Booting 7.0.1 From:ROM (Mac IIsi) /W Apps! My New Toaster:-)

Having this rom almost makes it like a Mac Gaming console

picture of the Custom ROM, It's like vintage and modern technology come together!

That is SUPER cool.

here is simcity, made sure that was on the rom

i built a city, i am going to let it sit for a few hours, see how stable this thing is.

so far its been rock solid.

Thats 's awesome! Is this something that can be run on a smaller macintosh like the quadra? Or even a compact? This would be something I would love to have if I had the resource. I'm working on getting the imac to boot from a CF card for the silent type as well.. not as cool as what youre doing though.. :b&w: have fun

That's ALL in ROM? 8-o

That's f%*! That has to be one of the most brilliant things I have seen done with the custom ROM SIMM.

i know , it takes you a second to realize how cool this is.

In My testing:

When you choose RA boot keys,(Copy Rom to Ram Disk) it takes like 30 full seconds before it boots.

This is only with the Macintosh IIsi, Macintosh IIci only takes like 5 full seconds.

Haven't tried the SE/30 yet, should work in that as well!

ok well norton utilities tops out at 398 on the "test volume" benchmark

its pegged, but it should be, its a ram disk. it won't let me run the test from ROM because it cant write.

PM me if you are interested in one of these,i can get you in-touch with the right guys!

This ROM works with the following:

IIx, IIsi, IIci, and SE/30

I feel like I've stumbled in on the middle of conversation. What, exactly, is going on here? What is in this IIsi?

This Macintosh IIsi has a Custom ROM Simm installed, This SIMM contains A Modified IIsi ROM, Mac OS and Applications. The custom simm has an 8mb capacity.

By Holding "R" down at power on, it will boot from rom to MacOS in Locked Read Only mode

By Holding "RA" down at power on, It copy's MacOS and Applications to an 8mb ramdisk, and is read and writable.

IF you use "RA" you want to make sure you have atleast 16 or so megs of ram because 8mb of it gets eaten up off the bat.

the Mac IIsi has been running (from rom only) for 24 hours straight, just now, i'd say its pretty stable.

pretty awesome!

Ok, I'v been thinking, Why would you want to buy one of these ROM SIMMS, and install it in your:

(IIx, IIsi, IIci, and SE/30)

- 32bit Clean! This simm will take your dirty 32bit machine and make it clean!

- Noise, With out the scsi hard drive in there, there is no noise at all.

- New Life, Even if you throw this in your SE/30 with a bad SCSI chip, Your machine is now up and booted, Apps running.

- Energy, if your aging PSU is already slightly weak, poping this rom in, and removing HD will relive your poor psu

- Speed, This thing is GD fast, were talking 4 second boot up times. Apps open as fast as you let off the mouse button, Instantly.

- Cost, Compared to CF2SCSI these simms are cheap! PM Dougg3 he will let you know the cost of a blank ROM 8mb simm

- 100% Fully customizable! you can put what ever you want on this thing, you got 8 mb's of space Talk to Dougg3 he sells a programmer for this 8mb simm, witch is also very reasonable in price.

- Reliability, your new rom is never going to develop bad sectors like Flash or Rotating media.

- Heat, the simm never even gets warm to the touch.

- Clutter, in the case of my IIsi, with out the HD, SCSI Cable, Power Cable, The inside of the case is now very tidy!

- Development, once you get this Rom Simm and programmer, you are open to options that were never available, including

changing boot up sound, and changing boot ICON, Etc

- Support, buying this will help continue the project, allows Dougg3 to continue making these simms

The only con I can think of is space, 8meg, however with 7.0.1 loaded on it, and Vintage apps, it seems like 8mb is plenty of room, you can always change what is on it, Taylor it to your liking!

If you have a IIci, you can stick 128MBs in that puppy. So if you use the ROM+RAM combo, that machine will be crazy fast with plenty of storage!

my only issue is getting ahold of some 16mb 30pin simms,

i'm absolutely not going to pay the robbery prices on epay.

It occurs to me that something handy to have in ROM on a compact Mac (SE/30 for example) would be a good serial terminal emulator.

Now that there can anything be preinstalled on that ROM, including the set up of a RAM disk with preconfigured contents, one could automate any task that formerly was doable with a warm restart, only. Hwo fast it works! Think of custom drivers for peripherals to boot from alternativley, like originally unsupported drives and removable media. I admit that I have no clue about the level of reverse engineering skills required for such a nice hack, but how about invoking a choice of available boot options by using the Option-Key ("Alt"), like in recent machines?

Btw.: Might this be related to the concept of a Helper Disk like used in XpostFacto, which enables old G3 Macs to boot from nearly any connected storage?

I missed something. Who's making these?

dougg3

uniserver, is that 7.0.1 w/tuneup? I may need to get one earlier than anticipated . . .

Setting the SIMM up with a full suite of diagnostic/troubleshooting tools, basic apps like ClarisWorks, Z-Term and a GraphicConverter/SlideShow/Pictureframe app with a few simple games thrown in could be very interesting indeed.

It should also be noted that bbraun created the amazing ROM disk driver that makes it all work, and olePigeon designed the ROM disk icon and the jolly roger logo on the SIMM and programmer board.

Good points, I thought he meant the BigSIMM that holds all that cool stuff . . .

. . . that bbraun got running.

I'm still diggin' the DigitalBuccaneer logo as well. :approve:

It's still hard for even me to believe this all works, its almost like its black magic

Heh. For some real black-magic funtiems, I'm looking forward to booting from a LAN disk...

AMAZING! We already knew it was possible, but seeing it actually running is just great

If I understand it correctly, if no key is pressed upon power-up, the machine will try to boot from an ordinary disk, right? Could that be modified in order to make the Copy ROM to RAMdisk boot option the default, leaving some key for the disk boot mode?

I can update the driver to do that if there's actual interest. I have to go through some contortions to not boot the ROM disk so always booting it would be easier. It's just a matter of defining the desired behavior.

A behaviour according to existing standards would be most preferable, like firstly check for some Alt-key depressed to invoke a custom boot drive selection and (if that is not the case) secondly look up boot disk settings stored in PRAM. Probably one could allow to optionally directly address a boot partition like with HDT formatted drives, or even better pick a System Folder from a selection of disks or partitions }

Formerly used shortcuts to influence the boot drive selection should work, still. It is always nice to allow experienced users to utilize their knowledge in evolving systems, still.

Are there any chances to make this hack available for other machines, like a PowerBook?

i just wanted to say thanks again for the efforts of dougg3 and bbraun.

Is it at all possible to have a color logo for the Happy Mac? I know that new world machines have the color Happy Mac.

Is it at all possible to have a color logo for the Happy Mac?

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Interesting notion!
It probably won't work on some machines, such as the SE/30, which don't support color.

However, I don't see why not on color-capable Macs, such as the Mac II series.

c

It probably won't work on some machines, such as the SE/30, which don't support color

Click to expand...

Perhaps a greyscale happy Mac for an Exceed SE/30. }

I miss the Picasso Mac after System 7.1. I think it'd be nifty to replace the Happy Mac with a color Picasso Mac.

The PPC ROMs use Color QuickDraw to draw the color icons, which are stored as 'cicn' resources in the ROM's resource map. I believe adopting this approach would work for anything that has Color QuickDraw support (such as the IIsi ROM already being used), regardless of what the current monitor settings support (Color QuickDraw figures it all out for you). The PPC ROMs use the following cicn resource ids:

-20020 for happy mac

-20021 for "empty" floppy icon

-20022 for '?'

-20023 for 'X'

Backporting the code to do this to the IIsi ROM doesn't seem too bad. When adding new code to the ROM I've been reusing the space from the RAM test functions, which have been disabled, then bsr.l to it, using a hand calculated offset.

The more interesting aspect is modifying the ROM's resource map to accommodate the new 'cicn' color icon resources. The IIsi ROM's resource map header lives after the resources, and before the declrom. So, the resource map can't grow without displacing the Slot 0 declrom.

Basically the ROM looks like this:

header information

code

last resource entry (which happens to be the .netBOOT driver)

last-1 resource entry

...

first resource entry

resource map header

Slot 0 declaration ROM w/video drivers, etc.

The most scalable approach would be to move the declaration ROM out, figure out all the things that refer to it (hopefully just located via looking at the ROM length field in the ROM header), update those, move the resource map header out, update the offset to that, then add the icons, then add the color icon drawing routines, and make the system try calling those first, and if they fail, fall back to the current B&W icons. Growing the resource map will be necessary eventually anyway for adding other things in the future (drivers, cursors, fonts, whatever).

Or just put stuff in the framebuffer and hope it works.

Is it something basic that's still supported in the older version of QuickDraw in System 7? Might pose a problem for System 6 unless the 32-bit QuickDraw init is put onto the ROM somehow.

My next machine is going to be a IIci, I am trying hard to find one. Found a guy from ebay.

His name is captinbob, he has a MASSIVE apple collection, pretty much a 3 story house FULL

I personally feel it would be the ultimate machine that works with dougg3's ROM SIMM.

The IIci /w Cache card sounds like a fairly beastly 030 machine.

That's what I use. It also supports an insane amount of RAM and an 040 CPU via the PDS. The power supply is also easily hackable to an ATX. It's a great hackable machine.

Could this idea of having the OS and applications on ROM be used on the ROM chips in original 128k and 512k Macs? It would be mighty nice to have System 4.1 and MacWrite on a 512k Mac without needing a floppy (except to save to).

(If this can be done, I'm sure it has. Anybody got a thread link I could go check out? My search-fu is weak today.)

nope i dont think anything is available for the 512k, just the (IIx, IIci, IIsi, SE/30) skipped right over the IIcx.

No idea on what it would take to do a ROM disk on the older classic Macs. The ROM SIMM slot makes it easy to add extra ROM. Without that slot you'd probably have to hack onto certain address lines elsewhere on the logic board. I have no idea if any more space is even available through all the PALs and stuff on the logic board...

uniserver, I'm pretty sure the ROM SIMM should work fine on a IIcx. This picture implies it has a ROM SIMM slot:



I can't seem to tell if it has a ROM enable/disable jumper like the IIci has though. Have you tried it in a IIcx by any chance? It's a machine that the SIMM is thus far untested in.

I will tell you in 15 minutes, babies have been asleep, and I just opened my package from SCOTT, that arrived today,

Scott sent me a IIcx, it's right here, I just have to put my IIsi away for a bit, and pop dougg3's simm in this new IIcx, I'll see what happens

Could this idea of having the OS and applications on ROM be used on the ROM chips in original 128k and 512k Macs? It would be mighty nice to have System 4.1 and MacWrite on a 512k Mac without needing a floppy (except to save to).

Click to expand...

Yes it could. But it does not work now.

I'm interested in this, partly due to having just acquired a pile of these old machines. I've also got several other things going right now, so if someone else wanted to jump on this, go for it!

Some more investigation is necessary, but here's just off the top of my head:

pre-Plus systems have more potential due to not having the SCSI registers in the way. 128k/512k/512ke have 5MB of contiguous space from ROM to the SCC registers.

It is my understanding that A1-A16 go to the ROM sockets and the two 8 bit ROMs are interleaved (one being the high byte and one being the low byte of the 16bit bus).

I don't know offhand what is being used for their output enable & chip select lines. It'd probably be a good idea to figure that out.

Ideally a small adapter PCB would be made, but a home-made job could be done out of two DIP28 sockets.

Take two 29F040 or something similar, use the socket(s) to make sure VCC doesn't go to the wrong pin on the 29F040, then solder wires from the additional address pins on the 29F040's to the appropriate address lines on the 68000. People do something similar for C64 systems, although there they typically use it with a switch on the extra address lines to allow selecting between several different ROM images.

Anyway, if someone wanted to try that, and then use macsbug or microbug or something to inspect the contents of the address space to make sure it showed up right, that'd be a good first step. That'd get you 1MB of space (minus 64k or 128k for the actual rom contents), which isn't too shabby for these machines. It'd be enough to boot and have some recovery apps. Like the Serial Disk driver.

Once you've got something where you can put stuff into the address space, then it's just a Simple Matter of Programming to make the driver work. And then wedge it into the ROM somewhere.

Heck, just figuring out a test rig for these machines would be handy, like the ATX extension cable trick for the SE/30, so one could work on the board on a bench without having to constantly swap it in and out of the case.

ok, for some reason the IIcx will not see anything higher then 8mb ram, also when i boot an os, in memory it doesn't give me the option of 32bit mode, this is with 64 meg installed.

so i found the jumper for the onboard rom on/off, and no dice douggs rom give bad chime instantly.

under the psu there are 2 jumpers that are jumped, i don't know what they are... doubt they are some kind of over 8meg ram cut off thing.

that is what i have so far...

LEM and Everymac Both say this is a 128meg ram capable... this thing was re-capped... maybe that has something to do with it... ? dunno...

there are 4 rom chips on this mainboard of the IIcx just like the IIci.

The IIcx's stock ROM is the same as the IIx and SE/30 -- i.e. not 32-bit clean. So that's why you don't get the option of 32-bit mode with the stock ROM. You either need a 32-bit clean ROM or something like MODE32 to use more than 8 MB.

Interesting that the ROM SIMM gives an error chime. We'll have to see if it can boot if the SIMM is programmed with a stock IIcx ROM. If you're even getting a death chime at all and the ROM SIMM jumper is correctly disabling the onboard ROMs, it means instructions are definitely executing from the SIMM so the SIMM itself is probably working. Can you verify that you've truly disabled the onboard ROMs to the point where if the ROM SIMM isn't installed nothing happens on power up?

Maybe the IIsi ROM can't boot a IIcx. I consider that unlikely, but I'm just throwing ideas out there...

ok this is what i got, the thing will not see anything more then 8mb period,

also the jumper is correct, jumper on, onboard rom is on, jumper onboard rom is off, if you turn it on , with jumper off it comes on, black screen and does nothing...

if i insert the 8mb hacked rom, it will boot up, Mac Sound, waits about 10 seconds then makes the chime of death.

i tried doing nothing, i tried holding down r and ra, with same result... seems like this rom simm is not working in the IIcx for some reason.

OK, that means the SIMM itself is working fine. I'm 99% sure that if the SIMM was burned with a stock IIcx ROM it would boot from the hard drive with no problems. I'm thinking there's something about the IIsi ROM programmed onto it that is causing it to crash, but I don't know enough about the ROM to know for sure.

That poor IIcx is wandering off to see if there are monitor sense lines active on a port that doesn't exist yet, to set up the buffering circuitry (to be made available in the next model release) for the setting aside of the correct amount of RAM in Bank A, to suck it out for use as a frame buffer it absolutely doesn't need and then dying a gruesome and sudden death in its attempts to figure out which is its elbow and which is its @$ . . .

so what you are saying is the IIci,IIsi and SE/30 all have onboard video,

and because the IIcx has a video card, that could be what is causing the issue??

i've not tested with the IIx but i think they have, this rom should work with the IIx, that has no onboard graphics.

Unless i am misunderstanding something

Yeah, I don't think the lack of onboard video is the problem. bbraun tests the hacked ROM on a IIx and it works fine, so it should be pretty much the same as the IIcx I'm thinking.

You'll have to experiment with various ROM images on the SIMM and see what works and what doesn't...

ok no problem, i will.

In the Mac IIcx,

I replaced the big (3) 470uf caps and the 220uf one, now all is working fine,

64 megs of ram shows up, Hacked ROMM Simm works, soft power is working great

uniserver, you are seriously making me drool over the prospect of having the SuperIIsi™ boot from the ROM SIMM with the custom startup sound:

We're at T-Minus 10 & counting . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . . ignition . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . we have liftoff!

Click to expand...

Followed by the Rocket's WHOOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! on re-boot! [] ]'>

Now to search out the perfect NASA sound track . . .

. . . and find someone to swap a Hardware Hack for a Software Hack of the RocketWare and RocketShare Inits to excise the IIsi exception. [}] ]'>

. . . anyone want me to hack their IIsi to a (these goodies not included) NuBus Adapter/Rocket/NIC ready SuperIIsi™ Spec?

Arranging a three-way goodies-for-services swap might work out as well!

You should msg dougg3 and have him send one out to you,

He can't budge on $30 bucks a Rom Simm, because that is around where he has to sell them for to keep the non-profit project going.

I just wanted to clarify what was going on with the IIcx, before i re-capped it, even if i had more then 8meg of ram installed, and in 24bit mode, it would not show my 68megs installed. Normally it would show you how much ram you have (Eg. 68megs installed), However it was only showing a total of 8. Normally a re-capped (fully working) machine in 24 bit mode, still shows your 68 megs, it just wont let you use anything more then 8mb.

after i recapped it, the 68megs of ram I had installed showed, then tried mode32 and it all worked.

then tried dougg3's ROM simm, it worked too.

bbraun has has a better image out, it works even better then before.

It's been some months now, but I still enjoy this rom simm all the time.

Moral of the story, if its not acting normal and needs caps, cap it, then it will probably work fine afterwards