cam henlin's blog|

Messages for Macintosh - what is it?

Messages for Macintosh is a new software suite for classic Macintosh (System 2.0 through MacOS 9.2.2) systems to interoperate with Apple iMessages via a familiar interface, with supporting software running on a newer Mac computer.

What is the purpose of this article?

The purpose of this article is to outline how to get your classic Macintosh system set up to send and receive iMessages with a familiar interface, just like what you would get on new Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc. This article will outline the simplest path to getting up and...

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Let’s get developing

After building up lots of tooling for classic Macintosh, we can develop a full application: Messages for Macintosh.

If you’re stumbling on this article without context, you might want to start with these to get up to speed:

• A simplified guide to classic Macintosh development using Retro68 and pce-macplus
• Introducing CoprocessorJS
• Introducing Nuklear for Macintosh

The motivation

This is the developer-oriented companion article to

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Retro68 projects / cool old Macintosh projects

• https://github.com/antscode/MacPlayer
• https://github.com/antscode/MacWifi
• https://github.com/clehner/Browsy
• https://github.com/antscode/MacAuthLib
• https://github.com/cy384/ssheven
• https://github.com/clehner/Retro68Test
• https://github.com/DrJosh9000/humbletwitter – actually, hypercard + go. Still cool so I’m leaving it...
  
  

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Profiling your Retro68 application using serialperformanceanalyzer

When moving Nuklear to Macintosh, it became apparent that there would be a lot of performance optimization work necessary to provide a usable GUI experience on an 8MHz Macintosh. To make the situation worse, there is no profiling tooling available for Retro68, and no way as far as I could tell to run some kind of code profiler against the pce-macplus emulator, so I came up with a simple library for profiling code over a serial port via simple function calls.

So let’s say you’re wanting to profile a Retro68 application that you’re working on. Here’s how you might go about...

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The motivation

GUI programming on old Macs can be pretty painful.

For some background, I am relatively new to Mac programming but experienced with programming in general. I have been doing a fair amount of programming using the Retro68 console recently, but now I’m looking to create some more GUI-based applications, so they can feel more “Mac-like”.

I’ve been pouring through the books “Inside Macintosh: Macintosh Toolbox Essentials” and “Inside Macintosh: More Macintosh Toolbox” along with some other resources online, and have been playing around a bit manipulating the “MenuSample” test app from this blog post: http://www.toughdev.com/content/2018/12/developing-68k-mac-apps-with-codelite-ide-retro68-and-pce-macplus-emulator/.

I...

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Parts list

I’ve listed out everything that I used on this project on amazon.

• rs232 to rs422 converter
• usb to rs232 converter
• mini din 8 cable - this is enough to build 2 cables!
• wire cutter and stripper
• small screwdriver

Getting started

Let’s lay out everything that we need to make sure we have all the necessary tools that we need to get started first.

Again, before you get started, you should have:

• rs232 to rs422...
  
  

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The motivation – what is CoprocessorJS and what am I hoping to accomplish?

One of my interests is to make old computers more useful in modern times so that they can once again be used in our day-to-day workflows. To that end, I’ve created a modern piece of software that allows programmers on nearly any old machine to hand off work loads to a modern machine over a serial port, and get a response back that they can then interact with. This software will provide a standard interface for serial-connected devices to provide code to execute. The serial port is a great choice here because it is relatively common, even on old machines, and fast enough for most tasks if you can break them down small...

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What’s going on here?

I started playing around using Retro68 on a modern Linux-based machine to do development work for old Macintosh computers in the spirit of one of my previous posts. In doing so, I ran into many problems while getting started and coming up with my own workflow. I hope that others can find this guide helpful in getting up and running with their own classic Macintosh dev stories.

Who can use this guide? Anyone who wants to get up and running with Mac development being cross compiled from a modern Linux environment as quickly as possible. I’ve laid out the commands and explanations in the most straightforward way I could with the simple goal of running a hello world application. I do not go very in depth as...

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If I had unlimited time on my hands I would work on software to make old computers more useful.

My ultimate goal is that I would like to be able to use a Macintosh Plus running System 7.x to:

• browse the internet arbitrarily, meaning full execution of JS, full images (converted to grayscale of course!), etc
• handle emails (using all the modern things you’d expect in an email client)
• ssh into other machines
• probably other stuff

I would achieve this by using a combination of:

• https://github.com/autc04/Retro68 - retro68 library for using gcc to target older macs
• https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI - mac scsi library for raspberry pis
• a raspberry pi to do heavy lifting
• create a custom library to easily offload processing to the rpi over the SCSI interface

The general idea is that...

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here is my budget turbo miata parts formula.

Parts listed are for a 1.8L build, adjust parts for 1.6 as needed. Should be capable of more power than what the rods are good for and should do so for less than $2,000. Dyno tune to 220whp and stop. Only missing parts here are downpipe and exhaust. Take to exhaust shop for finalization. I would do everything but the turbo, turbo manifold, and boost controller on a supercharged build.

• turbo manifold https://amzn.to/2O9ofi4
• gt2860 (internally gated) https://amzn.to/3jioJhg
• clutch https://amzn.to/3rmQ6tf - stock one might hold if you are nice to it but why bother?
• oil line kit https://amzn.to/3jrtlSs
• diypnp megasquirt
  

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