oldcomputers.net

We all have our own bits of nostalgia when it comes to computers “back in the day.” OK, maybe you don’t, but I do. I have many fond memories of my Apple IIgs and all of its glory. I had a Woz edition with a TransWarp GS, the Hard Disk 20SC, and the good ol’ ImageWriter II. Why let the past go, when you can run old programs on your screaming fast modern hardware with an emulator? On the Mac, the best Apple IIgs emulator is Sweet16, which is still in active development (2011). It even supports printing (to the Mac’s Preview.app).

I found a bunch of Apple IIgs disk images, and I recognized some of the programs, not that you can do much with them nowadays, but it’s fun. Try it out for yourself. Have some fun.

Happy Memories

Here are some screen shots that I was able to produce. What fun!

The GS/OS 6 Finder:

Many a birthday card did I print with Print Shop! I wish I could still print them out…

AppleWorks was a real winner:

Tetris!

GNO Multitasking Environment (GNO/ME). Unix for the Apple IIgs. This was a new one to me, but here it is!

So many more old programs to explore. Have fun!

I should add that if you’re having trouble getting files from your Mac into your GS image, since Apple dropped support for plain HFS disk images in OS 10.5 or 10.6, there’s a roundabout way to do it. I tried the program CiderPress, which is an open source tool on Windows for reading and writing ProDOS (and other) disk images. If you don’t have Windows anywhere, you might try WineBottler to run Windows apps on your Mac, though I don’t know if it works with CiderPress or not.

Without further ado, here is the bash function that I keep in my .bash_profile file (along with this handy function for assigning Finder labels).

[bash]# Assign a finder comment to a file
findercomment(){
if [ $# -lt 2 ]; then
echo “USAGE: findercomment file comment [words can continue]”
echo “Sets the Finder comment for a file.”
echo “Example: findercomment stevejobs.jpg this one will be worth money some day”
else
osascript – “$@” << EOF
on run argv
set text item delimiters of AppleScript to " "
set theComment to (items 2 through end of argv) as string
set theFile to POSIX file (item 1 of argv) as alias
tell application "Finder"
set comment of theFile to theComment
end tell
return
end run
EOF
fi
}[/bash]

With that function defined, I was able to recurse through a directory, run strings to extract words, and assign the words as a Finder comment to the files.

[bash]find . | while read F; do
echo "$F"
COMMENTS=$(strings "$F")
findercomment "$F" "$COMMENTS"
done[/bash]

There's probably an extra step I could take to filter the output of strings against a dictionary, but I left it as is. Enjoy.

Installing Snow Leopard in a Virtual Machine

I followed these instructions on OS X Daily which were for installing a developer release of Lion, but it worked for Snow Leopard as well.

My experience differed slightly from the instructions above, so here are some comments:

Their Step 1. I had to make a 7GB disk for Snow Leopard instead of the 5GB disk that Lion needs. I think I made the Image Format “read/write” instead of “DVD/CD master,” but I cannot remember.

Their Steps 3–4. I just “restored” the entire Snow Leopard Installer DVD image, since Snow Leopard was not a App Store download.

Their Step 5. I did not find, and thus did not copy, any kernelcache file.

Their Step 6. I did not remove any System/Installation/Packages file or copy any packages. “Restoring” the DVD image was sufficient to get the information onto the new disk image.

Their Step 9. I did nothing with any nvram files.

Result

I now have Snow Leopard running in a virtual machine inside of Lion. I have found that after 10–15 minutes of inactivity in Snow Leopard that it seems to freeze up. I do not know if this is an issue with Lion, VMWare, or Snow Leopard.

Update. Solution is here: Disable sleep, etc. in Energy Saver.

What I Lose

Of course applications that are still in development are or will be updated to Intel. It has been a few years now since Apple switched, but there are some things I will lose. My scanner is a set back. Other apps I will miss:

• Adobe Photoshop (my version is PowerPC)
• Basilisk II (Apple II GS emulator)
• LaTeX Equation Editor
• Glider Pro
• MacTheRipper
• DSS Player (reads my Olympus voice recorder)
• Flying Buttress (firewall configuration)
• and more

Actually this scan convinced me not to upgrade to Lion on my home computer, so only my laptop has Lion now.

Update: I have installed Snow Leopard in a virtual machine to retain access to my PowerPC applications.

Quick and Dirty

You can get a quick and dirty answer as to which applications are PPC-only by double clicking this script or cutting and pasting it into the Terminal.

[bash]system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType | awk ‘BEGIN { RS=”" } /PowerPC/ {print PrevLine} {PrevLine=$0}’[/bash]

It does not search your whole drive or command line programs, but if you do not use command line apps much, then this will suffice.

Thorough

The following script performs a more thorough search of your whole hard drive. The script is based on the information from a StackOverflow forum. I just jazzed it up a bit. It will take a while to run, but when it is done, you will have a text file that lists all the PowerPC-only executables on your system.

I have pasted the script below, but you can also download the file and double click it to open it in Terminal, if you are not used to working at the command line. When the script is done, it will open the text file in TextEdit for you.

Here is the thorough script:

[bash]#!/bin/sh
# Modifier: Robert Harder, http://blog.iharder.net
# Thanks to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1406456/find-all-ppc-libraries-binaries-and-applications-in-snow-leopard
# Quick and dirty alternative:
# system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType | awk ‘BEGIN { RS=”" } /PowerPC/ {print PrevLine} {PrevLine=$0}’

# Variable and temp file setup
ROOT=/
OUTPUT=~/Desktop/ppc-only.txt
H=$(tput setab 4; tput setaf 3; tput bold)
R=$(tput sgr0)
DIR=$(mktemp -d -t $(basename “$0″))
EXE=${DIR}/executables && touch “$EXE”
EXEf=${DIR}/executables-with-file-run && touch “$EXEf”
P=${DIR}/ppc && touch “$P”
X86=${DIR}/i386 && touch “$X86″
X64=${DIR}/x86_64 && touch “$X64″
Pf=${DIR}/ppc-filtered && touch “$Pf”
Xf=${DIR}/i386-x86_64-filtered && touch “$Xf”
trap “rm -rf ‘${DIR}’” 0 1 2 15

# Initial scan of whole hard drive for executable files
#echo “Searching ${H} ${ROOT} ${R} (this could take a while)”
echo “This could take a while…”
/bin/echo -n “Looking for ${H} all ${R} executables…”
find “$ROOT” -perm -u+x ! -type d 2> /dev/null > $EXE
wc -l “$EXE” | awk ‘{print $1}’
/bin/echo -n “$(tput sgr0)”

# Determine the architecture(s) present in each file
/bin/echo -n “Executing ${H} file ${R} command on executables…$(tput sc)”
C=1
while read LINE; do
/bin/echo -n “$(tput rc)${C}”
file “$LINE” >> “$EXEf”
C=$(( $C + 1 ))
done < "$EXE"
echo ""

# List PPC
/bin/echo -n "Looking for ${H} ppc ${R} executables..."
grep "ppc$" "$EXEf" | awk '{print $1}' > “$P”
#find “$ROOT” -perm -u+x ! -type d -exec file {} \; 2> /dev/null | grep “ppc$” | awk ‘{print $1}’ > “$P”
wc -l “$P” | awk ‘{print $1}’

# List i386 (32-bit Intel)
/bin/echo -n “Looking for ${H} i386 ${R} executables…”
grep “i386$” “$EXEf” | awk ‘{print $1}’ > “$X86″
#find “$ROOT” -perm -u+x ! -type d -exec file {} \; 2> /dev/null | grep “i386$” | awk ‘{print $1}’ > “$X86″
wc -l “$X86″ | awk ‘{print $1}’

# List x86_64 (64-bit Intel)
/bin/echo -n “Looking for ${H} x86_64 ${R} executables…”
grep “x86_64$” “$EXEf” | awk ‘{print $1}’ > “$X64″
#find “$ROOT” -perm -u+x ! -type d -exec file {} \; 2> /dev/null | grep “x86_64$” | awk ‘{print $1}’ > “$X64″
wc -l “$X64″ | awk ‘{print $1}’

# Make Intel and PPC lists
cat “$X86″ “$X64″ | sort | uniq > “$Xf”
cat “$P” | sort | uniq > “$Pf”

# Find entries that are only in the PPC list
echo “pwd: $(pwd)” > “$OUTPUT”
diff “$Pf” “$Xf” | grep -e ‘<' | awk '{print $2}' | perl -p -e 's/:$//' >> “$OUTPUT”
echo “PPC only in ${H} $(pwd)/ppc-only.txt ${R}…$(wc -l $OUTPUT | awk ‘{print $1 – 1}’)”
open -a “TextEdit” “$OUTPUT”[/bash]

Command Line

You will need to install x264, which I won’t go through here.

We will compress a copy of Big Buck Bunny for our example.

We use x264 to compress the video to an MKV file. It is possible to compile x264 with MP4 support, but my copy of x264 doesn’t have that compiled in. In this case I will compress to an iPhone-compatible size.

x264 --preset ultrafast --video-filter resize:480,270 \
  -o x264-bbb.mkv big_buck_bunny_1080p_h264.mov

QuickTime Player 7

Now we move to QuickTime Player 7 (formerly QuickTime Player Pro). You’ll probably need to install Perian in order to read the MKV file with QuickTime. Open the source file and the MKV file in QuickTime Player 7. You may need to drag the MKV file onto the QuickTime icon to open it.

With the source video window in the front, select Show Movie Properties (Cmd-J) from the Window menu. Select the sound or audio track and click Extract.

With the new “Untitled” window in the front, choose Select All (Cmd-A) and Copy (Cmd-C) from the Edit menu.

With the MKV window in the front, click the left arrow |&lt to be sure you are at the beginning of the video, and select Add to Movie (Cmd-Opt-V) from the Edit menu.

You now have video and audio, but you probably do not want it in an MKV file. Next we will export to MPEG4 but without having to do any more encoding.

Select Export (Cmd-E) from the File menu. Select Movie to MPEG-4 from the Export popup list. Click the Options button. In both the Video and Audio tabs make sure you have Passthrough selected in the Video Format and Audio Format popup lists. Click OK and then Save.

Conclusion

It is a bit of a hassle, but you can get some screaming fast video conversions done this way. Using the ultrafast preset, I compressed a feature length movie in 6 minutes as opposed to the 32 minutes that iTunes took and the 26 minutes that QuickTime Player took.

sudo dscl . -delete /Users/rob

when you mean to type

sudo dscl . -delete /Users/proxy

It will slow down your productivity.

Of course this is an understatement. dscl is the Directory Services Command Line utility on the Mac (man page). What I effectively did was to delete the computer’s knowledge of my existence, though not deleting my actual files. In this regard I was better off than sudo rm -rf / which you should also never type.

The Problem

Immediately after this I was still able to perform some functions on the computer. I could not run anything with sudo because it returned a who are you? error. I could still launch some applications, though not all. I had Safari already running, and I frantically Googled for advice on my problem.

The Fix

Eventually I worked up a strategy, based on many forum posts that did not quite answer my questions. I would retrieve a backup of this missing file, reboot into single-user mode, and replace the file.

Although you access user account information with dscl and other programs, there is an actual file that represents all this data. For me it was (and I do mean was) stored at /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/rob.plist.

Since I fortunately had an SSH connection already established with my home computer (I do not know if I could have established a new connection in my situation), I remotely opened the Time Machine disk image for my laptop. I navigated to where the rob.plist file was there and dumped it to my terminal with cat.

I copied this text to my local clipboard and then pasted it into a local file—actually two local files to be safe: /tmp/rob.plist and /Users/rob/Public/Drop Box/rob.plist.

I rebooted into single user mode (hold down Cmd-S at restart) and ran fsck until it reported Filesystem Not Changed. I mounted the drive with /sbin/mount -uw / and copied rob.plist to its original location.

After rebooting I could not log in. The login window shook itself whenever I typed in my password.

I rebooted into single user mode and tried using dscl to manipulate my account record thinking that maybe it needed to “validated” or something. I tried deleting the JPEGPhoto key and changing the Password key to something trivial.

This time after rebooting I was able to log in and go through the process of changing my password back again.

Conclusion

Be very, very careful mucking about with stuff like dscl! (It reminds me of the time I dd

-ed over the first 20 MB of my hard drive while I was at a hotel. There was no easy fix to that.)