Happy Mac
Things are starting to warm up now. I’ve successfully booted Plus Too as far as the Happy Mac startup icon! It’s not booting all the way into the Finder yet, but most of the tricky business with the IWM, floppy,…
Crazy Disk Encoding Schemes
Wow. I expected the details of the Macintosh floppy data encoding to be a bit complex, but this is worse than I expected. I think I finally understand it well enough to duplicate it, but I can’t explain why it…
Building a Halloween LED Display
This Halloween, my daughter and I are working on a large LED display board for the yard. We started with a 3 x 6 foot pegboard with a grid of 24 x 48 holes pre-drilled, and 100 each red, orange,…
Backcountry Logger Mini Custom Build
Chris Stemple has finished the first custom build of a BMOW project by a reader, with a great-looking build of the Backcountry Logger Mini. Using some spare room on a panel from InternationalCircuits.com, Chris added and removed a few things from…
Mac Floppy Disk Hardware
Ugh, I’ve been going around in circles trying to settle on the best way to add a floppy disk replica to Plus Too. I’ve been thinking about this way too much, and now I’ve got visions of sync bytes dancing in…
Too Many Macs!
While I’ve been working on the Plus Too Macintosh replica, I’ve also collected a few real vintage Macs in the past couple of weeks. Too many, in fact, so it’s getting hard to even walk through my office due to…
Mac Toolbox Mysteries
I’m making slow progress on Plus Too, unraveling the mysteries of the Mac’s operation little by little. I haven’t really worked on the IWM and floppy components yet, because I’ve been consumed with chasing down other details, and trying to…
Question Mark Disk
Now I’m really getting somewhere with Plus Too: it’s the “question mark disk” screen! If you ever owned a Macintosh with no hard drive, you’ll be very familiar with this screen, because it was shown whenever the computer was turned…
Xilinx vs. Altera Tools For Hobbyists
I used to believe that Altera’s FPGA tools were much more hobbyist-friendly than the comparable Xilinx tools, and I frequently bashed the Xilinx tools whenever the topic came up. But after giving them a head-to-head comparison recently, I think I may have…
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