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[rayarachelian]

Tried to load up the disk images with BLU and among other issues, turns out the SCC in my Lisa has gone bad - it'll rx bits no problem, but it can't tx them and naturally I can't find my other I/O board to try switching the SCC with. I also can't get Disk Copy 4.2 to work in either my Mac 128 or 512ke to write the images there.

This is going to be a bit Rube Goldberg right here ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine ):

Does your physical floppy drive work? If so, so do this then:  install MacWorks on the hard drive, make a dc42 image with DiskCopy 4.2 and StuffIt and anything else you can think of. Copy that to the hard drive off the floppyemu, transfer the 9 or 10 disks of UniPlus by imaging them with DiskCopy from the floppy emu.
Once everything's on the MacWorks hard drive, shut down the Lisa, switch to the physical floppy, restore the images to real floppies using Disk Copy 4.2, shut down again, install UniPlus to the hard drive.

Future goals: Your life would be much easier if you have something like an X/ProFile because then you can use dd on a linux or macos x machine to image the CF cards using a USB CF card reader. (You can also use SD or mini-SDXC cards with a CF adapter in an X/ProFile), and then you can switch between UniPlus, MacWorks, LOS, etc. by swapping CF or SD media. If you already have one, great, one of us might be able to send you an X/ProFile of a pre-installed UniPlus image instead.

You can always ping Steve Chamberlin about seeing if he can add UniPlus/Xenix support to floppyemu firmware. Most likely it's some timing thing, but presumably this isn't going to be trivial.

If serial port A works, you can try asking James to build a copy of BLU that works at 9600 or maybe 19200 on Serial Port A when he has the time.

Other options, you could buy a replacement I/O board if you can't replace the Z8530 SIO or figure out what traces are broken via corrosion, etc: http://vintagemicros.com/catalog/lisa-lisa-board-from-sapient-tecnologies-p-292.html

You could buy an old classic pre-macos x Mac, even PPC as long as it has a floppy drive like:

* https://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Power-Mac-G3-300-PPC-300MHz-384MB-RAM-13GB-HD-Mac-OS9-w-KB-and-Mouse/333649590847
* https://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Machintosh-Powerbook-180-MINT/283945176241
* https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Apple-Macintosh-Mac-IIvx-RARE-collectible-Tested-and-Working/254581552271

Even something like a powerbook pismo might work if it has a working floppy drive - but most only have CDROMs (ask the seller before you buy to make sure the floppy drive is functional)
You can then either use ethernet or the CF card slot to transfer stuff like disk images from a modern machine.

Avoid iconic toaster ones like MacSE as they're a lot more expensive.

[blusnowkitty]

Does your physical floppy drive work? If so, so do this then:  install MacWorks on the hard drive, make a dc42 image with DiskCopy 4.2 and StuffIt and anything else you can think of. Copy that to the hard drive off the floppyemu, transfer the 9 or 10 disks of UniPlus by imaging them with DiskCopy from the floppy emu.
Once everything's on the MacWorks hard drive, shut down the Lisa, switch to the physical floppy, restore the images to real floppies using Disk Copy 4.2, shut down again, install UniPlus to the hard drive.

Future goals: Your life would be much easier if you have something like an X/ProFile because then you can use dd on a linux or macos x machine to image the CF cards using a USB CF card reader. (You can also use SD or mini-SDXC cards with a CF adapter in an X/ProFile), and then you can switch between UniPlus, MacWorks, LOS, etc. by swapping CF or SD media. If you already have one, great, one of us might be able to send you an X/ProFile of a pre-installed UniPlus image instead.

You can always ping Steve Chamberlin about seeing if he can add UniPlus/Xenix support to floppyemu firmware. Most likely it's some timing thing, but presumably this isn't going to be trivial.

If serial port A works, you can try asking James to build a copy of BLU that works at 9600 or maybe 19200 on Serial Port A when he has the time.

Other options, you could buy a replacement I/O board if you can't replace the Z8530 SIO or figure out what traces are broken via corrosion, etc: http://vintagemicros.com/catalog/lisa-lisa-board-from-sapient-tecnologies-p-292.html

You could buy an old classic pre-macos x Mac, even PPC as long as it has a floppy drive like:

Oh, I can use newer Macs to write out Lisa disks? I was under the impression that the 1.44MB SuperDrive SWIMs couldn't generate the right encoding for Lisa disks. I have far, far too many SuperDrive-enabled Macs so that makes things a bit easier.

I do have an X/ProFile along with a MacWorks CF card, and I also went and got a Sapient I/O board a while back and that's what I'm using in mine. Floppy drive is fully working too. Haven't done any testing on Port A as of yet; I'll give it a shot tonight.

I did somehow manage to get things working just long enough to transfer the root fs image over via serial. Imagine an error rate so high it could only get two bytes every 30 seconds, see picture. Ouch... I also picked up a Mac Plus not too long ago. If it's equipped with a Z8530, I'll likely borrow the SCC out of the Plus and stick it in the Lisa and see what happens.

Amazingly, even though it took forever to transfer BLU said that the dc42 checksum was correct and wrote the root fs disk without issue and... still hangs when it finds serial ports in the installer.

[D.Finni]

Does your physical floppy drive work? If so, so do this then:  install MacWorks on the hard drive, make a dc42 image with DiskCopy 4.2 and StuffIt and anything else you can think of. Copy that to the hard drive off the floppyemu, transfer the 9 or 10 disks of UniPlus by imaging them with DiskCopy from the floppy emu.
You could buy an old classic pre-macos x Mac, even PPC as long as it has a floppy drive like:

Oh, I can use newer Macs to write out Lisa disks? I was under the impression that the 1.44MB SuperDrive SWIMs couldn't generate the right encoding for Lisa disks. I have far, far too many SuperDrive-enabled Macs so that makes things a bit easier.

The whole point of the SuperDrive is that it can read and write anything! 
Use Disk Copy 4.2 on any Macintosh with 1 MB or more of RAM, and you can write Lisa disk images to disk.

[rayarachelian]

Oh, I can use newer Macs to write out Lisa disks? I was under the impression that the 1.44MB SuperDrive SWIMs couldn't generate the right encoding for Lisa disks. I have far, far too many SuperDrive-enabled Macs so that makes things a bit easier.

Yes, yes you can. I think there's some issue with formatting over floppies that were already used on a Lisa because the r/w head is much wider than the one in the superdrive so it may leave some data behind that the larger head will see that the narrower head will not. But you can solve that with a degausser. I think

I do have an X/ProFile along with a MacWorks CF card, and I also went and got a Sapient I/O board a while back and that's what I'm using in mine. Floppy drive is fully working too. Haven't done any testing on Port A as of yet; I'll give it a shot tonight.

Well. There you go then.

But, if you got a Sapient I/O card, it's SIO should be working, if it's not contact John and see about getting another - that is once you swap it and find the old one was at fault, and not something else.

Also BLU will not use serial port A at all. You'd have to use ZTerm in macworks and then DiskCopy 4.2 in macworks to use port a.

I did somehow manage to get things working just long enough to transfer the root fs image over via serial. Imagine an error rate so high it could only get two bytes every 30 seconds, see picture. Ouch... I also picked up a Mac Plus not too long ago. If it's equipped with a Z8530, I'll likely borrow the SCC out of the Plus and stick it in the Lisa and see what happens.

Amazingly, even though it took forever to transfer BLU said that the dc42 checksum was correct and wrote the root fs disk without issue and... still hangs when it finds serial ports in the installer.

There's bunches of Z8530's on ebay, (I just searched for "Zilog 8530") but ofc, no guarantee that they're functioning, still they're around $15-20 each, so might be worth a gamble if swapping with the MacPlus one works. It could also be other components on the I/O board, motherboard, or even the serial cable.

I've had a weird experience using an FTDI quad serial USB adapter and a Linux laptop running Minicom and connecting to BLU. Without a null modem adapter, whenever it sends something to the Lisa, it receives garbage, so it looks like it's sort of working, but it isn't. Maybe you could try adding an inline null modem adapter and see if that helps - perhaps your USB adapter - if that's what you're using, has some logic in it to implement that internally but it doesn't quite work right. But from your screenshot, I don't think that's the issue - looks like a very noisy connection.

If you have another computer you can transfer from, I'd also try that.

You could also use the MacPlus to make disk images into disks.

If your Lisa is a real 2/10 maybe that's why the floppyemu doesn't work right, I've noticed that kind of an issue myself when trying to install LOS from the floppyemu to a Widget. In my case it booted the LOS installer disk just fine and erased the widget, but after that it kept failing when copying disk 2 and beyond randomly.

Also since you have an X/ProFile, I have some good news for you, once I'm done with the CPU tests, I'll add X/ProFile image support to LisaEm, so you'll be able to use it too - well, not for UniPlus, but for LOS at least and there'll be some tools to convert to dc42.

John also sold the Quad Serial Port card with a set of UniPlus and Xenix preinstalled CF cards, so that's also another option since you have an X/ProFile.

[blusnowkitty]

I've been using some old Prolific USB-RS232 adapters before and they were working great with my Lisa until recently. Still works fine for PC to PC transfers; I'm not convinced it's the adapter - though I have heard that USB-RS232 adapters generate lower voltage data pulses than a "real" RS-232 port puts out. I have tons of 486 and Pentium PCs so that might be worth exploring at some point.

As far as the MacWorks + Floppy Emu idea - tried that, but when trying to write back to a real diskette Disk Copy immediately errored out with -17. It could still be weird Floppy Emu emulation tripping me up though - if it won't boot UniPlus right, will it even read the DC42 images right?

Pulled the Mac Plus apart and it's got the AMD variant of the Z8530. It should still be compatible thanks to the rule of second-sourcing from back in the day, I'm just not really looking forward to desoldering all those pins and fighting with the ground plane stealing my iron heat. Bleh.

Dropping the $350 on that quad serial board is pretty tempting. We'll see... Looks like it's gone out of stock on VintageMicros right now.

As a side note, is Office System kernel known to dump debug messages onto the desktop when something goes really wrong? I got the attached on my desktop after recovering from a failed shutdown. Weird part is, when the message appeared it shifted my desktop up one line as if the graphical shell was just another text element. It worked fine after the message appeared and dragging a window around to force a redraw got rid of the weird graphical corruption issue. I also remember reading an article about how the Lisa devs would press a special key combo and it would switch from Office System to some text-mode debug console. Weird stuff.

[stepleton]

I've never known the Office System to yield those kinds of printed console messages. Very strange. I'd be interested to run `strings` on a ProFile image with the Office System installed and see if you can find that message buried in the binary data somewhere.

In the Workshop, the key to get into the debugger is usually the keypad minus. I think the ToolKit documentation also talks about some kind of online debugger, but nothing that looks like this.

[jamesdenton]

I've been using some old Prolific USB-RS232 adapters before and they were working great with my Lisa until recently. Still works fine for PC to PC transfers; I'm not convinced it's the adapter - though I have heard that USB-RS232 adapters generate lower voltage data pulses than a "real" RS-232 port puts out. I have tons of 486 and Pentium PCs so that might be worth exploring at some point.

As far as the MacWorks + Floppy Emu idea - tried that, but when trying to write back to a real diskette Disk Copy immediately errored out with -17. It could still be weird Floppy Emu emulation tripping me up though - if it won't boot UniPlus right, will it even read the DC42 images right?

Pulled the Mac Plus apart and it's got the AMD variant of the Z8530. It should still be compatible thanks to the rule of second-sourcing from back in the day, I'm just not really looking forward to desoldering all those pins and fighting with the ground plane stealing my iron heat. Bleh.

Dropping the $350 on that quad serial board is pretty tempting. We'll see... Looks like it's gone out of stock on VintageMicros right now.

As a side note, is Office System kernel known to dump debug messages onto the desktop when something goes really wrong? I got the attached on my desktop after recovering from a failed shutdown. Weird part is, when the message appeared it shifted my desktop up one line as if the graphical shell was just another text element. It worked fine after the message appeared and dragging a window around to force a redraw got rid of the weird graphical corruption issue. I also remember reading an article about how the Lisa devs would press a special key combo and it would switch from Office System to some text-mode debug console. Weird stuff.

I've used a FloppyEmu fairly successfully with a 2/5 and 2/10. There is a special 'Lisa' mode you will want to make sure it's in to ensure it works properly. I can't recall the process for that.

John builds the 4-port serial cards on-demand, so you might try reaching out to see if he can put one together for you. As Ray mentioned, it includes a Xenix and UniPlus CF card, though you may need to specify with John which model you have (2/5 or 2/10). The Xenix distro is funny that way. UniPlus works with 10mb on either system.

[rayarachelian]

I've been using some old Prolific USB-RS232 adapters before and they were working great with my Lisa until recently. Still works fine for PC to PC transfers; I'm not convinced it's the adapter

Yeah, not saying it is, saying it's possibly the adapter, could be anything from the I/O board, to the Z8530, to the motherboard, to the DB25-to-db9 to the USB adapter, to software, etc. Trying to say to eliminate it as a factor.

As far as the MacWorks + Floppy Emu idea - tried that, but when trying to write back to a real diskette Disk Copy immediately errored out with -17. It could still be weird Floppy Emu emulation tripping me up though - if it won't boot UniPlus right, will it even read the DC42 images right?

Nah, that's probably just a bad floppy - you're restoring from an image to a physical disk yes?

Pulled the Mac Plus apart and it's got the AMD variant of the Z8530. It should still be compatible thanks to the rule of second-sourcing from back in the day, I'm just not really looking forward to desoldering all those pins and fighting with the ground plane stealing my iron heat. Bleh.

Or you could buy a Z8530 or equivalent off ebay and hope the one in the Lisa was the issue.

Dropping the $350 on that quad serial board is pretty tempting. We'll see... Looks like it's gone out of stock on VintageMicros right now.

Just remember, those ports will only work with Xenix and UniPlus. AFAIK they won't work at all with BLU. But it will come with preinstalled Xenix/UniPlus on CF cards for the X/ProFile and will avoid the whole install floppy dance.

As a side note, is Office System kernel known to dump debug messages onto the desktop when something goes really wrong? I got the attached on my desktop after recovering from a failed shutdown. Weird part is, when the message appeared it shifted my desktop up one line as if the graphical shell was just another text element. It worked fine after the message appeared and dragging a window around to force a redraw got rid of the weird graphical corruption issue. I also remember reading an article about how the Lisa devs would press a special key combo and it would switch from Office System to some text-mode debug console. Weird stuff.

Whoa, that's a pretty neat screenshot!

Yeah, it's Command-(numpad) Enter to do that if the LPW debugger is installed.

I think the way it works is you install LOS, then you install LPW on top of LOS and use the environments window to boot between LOS and LPW but since they share the hard drive you can compile tools for LOS in LPW and then switch the shell to the desktop manager or something like that.

[rayarachelian]

I've used a FloppyEmu fairly successfully with a 2/5 and 2/10. There is a special 'Lisa' mode you will want to make sure it's in to ensure it works properly. I can't recall the process for that.

I think I remember having the upgrade the firmware to do that. There's info and binaries for the CPLD+firmware here: https://www.bigmessowires.com/efw
You have to hold next+previous during reset for one, and select+previous for the other part, or something like that.

Then you'd flash the Mac+Lisa firmware on there, and then on top of that there's a mode to switch. Fun times.
But the one I have worked on two Lisas 2/5s, but wouldn't work right on the 2/10 at all.

[blusnowkitty]

What I heard from Steve over at BMOW (and I think some people here or on 68kmla too) is that previously Lisa floppy emulation only worked on a 2/5 if you had the original Model A or B and until recently the Model C would only work with the 2/10. I did end up bugging Steve into fixing Model C for the 2/5 which is why that new firmware is out so, woo.

Yeah, not saying it is, saying it's possibly the adapter, could be anything from the I/O board, to the Z8530, to the motherboard, to the DB25-to-db9 to the USB adapter, to software, etc. Trying to say to eliminate it as a factor.

Heh, I didn't mean it to be taken that way, I knew you meant it could be a variable

Nah, that's probably just a bad floppy - you're restoring from an image to a physical disk yes?

That I am - weird thing being that LOS and BLU can format the disks I'm using okay and BLU was even able to write the images without issue but for some reason MacWorks just... can't. I'm fairly certain my 2/5 was very much a cobbled together system; I wouldn't be surprised if there's just some weird little hardware glitch or hiccup somewhere in there. I'll probably end up splurging on a 2/10 at some point; every Lisa owner I've heard of has multiple so why shouldn't I?

Whoa, that's a pretty neat screenshot!

Yeah, it's Command-(numpad) Enter to do that if the LPW debugger is installed.

I think the way it works is you install LOS, then you install LPW on top of LOS and use the environments window to boot between LOS and LPW but since they share the hard drive you can compile tools for LOS in LPW and then switch the shell to the desktop manager or something like that.

I knew I had to take a picture of it when it occurred. I'm sure such a bug has probably never been seen since at least the early days of LisaEm, if not 40 years ago when the Office System was still in development.

Yeah, that sounds about right - I read a copy of some interview out of a magazine that got republished to one of those early 90s Web 1.0 sites - the ones that only used 16 colour VGA, Times New Roman, designed for 640x480... I can't find the site now of course, but what the interviewer did first was to set the scene of where he was (at Apple's Lisa department) and what was going on, which included a line about a developer hitting a bug, pressing a special key combo to drop to some sort of debug console, and then hitting the combo again to return to Office System.

Far as the UniPlus issue goes, I got it to kernel panic tonight! That's something, right? Ah well... I'm just gonna shelve it for now until next payday, then see what John at VintageMicros has to say about new quad serial boards.

[jamesdenton]

Have you tried a different compact flash card? It's possible there are some issues reading/writing to the card. Also, do you recall which mode/target combinations you used to initialize the compact flash card originally?

[blusnowkitty]

Have you tried a different compact flash card? It's possible there are some issues reading/writing to the card. Also, do you recall which mode/target combinations you used to initialize the compact flash card originally?

It's been able to run GEM(DOS) and Office System fine. I don't remember the setting offhand but I've left my X/Profile in the default configuration it ships in that works with LOS and MacWorks.

[blusnowkitty]

Big bump, I know - I got a real 5MB ProFile yesterday so I hooked it up and tried to get UniPlus going again. This time, as soon as I specified w(0,0) at the copy prompt, the heads immediately crashed against the end stop and behaved as if they were trying to go further. No lasting damage as far as I can tell, thankfully.

What I did notice is that the installation instructions seem to be assuming that you'll have a 10MB disk installed, which would be consistent with how the real ProFile suddenly shot to the end of disk and kept trying to go further. I'm pretty sure I was using a 5MB STAR with my X/ProFile; I couldn't figure out how to set a 10MB STAR without it complaining. I wonder if it's possible that since the X/ProFile has nothing to physically crash into, it was "overformatting" my 5MB STAR with 10MB settings and somehow wrapping around to the beginning of the 5MB image? This might explain why the installer would die when it attempted to boot from the X/ProFile.

ETA: Aha, I saw Ray's post on absurd Uniplus disk sizes and it seems my assumption on it expecting a 10MB disk is correct

[rayarachelian]

ETA: Aha, I saw Ray's post on absurd Uniplus disk sizes and it seems my assumption on it expecting a 10MB disk is correct

Well, almost. It doesn't expect a 10MB or a 5MB ProFile, rather it has two different sets of entries for swap/root in it's partition table. One set is for 5MB ProFiles, and another for 10MB ProFiles, and then the instruction sheet: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/unisoft/UniPlus+_System_V_Installation_Instructions.html tells you which one to use for swap or mkfs.
So it's really a bit of a trick that allows it to function without detecting the size.

My guess is that early on, Apple shared details about the ProFile disk protocol, but not about the special block 0xffffff that has that info in it.

[compu_85]

I found this article this morning... it looks like Apple commissioned UniSoft to do the port for the Lisa:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050212052600/http://www.cfcl.com/~eryk/weblog/archives/000183.html

-J