07/06/07

Back at it!

So I'm a little late off the starting line for the RetroChallenge, but I'm off to a good start! For this challenge I changed it up a bit and pulled out my trusty IIci. This guy has 20MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive. Of course since the luddite snob in me won't touch anything later than System 6, I'll be limited to 8 megs of RAM, but like the warm-up challenge with the IIsi, I'll be potentially using the extra RAM for some ultra fast RAM-disk goodness. We'll see. The only problem with the machine is that the speaker doesn't seem to work (and swapping the known good speaker from my dead IIcx didn't help), but I can hear audio through a pair of headphones just fine.

I loaded my usual compliment of apps, and have it connected to the net using the very same Apple Ethernet card used in my prior endeavors. While on the road I'll again be using my PowerBook 170, which for all intents and purposes is a portable version of the IIci anyway. I still haven't found a SCSI to Ethernet adapter, so everything I write on the 170 will be uploaded to this site via a Dell laptop I use for work. Of course in the case of the IIci at home, it gets uploaded directly via FTP. Overall the IIci is a great system to use, and the internal video is noticeably snappier than either the Toby card in the IIcx or the internal video of the IIsi. Other than web stuff, it shouldn't be difficult to use the IIci as a day to day computer.

This time around I'll be aiming at creating something for the RetroChallenge. I've dusted off my volumes of Inside Macintosh and have been doing some work in Pascal to stretch my programming muscles a bit. I have a lot of experience in C, but decided on Pascal simply because it's a little different while at the same time not *so* different that I'll struggle to produce anything by the end of July. At the moment all I've done is work with the Mac interface, and a small amount of drawing with Color Quickdraw. Hopefully I'll think of something and get started soon!