Mousehole Report

By Rusty Hodge, Mousehole BBS

1st MAC Clone

From: Julio Carneiro

As the MAC II is starting to be shipped, a MAC Clone is hitting the stores here. This is a 512K MAC (64K ROM’s!!!). Can You guess the price for it (4-5K). Can you imagine that??? The only difference is that it uses a 800K internal drive (running MFS). Anyone interested in developping software to this machine (called MAC512) “eh! eh! eh!”. They have changed the Apple menu to a butterfly menu (ugly), I think to get rid of been sued (eh eh eh).... Their plans is to build (and sell) 300 MAC512/month??? THIS IS NOT A JOKE. I HAVE SEEN THE MACHINE. IT IS REAL.

MacApp Paint

From: Lsr

Well, MacApp Paint was mentioned in the November (or maybe December) 1986 issue of MacWorld. If any one has gone to a MacApp talk (at MacWorld Expo, for example), the program is generally shown as a demo of MacApp. My purpose in writing it was to demonstrate that writing a program using MacApp and object-oriented programming doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice performance. For a window that’s about the MacPaint size, the performance is very close to that of MacPaint. If you make the window larger or draw large shapes then the performance degrades proportionally.

The program implements the easiest features of MacPaint/FullPaint. You can draw rectangles, ovals, lines; the paint brush, eraser, and spray paint works, the marquee works (moving, copy, paste). The more recent versions have text and scaling (1-16 times). Since the program is written using MacApp, it has autoscrolling for all operations. Unlike FullPaint, you can draw a rectangle (or anything) the size of the document. Also, the window can be expanded upto the size of the document. You can also open as many windows are you have memory for. (To be fair to FullPaint, their design center was a program that could edit 4 docs at once on a 512K machine; they also implement some complicated commands that require multiple offscreen buffers, each of which has to be as large as the largest area you can edit at once. To satisfy all these constraints, they limited the maximum edit area to the size of the std Mac screen.)

There is also a version of the program that does color on a Mac II. (Same sources, with conditional compilation.) This version works with 8-bit deep color images; the speed is about the same as the balck and white version on a Mac Plus. As Jim implied, MacApp Paint is a demo and it is not being distributed. The MacApp product manager is tryingto get permission to distributed the application through the MacApp Developers Association. The main problem is that the application has enough features that developers might complain that Apple is doing application software. Also, users might think that this was a pre-release of a new Apple product. (In reality, there are no plans to make this into a product.)

If people are interested, I am willing to discuss some of the implementeatio details. In particular, the way in which the objects are structures is fairly interesting. (For example, there is a Bitmap object that manages the offscreen bitmaps.) I don’t know if this should be the exact place, or if the discussion should move to the MacApp section.

MacApp Paint palettes

From: Lsr

Jim also mentioned the MacApp Paint palettes on the Mac II (and other large screens). On the std Mac screen the palettes are in the same place as with MacPaint. If one were to position the palettes at the same place on a large screen, they would fall in the middle of the screen. To counter this, I explicitly move the palettes down so they are out of the way. I also make the default window size bigger, to take advantage of the extra screen space. I think this arrangement works out best. Accessing the palettes is not too bad, because the palettes are also available in custom menus. You can zoom a drawing window to the full screen size (covering the palettes) and still have full access to everything through the menus. On later versions of the program, I implemented a hack in which Cmd-click in a palette allows you to move it. My palettes are implemented as real windows, which never come to the front. So you can click on a tool in the palette and immediately begin using it without having to change windows too much.

New System 4.1

From: Jim Reekes

System 4.1 is a major revision. I may have been pessimistic about 4.0, but now I feel more confident with the new release. 3.2 gave us meat, and 4.1 is the potatoes and gravy. I do have a question regarding Apple’s documentation of the changes. RE: ‘DRVR’ (18,.Control Panel, Purgeable) [4612] The RAM cache arrows and size indicators do not appear if the control panel is running under switcher or twitcher. QUESTION: What’s a “twitcher”? [A new version of Switcher they’ve been juggling with?- Rusty]

PRINTING

From: Power Hopeful

I have tried printing in draft from MPW w/ the the mentioned configuartion to no avail. I noticed that of the 3 ‘PREC’ resources, two were identical save a 1 and a 0 at the offset where I figured the spool vs. draft offset to be. I assumed MPW was always accessing the one w/ spool, so I changed the id’s around. TO NO AVAIL again. I’ve noticed also that any app that offers a job dialog box prints only in Monaco when draft is selected. This, as I’ve mentioned many times, is a major source of irritation to me, and I’d appreciate ANY suggestions to be able to print accurately in draft mode. By the way, does anyone want me to beta-test their Mac II??

Does it run?

From: Frank Henriquez

Tried several programs on the Mac II today. The first was Turbo Pascal. It loaded fine (and even opened up the window to the edges of the Mac II screen - nice touch). I compiled the standard MyDemo.pas (which compiled in 1 - 3 seconds) and then ran Mydemo. That also worked. (The Sieve gave a time of 1.1 seconds, vs. a standard 512K Mac time of 5.9 secs). The only problem (albeit a MAJOR one) was when I tried to quit the demo and return to Turbo. It crashed the machine. After some thought, I figured it had to do with lauching one program from within another.

Then, we tried LightSpeed Pascal, and it died a miserable death - the editor did strange things to the menu bar, and in general Lightspeed acted in a very unfriendly way. The last program I tested, for sentimental reasons (it being the first program I bought for my Mac) was MacASM. As expected, it did not work, writing garbage to the screen. It DID however, accept by typed command to quit to the Finder. Frank

Where’s the color pallet?

From: Jim Reekes

Hey man, I had used a pre-release Finder on the Mac II that allowed me to choose my own colors. There was a ‘Color’ menu next to the ‘Special’ menu. Then by selecting an icon or folder, I could then go to the menu and select a color for it. This way I had all my folder in green, utilities in blue, applications in red, and documents in yellow (or what ever). I could even ‘View by Color’, which was just like view by name but the folder/files were sorted into groups according to their colors. Neat! And where’s the Color Pallet? There is suppose to be a ‘cdev’ in the System Folder so that when I open the control panel I could rearrange the color spectrum. As it is now, all the colors at one end of the scale appear in a olive green (yuck).

TMON patch

From: Jim Reekes

TMON crashes with the new system’s control panel UNLESS you make the folowing patch (on a backup copy of course) Find “4278 00BA 4278 00BC” in the control panels General file. Replace with “4268 00BA 4268 00BC”. Thank you Larry.

Mac II report

From: Jim Reekes

Well, there is a problem with the PRAM on the Mac II and SCSI drives. Certain system crashes will cause the Mac II to ingnore any SCSI devices currently attached. I have three hard disks on-line. All of them are valid, bootable volumes. But sometimes I’ve had the system bomb and then had to reset. After that I only get the flashing ? icon. (Interestly enough, the drives’ access lights are flashing too. So, appearantly the Mac II realizes there are SCSI devices attached but refuses to mount them.) I can boot from a floppy, but it will still not mount the hard disks. If I use the ‘SCSI Bus 2’ cdev, they can be manually mounted. This is strange. (I think this is a problem with the Startup Manager.) The only fix is to zero out PRAM with the Shift-Option-Cmnd routine while opening the control panel. Only one time did this not work. I don’t think it really zero’d out the PRAM, this may have been a problem with the new control panel.

This problem has happened to me at least once a day. This morning it happened while printing 20 copies of a Word 3.0 doc. About the 14th copy came out, then “SYSTEM BOMB ID = 01”. Reset, but no booty. Zapped PRAM and it works. This also happens when trying to use “MacZap Hard Disk Recover”.

Another bug report: Don’t use DiskExpress on a Mac II yet. I love this util and have always recommended it. But on a Mac II and certain drives it has problems that may corrupt the disk. Stay tuned for further info.

Consulair & 4.1

From: Richard Scorer

I have seen this kind of warning before, but I believe it’s _not_ Consulair but MegaMax which has this problem. We have Consulair in-house, and have no problems at all. The other report which said it was Megamax said they had hard coded the globals (I think - I don’t have my message dump handy).

Patching Apps Under 4.1

From: Lsr

The patch mentioned above tries to redirect applications that used location $02B6 (which was reserved by Apple and is now used in System 4.1) to use location $0A78 instead. The later location is the start ofa 12 byte application scratch area, which is reserved entirelt for applications. If you want to apply this patch, there are 2 things to keep in mind. (1) Not all occurrences of $02B6 are referring to the low memory global; ideally you would want to make sure that this was part of an instruction that actually refers to the memory location. (2) The application might be using the scratch area already. (Since there are 12 bytes in the scratch area, you might be able to patch it to use some other part of the area, however.)

Information Technology: Health Sciences

From: Dr. Dog

I just returned from Memphis, where I spoke at the Apple-sponsored conference “Information Tech...etc.” There were some interesting medical things going on there, including several previews of several medical data- base managers (Mini-medline), artificial intelligence programs for medical decision making (including ours, Iliad), and several interesting third party displays. One of the best third party programs was demonstrated by Bill Appleton.

“Course Builder” is a program that builds stand-alone teaching applications using an iconic, modular set of programming blocks. One can build multiple choice questions, branch randomly or deliberately from one set of questions to another, integrate graphics, etc. Bill integrates a paint program, a draw program, animation, and digitized or Mac In Talk sound support into his product! A planned update, to be called video builder, will integrate videodisk and/or 8mm video tape into the product. Imagine building a medical pathology lesson (or sales training product, etc) that can display various video images at certain times. Incredible.... He gave me a demo disk that will not save and said I could upload it to the M/H down loads, which I will try to do soon. On the lighter side, he is working on a new game, called Apache Attack, involving helicopters flying through a cityscape. It was not yet done, but the demo looked impressive (unfortuna- tely, no demo disk here).

Overall, it was a nice conference, with several hundred participants. Apple treated us well, with nice food, a barbeque with blues band at a local college, and good accommodations. Only two Mac II’s were present: one from Apple and one from a third party developer. The Apple sales manager for the western region told me that only a few of his sales offices even have Mac II yet. Brigham Young University (south of us here in Salt Lake) got 20 MacIIs into the bookstore, but they are only available to departments, not to individuals. Furthermore, they all have monochrome screens, no HD, and the regular keyboard. I was told they can’t sell them--everyone wants color, extended keyboard, HD 40, etc. We were told that we’d get developer machines in mid-late summer.

New System Probs

From: Jack Connick

Well, I’ve been running the new system 4.1 etc. for about a week now. Ran into a few problems. Excel will crash if you go to close any opened DA, pretty consistently. I’ve also noticed that upon a cold start up in the morning, the mouse control has switched itself to its slowest position, “tablet”. This has occured on my SE and on a Plu Anybody else? Jack

Word DCA Convert bug

From: Jack Connick

Latest in my litteny about Word 3.0 bugs, is that their DCA convert utility doesn’t work. I had occassion to get a file transfered from a client’s IBM mainframe, and when she said she could save it into DCA formatt, I thought “Great that’ll convert using that utility that came with Word and save me lots of editing time.”

Wrong. After having it XModemed down it wouldn’t convert. The error message said something like “There’s no DCA compatable text file present” What a bummer...called MS, they thought it was in the transfer. I thought that was BS because if a file transfers XModem it’s error free. Called my good friend at Aldus, who knows more about MS Word files than MS, he said “Just rename it xxxxxxxx.DCA (X=name, no more than 8 chars) and try placing it directly into PageMaker 2.0.” Well, lo & behold it worked! Same file as before, that wouldn’t work with MS word’s utility.

So there’s the work-around. I exported the file back to MS Word 3.0 formatt and did some cleaning up, but nothing like working with an ASCII file would of been. Try PageMaker’s Export feature if your’re having problems with Word 3.0 files. It writes better files than MS Word does.

System 4.1

From: Gary Voth

Well... System 4.1 seems to be a real watershed product. I am truly amazed at how many things have problems with it. Although I think Apple will take a lot of misdirected heat in the trade press for releasing “unstable” software, the obvious conclusion is that 4.1 heralds the beginning of a new ballgame with new rules to follow. I suspect we had all better cinch up our belts and get used to it.

One word of advice. With previous System releases it was usually safe to bypass the Installer: you could simply drag the new System off of the release diskette and off you go. NOT ANYMORE. Now there are at least four baseline machine/ROM architectures in wide (or soon to be wide) use. The System really must be tailored for your computer. (I know the SE looks like a MacPlus and has only slightly enhanced performance, but keep in mind that it is totally reengineered from the ground up.)

I tried running for awhile with some extraneous Mac SE/Mac II resources in my System file (I have a 512E with a Levco MonsterMac) and found all kinds of problems. Macsbug would hang, MacTerminal (which loads new keyboard templates) turned the keys into trash, etc., etc. I finally realized what was happening and launched the Installer using the Mac 512, 512E, Plus installation script. Things have been MUCH cleaner ever since. If you are experiencing problems and you haven’t run the Installer, give it a try.

Poor Old Switcher...

From: Gary Voth

Gee, poor old Switcher, once everybody’s darling, sure seems to be getting a lot of bad-mouthing lately. Frankly, I use Switcher almost daily in a 2MB environment and have found it to be pretty reliable. Insiders will tell you that most of the problems encountered when using Switcher relate to poor memory management by the client applications. To maximize memory use, most people run applications under Switcher in relatively small partitions--usually odd sized ones at that. Programs which operate flawlessly in 512K can be walking (er, running) time bombs when operating in 320K. With older programs which do not handle Switcher events, Switcher uses a rather clever technique to implement Clipboard conversion. This involves the use of a “fake” desk accessory. The application is made to think that the user has activated a desk accessory, which triggers (in most programs) an update of the system desk scrap so that the DA can access the data that has most recently been cut or copied. This particular sequence of events can eat up a lot of heap space, easily compromising an application running in a tight “world.”

On top of that, many users have never learned how to use the Option key to transfer the Clipboard between client applications, so they mistakenly keep the “Always Convert Clipboard” option checked. This is just asking for trouble, of course.

To convince yourself that Switcher is probably not the culprit the next time the system error alert appears, try using the “emergency exit” --Command/Option/Shift-Period)-- to escape from a hung application. Nine times out of ten it will work, at least allowing you to exit any other installed applications gracefully.

Mac 2 compatability

From: Jack Kobzeff

Well, we’ve been running our Mac 2 for about 2 weeks now. The list of totally incompatable software is suprisingly short. The programs that won’t work (that we’ve found) are..... Mac Write Mac Zap Recover Mac Basic 1.02 MicroSoft Works and a few PD items.... But that’s about it! Even Mac Paint 1.5 works like a charm! (in it’s regular sized window) Mac Draw 1.9 works! I’m kinda impressed that so much WORKS. Now if we could get some software that could really show off the new features of the 2. Oh, BTW, we hooked up our AST 2000 to the 2, and it works like a charm. Didn’t have to reformat, or change a thing.

Prodigy SE

From: Max

Just installed a Levco Prodigy SE in my Mac SE. Current configuration is 16-mhz 68020, 68881, and 2-meg RAM. As would be expected, the speed increase is genuinely awesome... beyond belief... stupendous... etc. What’s nifty about Levco’s arrangement is you can “lobotomize” (disconnect) the Prodigy board by hitting the Interrupt switch during Shutdown. A neat trick: for some of the writing I do, I have to use (icch) Tempo, and Tempo dies a horrible death on the 68020. Simple: Interrupt, reset, and you’ve got a garden-variety 68000, 8-mhz Mac SE. Do your dirty Tempo business, save the file, Interrupt, Reset, and you’re back up to a Prodigy! For System 4.0/Finder 5.4, the controls for the Prodigy reside in a “module” for the new control panel. Select the module, and you can turn on/off the 68020 or the 68881. In short, you can configure an SE to run like a Mac II, a standard Mac SE, or anything in between. AND... Levco has just lowered the price for the basic Prodigy SE to $1499. For 68881, add $300. For 2-meg, add $500. I think this means that MacMemory’s TurboMax board is dead.

Shutdown worries

From: Jim Reekes

This new ‘Shutdown Manager’ has me worried. I’ve always been concerned about the Finder updating my VCB (volume control block) with bogus data. How many times have we perform the Finder’s shutdown and later returned to the desktop reading the message “disk is unreadable, cancel or initialize”? Page 237 of S. Knaster’s book ‘How to Write Mac Software’ reads... “WARNING: After an application has crashed, the system is in an uncertain state. System globals of system heap objects may be damaged. If you use the debugger to exit to the Finder, everything may appear to be in good shape, but beware. The safest thing to do is to reboot after a system error. If you save your disk just once, you won’t regret the small inconvenience of rebooting.” Now consider this new ‘feature’ of System 4.1, the Shutdown Manager. I’m running an application and get the bomb dialog. Now, to click or not to click? That is the question. I’m worried when I see the ‘System bomb’ dialog because, if I click on Ok, then the Shutdown Manager is going to flush my volume’s buffer back to the disk, which maybe garbaged data. My disk would have been in perfect condition, until that bogus VCB was written to it after clicking Ok. I’m especially worried because so far I’ve not seen a program that can replace a bad VCB with the proper info. Only one util that I know of can get around this bogus VCB, MacZap. This means I may spend the rest of my day trying to recover my hard disk because I clicked Ok at the system bomb dialog. I hope I’m wrong, but I am worried about this.

Macsbug

From: Power Hopeful

I’m having trouble with the new Macsbug. There seems to be a different/no “DM” command. Am also having trouble with “Rxx” and “WH” commands.

From: Larry Nedry

Use lower case in the new Macsbug.

Undocumented Features

From: The Wombat

An expanded launch trap that supports sublaunching is described in apple tech note 126. Sublaunching means that when a sublaunched program is terminated the calling program is launched instead of the Finder. This is a means by which an MPW like shell can be implemented. Whate Apple doen’t tell us is that a sublaunch can be over-ridden by holding the the option key, a normal launch is performed instead.

Declaring data

From: Power Hopeful

I very much enjoyed David Smith’s articles in the current MacTutor. I was wondering if someone could clarify a few points concerning data declarations and Mac II compatibility. He mentions that the practice of DC’s and then changing their contents won’t work, as won’t DS’ing within your program space -- that all data should be declared relative to A5. He notes also the separation of code and data spaces, which I interpret to mean something to a more stringent degree than that of the current situation (i.e., before Mac II).

First of all, why can one not declare data in his own program space? Does this have to do with the 68020, memory management, multitasking or some combination of them? The only reason that comes to my mind is multitasking and having the data available at all times. Second,(and this question will probably illustrate my state of non-expertise ), it’s not possible to declare DC’s relative to A5, is it?

Code vs. Data Space

From: Cpettus

While the current Mac II system doesn’t enforce it, eventually there will be Mac systems in which the data space of the program is protected against execution and the code space of the program is protected against writing. This is usually done (although not required) in a multitasking system, and IS required if systems areeto share programs across multiple tasks. The enforcement will be done in memory management hardware.

The question which arises is how to tell if a particular piece of memory is code or data. On the Mac, it will probably be done by assuming that certain resources (CODE, DRVR, CDEF, WDEF, etc.) are executable code, while anything else is data. Thus, if one puts DS’s or DC’s into code resources, and then tries to modify them, the system will generate an unfriendly error. The solution? Put all data into either memory blocks allocated on the fly using the memory manager, or into global data areas referenced off of A5. The exact method for doing this is tremendously development system dependent, but nearly all of them have facilities for handling this. In most high-level languages on the Mac, it is handled behind the programmer’s back, so you don’t have to explicitly deal with it.

MacTerminal 2.0 and System 4.1

From: Bugs

We’ve been having some problems getting MacTerminal 2.0 to work with System 4.1. Has anybody else been experiencing the problem or have any thots as to why? MacTerm either hangs or fuse bombes with various codes and there doesn’t yet seem to be a pattern. This problem occurs on SEs and 512Es as long as we use the new System. Clues? Thanx.

MacTerminal Patch

From: Richard Scorer

Try removing Easy Access. I think this is causing the problem. It appears to give a few programs a headache.

From: Don L

The MacTerminal bug seems to be due to accessing BasicGlob which was not used by the system before but has now been changed to ExpandMem and is used. I have been able to fix my copy by changing the single occurrence of $000002B6 to $00000A78 with Fedit (BasicGlob => ApplScratch). This has been working fine now for about a week but no guarantees.

CRT repair

From: Power Hopeful

I thought someone might be interested in the final outcome of my blown tube (SE). I’m just about to get it back so am not sure of the exact details. Besides replacing the CRT, it was necessary to replace both the motherboard and a (logic?) chip on the analog board. Remember, though, that after it blew I continued to mess with it and turn the power on and off many times.

Mac SE CRT

From: Max

Funny thing... I installed a Prodigy SE in my Mac SE yesterday, and while gently sliding out the Motherboard, I heard this great WHOOOOOOSH! The sound must have lasted 15 seconds. Now, all the cables had been disconnected: I was going by the book, and nothing had been bumped or touched. Of course, when the Mac was bolted back together, it didn’t work. At all. Further examination revealed a hole in the back of the CRT: the end of the tube had fractured, and gassed the tube. Funny. Not a bump, not a jiggle, NOTHING touched the tube in any way. Near as I can figure, the CRT just couldn’t handle the thought of all the horsepower in the Prodigy board, and chose that moment to commit suicide! I’d be curious to hear of any other spontaneous SE CRT failures. If Apple intends for this machine to be opened (occasionally) for upgrade boards, it seems they have an overly fragile set-up for the CRT.

From: Power Hopeful

My CRT went when I unplugged the cord from the motherboard. I didn’t touch the tube at all to my knowledge.

Power Supply Bugs

From: Mysteray

I am not going to suggest that ALL problems are due to this, but it is worth a check if you have flicker on the screen (horizontal size instability actually). I had this problem off and on for several months. Then I got my SE and the 512e quit (at first I thought it was a problem of jealousy, but these are only COLD machines?). Well... the dead 512e was alive except that the screen raster was reduced to a thin vertical line centered on the screen. Ah ha, no horizontal deflection, but the horizontal section, which makes the hi voltage for the CRT was fine, since I still had something visible *and* in focus (the line).

Poking around on the analog board revealed a cold solder joint on pin 4 of J1, the 4-pin connector for the deflection yoke. This circuit operates at very low impedances, and thus at high currents. Cold solder joints can come from poor original soldering, but since this board is wave soldered, that is impossible. I suspect that poor contact between the pins(male & female) of this circuit caused local heating, enough to reflow the solder, which, due to deflux cleaning, had no flux to aid wetting; the result was a ‘cold’ solder joint. A quick resolder with a 50-watt iron fixed it. Now raster is rock steady. I also unmated the connector and retensioned the female contacts in pins 3 & 4 (uppermost ones) using a very small screwdriver--just to bring the two semi-circles closer and tighter. This should decrease contact resistance here, which may have caused the heating in the first place.

This may be a possible cause when horizontal instability is observed, and in my case it ultimately was complete failure of horizontal deflection. I might add that I have 25 years hardware experience (i.e., tinkering since high school, but my first job was repairing avionics while in high school). Anyone who doesn’t know what all this is about had best get some expert assistance. But if you know where to look and what you might expect to see in a good or bad solder joint (mine was under the double-sided foam), you can save yourself days of downtime and, of course, some money. Good luck. Anyone needing advice on this may contact me, but I don’t repair Macs for a living.

From: Jim Reekes

I wanted to thank Mysteray for his posting on May 11th about fixing a Mac power supply. My Mac has been with me since Feb 84. Everything has been upgraded since then except the PS. Recently my screen started flickering and it seemed like a good time to replace it. I’m Apple certified, but don’t work at a dealership any more. I have AppleCare to cover my repair but after waiting for more than 6 weeks for one to show up at my dealer, I decided to “do it myself”. (apparently Apple is still not exchanging Mac PS fast enough to met demand.)

My problem was a intermittent ‘blink’ across the screen and an occasional ‘seizure’ were it would shrink and get dim. It never dimmed out totally or shrunk to just a horz line, most of the time it just blinked at me. Removing the power supply and reading Mysteray’s messages closely, I found the exact same pins on J1 going to the deflection yoke now had bad soldering. I had to look REAL close to find it, in fact I was using a magnifying glass. There were two bad joints at J1 and two more at J2. Both of these connectors supply voltage for the CRT. After desoldering and resoldering them, everything has been fine. No more screen blinking!

More comments on bad solder joints and flicker.

From: Mysteray

Seeing the post from Reekes leads me to believe that we have a hardware design problem here. I’m referring to my post of about a week ago which explained locating a cold solder joint on the deflection yoke connector. I’ve thought more about it in the interim. I’ve been soldering since late 1950’s and was always sceptical that a cold solder joint could develop by itself. They usually occur from poor soldering techniques. But since most (all?) computer boards are now flow soldered, such things shouldn’t happen. They can happen if the joint is resoldered with lousy techniques, and this is what happens when you let the Mac itself try to heat up the joint!

I am convinced that the only way for my failure to have happened was by the connector pin itself becoming hot enough through increased ohmic losses due to poor mechanical contact in the 4-pin nylon housing crimp connector that Apple used. The vertical circuit that also shares two of the four pins should not be a problem, as it operates at a much lower current (the wire size in the vertical yoke winding is smaller, there are many more turns). But the horizontal deflection coil is much different. It has far fewer turns and the wire is 4 or 5 parallel strands. The DC resistance is below a half ohm. This makes it important that the losses everywhere in the circuit be kept low. The connector is hence a critical element. I myself can’t think of a suitable connector of comparable cost offhand, but Molex or somebody else probably has. It would have been better to have directly soldered the yoke to the PC board, but that would have made servicing by less skilled people difficult--and increased the risk of a human-induced cold solder joint as well.

The best thing to do is to apply preventive maintenance by increasing the friction of the connector. My previous post perhaps was not detailed enough here, so I’ll explain: Detach the 4-pin connector to the yoke (J1)--there is a locking tab that must be depressed. Inside the cable part you will see female pins that are made from sheet metal that was rolled into a cylindrical shape. It will appear to be in two halves, i.e., there are two semi-circular parts. These must be bent *slightly* so as to make them closer and hence more tightly grip the male pin when connected. A miniature screwdriver, or an awl, will work well here. The pins that need this (the horizontal yoke) are the ones that are on the upper end when mated. Do them all actually, it won’t hurt. Also, inspect the respective solder joints on the solder side of the PC board. Any side of any anomaly should be resoldered. Visually compare these solder fillets with others anywhere else on the board in case you are not sure what a good solder job looks like, i.e., don’t have experience soldering to PC boards.

I’d like to know how many will find their horizontal flicker gone. If anyone is unable to do this, or is scared of opening up their Mac, leave me e-mail. Perhaps if enough such responses come in I can set up a clinic some Saturday and fix ‘em somewhere for $10-30, but I’d rather everyone educate themselves to do such minor repairs. Kind of like opening the hood to check the oil and such. I want to add some caution about getting too near the Hi Voltage parts of the Mac. I myself don’t discharge the CRT, since it is very well insulated from the CRT back to the flyback transformer. I prefer to just not get close to these. If you remove the analog board or CRT this MUST be discharged, but otherwise is not necessary. But BE CAREFUL, just like you don’t stick your hand into the fanblades of a running engine. Good luck. [my 60th line...no more time/room]

Analog Board

From: Dirck

A friend of mine told me that all macs will eventually end up with the single vertical line syndrome. he says that capacitor c1 on the analog board will go out eventually. apparently there are occasional large surges going through it and it just goes out after a while. it’s good that it goes out, instead of something more expensive going out. we have a mac in surgery upstairs here, and were going to replace that capacitor. i’ll let you know how it goes.

Analog surgery results

From: Dirck

As it turns out, the topmost solder joint of the 4 pin connector had melted. this is connected to c1, so that may be why my friend has to replace his frequently. the connector’s plastic had melted together. the bottom line appears to be that the two heat sinks at the top of the board just ain’t sinking enough heat. we may try putting some larger heat sinks on the board, but now that we know what the problem is it’s really no big deal to fix. beats paying $150 for a board swap. i wonder if any techs out there are just resoldering the board and charging the full fee. techs at computerland type stores are just supposed to swap boards regardless of what’s wrong, anyway. i bought a little 3 1/2" AC fan at radio shack which i park on that corner of the mac’s case. it seems to help and it’s cheap.

WMgrPort...

From: The Cloud

I’m feeling a certain level of frustration about what “can” and “cannot” be done...apparently if I want to use ZoomRects (and, parenthetically, I feel they are a valid part of the implementation of the Mac Interface) I have to create a window of my own, fill it with the desktop pattern to look like it’s the real thing, and do my drawing in that. Kludge city. Why even have the GetWMgrPort available (or at least documented)? Next, we won’t be able to do anything with files not created by our own programs....or anything that might have the “look and feel” of the Finder...well, enough ranting. The next product from Apple will probably cause me to see the error of my wrong thinking....

Conditional Compile ‘feature’

From: The Toolsmith

If you are using conditional compilation, there is a feature I discovered Saturday that you should be aware of. The (* ... *) comment form DOES NOT COMMENT OUT conditional groups. The code between {$IFC xx} and {$ENDC} within the (* *) pair WILL STILL BE COMPILED! Beware!!

From: Lsr

The most effective way I have found to comment out code is to surround it with {$IFC FALSE} ... {$ENDC}. This technique works with both kinds of comments, nested conditional compilation, etc.

MPW Draft Printing

From: Rick Boarman

It seems some people are still having problems printing in Draft mode with MPW. Well, it doesn’t work in 1.0 nor in 2.0. I have a crude solution (not pretty but it works). Rename an old Imagewriter (like v2.3) to something other than ‘Imagewriter.’ Stick it in your system folder and use the Chooser to select it when you want to print from MPW. Be sure that you use the -q Draft option. Again, very ugly, but it’s better than waiting an hour for your printout.

MPW 2.0b1

From: Cpettus

In case anyone is either not an APDA memory or has been on Mars, APDA is now shipping (well, advertising) MPW 2.0b1. Contrary to previous rumours, it WILL run on a Mac+ or SE, but requires 128k ROM, 1 mb, and a hard drive (which, really, it always did before, for practical applications). The upgrade from 1.0.2 is $125 for the shell, and $50 each for Pascal and C; this includes the production version of 2.0 when it is released. MacApp 1.1 is also available for $15; it “extends MacApp 1.0 to support the features of the Macintosh SE and Macintosh II” (sayeth the APDA catalog).

_Launch from LSC

From: Gary Voth

Speaking of _Launch... I’m including a Transfer... item in my File menu in an application I’m writing in Lightspeed C, but I haven’t sat down and created the C interface routine for _Launch yet. My question is, does LSC permit an application to launch another program while still running under the development environment (i.e. using the RUN command)? Gary.

From: Larry Nedry

Yes you can launch to another program while under the development environment. Larry

32k limit in TextEdit

From: Mark Chally

Like in many things, doesn’t that limit go to 64k with the new (128k--not so new any more I guess) ROMs? Also, what happens when it goes to 32k? Do I turn into a pumpkin, or loose characters on the beginning of the TERecord, or bomb, or what? What’s the best way to avoid any of these problems (I.E. chop off the front when 32k is near). Thanks in advance. (PS: I’ve never approached the limit in my application (a basic chat window in a telecommunications game) so I dunno).

Mac II & LightspeedC

From: Larry Nedry

I had a Mac+ and Mac II side by side compile the same code, about 3000 lines, and the Mac II was done before the plus had displayed the first line number. Yes, it does work on the Mac II and IT IS FAST!

Rumors!

Would you’d like to believe that Apple has Stopped development of the Macintosh II. If you assume this your’e dead wrong. Why did Apple Hard wire the clock in the Macintosh II? Why didn’t Apple use a replaceable crystal like everybody else? I know that Apple wants second gen of the Mac II by First QTR 1988, thats less than two years away. Apple builds and test product well inadvance of anouncement. I saw a Macintosh SE at Apple over one year before it was introduced. It pays to drive by the Apple Corporate offices at lunch time. You see Apple ships product over to the main office about once a month. The guys doing this don’t ship everything in the boxes that there suppose use. I know that Apple has Taken delievery of 68030’s and 68020 (25MHZ). I know that Mr. Gasse want a suped Macintosh II by the First QTR of 1988. We all know that John Skulley said that he wants Apple to be the first vendor with 68030 microcomputer.

You guys remind me of the ostrich. Stick your head in a hole some where, now you can’t see anything there for it must not exist. I realize we have some important people on this BBS but some of you seem to think you are important enough to know Apples darkest secrets. I HAVE SEEN AND PLAYED WITH A 68030 PROTOTYPE AT APPLE.

There will be no 68030 based system any time in the near future. The ‘030 was WAY WAY preannounced to take some of the wind out of the sales of the 386 announcement: if it exists as a real chip at all (something of which I have considerable doubts), it is at least a year, probably more, away from production quantities. The ‘020 had been a full production, fully ramped up, chip for YEARS (yes, years) before the Mac II was announced. The post which started this flurry described the Mac II as an “interim machine.” What’s interim about it? Using an 020? I doubt it, since the 030 is just a data sheet with “preliminary” stamped on it. The NuBus? If Apple has announced the NuBus only to replace it with some other architecture, they should pull the lifesupport on Apple management now, since they would clearly shown to be brain-dead. If they stick with these, then any new machine which uses these would hardly be a revolutionary improvement on the Mac II. Finally, it simply makes no sense at all from a marketing point of view to spend the effort Apple has to do market development on the II and then kill it with a new machine. Conclusion? Some people are trying to play “too hip to live,” using the industry’s current intense paranoia and NDA-madness to score some points. Of course, I could be shown to be a complete fool and a**hole come December, but I don’t think that will come to pass. The fact of the matter is, the II represents just about the top end of the technology Apple can, this year, bring to bear on the Mac problem. Next year, 25mHZ ‘020s, year after, ‘030s. December? New video cards.

I have no doubt that somewhere there are ‘030s running at 25MHz. If one is getting 1 in 10,000 yields, all you have to do is run the foundry long enough; further, it doesn’t matter if the mask is full of bugs if all you are cranking our are preliminary samples. There is a LONG LONG time between the first prototypes of a chip and when it is ramped up for production. Remember, while Apple is a huge customer of Motorola, the board-level product OEMs are even bigger; if the ‘030 was ready for full production, I doubt Motorola would be holding back. PCs are built out of chips which are available in volume, not experimental prototypes.

The 68030 that I saw at Apple was running at 5 (five) Megahertz. Probably for reliability reasons.

Rumor has it that Apple has taken delivery of a few of Canon’s new Color Laser engine. The same engine used on the Canon Color copy machines, that are actually scanners/laser printers combined.

Apple is looking at using the Conner Peripherals 3 1/2 inch 1/2 height 100 Megabyte drive in future versions of the SE. I saw an SE with one yesterday. The drives will be available for evaluation in August/September at $1595. If you want to buy 5000 units per year you can probably get a contract at $1000 each. I meant to say they will be available from Conner in August/September.

System 5.0 and Finder 6.0 will be released on schedule in July, 1987. Finder 6.0 is multitasking.

Finder 6.0 will almost certainly NOT be multitasking in the traditional preemptive rescheduling sense. If they get J*****r working in time, it might be a nonpreemptive system in which other programs can run while the foreground application (the one whose window is frontmost) is waiting on GetNextEvent, but true preemptive rescheduling will probably not be for 6 months or more, and then probably only on the Mac II and future machines.