Don't worry about networking, it wasn't a thing like it is today. Imagine having fun with a computer because it's a computer barely knowing there could be such a thing as an internet.
anyone here into retro computing -
- Thread starter WhitePaperKat
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I'd like to learn about the functionality of it, learn everything about it, but I have no idea where to start, or even where I'd find an old computer. If I did manage to get my hands on one, what would be some of the first things I'd want to do to learn about how it works?
Although as a counterpoint, if you actually want to transfer files onto an old computer from elsewhere (such as finding drivers on Soviet-era FTP sites), you're probably not going to want to fool around with floppies like you would have back then.
Really, if you don't have any specific goal in mind, I'd just start with a VM or emulator. No sense buying hardware that you don't know how to use and have no particular affinity for.
And then... read the manual. Those actually existed back then and they're surely all scanned online now.
User Manuals
Although as a counterpoint, if you actually want to transfer files onto an old computer from elsewhere (such as finding drivers on Soviet-era FTP sites), you're probably not going to want to fool around with floppies like you would have back then.
Really, if you don't have any specific goal in mind, I'd just start with a VM or emulator. No sense buying hardware that you don't know how to use and have no particular affinity for.
And then... read the manual. Those actually existed back then and they're surely all scanned online now.
User Manuals
www.applelogic.org
I'm about as clueless in that regard as I am with the older machines. Is there any particular VMware and a specific type of computer you recommend emulating?
If you want Amiga(and you do) there's WinUAE and there are tons of sites with games and software for it. There's also emulators for C64, another Commodore product. There's also Atari...
Start messing around with stuff like that, emulators for the weirdest things exists.
Wholesome and based thread. Old electronics have soul to them. New electronics technology is just an uninspired process with no real changes, just slow progress on the same path for the last 20-30 years.
It depends on where you live. If you're in the States, a Commodore 64 is probably a good place to start. They're a bit spendy on eBay, but can still be found in thrift stores and yard sales for cheap AFAIK. That said, the C64 isn't so great for reliability (especially breadbin-style C64s). If you're buying one untested, it'd want to be really cheap.
If you're in the UK, consider a ZX Spectrum. Whilst technically inferior to the C64, they're still quite cheap. As an added bonus, they're very easy to repair if they're not working with all parts still readily available (including reproductions of the ULA, which is the custom chip that the ZX Spectrum uses).
That said, the cheapest and easiest way to start is emulation. There are online emulators for a whole bunch of retro machines out there, with Internet Archive hosting dozens of in-browser emulators.
I agree. The Pi 400 is a cheap and effective emulation platform. IMHO it's the spiritual successor to the Acorn Archimedes, which was the first ARM-based computer. Running RISC OS on a Pi 400 just feels so right.
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Occam's Spork
kiwifarms.net
I still have an old IBM PC XT if that really counts. Gonna echo the people saying to just use emulation. Old computers are fun to tinker with, and fun to use if you're an old like I am for nostalgia, but unless you really want to delve into fixing them when they inevitably break and toss money at them, it's far better to just find a way to emulate them than to deal with old tech. Just my 2 cents.
Ancient mac tard here. I've got a pile of them I've gradually been refurbishing but it's time consuming so they're mostly just sitting for now.
The 68k era macs from between 1988-1995 are a fun rabbithole if you haven't played with them before since there's great emulation support and the emulated hardware can easily scale up to levels the real hardware couldn't (system 7 circa 1990 will happily push a 1080p display at 256 colors or a 4K one in monochrome) and aside from dialog box positioning most everything handles the obscenely high resolutions well. Sims that use the standard mac UI kit (SimCity/Theme Park/etc) are fun like that. There's also good support for reading/writing their filesystems via free tools and it's fun to just make a multi-gig disk, dump thousands of apps onto it and have it just work.
If you've got an amiga or any old computer that reads floppies it's worth the time to build a Greaseweasle since you can image and write floppies at the flux level. It might seem a bit intimidating but it doesn't require soldering, just a breadboard, $5 microcontroller, FDD and a couple wires. Works like a champ for cloning disks with weird copyprotection or creating Amiga media on a PC.
The 68k era macs from between 1988-1995 are a fun rabbithole if you haven't played with them before since there's great emulation support and the emulated hardware can easily scale up to levels the real hardware couldn't (system 7 circa 1990 will happily push a 1080p display at 256 colors or a 4K one in monochrome) and aside from dialog box positioning most everything handles the obscenely high resolutions well. Sims that use the standard mac UI kit (SimCity/Theme Park/etc) are fun like that. There's also good support for reading/writing their filesystems via free tools and it's fun to just make a multi-gig disk, dump thousands of apps onto it and have it just work.
If you've got an amiga or any old computer that reads floppies it's worth the time to build a Greaseweasle since you can image and write floppies at the flux level. It might seem a bit intimidating but it doesn't require soldering, just a breadboard, $5 microcontroller, FDD and a couple wires. Works like a champ for cloning disks with weird copyprotection or creating Amiga media on a PC.
Do you know of any places where you can download a disk just full of tons and tons of Mac OS 7 games? I've collected what I can but that kind of software is just scattered all over the internet
Like, I know about archive.org and macintoshrespository.org, but like, how about a 1gb+ .dsk file full of games and software?
I've been putting together a System 6/7 everything disk slowly in the last couple months when I get time to work on it though since I want to get a SCSI2SD at some point, It's kind of a jumbled mess right now but when I get through cleaning it up I'm going to throw it up on archive.org but I've still got another 1200ish archives to filter though.
In the meantime though the best bet if you don't mind the jumble is to just grab the Macintosh 68k TOSEC set on an older OSX Mac (or VMware machine running x) and dump the whole mass into stuffit expander with the output going onto a HFS classic formatted disk image. Just remember to lock the image or keep a backup copy when you get to testing stuff since some older games crash hard under 7 and system 5/6 era stuff in particular seems prone to corrupting drives since they were never intended to run off anything other than floppies.
In the meantime though the best bet if you don't mind the jumble is to just grab the Macintosh 68k TOSEC set on an older OSX Mac (or VMware machine running x) and dump the whole mass into stuffit expander with the output going onto a HFS classic formatted disk image. Just remember to lock the image or keep a backup copy when you get to testing stuff since some older games crash hard under 7 and system 5/6 era stuff in particular seems prone to corrupting drives since they were never intended to run off anything other than floppies.
AmpleApricots
kiwifarms.net
Both as german and amiga fanboy my exposure to 68k Macs was slim to none back in the day. Amiga/Commodore was YUGE here, if you met one of the few computer owners it was much more likely that they had a C64 or Amiga than anything else, this also didn't really flip to favor PCs until past '92-93ish I'd say. Until recently when collecting this stuff became trendy, Amiga and C64 hardware used to still be really ubiquitous here. You could easily pick up an Amiga 500 with standard memory expansion for five bucks on a flea market. The C64 you'd probably have gotten for free because it was broken and I think I got like a dozen that way, they're usually easily fixed and it was always too much of a pity to see them thrown away. I bought a Blizzard 1230 IV Accelerator I found in some cardboard box on a flea market for a similar price. I even have a similar story to tell (although I paid more) for a Blizzard 2060. Really ubiquitous and great fun to explore random fleamarket trash heaps and pull out ancient hardware before retro became a consumer thing for the star wars poster owning/NES T-shirt wearing crowd and ebay showed up and everything stopped being fun. Amigas are also really good at emulating 68k macs without really losing any speed and that was basically their main way to be used for many of the Amiga die-hards in the mid to late 90s. The fastest you can run 68k Mac software on 68k native hardware is still an 060 accelerated Amiga with graphics card. I played games like that TNG adventure game and Full Throttle in that configuration on my Amiga 2000. You had to fudge a little because by default, System 7 crashes on 060 CPUs.
Anyways, I got a Performa 475 (040 Mac) in pristine condition for 25 bucks about maybe 6 years or so off ebay (because they have little history here, nobody cares about old Macs although they're kinda rare) just to see what it all is about and after recapping it, fixing it up with a full 040 at 25 Mhz and a SCSI/SD card emulator, it quickly became one of my favorite systems ever. I absolutely love that machine, great engineering, very comfy OS. I got a 12" 800x600 LCD for it it natively supports and my ancient Laser printer even has a serial port for it. I could totally see myself doing serious office work on that machine, if everything wasn't in "the cloud" these days. If I was some kind of eccentric rich book author, I'd use it for writing.
Most people just play games on these platforms but I also really like to explore application software on them. A lot of stuff is actually quite surprisingly useful. The 68k Mac has some cool Tektronix emulation software, so you can connect to a machine running Linux and gnuplot and have it generate gnarly threedimensional graphs.
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Stasi
kiwifarms.net
Don't know if it will have what you are after but you can try poking around on https://the-eye.eu/public/ has loads of old shit archived and you can pull entire archives/directories with wget.
AmpleApricots
kiwifarms.net
You really have to wonder why it can't be as simple as this anymore. There also used to be a different one that was made by Borland, but it ran in a graphics mode. I think they even got into a lawsuit with Lotus over it because of similarities.
A nice thing to know (but you have to do your own research for it) is that you actually can change fonts and the color palette in DOS text modes easily with an VGA capable graphics card. On CRTs the standard DOS color palette is mostly fine but doesn't look as good on LCDs IMHO. There's also the problem with the default setup of the high intensity black (grey) on black as most modern screens have some form of backlight bleeding or IPS glow and a black background doesn't mix well with it. Setting the background color to something else can work wonders there for your eyes. (this is even simpler and you don't need to change the color palette for that)
A lot of the old OSes for these systems were very compatible to monochrome displays. I always wondered how well you could combine that with modern e-ink screens.
I've always been impressed by quickdraw on macs and the dead simple and oddly zen way they address video memory, allowing you to draw shapes, lines or invert an area in one API call which redraws only what is absolutely necessary. Seems like that architecture specifically would be a great fit for epaper especially if we ever figure out how to up the refresh rate.
Prompted by this thread and a SCSI HDD from a yard sale I decided to throw my off-time this weekend into getting some of my mouldering macs working again and discovered this neat project. I forgot how much of a bitch scsi though is and my voodoo skills are lacking, so now I'm fighting an external drive that refuses to change its scsi ID, format or mount, but will still give me its characteristics and size in lido.
Also getting around to cleaning up that disk image. I'll throw it on mega when I finish, I'm aiming for 4gb usable in 6.0.8 and 7.5.5 since that's just under the limit system 6 can address. Currently it's 900mb of mostly system 6 with a smattering of 7.x. This will change when I get the ten thousand stuffit archives I've collected onto it.
Prompted by this thread and a SCSI HDD from a yard sale I decided to throw my off-time this weekend into getting some of my mouldering macs working again and discovered this neat project. I forgot how much of a bitch scsi though is and my voodoo skills are lacking, so now I'm fighting an external drive that refuses to change its scsi ID, format or mount, but will still give me its characteristics and size in lido.
Also getting around to cleaning up that disk image. I'll throw it on mega when I finish, I'm aiming for 4gb usable in 6.0.8 and 7.5.5 since that's just under the limit system 6 can address. Currently it's 900mb of mostly system 6 with a smattering of 7.x. This will change when I get the ten thousand stuffit archives I've collected onto it.
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I purchased an IBM from someone on Craigslist, Windows 98 vintage. Whoever owned this took perfect care of it. Not only is the device in perfect condition, they had all the original manuals and CDs. What a score - I paid $50 for the whole thing (monitor, tower, keyboard, mouse, manuals/disks)
Might be time to consider a BlueSCSI. Seems to be the most cost-effective SCSI drive replacement for classic Macs.
Golden Age of Computing ended when normies demanded more and more GUI based applications and use. Nothing needs to come off the command line to be useful (except for vidya games).
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