and my BBS machine.
So over the past year, I wrote all of
that firmware code and got it all-- well,
most of the firmware code and got
it all working. And so that's currently in beta.
So there's been quite a decent
response to that from
people testing it out. And so my Mac Portable
and the PowerBook 100 had WiFi support.
And so one of the other things that I
had worked on was creating a Desk Accessory.
So you can now install a Wi-Fi
Desk accessory which talks to the BlueSCSI and
then does like a normal scan to show you the access
points around you. And you can pick a
different one and it prompts you for a password and will try and connect
to it. And then this is actually the signal strength that
will go up and down depending on the signal
strength from the Wi-Fi chip
on the Pico. So that's pretty cool.
I was excited to finally get that all working.
I have a big-- a long article on my website about it.
And I'd originally planned to write it up about getting it--
like adding Wi-Fi to the PowerBook
100, but my PowerBook 100 died
as I was writing the article, so I had just got my
Mac Portable working and so I did it in that one instead.
And I don't know, maybe it was just too esoteric or something,
but I feel like the article didn't really get a lot of attention online.
But anyway,
so that's BlueSCSI,
the Wi-Fi support is currently in beta,
and then I have to finalize the release of the Desk Accessory
and it works in System 6 and System 7,
and I can go over the code for that in
a little bit. But also in the past year I
finally got version one of Subtext, my BBS software,
out and then added
FidoNet support to it.
Which was a lot of work.
So FidoNet-- like the actual FidoNet-- I'm not
a part of, but the collection of protocols and
message formats and stuff is used
by other alternate networks that
run the same protocols as FidoNet.
But it's just like, who's on the network is not FidoNet.
So my Kluge BBS is
part of fsxNet, which I
think is based out of Australia, but there's a few dozen BBSes on
it, so it's kind of lower traffic than FidoNet.
So there's like a central hub that my BBS connects
to every half hour or something and then downloads any
messages from the network that have been queued up for it, and then any
private mail for any users at my BBS. And then Subtext
downloads it. And it's actually a zip file.
So subtext unzips the
FidoNet -- I've already forgotten all of the terminology,
but I think they're the packets that are inside of the zip file
and then parses them and then imports them either
to a local folder
or a local board of messages or it
sends like private mail to any users that it finds
in it. So I can just show you what it looks like here.
So like these FSX_HAM and TST,
these are some of the boards
on fsxNet. So yeah,
that's my node on
that network, 21:3/177.
So these are the boards that I subscribe to
in fsxNet.
And then you can just read them like normal boards.
They're not threaded because the actual threading
of phyto net packets is not precise.
So some-- like some BBS implementations get
it wrong and so the threading gets screwed up. So I just decided to not
try and thread them.
So they're just in chronological order. But anyway, so you
can reply to a message and then it gets queued up locally and then as
soon as you disconnect and there's nobody connected,
Subtext will dial-- connect out to
the hub and then send it the packet
and then it gets kind of distributed out through that throughout the
network. So that was a lot of work because
there's a lot of separate components like the
PKUNZIP module and
the BinkP is like the protocol that it
uses to call out to a hub and then ask it to
download any packets and exchange packets with
it and whatever. So yeah, all of that
is running now on my Kludge BBS. And then I think
there's another somebody else running Subtext
out there on a classic Mac that's running their own
BBS on it. So I am no longer the only person
using my software.
So that's kind of neat. So all that's available for download
on my website and what else?
I made some bug fixes to the Wikipedia reader,
so it's a lot more stable now,
for the Wallops IRC client, I've been working on
multi window and multi tab support so you can be in separate
channels and each of them have its own tab, kind of like a
lot of modern IRC clients.
And it
basically looks like this a little tab bar. This is like a custom thing
that I wrote for drawing all these tabs.
And then it has resize support now,
and somebody else requested that it have
like, invert support. So the main window can all
be black and the text can be white. I haven't done that part of
it yet, but these are like, how the tabs work.
So that's Wallops. I'm still working on that,
I have a few other changes to do, and then I'll
release a new version of that pretty soon.
And what else?
The code for the Wi-Fi DA.
I had never written a Desk Accessory before, but there's
a sample project in THINK C
that it shows how to do like, all the weird hooks that
you need to do a desk accessory.
So you get like this thing that comes in
and then your main is basically responding to
things on that object, I guess. I don't know. This is
all kind of boilerplate code that came from the sample,
but you get like-- this is what your
main event loop looks like. And then for
the Wi-Fi DA, it's all my code that
creates a window and then parses
the-- the RSSI from the SCSI
device. So those are all like, custom SCSI commands that I wrote
into the BlueSCSI firmware to scan the list of networks
to get the current network and RSSI, and then to
join a new network with a password that I've
collected from the user.
Each of those does a SCSI command.
So this is when
you first launch it. It scans the SCSI bus to try and find where
the Wi-Fi device-- the network device
is. And then it looks
for the vendor and product. Then it knows
which ID on the bus. And then for each subsequent
command, it can just send like a
simple command and
then parse the data. And then when it gets
the list of Wi-Fi networks, it can build
the drop down menu.
And then when you select a new one, then it pops up the dialogue
asking you for the password. So it's
pretty simple. I'll be
releasing the source code and binary for that pretty soon once the
BlueSCSI Wi-Fi stuff is out of beta.
But other than that,
sorry, I can't really concentrate very well.
I guess this is COVID for you,
but that's about it. Just wanted to show
my table that I had at VCF
Midwest and show
this Wi-Fi Desk accessory.
Eric from BlueSCSI was selling them at VCF
Midwest, so I know a lot of people picked up the
new V2 units that have Wi-Fi support,
so if you haven't, you can buy them from
anybody that's reselling the BlueSCSI devices.
And you can try out the new beta firmware and have
networking on your old Macs.
So it's available, like in the DB 25 format that I
have on this Mac Plus, there's an internal PowerBook version
and then an internal 50 pin version,
and it should work the same on all of them.
The only concern is the antenna on the Pico W
is so small that if you're putting it inside of a
thick metal Mac,
your signal's probably gonna suck. But I
don't know, it's kind of cool to have it like in a PowerBook because you
can actually use the PowerBook. Oh, one other thing.
I have begun creating my own batteries
for the PowerBook 180
and that whole series, the 140,
150, 160, 170, 180.
So I'm gonna be-- I designed
a 3D printed case. And then it
can use like whatever
this would be called, little door from the stock battery.
And then it just clips on and
then that's like you put it in and then it just
closes and locks it. So you just
take the one off of your original battery
that is most certainly now dead, and then you can just
stick one of these in there. And so this
actually uses a battery pack inside of it that is made like a professional
one that's made by a battery company. So it has more
capacity than the original batteries slightly,
and then it has the safety cut off
with the thermostat inside so
it won't hopefully explode or anything like that.
And then I 3D print the case and then I add
the contacts and then kind of secure everything inside.
And then I'm going to be selling just like a full
unit like this, probably on my Tindie store,
where I have my WiFiStation for sale as
well. So I'll put a link to that
once that's live. And like I
said, I'm making them by hand. I have to print
each case and then assemble them, so I'm
not sure, and obviously buy the battery pack from
the manufacturer. So I bought ten of them and then
I'm slowly assembling them and kind
of doing a rundown test on my PowerBook 180 with each of them
to kind of calibrate them before I sell them.
But yeah, no one's making them anymore. Someone is making the batteries
for the PowerBook 100
that I have. So this is the one that
somebody's selling on ebay. And this one is actually
a lot more complicated because it's not just like
a nickel metal hydride like the other.
Like the one I'm selling, it actually uses Lithium Ion
batteries. And then it has this custom circuit
board that's needed due to the voltages required.
It basically can't charge both of the battery packs
at the same time. So this circuit board, I think,
charges one of them up to capacity,
and then it flips over and starts charging the other one or something like
that, so it's a lot more complicated. But mine doesn't need anything like
that, so I'm not sure how much I'm
going to be selling mine for. But anyway,
I guess that's it. I don't really have anything else to
talk about.
Yeah, so VCF Midwest was overwhelming,
but a good show, and I'm
not sure what I'm going to be showing next year, but I guess
I'll worry about that in a year from now, so anyway,
thanks for watching. And if you have any questions about the
Wi-Fi DA or the BlueSCSI Wi-Fi stuff,
let me know, and I'll see you later.