Re: lisa demo

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I was one of the people involved with this project, and can answer a few of the questions people had.

For some background, the people responsible for this were some members of the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club (http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu). The club had a Lisa sitting in their server room for many years with no idea what to do with it, but as I have an interest in retro Apple hardware I took it upon myself to restore the machine (Actually in Mac XL setup with a nonworking Sun 20 hard drive, 800k floppy, 3A ROMs and screen mod kit) to its original Lisa 2 configuration (although we left the 800k drive in since it works fine with 400k drives in the Lisa OS). Along the way we obtained a dead keyboard and made new foam/mylar pads (I used pretty heavy-duty closed cell foam intended for weatherstripping windows: It's cheap, can be bought at any hardware store, and since it's designed for exposure to the elements will probably greatly outlast the original stuff Keytronic used), built an IDEfile that's currently working with a 2GB SanDisk CF card, totally recapped the power supply and CRT drive board, and also replaced all of the little trimpots on the CRT drive board because a few of ours were bad enough that Deoxit couldn't make the screen stop rolling like an old TV with the horizontal sync out of whack.

The Lisa hardware is not capable of spitting out color for obvious reasons, this is a bit of a hack on our part. Some other club members designed FPGA based hardware for stealing video signals from old machines, so the color you saw was generated in the FPGA board that converts the Lisa's output to DVI, the color selection is accomplished by interpreting the contrast register setting in the Lisa.

And now for the interesting part: We did it again: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59635 (video at http://capped.tv/cmucc-introducing_the_ilisa). You may notice a vast improvement in the audio quality, this is because a couple of the guys took it upon themselves to design a Lisa sound card. Take a look at the NFO file (http://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=59635) if you'd like to run this, in an emulator or on a real Lisa, but be aware that there's no sound without the (sadly currently unobtainable because they're a pain to assemble) sound card. There's a bit more detail about the sound card on the website of the guy who wrote the music: http://coda.s3m.us/2012/08/06/creation-of-the-ilisa-demo-soundtrack/

On Saturday, May 7, 2011 4:24:11 PM UTC-4, gilles wrote:
>
> I am now running under IDLE emulator, it's a bit tricky to launch...
>
> Install workshop 3
> run workshop.
> insert disk image
> run -LOWER-Requiem
>
>
> last image is mono with only lisa logo, I suppose color is added for
> projection by external hw?
>
>
> On 7 mai, 21:57, Jason Perkins <perkins.ja..._at_email.domain.hidden> wrote:
> > I saw this live on a stream, what's with the color apple logo at the
> end? Is
> > the lisa's hardware capable of spitting out color?
> >
> > -J
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 2:19 PM, gilles <gilles.fe..._at_email.domain.hidden> wrote:
> > > found this post on the 68k macintosh liberation army :
> > >http://68kmla.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=15987&p=151405#p151405
> >
> > > I had no success in running this demo for now, it seems to be workshop
> > > 3 based but is not bootable on emulators.
> >
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