from Hacker News

Mac ROM-Inator II Restock and Partnerships

by electricant on 9/11/23, 6:18 PM with 29 comments

  • by johnklos on 9/11/23, 8:55 PM

    Modifiable ROM images let us do all sorts of things like add support for more memory via higher density SIMMs (Quadra / Centris 610, 650, 800), add support for non-native and not normally supported hardware, fixing bugs, and so on.

    I'm considering getting one so I can have a low power, boots-straight-into-use LocalTalk to ethernet bridge with print drivers and printer sharing. Another option is network booting, since network file sharing is so incredibly easy with classic Macs.

    Fun!

  • by syx on 9/11/23, 10:32 PM

    I have used the Floppy-EMU from BMOW and it was incredibly powerful I was able to emulate hardrives and floppies on both Apple II and Macintosh Plus that I own. Glad to see this guy is still making new products for the retrocomputing community!

  • by nxobject on 9/12/23, 5:48 AM

    A somewhat-unsung feature that a custom ROM can give is HD20 support – essentially, a hard drive that connect to a Mac's external floppy port, without having to worry about the complexities of SCSI. I believe it can actually be hot-swapped as well.

  • by NoMoreNicksLeft on 9/11/23, 8:32 PM

    Nice. I've got the ethernet card for my SE/30, and I always meant to upgrade it to 128 megs of ram. Maybe I should get this.

  • by brian_herman on 9/11/23, 8:09 PM

    Wow this looks amazing.

  • by sneak on 9/11/23, 9:17 PM

    > Friendly competition is great, but it creates a potential dilemma for me if someone buys another vendor’s ROM SIMM and reprograms it with BMOW’s base ROM in order to get the on-the-fly ROM disk decompression and other features. It could turn into a situation where my base ROM software is subsidizing another competing product. To compound the problem, I didn’t have any clear usage policy or “license” for the base ROM to say whether this type of use was OK. Furthermore my FC8 compression algorithm is free open-source, but the BMOW base ROM which incorporates it is not. This all created a large gray area.

    Imagine thinking that copyright should protect your revenue stream that is based on making tools for infringing the copyrights of others.

    Admittedly the thing they're making unauthorized derivative works from (the Mac ROM) is abandonware, but the idea is still silly and hypocritical to me. Copyrights are ridiculous to begin with, ignoring them in one case while trying to wield them against your community in another is extra ridiculous.

  • by indrora on 9/11/23, 8:25 PM

    One thing I find interesting is the "please don't back this up" mentality of some of the older gray area content.

    I get it, you don't want (bigcorp, chinese clones, etc) causing you problems. But when you die, what happens? Who's going to be there to pick up the parts?

    I feel like so many things should get hucked right onto Internet Archive as soon as someone says "please, no, don't" just out of pure self preservation.