[LispM-Hackers] Introduction and MicroExplorer Question

[James A. Crippen]

William von Hagen <vonhagen@vonhagen.org> writes:

> Hello. I've recently joined this list and have found the dicsussions to
> date to be fascinating. I hope that the enclosed MicroExplorer question
> isn't perceived as too far off-topic, since most of the recent
> discussion has been emulator-related. 

That's the primary purpose here, but we'll discuss just about anything
vaguely related to Lispms or Lisp in general, as long as the flamage
is kept to a minimum.  (You can go to c.l.l for flamage... :-)

> I own a variety of working LispM's (Symbolics 3620, 3650, and MacIvory
> II, TI Explorer I and II, and Xerox Dandelion, Dandetiger, and 1186),
> and am trying to get a MicroExplorer (software version 5.0) working in a
> Mac II FX (32 MB, MacOS 7.6.1) without any documentation. If anyone
> could outline the procedure to me (or has the actual docs that they
> could scan or photocopy), I'd be eternally grateful In the meantime,
> here's what I've tried to date: The "Host Software" floppy appears to
> contain the actual binaries, while disks such as the "Development System
> Software" disks appear to contain slices of the load band. On the "Host
> Software" floppy is a utility called "MkPFiles" which (according to the
> online "About MkPFiles") seems to create partitions as disk files that
> will hold the reconstituted bands, in a directory called "LISPM".
> However, when I run this and try to create a Partition File, it reports
> Error(-51) and goes no further. Can anyone tell me what this error means
> and what I might be able to do about it? 

Macintosh System version is important here I think.  I'm not sure
though.  You might follow assumptions based on bug fixes supplied by
SMBX for their MacIvories, ie probably you need earlier than System
7.5 and you probably should have no disks larger than 1 (4?) GB.

The problem with Partition Files sounds to me like a disk size issue,
perhaps.

To figure out what's wrong with that you could probably hunt around
for a Mac 68k debugger...  I know there are some, and probably at
least one free one.

> Also, when I run the actual TI MicroExplorer binary, it reports that it
> can't load the microcode file, even though I've tried putting that in
> various locations (root of the hard drive, working directory, LISPM
> subdirectory, etc.).

Try putting it in the same directory as the load band and the
Crash.Log.  Perhaps in the 'Microexplorer' folder or whatever it's
called?

Here's an excerpt from a message to info-ti-explorer@sumex-aim.stanford.edu
posted in 1993:

> From: ifi!rathke@news.belwue.de (Christian Rathke)
>
> In article <CF31p9.95v@sparc0a.cs.uiuc.edu> ywlee@sparc56.cs.uiuc.edu (Youngwhan Lee) writes:
> >Did anybody have any luck in mounting microExplorer card
> >on MacOS 7.0?
>
> It is working for me.  A keyboard resource of the microExplorer
> application must be copied to the system file.  This is the binhexed
> version of the US keyboard for the microExplorer.  Just drag and
> drop it onto the system file.

And I have the binhexed version as part of a file.  Take a look around
kappa:/home/lispm/explorer-source/uExp/MICROEXP for more.

> There is a configuration file for the uExplorer software, but I
> don't know the meaning of most of the entries or the specific
> syntax. It's just a text file, and I've experiemnted with some of
> the settings, but can't get past the failure to load the Microcode
> file.
> 
> I'd appreciate hearing from anyone with any suggestions (or the actual
> docs - I'd be glad to pay postage or FTP scans or PDFs from anywhere!).

I don't see any docs in our collection on the uExp.  Sorry.

Would it be possible for you to package all your uexp sw into a
tarball and upload it to kappa?  You could add it to the library.

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
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