Mac Plus update

[jca]

Does anyone knows what the SCSI update is about? Does it allow to create disks bigger than 20MB directly on MISTer? Until now bigger disks where supported but had to be formatted somewhere else.

[breiztiger]

floppy doesn't seem to work anymore

all dsk i have when inserted want to be formatted

as mac se become implemant does it possible to make it mac se fdhd to have 1.44mo floppy ?

[jca]

Did you update the roms? I see that there are 2 new boot roms.
I will test it later today as I am far from my MISTer.

[breiztiger]

Yes boot0 and new boot1

[jca]

It would also be nice if the developers could update the readme but one can only dream.
Update to SCSI: what is it about?
Boot rom: previous version used boot.rom (128K), updated version boot0.rom (128K) and boot1.rom (256K) related to Mac SE.
boot0.rom for Plus?
boot1.rom for SE?

[jca]

Confirmed: floppy broken.
Something else is broken: at some point I was unable to boot from vhd. I tried everything but no go. I used a previous version of the core and had no problem booting from the same vhd.

[alanswx]

Confirmed: floppy broken.
Something else is broken: at some point I was unable to boot from vhd. I tried everything but no go. I used a previous version of the core and had no problem booting from the same vhd.

The floppy seems to work well now -- once I installed the boot roms correctly. I had it in SE mode without the boot rom, and I couldn't get it to load floppies correctly.

[Moondandy]

Does BIOS getter need updated to grab new bootroms?

[EeDee]

After a bit of messing around I've found that on this updated core, in Plus mode, "MacPack for FPGA" boot.vhd, boots into a "..disk is unreadable by this Macintosh.." error message. By cancelling the boot continues. In SE mode the MacPack loads with the same "..disk is unreadable by this Macintosh.." error, which again can be cancelled out of. Unfortunately, in SE mode, the boot.vhd gets corrupted somewhere and no longer boots again in either mode.

[jca]

Did you shut down the Mac before switching to SE? That could be the reason of the corruption. I will try it later today.

[jca]

Does BIOS getter need updated to grab new bootroms?

The first thing to do when a new core or an update to an existing core is to go to the Wiki for that core and read the readme file.
Got to the MacPlus wiki and look at the readme file.
OOOOPS!
It looks like it is 3 years old.
But there is some hope: go to the releases directory, you might find some goodies.

[EeDee]

Did you shut down the Mac before switching to SE? That could be the reason of the corruption. I will try it later today.

Yes but I think your giving it a try later would be helpful. I may be doing something wrong.

[jca]

Before relating my experiments:
When reading a post it is easy to make assumptions which you realize are wrong when trying to reproduce the problem on MISTer. I asked you if you did shutdown the Mac but when the Mac is "looping" there is no way you can do it, there is not even a menu as the Mac did not boot.

What I did:
When I was testing the release with the broken floppy core I managed to destroy my boot.vhd which was in games/MACPLUS. I have a whole copy of MacPack 2021/12/12 in games/MACPLUS/MacPack-20211212 and when I made the test with the latest core I did not bother to copy the boot.vhd to /games/MACPLUS which was a good idea as you will see later.
First I started the core in Plus mode with the boot.vhd mounted. The Mac booted properly, no error message.
I shutdown the Mac, went into the OSD, changed the mode to SE and selected "Reset and apply CPU + Memory". The Mac started to boot but gave the following error:

Sorry, a system error occurred
"SCSI Accel r0w0S6"
address error
To temporarily turn off extensions, restart and old down the shift key.

I tried different ways (press Shift after clicking Restart, press Shit before Restart, press Shift as long as possible), no matter what I did the Mac tries to boot again but the message pops up again. At this stage there is no way to shut down the Mac.
I went to the OSD, unmounted the boot.vhd, saved the settings, reverted the mode to Plus and rebooted the core. Once the mac with the cross or the question mark (I don't remember which one) and the Mac booted properly. I did not break the boot.vhd.

At this point I remembered that when testing the core with the non working floppy I managed to boot the Mac Pack in SE mode but it said that it could not start Adobe Font Managed due to insufficient memory. I think this is due to the size of the rom: boot0.rom is 128K and likely used for the Plus, boot1.rom is 256K and is likely used for the SE. I think at that time I had only 1MB selected, not 4MB.

I decided to try with the broken floppy core to double check but before doing that it was time to copy boot.vhd from games/MACPLUS/MacPack-20211212 to games/MACPLUS: the more you try different things the more likely you are to destroy the vhd.
Surprise: size of boot.vhd in games/MACPLUS/MacPack-20211212 1,536,000 KB
size of boot.vhd in games/MACPLUS (the broken one) 962,560 KB.
I looked on my PC and found MacPack-20210415-v14.03 with a vhd of the same size.
I uploaded it to games/MACPLUS and using the latest Mac core (not the one with the broken floppy) it boots without error both in Plus and SE mode. I also do not get the Adobe Font Manager error as I did set the memory size to 4MB.

Conclusion:
The Mac Pack from 2021/12/12 has something which is different from the previous versions.
The core has some kind of bug: I suppose it does not accept keystrokes when the core is booting and explains why the Shit+Restart does not work.
As for the difference between the Mac Pack version I have no idea what it could be as I don't really know much about the Mac (I never had an Apple product and never will).

[EeDee]

A thorough investigation. Thanks for that.
Came across the SCSI Accel error after my last post.
I've tried dismounting the vhd before switching from or turning off while in SE mode and that seems to prevent any corruption.
Never been an Apple product user either

[EeDee]

A couple of additional observations:
I noted vhd sizes and mine didn't change after being corrupted.
Not only MacPack was affected. I tried a 7.01 OS vhd and it suffered the same fate

[meauxdal]

I will need to make a different configuration for the MacPack .vhd for SE mode. There is a SCSI Accelerator enabled which specifically only works with the Plus - the error is expected when booting in SE mode.

You can fix this yourself - you'll need to go into the System folder for the boot OS and remove the SCSI Accelerator extension, either by moving it to a non-system folder or deleting it.

I haven't had much time to test SE mode but when I get around to it I'll try making a new version of the .vhd that will work in SE mode.

[EeDee]

Thanks @meauxdal

[jca]

...
I noted vhd sizes and mine didn't change after being corrupted.
...

I may not have explained correctly: the vhd did not change size, they were from 2 different versions of the pack.

[EeDee]

Oh I see!

[jca]

Thanks meauxdal.
I don't much about Mac but I think I I managed to fix the disk.
I started the boot.vhd in Plus mode, opened the hard disk and went into each OS. For each OS I went into the System folder. For OS6X the SCSI Accel is there and I trashed it, for OS7 I went further down into Extensions and trashed the accelerator.
I rebooted the system without any problem, it looks like I did not break anything. After that I shutdown the Mac, switched to SE and once again I rebooted the system without any problem.
So far I did not do any real testing.

[breiztiger]

it seem to have a SCSI accel 7.0 for os7+ and 2.1 for os6+

but doesn't work after mac plus (se for exemple)

[GreyAreaUK]

On a slightly different tangent, does anyone know if it's possible to get networking going? Might be interesting to set up an Appletalk server on my network using something like RetroNAS.

The Wiki doesn't mention networking at all, so I'm assuming it's still too early for that.

[alanswx]

On a slightly different tangent, does anyone know if it's possible to get networking going? Might be interesting to set up an Appletalk server on my network using something like RetroNAS.

The Wiki doesn't mention networking at all, so I'm assuming it's still too early for that.

The Mac Plus serial works, tested using ZTerm, and the PPP works with MacTCP and PPP. I haven't tried to run Appletalk over IP yet. But I think it should be possible. Let us know if you get that working.