Networking an Apple IIGS with a Mac via EtherTalk and AFPBridge

In Networking an Apple IIGS and a Mac with LocalTalk, I discussed the issues I encountered getting an Apple IIGS and a Mac, both on the internet, to network via EtherTalk and AFPBridge. Being wholly unsuccessful in getting this to “go”, the above post moved on to accomplishing the same task via the infinitely slower LocalTalk.

This post brings this story to a happier conclusion. In the end, we were able to get our Apple IIGS to network with our G4 Cube via AFPBridge. The obstacle that prevented this when it was it was first attempted turned out to be trivial… something REALLY obvious had been missed!

So, to network an Apple IIGS and a Mac via EtherTalk/AFPBridge, get AFPBridge and install it onto your Apple IIGS. AFPBridge can be downloaded from https://sheumann.github.io/AFPBridge/. This installs a new AFPMounter Control Panel, from which you can configure AFPBridge connections. Next, install Marsha Jackson’s patched AppleTalk CDEV. This can be had at https://peterwong.net/files/apple2/Asmj21h.shk

That’s it! You are all set on the Apple IIGS end!

On the Mac end, we need to start by acknowledging a significant restriction: AFPBridge can only connect to Macs running Mac OS 9.x. In the case of the Happy Macs lab, that restricted the pool of available Macs to our G4 Cube, and hence that was the machine used as our test Mac.

On that Mac, enable File Sharing and ensure that the volume you plan to share with the Apple IIGS via AFPBridge has Sharing enabled. To allow sharing of a whole volume, click the “Share this item and its contents” check box for the volume itself (File, Get Info,  Sharing…). File Sharing MUST have something to share in order for AFPBridge networking to work. THIS was the “obvious thing” that was missed the first time this was tried, and it was for that simple and silly reason that AFPBridge would not connect.

You are now all set on the Macintosh end… let’s network these two machines!

On the Apple IIGS side, open the AFPBridge Mounter control panel.

From the dropbox in the upper left of that control panel, select options “Use Large Reads”, “Force AFP Version 2.2” and “Ignore Errors Setting File Types”, per the screen shot below:

For the server address to connect to, type in: “afp://username:password@IP-address/volumename” as shown in the below screenshots. Two are included below so that the address box could be scrolled over for the second screenshot to show the full URL that was entered.

That is it! With that done, click the Connect button and the selected volume mounts on the Apple IIGS desktop and can be used from the Apple IIGS Finder to copy files in either direction.

The same is NOT true in the inverse. APFBridge does not include an AppleShare server and so while the IIGS can “see” the Mac, the Mac cannot select the IIGS in its Chooser. Buyer beware!

So… AFPBridge turns out to be a great way to network an Apple IIGS and a Mac OS 9.x Mac. Just remember to enable file sharing globally on the Mac and then specifically on at least one volume or at minimum, one folder in a volume.

Happy Networking!

A Tale of Two G4s

As regular readers of this blog will know, I have recently acquired a 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4, model A1138. Since I am already in possession of a G4 Cube that had been upgraded to a 1.2 GHz G4 by the seller, I thought it might be interesting to benchmark the performance of these two G4s using real world applications, vs. using a more formal but more artificial benchmarking suite like GeekBench. Both were loaded with Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard and so a fair fight seemed in the offing.

At first glance, this should be a case of “no contest”. The PowerBook should be the clear winner. The CPU is nearly 40% faster, the RAM is more than five times as fast (533 MHz vs. 100 MHz), AND there is more of it, and finally the disk technology is 5 years younger than its peer on the G4 Cube. As the icing on this particular cake, the graphics cards are grossly mismatched as well: a 128 MB ATI 9700 in the PowerBook, but only a 32 MB nVidia GeForce 2 in the Cube.

Here are the relevant configuration screen shots for the G4 Cube:

… and here are the equivalent screen shots for the PowerBook G4:

So how did the benchmarking work out with real life tasks? Let’s take a look:

Task                                                       PowerBook G4                  G4 Cube

Cold Boot (Leopard 10.5.8)                   53s                                         43s

iTunes 10.6 Launch                               10s                                         8s

TenFourFox 31.5 Launch                       19s                                         13s

Photoshop CS4  Launch                        18s                                         16s

As you can see from the numbers above, a curious thing happened on the way to “no contest” – the results got inverted! Inexplicably, the older, slower and less powerful G4 Cube trumped the newer, faster and (at least on paper) more powerful PowerBook G4! How could this be?

I quickly realized that two salient differences had not been accounted for in the lineup of specs I presented above. Firstly, the G4 Cube’s CPU is equipped with 2 MB of L3 cache, while the PowerBook’s G4 only has 512 KB. That had the potential to make a big difference, perhaps even neutralizing the putative 40% speed gain of the PowerBook over the Cube. Further to that, I failed to account for the fact that I had upgraded the G4 Cube’s hard drive with a new and fast 320 GB ATA-100 drive. This drive was not just fast, but also had 16 MB of onboard cache vs. the PowerBook disk’s 8 MB of onboard cache. Finally of course, we must not forget that as a notebook, the PowerBook uses a slower 5400 RPM hard drive, vs. the Cube’s desktop class 7200 RPM hard drive.

Since all of the metrics above relate to loading large amounts of data (programs and OS) from the hard drive, perhaps the skewing of results in favor of the G4 Cube was strictly a function of its faster hard drive and more disk cache? What about the CPUs? Did the Cube’s more generous CPU cache also contribute to the unexpected results above? How would the two machines fare when the task was CPU bound, not disk bound?

To answer these questions, I loaded the same very large photo (4128×3126) into Photoshop CS4 on each of the machines, and applied several CPU intensive filters to them. Let’s see how each machine fared under this testing:

Filter                                      PowerBook G4                                  G4 Cube

Watercolor                             21s                                                         27s

Chalk and Charcoal              12s                                                         16s

Mosaic Tiles                          21s                                                         28s

Here we get the “expected” result. In CPU bound tests, the Cube’s slower G4 was significantly outperformed by the PowerBook’s higher spec’d counterpart. Unexpectedly however, the onboard cache difference did not seem to provide the Cube with as much of  a performance boost as I had anticipated… or had it?

In comparing the raw clock speeds of the two CPUs, we see a nearly 40% faster CPU on the PowerBook G4, but in comparing the two sets of test results above, we see only about a 25% faster performance by the PowerBook. Why didn’t the 40% CPU speed difference translate directly into 40% result differences? My guess is that the missing 15% is the visible result of the extra L3 cache on the upgraded G4 Cube’s processor. Quite a nice boost for a small amount of extra cache! As I said in one of the early posts of this blog, cache is king! 🙂

Clearly the extra L3 cache improved the Cube’s performance in the above tests, but not enough to neutralize the significant clock speed advantage that the PowerBook had. Returning to the question above (“did the Cube’s extra L3 cache contribute to its superior performance in the OS and application loading tests?”) the answer is … probably. Just how much is hard to say, but loading either OS code or program code requires a fair amount of CPU, and so it is reasonable to assume that some part of the Cube’s OS/program loading performance results can be attributed to the extra L3 cache.

So, what do we conclude from all of the above? Well, the fundamental takeaway is that in real world testing, G4 clock speeds are not the best direct measure of how well a machine will perform for you. Disk speed, disk cache and CPU cache are all factors that must be taken into account.

Secondly, and particularly in subjective evaluation of boot times and program load times, disk rotational speed and disk cache depth are significantly more important than CPU speed.

There you have it then, a tale of two G4s. Something of a tie between the two, but one that delivers some important lessons on what really influences real world performance.

Expand Your G4 Cube’s Hard Drive

When the G4 Cube was introduced in 2000, Apple released it with either a 20GB or a 30 GB hard drive. Consistent with these sizes, the machine’s ROM generously supported booting from up to 128GB of disk – plenty for the time. Since then however, the machine has become a cult favourite and is often heavily upgraded. Cubes are frequently seen on eBay with 160GB hard drives, and I recently saw one with a 750GB hard drive! Given the 128 GB hard drive limitation, what is going on here?

The quick answer is that the 128GB barrier is a firmware limitation, and so as long as the operating systems you wish to boot reside completely below the 128GB line, you can boot them successfully. In my case, with a roomy 320GB hard drive freshly installed into my Cube, I chose to install all of Mac OS 9.2.2, Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Mac OS X 10.5.8.

Respecting the “all boot partitions below 128GB” rule, I partitioned the first 128 GB into three boot partitions of 14GB, 24GB and 24GB (for Mac OS 9.2.2, Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Mac OS X 10.5.8 respectively), plus one 68GB data partition. That left something less than 192 GB of available disk space that none of the OS on the Cube could “see”. Therein lies the challenge – how can a Cube OS be equipped such that it CAN see all of this extra space? The answers vary by OS and by your pocketbook. Lets look at each one of the OS I equipped on my Cube.

Mac OS 9.2.2: Mac OS 9.2.2 is an amazingly productive environment and feels crisp and responsive on my Cube. If only there were a modern web browser for it… sigh. Classilla is good, but not good enough. Anyway, I digress. You would think that something as old as Mac OS 9.2.2 would be a lost cause for seeing above the 128GB barrier, but this was not the case, and the fix was amazingly simple. Advised by the very helpful denizens of the forums at http://www.cubeowner.com, I hunted through my Cube’s Mac OS 9.2.2 System Folder, and replaced the “Mac OS ROM” file there with the newer one from the System Folder of the Classic installation on my PowerMac G5 running Mac OS X 10.4.11. With the newer “Mac OS ROM” file in place in my Cube’s Mac OS 9.2.2 System Folder, I restarted and was immediately able to “see” and use the entire 320GB of the hard drive. This is actually pretty interesting, given that my Classic installation was for a G5, and I was now dumping a file from it into the System Folder of a G4 machine, but happily it all worked! Of course, if you don’t have a PowerMac G5 Classic install to pull from, this solution becomes a bit problematic, but if this is the case, please leave me a message and I can make the right file available for you.

Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger): To this day, Mac OS X Tiger is my favourite OS X release of all time. It is simply beautiful to look at, bright and colourful, and there is almost nothing it cannot do. As I have posted previously, new and very capable web browsers and email clients exist for it, and I even managed to get the majority of my iTunes library imported into Tiger’s iTunes. It is a marvelous and very productive environment. Alas, it could not see across the 128GB divide on my Cube. Now for a bit of serendipity. Back in 2006 when I got my first Mac, a PowerMac G5 Dual 2.3 GHz, I bought Intech Disk SpeedTools for it, so I just happened to have their ATA Hi-Cap Driver, and their ATA Drive Extender program available at hand. I installed the Hi-Cap driver into Tiger and restarted, and it was then able to see the full 320 GB of the drive. I followed this up with use of the Intech ATA Drive Extender, to modify the partition table and add one final partition that covered the remainder of the disk. This went from the 128 GB line to the end of the disk (in this case about 170 GB) and after a restart, was fully visible and useful from Tiger.

So what do you do if you do not have Intech SpeedTools available? Well happily, even after all this time, you can still buy them! Visit http://http://www.speedtools2.com/shop.html if you are interested. At about $US 60, they ARE a bit “dear”, and this was the basis of my “vary by pocketbook” comment above, but they are still very good. For the record, I am not associated with Intech in any way – just a satisfied customer.

There is reportedly a free alternative, which I tried but was not able to get to work. Visit http://http://4thcode.blogspot.fr/2007/12/using-128-gib-or-larger-ata-hard-drives.html for all the details. It involves manually inserting a small script into the OS X startup routine. While it sounded simple, I was not successful with it, and so I moved on to the SpeedTools solution, since I had it available.

Mac OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard): No need to belabour this one. The story here is identical to 104.11 EXCEPT that there is a separate, Leopard-specific version of the Intech Hi-Cap driver. Be sure to use that one, and not the Tiger version, which did not work at all with Leopard (I tried it!).

So there you go – hard drives of pretty much any size you might wish on your G4 Cube!

Will File Sharing EVER Start?

A funny thing happened on my way to file sharing on my G4 cube – it wouldn’t share! Had it missed this important lesson from its mother? 🙂

I picked up my G4 Cube on eBay some time back and have been slowly renovating it and ultimately loading it with all of Mac OS 9.2.2, Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Mac OS X 10.5.8. With this all in place, I decided to try sharing files between it and the Quadra 660AV I have mentioned in previous posts, as a means of not having to share files manually, via Zip 250 disks (my travails with Mac OS Standard in this area are recorded in an earlier post). Mac OS 7.6, and in particular Open Transport 1.1.2, which is running on my Quadra 660AV, isn’t compatible with the version of AFP on my Cube’s Mac OS X 10.4.11, so I booted the Cube into Mac OS 9.2.2, reasoning that it was the same “family” of OS … surely this would work. Well, perhaps not…

After booting the Cube into Mac OS 9.2.2, I went to the File Sharing control panel and clicked the button to enable file sharing. It dutifully said that File Sharing was starting up and the little network icon started to blink. This would all have been excellent progress except that nothing further happened! I waited and I waited and still file sharing never finished “starting up”. I tried rebooting with the File Sharing control still checked, but when the Cube was booted, File Sharing was still “starting up”. I finally gave up, thinking I must have messed up something in the software configuration.

I resolved to start Googling around, and eventually I came upon an astonishing fact. The FIRST time you enable Mac OS 9 File Sharing on a Mac that has both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, it can take up to 45 MINUTES to start up! This was the case with my Cube and this was the explanation. I re-enabled File Sharing in the control panel and walked away. An hour or so later I came back, and sure enough, File Sharing was on!

I am not sure who at Apple thought that a 45 minute wait with no user feedback at all was a good idea, but I suppose that when that code was written for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X did not yet exist, and so whatever causes the delay was not a case they had taken into account.

Anyway, patience is the order of the day. If you have a Mac with both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on it, and you attempt to enable File Sharing on the Mac OS 9 side, go out and get yourself a latte – it is going to take a while!