Adventures at the 2021 Vintage Computer Festival (RIP Power Computing)

[@iamtheeverblack]

VCF East was a ton of fun, and we're so over the moon with how our weather-related exhibit was received. It was years of reverse engineering to get us up to that point, and we're glad these systems are now running as they were intended. We're already considering doing Midwest next year, whenever that is. It was a pleasure meeting you and Steve, and thanks for putting up with my shenanigans with the PowerWave too, haha.

[@RetroTechChris]

Your weather station was AMAZINGLY cool!! It would be great to see you at Midwest too. I'll be showcasing your exhibit when I get my VCF East video out here in the next few days ;)

[@iamtheeverblack]

@@RetroTechChris We're looking forward to seeing that! And yep, we're in talks to do Midwest and we're planning out the logistics.

[@quiksr20]

The weather setup was awesome!!!

[@charliesretrocomputing]

are you doing it again for 2024? I'm going this year.

[@dungeonseeker3087]

Loving the Ncommander cameo, he should have been your guy for when the Quadra crashed, to say he's a coding wizard is doing him a disservice. On one of his streams he crosscompiled GCC from Linux to Solaris, then chat dared him to grab the source for Doom and port it to Solaris. It took him a little over an hour and he was playing Doom on Solaris.

[@_PGleo86]

Those Weather Channel machines bring back such great memories! I was a bit of a weird kid; I'd always sit in front of the Weather Channel instead of cartoons. I liked the hurricane tracking segments the most. Seeing those graphics again really took me back!

[@dotmatrixmoe]

Seeing my brother growing intrigue to the computers _only_ because it had Minecraft was fun.

[@MichaelAStanhope]

It was alot of fun to share the weekend with both you and Steve! Glad I could come. Thanks for allowing me to share in the Macintosh Shenanigans! Great find on the Powerbook 540c. Unfortunately those screen hinges are a lousy design, it reminds me of how my 540c was when I finally got rid of it around 2000.

[@Dark_eVader]

Thanks to your video I also got to finally see how good looking Sean was hehe.

[@RussellLeChard]

@mac84, It was a pleasure to speak to you at the VCF East event last weekend (I was the guy on the mobility scooter with my wife and 12 year old son.) VCF East hosts a great events.. It was nice for you to take a few minutes to speak to us. I'm not a big Apple guy(more of the PC camp) but i love Vintage computers in general. I'm presently trying to restore several vintages computers including an IBM 5155 luggable, Zenith Data Systems Suprasport z-184, and a Toshiba Libretto CT70. Thanks again.

[@THEtechknight]

Dang! you can see me right around 4:00 in the gray shirt!

[@techman2471]

I worked for Digital briefly in 1994-1995 in Augusta, Maine. They sold the plant but kept building Digital Products. I was there until 2003 when Sanmina shut it down. I remember playing that game for a bit a few times. Never knew what it was called. Yes, i want to play this game again in the worst way!

[@MrLurchsThings]

Never played a MUD, but if you’ve got something running - absolutely.

[@td4dotnet]

YES! MUD! I played the Discworld mud for years love to play the ModdedMacMUD ;-) (also love your channel AR thanks for all the great videos!)

[@SuperSmashDolls]

Action Retro and NCommander is the crossover I never even thought would happen and appreciate immensely. Watch out, he might find a way to install OS/2 on your Macs.

[@logansorenssen]

Or Solaris! Actually, there is Solaris 2.5.1 for PPC...

[@PMARC14]

In the background I saw what looked like a sony 14 inch trinitron which I recently saved from my school tech dump and give to someone who would appreciate it. It would be funny if it was mine, but it is great to see a convention that keeps all that old tech alive and in use, brings a lot of nostalgia, but also out of the landfill

[@00Klingon]

Awesome! I used to play MUDs quite frequently back in 1993-94 on a Performa 600 using NCSA Telnet. My favorite was one called Midgard. Also used to play around with something called MacMud but never got very far with it. Some good memories for sure.

[@LevelUp_ErikJ]

So glad I was able to make it and snag a few photos of this little misadventure. Here's hoping the PowerComputing unit is working again!

[@quiksr20]

I stopped In at VCF and got got to talk to some of you guys…. Was awesome to see some of the cool macs setup…. Didn’t even recognize the clear Mac was from the channel… been a subscriber for a while…

[@AtomicGoober]

The mud sounds like fun, sign me up! I just picked up an 540c new in box from someone's closet stash, so looking forward to playing with 8.1 and getting it online.

[@kbhasi]

(18:47) I would, but not very often, however, I would like to mess around with it on my vintage PCs, like with a VM I have that runs Devuan to provide some modern Web stuff for my vintage PCs*, and maybe also on my modern PCs occasionally. I'd especially like to mess around with a MUD (and BBSes) once I get my old ThinkPad 760ED back up and running after sitting for years in a humid storeroom with the previous owner, once I can find the time to perform the requisite board-level repairs to patch the damages caused by battery corrosion. I'd also want to mess around with your server on some of my other vintage PCs too. I have never played a real MUD as I was born too late to experience that. I do like that you've moved it to a Raspberry Pi board that I'm sure is running some version of Raspberry Pi OS, which would also be more secure as long as you aren't using default passwords. Oh, I also forgot to mention that I don't yet have any vintage PCs from the early 1990s, as my expertise is more with Windows 3.1 and later. (Edit: does your Minecraft server only accept Java clients, or does it also accept Redstone-based clients? I'm guessing it's the former)

[@TechTimeWithEric]

I was hoping to make it to that one, I live in NJ, but I wasn't able to pull off the scheduling. But I will be at Retro World Expo in Hartford CT.

[@LaurelGeek]

Heck yeah I would play on a mud!

[@memsom]

Wow, you missed the Acorn Archimedes. Significant. First computer to use an ARM chip, in fact, the computer the ARM chip was originally designed for.

[@benlinuxguy]

Oh yes I'm interested in the MUD

[@phreapersoonlijk]

For some unknown reason I keep loving the animated and disembodied hand more and more ! :D

[@minkispacebirb]

I would REALLY enjoy it if you made your MUD available using the pi. would probably connect from either my 486 or my nintendo 3ds.

[@martinnyberg71]

9:21 Was that Steve’s SE/30 with a flatscreen colour display that just flashed by there!?

[@DavidStahlOLDHAPPyMACs]

Thank's Sean For the inside look at VCF East that was A lot of cool stuff to see I need to get that firmware so I can put the SD card reader on my 20" iSight G5 Great Video

[@noahbleam2805]

I would love to play on the M.U.D I'm 23 and never really got to play things like that but I have a major interest in almost everything retro tech.

looking forward to you renovating and upgrading your 510 mac.

[@MisterMsk]

Your exhibit was my favorite one of the show. I love MUDs. Used to play them when I was kid. There was one called Holodeck which was really cool. You would enter the Holodeck to get a 'new world'. Besides exploring, there was a purple lotus that you could find that randomly appeared. Anyway, as I said, well done exhibit.

[@allycat7699]

I'd love to play the mud! Would be a good excuse to finally upgrade my mac se :^)

[@SudosFTW]

Why not just use the Mac Mini for the MUD? it has more than enough brunt to do the MUD serving AND minecraft at the same time. My like-mac mini to yours was doing a Minecraft 1.16 server, web serving, HL2DM and UT99/2004 servers all at the same time before I went and replaced it with something more power efficient. This also frees up the raspberry pi for other projects.

[@ActionRetro]

Ah that's probably smart lol

[@RetroTechChris]

It was super great to meet you there at the show!! Loved your table, it was awesome.

[@nticompass]

Yay, put the MUD online! Then I can try to connect to it from my Compaq Portable III or even older machine!

[@DrTofu83]

It's really cool, and I think the MUD idea is too ^_^

[@DissertatingMedieval]

I remember playing a mud called The Final Challenge in the mid-90's.

[@asfrflagcommunity966]

Here’s proposal Take three vintage Macintosh computers and Mac Pro G5 and build what I like to call Project Tesseract: Three Macintosh computers all linked together in one supercomputer

[@daviddgtnt]

I asked NCommander about if he stopped by and responded, glad he got into this video!

[@bramvandenbroeck5060]

I have never played a MUD but i am interested in trying it out!

[@golfguy25]

If you put MUD online, I would definitely join with my SE/30, and many other classic computers!

[@fsfs555]

>You can't get ye flask. It would be pretty neat to get card readers on the iMac G5. Just have to completely recap them first and install the CF stuff after the firmware's loaded. Your new 540 may have been owned by the very definition of a Power User: it's likely that the keyboard and trackpad (and spots on the palm rest area) are smooth because they've been worn down. There were a few PPC upgrade cards for them: the official Apple-branded one was 100MHz, as were the early clones; I don't know where your 88MHz came from unless it's either got dodgy software that's not reporting correctly, it has problems, is modded, or it's preproduction. Anyway Newer made up to 187MHz versions of the 500 series upgrade complete with a L2 cache. Supposedly they were working on a G3 upgrade but couldn't get enough parts to build new cards (the connectors were custom and the molds were long since destroyed). Someone on the 68kmla forums tried to build a custom PPC 740-based G3 card out of one of the late-model Newer cards but it didn't work for some reason (and it still didn't work after the original chip was swapped back on); I'm not sure they ever figured out why since, according to the PPC 750 User Manual, the 740 is pin-compatible with the 603ev so it should've been a straight swap.

[@gamepad3173]

I'll give this Mud game a go once I can get my modern 1993 Apple IIe platinum built. I mostly have all the hardware (Pi 4 B included) just not the case or keyboard. I'm waiting on those. a Video will be up detailing all of the hardware plus the case and keyboard. (I'll need to pickup a 32gb micro SD card and a 32gb Compact flash card for Apple Pi OS and maybe a working card reader as well).

[@luked3172]

I'm interested in playing the MUD. However, I don't have a vintage mac but a mid 2010 MBP. Could I still log in through the terminal window?

[@ActionRetro]

Yup! All you need is telnet in the terminal :)

[@theObsoleteTechie]

It would be to play the mud game, never played it would be interesting to try it.

[@MichaelAStanhope]

And it would be great if you put the MUD online!

[@BilisNegra]

No mention in the video about what happened to the Power Computing beast? It's such a recent upgrade project and was so great, what's going wrong? Sonnet card died?

[@ActionRetro]

I messed it up.trying to install 10.5. For some reason it stopped seeing the video card

[@sixteenbitify]

@@ActionRetro Did you reverted back to its original video card? My 9600 did the same thing with the Radeon 9200 and didn’t fix itself until I put back the Twin Turbo 128. If you get a picture back with the original video card, you can put back the Radeon 9200 and it should work again. Believe me, my fully maxed out 9600 is extremely temperamental and I assume your Power Computing is the same way too.

[@MistahMatzah]

@@ActionRetro Happened in my G3. Slapped a bad old Matrox PCI card in there, booted with it,.then put the Radeon 9250 back in. Came right up.

[@billkalwite728]

I would be interested in playing a mud

[@fuxi1444]

I have a question related to the sponsor: Are squarespace webs frogfind friendly?

[@ChrisCookTech]

Guessing not… unless you can disable SSL

[@AlonsoVPR]

I can see your face on the crt reflection lol!

[@thenewretroshow]

Love to try out the Mud 😎

[@95Comics]

omg i live 5 mins from there and i had no idea it happened! i feel so left out! lol

[@danielson9579]

I remember the days when the fattest mac was an Amiga 😊

[@David_Phantom]

For the firmware dump, would that also allow an iSight camera to work? Or is there no connection for one on production G5 iMacs?

[@eDoc2020]

It looks like there might be another chapter in the PowerWave saga...

[@ellienore]

Did you release the source code for Action MUD?

[@DavidMarvin]

I would love to play some MUDPi.

[@RetroTechToys]

I really need to make it out to one of these meetups!

[@khristopkel]

I would love to play mud again

[@Paladin732]

I would like to try MUD

[@silkdragon47]

Heck ya! I would love to play a MUD

[@nasko8605]

Just give us an adress for mud server already !!! :D

[@ericvtheworld]

Hear me out: OS X 10.0's system requirements say that it unofficially runs on 64mb of ram. MacOSX PowerBook?

[@MistahMatzah]

Won't work in any NuBus Mac.

[@antoinevs7201]

C'mon! Put the cursed mac original case back on, it looks nice without it but it's just not the same anymore!

[@monchiabbad]

Sorry for repeating but; The cursed mac looks nice but it's not cursed anymore, it's just transparent. The totally un-apple black and blue colors where more cursed-like and the iomega drive brought the durse to reality with the huge potential to crash. Not to mention the original black color of the cursed mac brought more potential of overheating making it into a mac cursed beyond bad apple's curse of designing systems to get overheated.

[@thechillhacker]

ok now time to go dosdude1 and put a g3 or g4 (possibly needing an interposer... from PCBWay!) on that 540's upgrade card. i kinda want to do something similar with mine, but first a new screen. Someone put a 520 display on my 540, so - sadness :( Actually, I already bought a non-LC 040 chip to upgrade mine, then found out about the firmware issues, which i may or may not be able to investigate. The PPC sounds more promising though, really - even though it too will likely require XLR8 enablers at least, if not firmware patching or whitelisting

[@thechillhacker]

Sean, if you want to work on that, let me know. I'm stocked with enough parts and equipment to possibly make such a monstrosity work - not to mention a lab full of AV recording equipment to document the process

[@mikek1187]

LOL, you got me on video. Now I'm KZbin-famous! I won't mention which timestamp though... ;)

[@systemchris]

In the top 10, whooo

[@yassro5424]

I have the same PowerBook 540C PPC upgrade. it’s one of the best laptop ever made imo... But I think something is wrong with yours.. it should run at 166 not 88 Mhz.. Greeting from France !

[@ActionRetro]

Interesting thanks!!

[@growingup15]

Am I the only one that got a Nerd Boner when you shown the Weather Channel stuff. I would kill to get a hold of a WeatherStar 4000 Computer. The Weather Channel is my Childhood in the 90s and early 2000s

[@paulwratt]

Yep, MUD me up

[@encorespod2135]

Nope, don't like muds, don't like muds that have been converted into talkers. Just do a talker.

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

I wish I could go!

[@mikemorrell7921]

MUD please

[@toolb0x]

Bro your hand needs a channel of its own you wave it around so much

[@808v1]

your thmbnails should always predominately feature your arm gesticulating vigoursly!!

[@50ShadesOfBeige]

I'd get down and MUDdy!!

[@michaelpastras]

Hi

[@donbot5000]

do an emac.

[@noamharduf]

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