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title: usb4vc and other Mac things
tags: macintosh retro tty
date: 2024-08-12
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Last week my usb4vc arrived along with a Mongeek Ice75 keyboard and some sort
of knockoff wireless mouse. Both are transparent blue and pair really well
with my 512ke. For how much the board was (clearance on TheKey. Company) I'm
really impressed with it's build quality. I did replace the Akko Crystal
switches, they are linear and I really like a tactile feel, with Akko Cream
Blues that really make the board sing. The one thing it's missing is QMK
support, so all my combos/layers are missing, but overall it types well as
my muscle memory adjusts. The mouse is quite good too, much quieter than I'm
used too and it works great on System 6. As a bonus I figured out how to 
udpate the usb4vc raspberrypi image to use Bookworm and connect to my serial
cable, so it pulls double duty as both my serial console and input device.

A few nights ago I also put in a PicoRC power supply that uses
a PicoATX power supply, as well as includes a fan header. Now I can bypass the
original PSU which was starting to show signs of age, especially when doing
reads from the FloppyEMU. While watching an episode of Adrians Digital
Basement, I saw he connected it to a RGB2HDMI adaptor directly, and might get
one of those to output to a LCD monitor. This original monochrome CRT is a 
delight to use though and I think I might hold off on that until later.

Last night I also took my bodged up RS422<->RS232 serial adapter and figured
out how to use it to transfer files over xmodem. Previously if I wanted new
software on the Mac I'd have to do a whole SD card swap via Basilisk on my
old MacBook, which was rough on the SD cards and just a pain. Now it transfers
via a "new" Macintosh app called Tiny Transfer, that does the binhex conversion
on the fly and works with screen on the MacBook. Transfer speed is closer to 
14.4 modem speeds (due to the CPU on the 512ke 57600 baud is actually more like 19200 due to the cpu throughput).

With these updates to my FatMac I'm more than happy with what I can accomplish
and feel good about my ability to work with technology, even if it's more than
40 years old. I'm continually impressed with how much the modern mac community
has done in regards to new hardware and perphirals and have a few things in the
pipline like an AirTalk and Localtalk adapter (so the FatMac can use
AppleShare) and maybe even a MacPlus board with 4MiB of memory and SCSI if
my ebay bid wins out tomorrow.

One final thought, last phlog I was lamenting the KC_ESC and KC_GRV codes
not working on my FatMac. It appears to be only a ZTerm and MacTerminal thing,
since I can type the characters just fine in other text programs. While writing
this up I discovered though that the backtick/home key is actually Escape here,
so it makes using Vim ty type this much easier than before.