update on the ALyX semi-replica project

From: Brian Connors <connorbd_at_email.domain.hidden>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 14:31:42 -0800 (PST)


I don't know if anyone's been wondering, but I thought I'd give a bit of a progress report since I put up my first announcement. I may have pictures soon, depending on how long it takes to get the plastic cut out and mounted on the frame.

I finally settled on constructing the frame from Actobotics parts, since that was what I could get the best price on at retail; it cost about US$40, not including tools and plastic for the shell. There's a picture at http://instagram.com/p/wSZLMSJQsc/ which shows the main part of the frame before I attached the motherboard rails; the plan is to support the rear of the case with the plexiglas shell itself (which I am currently learning to cut and paint). I'm not sure about putting out more than basic measurements of the frame, primarily because anyone who wants to duplicate it is likely to have a completely different set of parts available, but if anyone's interested I can put a materials list together.

Unfortunately I'm still not sure about using the Raspberry Pi for the CPU. I haven't been able to get LisaEm to work at acceptable speed on the Pi and I'm going back and forth between trying to tough it out or upgrading to a BeagleBone Black (and losing 3 USB ports) or even a Riotboard (and losing about $40). Mini vMac works fine -- great, in fact -- but I feel like I'd be copping out settling for a sort-of Mac XL.

Keyboard and mouse aren't an immediate concern, but if cost was no object I'd go straight for a Matias Tactile Pro and maybe build a mouse with a cheapo optical mouse and a handful of PCL pellets. (In a lot of ways, this is going to wind up looking like what a Lisa would have looked like had they still been available around 1990.)

I have the Lisa Workshop-like shell to the point where it can be used to compile simple Pascal and C programs, view and kill processes, and create, mount, and burn ISO images to optical disc, but I've been primarily building and testing on OS X Yosemite, so although it compiles and runs fine under Free Pascal on Raspbian, very little works because the config file I'm using is tailored to OS X. I haven't tested it at all on Windows; I don't know if Free Pascal sees Cygwin as Windows or Unix, so I'm not going to open that can of worms unless someone specifically asks. It doesn't support anything like the LW Exec scripting language; I may do that eventually, but right now it just runs bash scripts as shell commands.

I'm trying to figure out a platform-independent way of implementing stationery pads. I'm considering making something like a sharchive that would invoke the stationery pad manager with a hashbang line at the beginning and extract the actual file; this would have the advantage of requiring no changes to any file managers you'd use on Raspbian, but it also fills me with horror at the possibility of someone breaking through the sandbox somehow, so I haven't tried to implement it just yet.

So that's where the project stands at the moment. The code and shell templates are still available at github.com/csyde/alyxproject (the shell is lash.pas). I want to get it out to a wider audience but I'm not quite sure how. Feel free to send suggestions.

/Brian

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Received on 2015-07-16 08:24:11

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