Some Things Done the Hard Way
May. 1st, 2026 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIn the midst of “MARCHintosh” the Snow emulator’s home page pointed to “Doom for the SE/30.” I was a bit tickled by this latest example of “Doom being ported to unlikely hardware,” although when I checked out the project I saw it required more memory than my own SE/30 is equipped with. The certain emphasis on “MARCHintosh is a chance to work with real hardware” did somewhat diminish thoughts of at least trying the port in Snow itself. In the end I did get around to playing two levels inside the emulator, noting how many graphical (and audio) features were turned off or pared back to move a game intended for relatively high-end PCs of 1993 to a 68030-powered computer (“laden down by more operating system overhead,” as I can imagine some saying) that had been supposed “premium” back in 1989. A bit later on, the port was developed to the point of also running on colour Macs, and I resorted to Snow’s IIcx emulation. It was a little easier to make things out there, but I was also reminded of how my family’s LC II had to disable almost every bell and whistle in Marathon to run that “Doom clone” (from a certain detached and dismissive perspective) at any semblance of speed. (The question is whether “the LC II was just as compromised a ‘low cost’ machine as its predecessor” was outweighed by our having put an accelerator card into it not that many months after we’d got it.) In any case having to run this program in an emulator rather than on genuine vintage hardware kept me thinking it would be just as easy to launch a modern Doom port and have all the features working.
All of that didn’t quite seem significant enough to make a post about, so I turned back to an idea I’d been thinking about for a little while. Using Snow to run the limited amount of software bundled with the very first Macs sold had left me thinking about how the not altogether impressive first release of Microsoft BASIC for that computer, available for sale not that long after the computer itself showed up, had at least been used to create and run a first simple terminal program. While “MacTEP” can still be found in archives of Macintosh software, an earlier version of it had been included as a type-in program in a computer magazine from 1984. The comment it took “less than an hour” to type it in did get me thinking about going to grandstanding lengths and doing just that. I didn’t keep track of how long I was typing, instead breaking the effort into a few sessions and saving drafts in between. Afterwards it took a certain amount of debugging to spot where I’d mixed up colons and semicolons or the letter B and the number 8 (and that knowing how the typesetting had gone awry as explained in a later issue), but with Snow bridging a serial port to the computer running it I was able to type back and forth between MacTEP and later terminal programs such as the one I use to capture ImageWriter commands. The only problem was that trying to send big chunks of plain text from those terminals into the emulator overloaded something somewhere such that MacTEP couldn’t even manage to capture eighty characters at a time that way. I wound up resorting to MacTerminal, one of the applications that had been late to get running and ship in 1984 such that MacTEP had been necessary. Using the “XMODEM protocol” did capture text, which amounted to getting information into an emulated original Macintosh without using an emulated later machine to import it and write it to a disk image.
After those two elaborate exercises in doing things the hard way, I did notice a “fork” of Snow promising to emulate a low-end LaserWriter that hadn’t used PostScript and had hooked up to the SCSI port. At this moment, trying that out meant building a version of the emulator myself, but I’d practiced that back when I’d had to copy ImageWriter commands out of the emulator’s own built-in terminal and decided to increase how much data it could capture before overflowing. Then, I’d had to try that again when a revision to the sound code had appeared to overload the lowest-end, now Linux-running computer I’ve tried running Snow on. With the new version built, it had taken a little while to figure out what printer to select in the Chooser (its icon was for a later machine than the printer said to be emulated), but I did end up getting single-page images saved with fewer steps than it takes to turn ImageWriter commands into a human-readable document, or perhaps even than it takes to use the full ImageWriter driver, “print to a PostScript file,” and export that file.
All of that didn’t quite seem significant enough to make a post about, so I turned back to an idea I’d been thinking about for a little while. Using Snow to run the limited amount of software bundled with the very first Macs sold had left me thinking about how the not altogether impressive first release of Microsoft BASIC for that computer, available for sale not that long after the computer itself showed up, had at least been used to create and run a first simple terminal program. While “MacTEP” can still be found in archives of Macintosh software, an earlier version of it had been included as a type-in program in a computer magazine from 1984. The comment it took “less than an hour” to type it in did get me thinking about going to grandstanding lengths and doing just that. I didn’t keep track of how long I was typing, instead breaking the effort into a few sessions and saving drafts in between. Afterwards it took a certain amount of debugging to spot where I’d mixed up colons and semicolons or the letter B and the number 8 (and that knowing how the typesetting had gone awry as explained in a later issue), but with Snow bridging a serial port to the computer running it I was able to type back and forth between MacTEP and later terminal programs such as the one I use to capture ImageWriter commands. The only problem was that trying to send big chunks of plain text from those terminals into the emulator overloaded something somewhere such that MacTEP couldn’t even manage to capture eighty characters at a time that way. I wound up resorting to MacTerminal, one of the applications that had been late to get running and ship in 1984 such that MacTEP had been necessary. Using the “XMODEM protocol” did capture text, which amounted to getting information into an emulated original Macintosh without using an emulated later machine to import it and write it to a disk image.
After those two elaborate exercises in doing things the hard way, I did notice a “fork” of Snow promising to emulate a low-end LaserWriter that hadn’t used PostScript and had hooked up to the SCSI port. At this moment, trying that out meant building a version of the emulator myself, but I’d practiced that back when I’d had to copy ImageWriter commands out of the emulator’s own built-in terminal and decided to increase how much data it could capture before overflowing. Then, I’d had to try that again when a revision to the sound code had appeared to overload the lowest-end, now Linux-running computer I’ve tried running Snow on. With the new version built, it had taken a little while to figure out what printer to select in the Chooser (its icon was for a later machine than the printer said to be emulated), but I did end up getting single-page images saved with fewer steps than it takes to turn ImageWriter commands into a human-readable document, or perhaps even than it takes to use the full ImageWriter driver, “print to a PostScript file,” and export that file.