LisaList2

At the VCF Midwest show last week I was displaying a running Lisa card cage containing a full set of Sapient recreation boards.   While the I/O board was a recreation, it had an original MW+II PFG board installed, and many folks pointed it out and had questions about the PFG.   There seemed to be some confusion about the PFG and what it’s for.   

The PFG is a small board that attaches to the Lisa I/O board that is part of the MacWorks Plus II package.  Here is a quote from the MW+II manual:

MacWorks Plus II includes a user-installable hardware upgrade called the X/Lisa Programmable Frequency Generator (PFG). The PFG circuit board has been designed to provide three major hardware improvements to the X/Lisa. These enable MacWorks Plus II to read virtually all valid 800k Macintosh disks, store Control Panel settings more effectively, and allow the serial ports to operate more closely to the Macintosh Plus hardware specifications.

I was asked if having the PFG installed required me to run MW+II on my Lisa.  The answer is no, the PFG has no effect if MW+II is not running.  LOS, Xenix, UniPlus, MacWorks, and MW+ all run fine with a PFG installed. 

I was also asked if running MW+II required more RAM, a SCSI disk drive, or the Lisa Screen Mod kit.  The answer is no, MW+II will work on any Lisa2 or Lisa2/10 with the standard 1 Meg of RAM.   Using 800K floppy disks will require a double side drive.

Running MW+II requires a PFG to be installed.  If you would like to try MW+II more information is here: https://lisalist2.com/index.php/board,11.0.html

If you would like to buy a PFG, you can buy one here:  http://vintagemicros.com/catalog/lisa-pfgprogrammable-frequency-generator-p-325.html

If you have any questions about MW+II or the PFG, please PM me and I will help anyway I can.

Rick

Oh of course you would get a bad checksum! I'm sorry about that, you can't just go editing the drive image like I did. It's too late for me to correct this obvious mistake now, but I will deal with this tomorrow evening (UK time).

If you're handy with Python, you can see the checksum calculation (and where the checksum is placed in each 532-byte disk block) in my hard drive image creation script.

woot! Thanks so much -- this was super helpful. I managed to fix the checksum (bytes 2990 and 2991 changed to AA F6 respectively) and scrolling with 1 and 2 works great now. Here's the image with the fixed checksum: https://blog.vladovince.com/files/selector_scroll_with_12_keys_CHECKSUM_FIXED.image

Thanks again Tom -- I really appreciate your super quick response.

Oh of course you would get a bad checksum! I'm sorry about that, you can't just go editing the drive image like I did. It's too late for me to correct this obvious mistake now, but I will deal with this tomorrow evening (UK time).

If you're handy with Python, you can see the checksum calculation (and where the checksum is placed in each 532-byte disk block) in my hard drive image creation script.

Thanks so much to both of you for replying so quickly, James and Tom! I've had such a great time using both of your tools.



Tom, I really appreciate you jumping on this right away -- using alternative keys would work perfectly for this. I tried the alternative image but unfortunately I'm getting a checksum error -- I could probably fix this myself, but I'm not familiar enough with the image format to make a guess where the checksum is located in the file.

James -- it would be awesome to have a key combination available for the arrow keys, if it's not too much trouble. The Selector is so far the only piece of software that I've had an issue with, so if we're able to resolve it with an updated image it wouldn't be critical to have the function.

A Floppy Emu will not help you very much as a backup medium, as the Lisa only knows how to use the floppy drive connector to speak to a floppy drive. (It's not like a Macintosh where the floppy connector can connect to an HD20 hard drive, for example.)

Instead, I'd recommend the following: work out a way to connect a serial cable to your Lisa, then use BLU to download an image of your hard drive to a modern computer with Xmodem.

Are there recommendations on how to back up the Lisa HD?   I have a floppy emu and I was thinking of creating 10 MB blank image - but not sure what I'd use to create that image - especially since it's running multiple environments.  I'm sure someone must have already figured this out - your help is appreciated!

Michael

the standard Linux program that does xmodem, ymodem, and zmodem reception ("rx", "rb", and "rz", but deep down it's the same program) has the annoying habit of dealing with fatal errors not just by quitting but by deleting the file that it was receiving first!
...
The hard drive image you spent many minutes downloading (all while wondering if the drive itself will survive!) is deleted immediately

I'm working on a new version of BLU, and hoped to fix this annoyance, but I can't reproduce it.

Using a Prolific USB-serial interface, and rz -X, and lrz -X with minicom 2.9 (under Monterey / Homebrew), xmodem transfers seem to work normally.

I'll look for an FTDI interface, but if anyone has pointers on how to induce the failure please let me know!

James

The only thing that makes sense is 1) it was from Paul Allens hoard (although not restored) and 2) the buyer was wealthy enough to set the valuation with their purchase price. 
The old saying that 'something is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it' proves itself once again. 

This is reminiscent of the pricing we've seen in art and antiquities over the past decade, which has always been driven by rarity and heavy wallet flexes. 

One last-minute thought is it is a tribute purchase made by someone well-off enough to 'tip' Paul Allen (estate) for his philanthropy. <and in the process significantly raised the value of his L1>

In either case, it will be interesting to know how many L1 owners will be contacting auction houses over the next few months.

Please can you try the drive image in the attached .zip file in place of your regular Selector drive image? (You will probably need to rename the image file.)

If my byte edits worked, you should be able to use the 1 and 2 keys at the top-left of your keyboard to scroll up and down respectively.

I hadn't considered this possibility when I made the Selector! I think though that it wouldn't be too difficult to change the Selector so that it uses keys from the main keyboard --- it's probably even possible to do it by just editing the profile.image binary directly in a hex editor. I'm busy for the next several days but can look into it next week.