MARCHintosh 2025 Projects

[Arbystpossum]

The processor card I have is this weird XLR8 Interex thing, and it took me far to long to realize that one knob is for the CPU clock speed and the other is for the BUS speed. But I got it running at 298Mhz at 45Mhz bus, so it's slick. Kinda wish I had run a benchmark program to show the difference between a 604e at 225Mhz and this. What's a good benchmark program?

 

[eric]

AfterDark fixed for MacOS 9.2.2! https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/after-dark-494-collection

 

[Trekintosh]

Got USB on my Whisper card just in time for a Wings to show up on eBay. Maybe this whisper will have been my practice board.

 

[Kai Robinson]

The processor card I have is this weird XLR8 Interex thing, and it took me far to long to realize that one knob is for the CPU clock speed and the other is for the BUS speed. But I got it running at 298Mhz at 45Mhz bus, so it's slick. Kinda wish I had run a benchmark program to show the difference between a 604e at 225Mhz and this. What's a good benchmark program?

MacBench!

 

[JDW]

MacBench!

You're going to be seeing a fair amount of MacBench in my newest video, Made for MARCHintosh, which hopefully will be out by next week. I will be sure to post the link here when it goes public.

UPDATE: The VIDEO is out! Happy #MARCHintosh!

 

[Arbystpossum]

These results are kind of concerning. The 604e card is running at 225mhz with 1mb of L2 cache, the 298Mhz G3 with the the L2 cache is much faster but will crash if you look at it wrong, and the G3 without cache tests LOWER than the 604e.

Real world testing, the G3 feels like it's snapper, games feel more fluid, but I'll likely need games/software with Fps counters for clear results. I thought the G3 was going to be a massive improvement, but apparently not.

 

[JDW]

I thought the G3 was going to be a massive improvement, but apparently not.

I don't know what falls under Eric's definition of "Projects" for MARCHintosh, or if this thread is open to talk about "what fabulous things we're doing this month to celebrate it" (as opposed to this thread being strictly focused on major engineering development projects), but I would like to just say in response to what you wrote that I lived through the PPC days, and it wasn’t pretty in the early days when the 603 and 604 were on the scene, and certainly not the 601.

The release of the PM6100 brought horrible and shocking slowness as much as it did speed, mainly because in those days not a lot of apps had been reworked with PPC-native code. But all that was beyond the control of the Mac-only Faithful, and we all pressed on, upgrading, then upgrading again, with slow, incremental improvements over a number of years. Things really didn’t start to get fun until we hit about 1GHz.

With 1GHz or higher, you then have enough performance to truly enjoy the machine. By the time the PPC world hit those speeds, most apps were PPC-native too, which was a rich blessing beyond words. We take that for granted today, as we can get any Native app we want for free on Macintosh Garden.

My favorite PPC machine is the G4 Cube. It’s stock speed of 450MHz is faster than the 604e you’ve been testing, but it’s still a little hampered (especially if you want to run OS X) UNTIL you upgrade it to a 1.2GHz or faster CPU card (which I’ve done on both my Cubes). The machine remains compact, yet it really flies (for a PPC machine, anyway) due to the 1GHz+ clock speed. And that is really why the Cube has been my Avatar for so many years. It’s small, looks lovely even today in 2025, and has enough speed to run PPC apps (even heavy games) so that you can be truly happy with it. You're not constantly shaking your fist at the Mac screaming, "Curses!"

That’s not to say there is no merit to the 604e processor tech. It’s just that RAM and MHz matter a huge amount in the world of PPC. And that’s precisely why I never upgraded my Color Classic to a Takky, sticking with the 68K Mystic instead, knowing I am going to be happier with overclocked 68K performance (for the 68k apps I can use with it), especially since the fastest Takky is limited to 500MHz, by way of a Sonnet Crescendo/L2 G3.

 

[Arbystpossum]

I don't know what falls under Eric's definition of "Projects" for MARCHintosh, or if this thread is open to talk about "what fabulous things....

I wasn't a part of the Mac world when all of this was happening, more so the PC world, and even then more like the super budget pc world. I haven't used a 601, but I can totally feel the problems with early 7.5 PPC builds and something like 8.6. I'm seeing it years later, and I find people's personal accounts fascinating.

My particular account is puzzling to me because I thought the G3 was a huge turn in speed with the Powerpc line, but benchmarks claim otherwise. Though, bus speed is something I got a crash course in when installing a 68040 upgrade card in an LCII and not being impressed by the result.

Perhaps the G3 can make better use of a bus speed that isn't 45mhz. I'll have to do more tests when I have the time.

 

[JDW]

My particular account is puzzling to me because I thought the G3 was a huge turn in speed with the Powerpc line, but benchmarks claim otherwise.

Again, it's the clock speed, more than anything else. If you could boost that G3's clock higher, you'd see the benefits.

I've got a PowerMac 9600 at the office, which originally had a stock 300MHz 603e card in it (still have that card, actually). It was later upgraded to a 400MHz G4 (7400) CPU. Compared to my G4 Cube running at 1.3GHz, the upgraded 400MHz 9600 takes an eternity to boot OS 9. It's really quite painful. And while that 400MHz G4 performance is better than the 300MHz 603e, the clock speed of the G4 is still too low to make an important difference. And like I said, even my G4 Cubes with their stock 450MHz G4 processors were a bit lacking, which is why CPU upgrades to 1GHz and beyond became so popular. At 1.2GHz, OS 9 boots in lightning fast time, and it feels almost "emulator fast" in normal use.

BTW, I was a major player in the Cubeowner forums back in the day along with the famous GeneHack and all the heavy modders. It is SO SAD that it was shutdown and all those YEARS of posts, hacking, upgrading and replying is now lost forever. So SAD! We talked long and hard about performance, MHz, and all that... Gone forever. And that's why when we founded TinkerDifferent, we organized it in such a way that it could live on long after the original founders are gone. I hope this forum is still around in some form a hundred years hence!

 

[fogWraith]

With 11 days into March, and lord knows how much time has been spent on this project behind closed curtains. I'm a bit late to the party. In any case, I don't do YouTube or social media, so I thought I could leave some notes here.

Project Name: VesperNet [URL]
Project Description: Alternative root DNS server, with the capability of launching multiple slave servers, in events of growth.
I would consider the project to be pretty ambitious and fairly niche, since I am the only one working on it at the moment. I am not expecting a heavy influx of users or heavy use even though this project has a goal to be long-term.

It started out as a simple idea, to detach from the mainstream internet and achieve some sort of 'peace of mind' with my tiny fleet of Apple products, to reverse engineer and work on small projects. Then it dawned on me, I could make it public as well, and let others use the DNS server if they wanted - so next issue was ... what good does a DNS server do if there aren't any services tied to it, to make it more engaging and possibly promote growth?

Project Additions: The first service to launch next to the DNS server is a fully functional domain registrar (domains.com on Vesper), and since the DNS server is detached from the mainstream internet, the sky is truly the limit (except for the fact that users can only register 1 domain every 24 hours to keep it sane). All domains that are registered are only accessible within the network, however it is entirely possible to manage owned property to tie in services from out on ye public internet.

As an example, Macintosh Garden as well as Revontulet are accessible through VesperNet.

In any case, to further grow the project, I have re-instated an old domain of mine, MacDomain [URL], which is accessible both via the public internet and from within VesperNet, which also gives additional perks to users on the network. Entirely re-purposed.

Via MacDomain,

• E-Mail: POP3 and SMTP
  Both services / servers have been written from the ground up, and does indeed act like real mail services, however mail can not be delivered from outside the environment into the environment, and mail out is never relayed to outside the environment. It is entirely contained. I have compensated for vintage mail clients that are lacking in one way or the other (various ways of authentication), to make it fully functional.
  
  It is possible to request the account to be tied to (currently limited) valid domains within the mail environment, each account@domain being its own mailbox of sorts.
• Usenet:
  This too, is unfederated and a clean slate, written from the ground up to fit the glove that is the project. It does currently not support mail.
• Web Hosting:
  An entire floppy's worth of storage (1.4M), a subdomain that can be changed, additional endpoints if the browser doesn't send the Host header, ability to connect the VesperNet domain registrar account and actually tie your domain to the free hosting. There is a lot in this package.
• Jabber/XMPP: This ties to the service run by Knezzen, and is also available via other platforms.
• User Accounts: These are currently manually verified, and there is no notification as to whether or not it has been approved or denied, I have ideas for improvements here. At this time, the one account works across all the services on MacDomain, so there is no need to create more than one.

Project Status: This is still in active development (bugs and errors can occur) and has thus far been a great learning experience - and there is even more planned. As far as it has come now, I am sort of confident enough to unleash the beast into the wild.

So what else, in the immediate near future?

• Search Engine [added, working - search.com]
  Something like this feels somewhat essential, think Google ~1998-2000.
• Web Indexer / Crawler [added, working]
  While actually respecting privacy and robots.txt and sensible traffic settings.
• Web Directory [semi-there]
  Another "nice to have" feature, and goes well with a search engine.
• Public Netatalk
  There are some thoughts and ideas behind this.
• Gopher
  In the grand scheme of things, leaving Gopher behind would be absurd.

I guess, in short, that describes my contribution this year. If there is input, feedback, tips, ideas, reports, questions - whatever, I'll answer to the best of my efforts.

Thanks to...
@eric , Europa, @phipli for ideas, feedback, testing.

 

[mmu_man]

Search Engine
Something like this feels somewhat essential, think Google ~1998-2000.

What about https://oldavista.com/ ?

 

[fogWraith]

What about https://oldavista.com/ ?

oldavista is great, however it would be a tough nut to crack, while it would be possible to incorporate it on the network, all results would be unavailable, since when using the DNS server, you're kinda no longer on the mainstream internet. The easier, or rather better solution would be to develop a search engine that relies on the data that it receives from the indexer/crawler, which of course would be locked behind to the environment as well