[Ham-Mac] quadra 630 software

[Chris Smolinski]

>Chris and Don,
>
>Of course the download rate for older versions fall off ,mostly because the
>number of  those who are interested in any particular program is finite and
>eventually they all have a copy.It seems to me this is part of the reason
>for the much touted OS upgrades.So as soon as nearly everyone has the
>current version,its time to announce a new,improved? one,and the SALES cycle
>begins anew.
>
>Getting tired of running faster to stay in place,

To be honest, I am not sure why I would want to run faster to stay in
place?  I've used Macs since the 128K days, and the Apple ][ before that.
As quaint as older computers are (witness the collection of Lisas and Lisa
parts in my basement that the wife would like to see go out the door) I
certainly would not want to use them for daily activities any more.

Let's go back to the original question posed:

> i have come to own a very used quadra 630 mac computer,and wanted to know
>if there is any software for it. i want to use it for cw,rtty,and psk31.
>ive tried the blackcat software,but my computer says there isnt enough
>memory(only8,000k). has anyone come up with software or a way to get the
>blackcat system working?

Here's the scoop: MultiMode only runs on PowerPC Macs. You're getting an
out of memory error most likely because you are running on an older Mac,
that probably has no idea how to handle a PPC only application.

You want to use it for CW, RTTY, and PSK31. If you just want to use CW and
RTTY, you could connect a TNC (which you can also find very used, they
aren't being used much any more, MFJ made a bunch of them). I don't know
that you will find one that does PSK31 however.

You could go over to the Dark Side, and get an old PC, say a 486, run DOS
on it, build a hamcomm style modem, and use that. Again, for CW and RTTY,
not PSK31. This technique was very popular on DOS systems, but could never
work on the Mac, since an application is not allowed to hog the system 100%
of the time to monitor the serial port looking for zero crossings on a Mac.

There is another posibility... you could write your own application. You
could either use C or RealBasic. The latter would be easier to get an
application up and running, handling the GUI for you, but RB's performance,
well, leaves much to be desired.

Since you just want text modes, I'd suggest using CodeWarrior and writing
it in C, and just use a console window for user IO. Tuning PSK31 without
any tuning indicator will be a bear though. You will need to grab sound
input, and process it. Since you have a 68K machine running at a few tens
of MHz, you'll want to implement all your DSP routines in 68k assembly. For
transmit mode, you will need to continuously produce audio, which should
not be too difficult to do, although on a slower machine like that I would
turn decoding off during transmit time, or you will probably not have
enough CPU time, and audio output will skip.




---
Chris Smolinski
Black Cat Systems
http://www.blackcatsystems.com
Macintosh Software
GM-10 Radiation detection system