Print

[AlexTheCat123]

Just finished this video and continue to be super impressed with your efforts and success. You guys should be super proud of what you managed to do here. Looking forward to what's to come!

Thank you James!

[stepleton]

The term benchmark is what worried me the most - it stuck out to me as an odd thing to be against.

I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice; in fact, it's not really advice at all.

My familiarity with big tech companies like Apple, however, is that attorneys cost money and are as underprovisioned as any other job role at the company. They will be busy and they will have loads of different people from all different departments asking them to please, please just take a look at this one thing, or review this one launch, or check this policy or approve that one contractor agreement and so on and so on for all time. Everything will be immediate and urgent because some product manager didn't realise that it was necessary to get legal review and $DEADLINE is right around the corner, or because some tech lead is gunning for promo this cycle and that means it is 150% time to launch ASAP so let's get legal to tick the box right now please and thank you. Everyone who talks to you, some Associate Counsel with an employee ID in the low millions, has the most startling and unusual crisis that absolutely must be dealt with right this second.

Therefore it will have been an achievement that the review necessary for this source release, which does very little to advance Apple's most pressing business aims, happened at all; I suspect some arms needed to be twisted in order to get anyone to think about licensing terms for a 40-year-old operating system for a rare computer that has very little relationship, practically speaking, to any of Apple's modern products. And, when someone finally did, I wouldn't necessarily have expected them to have put their absolute heart and soul into the job; it might have been fun to do something different for a change, but that product manager and that tech lead are still pinging them incessantly, and the PM has started muttering about "escalating"...

What I'm saying is that although the clauses are for sure legally binding (assuming the relevant authorities to you will consider them lawful; speak to your lawyer), they may not represent some profound, deeply thought-out plan or some specific attitude that Apple bears toward the Lisa Office System or its community of fans. Ambiguity or puzzlement may be a byproduct of the circumstances under which the agreement was composed. That doesn't mean that Apple's lawyers can't take advantage of that ambiguity later if they decide they want to ding you for sticking your neck out and comparing your improved task scheduler against the one that comes with the OS, but to my mind it means that the peculiarity itself may not really be a useful hint about Apple's motives.

Why does Apple not want you to "benchmark" and what does that mean? I don't really know. But I can't think about it without remembering that attorneys at tech firms cost money and are constantly being bothered to focus on work relating to important, imminent problems that relate pretty directly to the company's bottom line.

[andrew]

But I can't think about it without remembering that attorneys at tech firms cost money and are constantly being bothered to focus on work relating to important, imminent problems that relate pretty directly to the company's bottom line.

I don't doubt this... I was just offering my thoughts is all, given that both now and even a couple years ago when the code was released, people have been especially concerned about the restrictiveness of this license.

And with all due respect to Apple and all honesty, regarding entirely obsolete 40 year old code for which no amount of development could remotely create anything that would cannibalize Apple's existing revenue sources, in my opinion this license is probably irrelevant so long as people don't start selling copies of rebuilt Lisa software. The code is out there, and many people are going to scroll past the agreement, check the box, and then copy it, share it, and disregard the license entirely. One way or another, the cat is out of the bag.

[andrew]

Finally finished watching the Recompiling the Past talk. It really is impressive how you guys managed to accomplish this without going insane.

I appreciated the masterful artistry of the redrawn icons! It's also interesting to know what that file cabinet drawer in the desktop manager icon font represented.

That comment, in the preferences window? I don't think it's a reference to anything. Rather, the programmer who wrote it must have been driven past the point of insanity. Who knows if it was because of the preferences window in particular... although it does have a large amount of UI elements interacting with many different parts of the system. I almost went crazy trying to make a recreation of it in my JS project.

[AlexTheCat123]

That comment, in the preferences window? I don't think it's a reference to anything. Rather, the programmer who wrote it must have been driven past the point of insanity. Who knows if it was because of the preferences window in particular... although it does have a large amount of UI elements interacting with many different parts of the system. I almost went crazy trying to make a recreation of it in my JS project.

Yeah, I guess so! I looked it up online and the only mention of that text was from someone else who found it in the source code, so it's got to be something original from the programmer. And awesome work with LisaGUI by the way; it's a really impressive project!

[andrew]

Forgive me if it was mentioned, but aside from using video capture instead of the CRT, did you have to take any extra measures to keep the Lisa(s) cool while you were transferring files and compiling code for hours on end? Or was it even an issue? I'm honestly afraid to keep my own 2/10 turned on for too long.

it's a really impressive project!

Thanks!

[AlexTheCat123]

Forgive me if it was mentioned, but aside from using video capture instead of the CRT, did you have to take any extra measures to keep the Lisa(s) cool while you were transferring files and compiling code for hours on end? Or was it even an issue? I'm honestly afraid to keep my own 2/10 turned on for too long.

Since I didn't need the CRT, I was using the card cage outside of the Lisa chassis, with the motherboard edge connectors hooked to a breakout board that allows me to connect power, floppy, video through the RGBtoHDMI, and so on. And having the card cage open to the air like that instead of being constrained inside the Lisa already helps with cooling a great deal. Nothing felt like it was getting too hot (and I only had 2 hardware failures throughout the whole process, neither of which was related to overheating or to this project), so I just left it alone!

[sigma7]

did you have to take any extra measures to keep the Lisa(s) cool

This is a really good point for this topic... building LOS is going to be stressful!

I suggest a fan drawing air through the power supply is the most critical thing for extended use.

Next would be turning down the brightness to minimize burn-in, and not use a vintage spinning disk (eg. disconnect your 2/10's widget if still installed and use an emulator).

Beyond that, you could remove or elevate the rear of the top cover for better cooling of the flyback and video board, and add a card-cage fan similar to the XLFan intended for the faster XLerators.

Since the Lisa was designed for convection (fanless) cooling, it doesn't take much additional airflow to make a substantial difference. Quiet fans are sufficient.

[AlexTheCat123]

I suggest a fan drawing air through the power supply is the most critical thing for extended use.

I don't think I mentioned this, but I used an ATX power supply as part of my breakout board setup, so I didn't even consider cooling the original Lisa supply. But yeah, that's certainly a really good idea!

Next would be turning down the brightness to minimize burn-in, and not use a vintage spinning disk (eg. disconnect your 2/10's widget if still installed and use an emulator).

Yeah, you do NOT want to be using a spinning disk for this. For one, the code alone takes up over 20MB, and grows to fill up a 32MB volume after you've compiled everything. And also, you'll want to make frequent backups in case things go wrong and corrupt your OS install or filesystem, which has a decent chance of happening, especially if you're messing around with SYSTEM.OS, the configurable drivers, or the libraries. And backups/restores are much quicker and easier on an emulator (just choose the Copy option in the Selector if you have a Cameo/Aphid, ESProFile, or ArduinoFile) than they are on an actual disk!

[andrew]

Has anyone tried any of the Notca fans as a replacement for the built in fan? They are supposed to be very quiet.

[sigma7]

Has anyone tried any of the Notca fans as a replacement for the built in fan? They are supposed to be very quiet.

The only original fan is under the widget, and it doesn't effectively cool anything else in the Lisa (such as the PSU). Those with a stock Lisa 1/2 without a Widget will find it doesn't have any fans.

While the Noctua fans are very good, inexpensive fans have improved a lot and low cost quiet fans (with low airflow) are adequate for this purpose IMHO.

I suppose if your room temperature is high then you might want a medium speed fan.

[AlexTheCat123]

Sorry that it's taken a bit longer than originally promised, but I think I've gotten everything to a place where the documentation and build scripts are ready to release now! I'm just waiting on a friend of mine to proofread the readme for me, and then I'll make it public!

[jamesdenton]

Sorry that it's taken a bit longer than originally promised, but I think I've gotten everything to a place where the documentation and build scripts are ready to release now! I'm just waiting on a friend of mine to proofread the readme for me, and then I'll make it public!

Alex - In your video I believe you mentioned needing to patch LisaEm to work around some issues. Any chance you could provide a diff of those changes so we might get things patched up?

[AlexTheCat123]

Alex - In your video I believe you mentioned needing to patch LisaEm to work around some issues. Any chance you could provide a diff of those changes so we might get things patched up?

Absolutely! The patched glue.c will be included along with all the other stuff that I'll be releasing, hopefully within the next day or two. But I've also attached it here in case you don't want to wait. Basically, it's just hard-coding the check_running_lisa_os() function to always recognize the running OS as LOS 2.0/3.0 and sets the mouse scaling accordingly.

[AlexTheCat123]

Sorry for the big delay, but I've finally gotten things ready to go! Just go to the following GitHub repo, and that should give you all the info you need to compile LOS for yourself! And of course let me know if you've got any questions!

https://github.com/alexthecat123/LisaSourceCompilation

Enjoy!