LisaList2

Naturally I don't know if anyone has ever attempted this, and some of the units referenced in the example code and in the docs are units I don't remember from a standard Workshop install. Fortunately, with the source code release, it may be possible for anyone to build those units for themselves. I haven't investigated this. Of course the OS code itself has source code for device drivers too... I expect the document linked above could help make them easier to understand.

Yep, I can confirm that we have all those units in the source code release and they can all be built pretty easily!

Thanks, this is awesome! I wish I had something like this when I started compiling all the source code a couple months ago. I decided that it would be quicker to transfer the files to the Lisa via serial instead of taking the time to write a filesystem tool (not sure if I was right about that or not), but the serial transfers obviously ended up being really painful for the full 20-something MB of code.

I think this is a good idea and have had FujiNet come to mind before when thinking about networking for the Lisa.

If "Mac XL" means a Lisa running MacWorks, then a FujiNet solution might not be too different to a hypothetical FujiNet for classic Macs. For those, it could make sense to use the same serial port technique that LocalTalk uses, giving you 230 kbit/s --- not super speedy, but much faster than the Atari SIO bus where FujiNet made its debut (126 kbit/s). This kind of solution may allow you to use the same driver software on the Lisa (under MacWorks, of course) or the Mac.

Parallel port only is much faster (approaching a megabyte per second in some cases IIRC) but is a Lisa-only approach --- and if you're going to be Lisa-only, then I say go for the Lisa OS and the Office System. The good news is that some detailed information for making Lisa device drivers is out there, with example code even:

https://archive.org/details/AppleLisa-DeviceDriverManual/mode/2up

Naturally I don't know if anyone has ever attempted this, and some of the units referenced in the example code and in the docs are units I don't remember from a standard Workshop install. Fortunately, with the source code release, it may be possible for anyone to build those units for themselves. I haven't investigated this. Of course the OS code itself has source code for device drivers too... I expect the document linked above could help make them easier to understand.

It's been a while since I looked at that document, but I seem to recall that the device driver system supports dynamic loading, without rebooting --- seems like that's what it says on page 6. Like so many things Lisa, pretty impressive if maybe unnecessary for 1983!

Thanks for your hard work!

In a Facebook conversation with someone at FugiNet they said they would need documentation on how to make Lisa drivers. I’m not a developer although I’ve been IT for a long time. It’s been on the network and Security side. Do we have any archives of information that would help?

Something that would run on a Mac XL I’m assuming…

“ Possible only if sufficient information is available e.g. to make a new device driver for 7/7. e.g. a version could be attached via the parallel port, in the same way as the Profile hard disk, but again, information is needed. The only documentation I have is for writing 7/7 user applications (using Clascal).”

Hi everyone,
I wanted to share some code from a project I've been working on recently.

Now that we have the actual Lisa source code to reference, I thought it would be a worthy challenge to try and write a utility program to programmatically add files onto a Lisa disk image. It took about a month of fiddling with code and combing through the Lisa source for me to understand all the moving parts, but I finally have a version that (mostly) works! (I also wrote the corresponding read code, which will extract all files from a given disk).

Code is here, under "srcBuilder". The README will explain more about how to set things up: https://github.com/tfrikker/lisa_utils

(Right now I only support 5MB images in B-tree FS format, but perhaps more will come later. I also still have a significant bug that shows up sometimes when writing the catalog entries; sometimes adding files makes others disappear)

I wrote this in the hopes that I could compile at least *something* from the Lisa source release in Lisa Pascal Workshop (and, spoiler alert, I was - the "STUNTS" hardware demo. See attached image). After fixing some of the above issues, it'd be really great to ingest many more files and see if we can get a full app built.

I hope someone here finds this useful (or at least technically interesting!). I learned a lot from this project, and I hope to contribute some code to lisafshtool soon as well.

Questions, comments, or PRs would be much appreciated 

If you offer it too cheap then someone’s gonna buy it as a spare (and probably never use it). If it’s tested and working, then you could hold your price until someone actually needs one to get a system working.

I also concur. These CPU cards are quite common in Lisa-land. A cursory search for "Sold" Lisa CPU cards on eBay show 3 sales (all untested) from ~ $125 to $192

It could also be the part itself...

I agree.  The CPU card is common to all variations of the Lisa.  They are very dependable and even in earlier battery damaged systems the CPU card is rarely effected.  Also being located inside the card cage it does not easily get physically damaged.  I am not saying the price is wrong, you just need to wait for someone who needs one..

It could also be the part itself... I've not heard of CPU bards breaking very often. I/O boards are of course a different story.