Mastodawn

I've always wanted a machine to run NeXSTEP natively, the chances of me ever getting a real Next Computer are very slim.
So, I've been researching hardware for an Intel based build and today I got to about 99% completion of the testing.
I'm more than pleased! 😍👇

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Gammitin (Ben) 💾1d ago

The hardware:
- Pentium 3 - 800Mhz (Coppermine)
- 512MB RAM
- Ati Rage XL 8MB Video
- Creative Soundblaster PCI 128
- Intel Pro 100 Network Card
- SSD
The goal:
- High Res Colour Video
- Sound
- Full Networking
- Fast Booting and Usability

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Gammitin (Ben) 💾1d ago

So, as I've had to do numerous installs to get the video working, I ended up making a VMWare machine.
I mounted an SD card as a physical IDE drive in the virtual machine and did the install that way.
Also a great way to get files on is to add packages to an ISO and mount it.

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Gammitin (Ben) 💾1d ago

The Video is fully working, check this screensaver out, I think I've seen it somewhere before 🤔

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Gammitin (Ben) 💾1d ago

Sound is also now working!

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Gammitin (Ben) 💾1d ago

The IDE to SD card was quite slow, so I've dd'd a backup image of it and written it to an SSD, it's about 5x+ faster now, really impressed with the boot speed and general usability.

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Gammitin (Ben) 💾1d ago

So, to get the network card to work I've had to swap it around with the video card as I had IRQ issues. It's now initialising.
Also I had to use my 10/100 switch as it only seems to like a 10mb connection.

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abs(in)the

@Gammitin way way back at DreamWorks we supported NeXTStep 3.3 on a set of Intel machines for a custom ink & paint app.

They were... Less than totally stable and needed rebuilding so very often.

There were so many time consuming steps in the setup we came up with a custom floppy which would download a gzipped 2GB disk image, write it to the disk, then send a pager message when done