MARCHintosh 2025 Projects

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?

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.

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 said:

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....

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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.

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 outside the DNS, on ye public internet.

As an example, Macintosh Garden, System 7 Today, MacDomain as well as Revontulet are accessible through VesperNet.

Not only is there a domain registrar, there is also a fully functional search engine, with an indexer / crawler (which actually respects robots.txt, and thus privacy).

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 for this project.

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. For VesperNet users, a general domain is used for sending and receiving E-Mail.
• 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.
• Gopher:
  Another from the ground up server, almost feature complete, and hooks into both Vesper and MacDomain, the latter is because you simply create and manage your gopherspace via the web frontend. Fancy? Quite.
• Jabber/XMPP:
  This ties to the service run by Knezzen, and is also available via other platforms.
• ICQ/AIM:
  This really shines if you're on VesperNet, it is possible to register an UIN as well as a screen name for AIM - as well as manage your passwords, and there is no need to patch your client - they will simply just work (if the client is supported). While it works on the public, mainstream internet, I will not provide more help or further instructions that is available via the knowledge base.
• IRC:
  Discord for old people, check! It's up an running on ngIRCd while I keep hammering away at my own solution, which unfortunately has hit a few snags. Though it's jam-packed with features not seen in any other IRCd as far as I'm aware. Very close to deployment into the real world.
• 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?

• Web Directory [semi-there]
  Another "nice to have" feature, and goes well with a search engine. As of right now there aren't enough sites to warrant launching this just yet.
• Public Netatalk
  There are some thoughts and ideas behind this.

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.

fogWraith said:

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

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What about https://oldavista.com/ ?

mmu_man said:

What about https://oldavista.com/ ?

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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

JDW said:

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

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This got me to sanity check myself, looking at the FPS counter in Doom, looking at every detail Macbench The card has 512Kb of cache onboard, I think it calls itself "Backside cache", it was running at 45Mhz, the standard bus speed of the system. I cranked it up to its maximum (192 or something), and now the system if absolutely flying, 98% compared to the default G3 300 in Macbench.

Thanks for the nudge.

No videos, but have been working on getting a 7100 up and running. Started out with a 7100/66 that I picked up early last month. This was the machine that had the capacitors that had corroded severely, yet seemed to run ok otherwise. I wound up retiring it, and picked up a 7100/80 from Ryan Cook (the guy who's the son of the people who ran Sun Remarketing) that was incomplete. Kludged it together with the power supply, floppy drive, and video card from the 7100/66, a drive chassis from an early IIvx (aka P600), a Quantum Fireball TM 1.2GB drive, and an Apple CD 600e that I bought from Brett B. over at the other site. Had a couple issues when I first got it up and running, mainly my forgetting that the CD-ROM drive needs to be unterminated when the hard drive needs to be, so it would start up, then the hard drive would act like it had sticky bumper syndrome and spin down. But, whenever I'd reboot, the drive would spin up. Got that sorted out, and the machine is running. Hard drive apparently came out of a 6100/66 and has System 7.5.5 on it. It will be getting upgraded to 8.1, and maybe even 8.6, depending on if I can find where I put the 8.6 disc.


-J

Hello everyone!

For Marchintosh, Keith and I filmed a fun video regarding the unlikely possibility of running the 575 logic board, PowerPC 601 card, AND the Apple IIe card simultaneously! Check it out here:

I'm pretty new to using pre-Intel Macs so I'm not really in a position to do any projects per se. I'm just trying to spend the month in OS 9 as much as possible to try learning the system. It's definitely very different than what I'm used to. I'm putting together several articles for my Substack on it and I'll share them in a single post here when they're done so as not to spam the thread.

Been tinkering with the Thunderscan 80’s contraption that turns your ImageWriter ii into a scanner. After opening the scanned image into Photoshop 1.0 (it can open Thunderscan format files) and saving out as a tiff and then sending it to my modern MacBook Pro by way of Fetch and BlueSCSI WiFi, I was amazed by the high quality 8 bpp grayscale resolution. Impressive for what it is. Since Mac’s were 1bpp I suppose not many people realized how high rez the scans actually were back in its day