Thread
Crazy/hilarious eBay auctions
There was usually one of these topics over on 68kmla, but I don't think we've got one here yet, so here's one to start it off:
Link!
The most surprising thing about this one is that there's actually bids on it! What do you reckon is in the box? The only thing guaranteed to be in there by what it says in the listing is cash, so I think a $0.01 coin
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Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)
Link!
The most surprising thing about this one is that there's actually bids on it! What do you reckon is in the box? The only thing guaranteed to be in there by what it says in the listing is cash, so I think a $0.01 coin
_________________
Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)
I started making a new modern browser for use on System 6. I named it Browsy. Right now it is just the chrome of a browser, and doesn't actually render pages or make network requests.
It is written in C and builds in Apple's MPW.
https://github.com/clehner/browsy
I haven't worked on this in a while but I wanted to put it out here in case it may inspire others.
For the actual HTML/CSS parsing and rendering, layout and painting, I would consider using netsurf or some of its dependencies, or Matt Brubeck's "Let's build a browser engine!" guide. The network and painting code would be specific to the Macintosh Toolkit and MacTCP, but parsing and layout could probably be taken from netsurf and its subprojects, or other existing projects.
It is written in C and builds in Apple's MPW.
https://github.com/clehner/browsy
I haven't worked on this in a while but I wanted to put it out here in case it may inspire others.
For the actual HTML/CSS parsing and rendering, layout and painting, I would consider using netsurf or some of its dependencies, or Matt Brubeck's "Let's build a browser engine!" guide. The network and painting code would be specific to the Macintosh Toolkit and MacTCP, but parsing and layout could probably be taken from netsurf and its subprojects, or other existing projects.
How people can be so bloody dumb is far beyond me. :-/
I'm sorry....i'm just having "Bad Customer Blues"...a thread on this will probably follow later. :-/
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"I mean, how hard can it be?" - Jeremy Clarkson
The Infamous LCGuy - Now back with Amazing Working iMac Action!
I'm sorry....i'm just having "Bad Customer Blues"...a thread on this will probably follow later. :-/
_________________
"I mean, how hard can it be?" - Jeremy Clarkson
The Infamous LCGuy - Now back with Amazing Working iMac Action!
Well it probably is technically "legit", as all it promises is that will be in the box is cash (it only says there might be one of the other things), and that if you bid $100 you'll get $20. When he says things like "I JUST ADDED ANOTHER EXPENSIVE GADGET TO THE BOX!", "expensive" doesn't actually mean anything ie his definition of "expensive" could be $0.50 _________________
Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)
Netsurf can run on quite low end machines... I guess it is possible it could work ok. The machines I usually run it on are relatively beefy (50-85Mhz sparcstations) but... I see no reason an SE/30 couldn't run it well enough. Certainly my Powerbook 190 could run it... and Netsurf would likely render better than iCab. Another possiblity would be to grab the FLTK 1.1 source as a starting point and merge classic mac suport back into FLTK 1.3 that way you could havea shot at building Dillo or Dplus. The netsurf developers a great guys also they helped me straighen out an endianness bug a few months back on big endian arches.
If you are unable to get a compiler that can build the netsurf libraries... perhaps you can try out that Retro68 gcc based cross compiler assuming MPW etc.. can link to the binaries it builds. Apparently you need a copy of the universal headers to use it though.
Why not VNC? ... well why not just use the machine VNC is running on at that point.....
If you go the coprocessor route... in order to maintain coolness
... I suggest FPGA that way you could put a second 68k core on there or somthing cool like that. among other things. I think thats sort of how those radius rocket cards work (they essentially slap a mac on a card as an accelerator right?)
Btw you current progress looks excellent!
If you are unable to get a compiler that can build the netsurf libraries... perhaps you can try out that Retro68 gcc based cross compiler assuming MPW etc.. can link to the binaries it builds. Apparently you need a copy of the universal headers to use it though.
Why not VNC? ... well why not just use the machine VNC is running on at that point.....
If you go the coprocessor route... in order to maintain coolness
... I suggest FPGA that way you could put a second 68k core on there or somthing cool like that. among other things. I think thats sort of how those radius rocket cards work (they essentially slap a mac on a card as an accelerator right?)Btw you current progress looks excellent!
I can get slow but usable browsing with iBrowse on an A1200 with a 50MHz 030 (and with no L2 cache, the difference between a 50Mhz 030 and a 16-33MHz 030 is not all that great.) I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that an SE/30 with a well-coded browser could get similar results.
Not outside the realm of possibility. They've already done it for the Apple II:
http://www.applelogic.org/CarteBlanche.html
http://www.applelogic.org/CarteBlanche.html
I'm glad you guys like the idea of this project.
I don't have a coprocessor. In fact, the development so far I did in BasiliskII, although I tested the program on a Mac Plus (which I don't have access to currently).
For a thin client approach, it would be interesting to have a special proxy server do the fetching, parsing, and maybe even rendering. It could pass paint instructions or text/rectangle data to the client on the mac. However, the browser would have to respond to scrolling and window resizing, so maybe the proxy server would just pass the style data and DOM tree to the client. I think (perhaps naively) that with a good design and implementation, the full browser could be made performant on old hardware.
Retro68k looks cool. I will look into using it for this project, or for compiling netsurf's dependencies.
I don't have a coprocessor. In fact, the development so far I did in BasiliskII, although I tested the program on a Mac Plus (which I don't have access to currently).
For a thin client approach, it would be interesting to have a special proxy server do the fetching, parsing, and maybe even rendering. It could pass paint instructions or text/rectangle data to the client on the mac. However, the browser would have to respond to scrolling and window resizing, so maybe the proxy server would just pass the style data and DOM tree to the client. I think (perhaps naively) that with a good design and implementation, the full browser could be made performant on old hardware.
Retro68k looks cool. I will look into using it for this project, or for compiling netsurf's dependencies.
I know that both Links (aka: MacWWW) and the older Lynx are text Based Browsers that can work on System 6, as there are ports for them on the Apple II+/e/c/gs. You will need System 6 TCP/IP to work with them.
Things get tricky with graphical browsers, most want System 7 with TCP/IP. But Mosaic can be tricked to run on System 6. Thing is, it requires at leas 4MB of RAM, so it will only for on a Mac II Series or a SE/30 with 8MB or more. The same with Netscape 2.0.
MacWeb seems to be better as it can work on B/W Macs but wants System 7, damn. One could tweak it to work on System 6 with TCP/IP. It can do either Text Only or Text & Graphical Browsing. You'll need Resedit to do the tweaking with.
Look over this link for some details: http://www.ccadams.org/se/macweb.html
Things get tricky with graphical browsers, most want System 7 with TCP/IP. But Mosaic can be tricked to run on System 6. Thing is, it requires at leas 4MB of RAM, so it will only for on a Mac II Series or a SE/30 with 8MB or more. The same with Netscape 2.0.
MacWeb seems to be better as it can work on B/W Macs but wants System 7, damn. One could tweak it to work on System 6 with TCP/IP. It can do either Text Only or Text & Graphical Browsing. You'll need Resedit to do the tweaking with.
Look over this link for some details: http://www.ccadams.org/se/macweb.html
I'd like to see this browser happen if it it doesn't support images etc... text only. It would be nice if it could get formatting mostly right though. Forgoing any accelerator support would mean it could run on most all 68k macs.
Just about any DSP from that period would be woefully incapable versus what you could slap together in even a small modern FPGA... and most likely harder to code for since the toolchains are ancient.
An FPGA accelerator would be hard to design and write accelerators for but once you had them the ought to be pretty easy to write applications for.
If you take the Pippistrello for example it can have a Spartan LX9 - LX45 FPGA so you could have cheap or expensive boards in the $100-300 range by using a difference size FPGA. Perhaps modify that board to accept a motherboard adapter so it could work on the various buses. I think that should be possible, HDMI out, Audio out, SCSI emulator (CD, HD , Floppy, Scanner.... lots could be done there), Diimo030 clone + larger cache, Ramdisk, application specific accelerators it might acutally be best to implement these on one or more generic Microblaze processors running around 100Mhz... you could add a vector coprocessor etc... You could put a Parallax proppeller in the FPGA and go crazy with that it would probably use less than half of an LX45 since a slightly size reduce version will fit in a DE0 board with 22k luts. There are also Zync FPGAs which include an ARM hard core... which could handle alot of things far faster than a softcore.
Just about any DSP from that period would be woefully incapable versus what you could slap together in even a small modern FPGA... and most likely harder to code for since the toolchains are ancient.
An FPGA accelerator would be hard to design and write accelerators for but once you had them the ought to be pretty easy to write applications for.
If you take the Pippistrello for example it can have a Spartan LX9 - LX45 FPGA so you could have cheap or expensive boards in the $100-300 range by using a difference size FPGA. Perhaps modify that board to accept a motherboard adapter so it could work on the various buses. I think that should be possible, HDMI out, Audio out, SCSI emulator (CD, HD , Floppy, Scanner.... lots could be done there), Diimo030 clone + larger cache, Ramdisk, application specific accelerators it might acutally be best to implement these on one or more generic Microblaze processors running around 100Mhz... you could add a vector coprocessor etc... You could put a Parallax proppeller in the FPGA and go crazy with that
it would probably use less than half of an LX45 since a slightly size reduce version will fit in a DE0 board with 22k luts. There are also Zync FPGAs which include an ARM hard core... which could handle alot of things far faster than a softcore.Including accelerator support doesn't mean it couldn't run on most all 68k Macs - you can support hardware without requiring it.
The difference is that the AV Mac DSPs are something 68k Mac users might actually have. Unless there's already an FPGA-based 68k Mac add-on out there to target (is there? I haven't heard of such a thing,) doing that would require not only overhauling the browser project to take advantage of it, but also designing and manufacturing the requisite hardware (and interfacing it with NuBus or one of the multiple different, mostly-incompatible PDS standards.) That's a lot of effort to go to just for a novelty Web browser.
(That said, I do wonder exactly how useful a DSP would be for the purpose, since they're usually heavily-oriented towards stream processing rather than general-purpose code. I suppose it could help image decoding.)
If you go down the FPGA route you at least can get the accelerator... DSP accelerators for machines that didn't come with them are rare as hens teeth otherwise right? Also ... you could implement those old DSPs in the FPGA... that might even be a good option dunno.
Regardless I'm gonna pick up Terasic Cyclone V GX board... and give it a go probably won't turn into a Mac accelerator but it might turn into a custom Sparcbook if I can get the code from temlib.org working on it.
Regardless I'm gonna pick up Terasic Cyclone V GX board... and give it a go probably won't turn into a Mac accelerator but it might turn into a custom Sparcbook
if I can get the code from temlib.org working on it.
DSPs were notoriously difficult to program. Its one reason why the AT&T DSPs went mostly unused in the AV Quadras. The proxy solution I posted about in another thread is a good alternative and basically does the same thing. Its generates the page on a modern machine with WebKit and sends a clickable GIF to older machines.
To be honest, AOL did just about the same thing as that web rendering proxy. It handled the pages off site, and compressed images (the aol *.art file format) and you got the crappy version over dialup. System 6 and 68k's aren't meant to be on broadband connections, if anything they are supposed to be a terminal.. It's cheating if you build a board with stuff invented way after the computer itself, and use that to handle the rendering too.
http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3910
and it works very well too. I made a quick howto for anyone interested. http://markyb.applefool.com/?p=184
IPanindromel I agree its not quite in the spirit of things 
... for any browser than can render gifs and links half decently though it would be an option regardless since its the least ammount of work... it might even be nice to have a button to switch quickly between local rendering and the gif/html-proxy for sites that don't load properly otherwise. Sort of as a fallback.
... for any browser than can render gifs and links half decently though it would be an option regardless since its the least ammount of work... it might even be nice to have a button to switch quickly between local rendering and the gif/html-proxy for sites that don't load properly otherwise. Sort of as a fallback.Yes, an icon would be cool. Unless you all are content with the one I made.
Some more updates since my last post here:
Some more updates since my last post here:
- The project is ported to the Retro68 dev environment. I am building with gcc on my Linux machine and testing in Mini vMac (System 6.0.8 ) and BasiliskII (System 7.5.5).
- Networking is implemented. I made an asynchronous stream abstraction for file and network IO, which along with an http parser library, allows us to make HTTP requests and handle the responses (mostly). http:// and file:/// URLs work.
- There is still not yet actual rendering of HTML taking place. For implementing that, I am thinking of making it text-based (e.g. using a styled TextEdit field), like how WannaBe does it.
- I could release another dev build if people want to test it out so far.
What a fantastic job you did Charles! I would really like to try it on my System 6 boxes! Could you provide a link to the program ( execuable) in .zip or .sit format?
If you see my postings I'm always interested in connecting old Mac's with TCP/IP on the Net. I have made some efforts to make this simple for not to technical people with a virtual machine you can use very simple to connect your old mac to the Internet. See:
http://www.macip.net
But what then....what to do.... Browsy is an excellent way of enjoying a System 6 Mac connected to the Internet.
In an other tread I have showed what my other "dream" is for System 6. A web server. See:
https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/21029-help-with-tcpexample-in-pascal/?hl=tcpexample
It is immediately what I think. Will it be possible to rebuild Browsy in Websy?
A web server for System 6.
If you see my postings I'm always interested in connecting old Mac's with TCP/IP on the Net. I have made some efforts to make this simple for not to technical people with a virtual machine you can use very simple to connect your old mac to the Internet. See:
http://www.macip.net
But what then....what to do.... Browsy is an excellent way of enjoying a System 6 Mac connected to the Internet.
In an other tread I have showed what my other "dream" is for System 6. A web server. See:
https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/21029-help-with-tcpexample-in-pascal/?hl=tcpexample
It is immediately what I think. Will it be possible to rebuild Browsy in Websy?
A web server for System 6.