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