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(Mac)Flim-Flam(boyance)
Sep. 26th, 2021 06:09 pmThe programmer of “MacFlim,” a “1-bit video player” for the black-and-white “compact Macintosh,” has made multiple revisions to his code, an encouraging sign so far as small-scale open-source programming goes. It might remain a matter of “that it can be done at all is perhaps more interesting than what can be done with it,” but I haven’t quite moved on to some other novelty of antique personal computing yet. When I do encode a video clip it’s easy enough to use the Mini vMac emulator to copy that file into a disk image and view it that way. However, having gone to slight lengths to get some actual antique hardware working in part because of the thought I could also play the clips that way left me wondering just how to move the files between computers. I had bothered to get a “SCSI2SD” card with a mounting that left its SD cards swappable without prying the computer open and risking electric shock, but once I’d initialized an SD card with a disk image loaded with files through the MAME emulator I wasn’t quite sure how to access that disk image from anything else but SCSI2SD again. The SE/30 only works with the “floppy mode” of my “Floppy Emu,” and any MacFlim file with more than a few seconds of video is bigger than 1.4 megabytes.
For a while I wondered about getting a serial cable with the right plugs to connect the round ports on the back of a compact Mac with the USB-to-serial adapter I’ve used with my Color Computer and DriveWire; it would mean copying files to one of my older portables as an in-between step and I didn’t know how long the transfers would take but it did seem possible. Then, though, I got to considering how the oldest portable I have, a PowerBook G4 (bought used before leaving on my first ocean cruise, as the “12-inch model” was sliding from “a supremely ideal form factor Apple just isn’t bothering with any more” to “not able to run modern software”), still runs a version of OS X that can write to “HFS” files of the sort an old-fashioned Macintosh uses. Getting out my multi-card reader, I tested the first SD card I’d formatted for SCSI2SD, and I was indeed able to write files straight to it from a computer I can put files on using modern USB memory keys. I suppose it all depends on “a second old computer still working,” but as I have to admit it’s all an idle pastime anyway.
For a while I wondered about getting a serial cable with the right plugs to connect the round ports on the back of a compact Mac with the USB-to-serial adapter I’ve used with my Color Computer and DriveWire; it would mean copying files to one of my older portables as an in-between step and I didn’t know how long the transfers would take but it did seem possible. Then, though, I got to considering how the oldest portable I have, a PowerBook G4 (bought used before leaving on my first ocean cruise, as the “12-inch model” was sliding from “a supremely ideal form factor Apple just isn’t bothering with any more” to “not able to run modern software”), still runs a version of OS X that can write to “HFS” files of the sort an old-fashioned Macintosh uses. Getting out my multi-card reader, I tested the first SD card I’d formatted for SCSI2SD, and I was indeed able to write files straight to it from a computer I can put files on using modern USB memory keys. I suppose it all depends on “a second old computer still working,” but as I have to admit it’s all an idle pastime anyway.