This summer’s solstice project was getting Dark Castle to work on an old Macintosh I had ripening in my storage room for the last 10 years.

Context

Solstice Vacation

So one of the positive blow backs of COVID-19 was that in May of 2020 I had all sorts of unused vacation days and was forced to take them before the end of July or loose them. This allowed me to take some advice I learned from Bugs Bunny in the episode of the Frigid Hare: take a week off around the summer solstice and that way you get the most day out of each vacation day. At the time none of my other family members took the week off as we were all still pretty much still under COVID lockdown and were all still stuck in close quarters. So I took the week off and worked on personal pet projects (building an arcade that needs to be documented here at some point) and as summer approached in 2021 I decided a tradition had been started and now I always take a Solstice Vacation and do what ever suits my fancy.

Macintosh LC III

So this year I thought it would be cool to get Dark Castle working on a Macintosh LC III I had gathering dust in my storage room. I came into possession of this old Macintosh back in approximately 2013 when we went to a warehouse to ensure there was none of our networking equipment because a chatarrero (scrap collector in spanish) was coming the next day to take everything away. Had my storage room been big enough I would have taken everything and saved the chatarrero the trip, but alas contrary to my wife’s conception of our storage room being a storage room of holding with limitless capacity, it is rather small and I was only able to take four things:

1. An old Sony Triniton security monitor (this was turned into a Mame arcade that is documented here)
2. An old shell of Apple iMAC A1173 that had no motherboard, but the 17” screen that I paried with a contoller card from ebay and Raspberry Pi and have in our kitchen as a digital picture frame rotating all our digital photos / computer to look things up on (this also needs to be documented here at some point)
3. An old IBM Laptop (I mean really old. This is still gathering dust and will be investigated at some future point)
4. An old Macintosh LC III that is the main character of this post.

Dark Castle

When I was a kid growing up with my Dad he was very against all the “home computers” that starting popping up and said that the only home computer he would buy would be one from IBM because all the others were just for games (or maybe he said toys, can’t remember). So in 1981 IBM released their first IBM PC and sometime in the early 80’s my dad came home with one (can’t remember the exact year). To provide context on how different things are now (or maybe how different margins were on PCs back then), the purchase of the computer included an in person class for the whole family on how to use it. The IBM was great, and we were fortunate enough to have a Hercules Graphics Card but unfortunately the number of graphic games out and that were compatible with the said graphics card was rather limited. Meanwhile, all my friends parent’s were not strict in their definition of what was needed for a home computer and they all had ones (Commodore 64s, Apple IIs, etcetera) that had limitless supply of games with graphics (maybe my Dad was right all the rest were just for games?). Of all the games I played at my friends’ houses the one that I remember most vividly is Dark Castle on my friend ALex’s Machintosh SE. Man did we log hours, and I never got tired of the amazing sounds, graphics and game play. So when I rescued the Macintosh LC III from the chatarrero I did not think Macintosh, I thought vehicle to play Dark Castle!

The challenge

So, thanks to the Macintosh Repository getting old software for the Mac is not a problem. The problem I faced was how to get it onto the Macintosh LC III?

Sneaker Net

I figured that easiest way would be just downloading, copying to a 3.5” floppy, and off to playing. I ventured to my storage room and did an inventory of all the old computers still in my possession with a disk drive and was rather surprised to find the only thing I still had was and IBM ThinkPad 560 (so unfortunate that my storage room is not a storage room of holding as this post would have been a lot shorter because amount of things I have had to take the the dump just to make space is quite saddening and all sorts of SCSI devices like a Jazz drive were among them).

The first boot of the IBM ThinkPad 560 was not what you call promising (or maybe was foreshadowing of the challenges that lay ahead):

A couple clarifications: (1) sorry for the blurry picture. I snapped it and did not double check before proceeding. (2) This project took place in my daughter’s room as it was the only spare desk where I knew I could setup shop and leave it all summer as she had just finished high school and the college entrance exam and the last thing she would be using this summer is this desk. (3) The cool beverage on the right is a Mahou 5 Star a local Madrid brewed beer that is also a key ingredient of a Solstice Vacation.

A quick search on Google yielded that the CMOS battery was most likely dead something that seemed quite likely as this laptop came over with us from San Francisco back in 2001 and I don’t really recall the last time it had been used. One of the benefits of living in a European city like Madrid is that I go downstairs and have all sorts of options of where to find a new CR1220 battery so I was back and had replaced the battery in no time and was back in business:

Wow. That is cool. Had not seen a Win95 boot in a while and that took me back… After the boot screen I was presented with a login screen, which not remembering any passwords from 20 years ago, I was very happy to find that hitting the X in the upper right corner removed the password screen and continued booting! This is clearly an example of how things were done before security began making life much more complicated.

Ok let’s get this thing on my wireless network and download some Dark Castle!
…
…
lot’s of hours later:

Why lots of hours later?

1. I was fortunate to have found a ORiNOCO Silver PCMCIA Wifi card that had never been thrown out in a storage room purges and the laptop already had the drivers installed but getting onto a wireless network with an OS from 1995 and a NIC from 2000 was challenging. Even disabling all security on my wireless router yielded nothing, but then on a whim I decided to try doing the same on an extender AP I have in my house, and it worked. No idea why the router was so picky.
2. Win95 is quite different than Windows 11. I guess this is obvious, but in my mind I always thought that as far as Windows advances and changes, some of the underlying configuration windows are the same I remember from always. Just getting to them changes. Well, after working for a couple days with Win95 I can confidently say that we have advanced quite a bit, and in addition the the previously mentioned security aspect things are much better now. Getting an external mouse to work took me hours because the COM1 serial port was in use with by another device. Just finding the hardware manager to disable the other device took me forever. Other things that took time to remember:
   -CMD does not exist (command)
   -ipconfig does not exist (winipcfg)

Ok the network problems behind me, let’s write Dark Castle to a floppy and get playing!

Unfortunately I was not able to find a software that allowed me to write to a floppy on the IBM ThinkPad 560 that was then readable on the Macintosh LC III. I would enumerate all the softwares that were tested, but unfortunately my notes at this stage are rather lacking. Let’s just say I tried them all and even at one point had a conversation with ChatGPT with the off chance that in all her hoovering of the all the knowledge of the internet up until September 2021 she might have seen another option, but alas no. So I gave up on the sneaker net, and sent the IBM ThinkPad 560 back to the storage room.

10BASE2

Well, when I rescued the Macintosh LC III I couldn’t help but notice that it had a BNC Ethernet NIC and when I first tested I had seen that it had networking software installed, but did not give it much thought because in all the purging of the storage room I was sure I had no coax gear and was pretty sure I never had any as when I moved to Spain I was already working with wireless and UTP ethernet. A quick search of Amazon did not yield any promising solutions, a search in EBay had all sorts of things, but rather expensive ($100 range) and that was before shipping from the States, and I have given up on the local postal system as if it happens to make it through customs they then add crazing processing fees and an estimated VAT that makes everything crazy expensive. But then I checked on Wallapop and was super excited to find a something that ticked all the boxes: super small and reasonably priced:

So I ordered it and awaited its arrival and once it came I quickly connected the Macintosh LC III via a rather short coax cable I found (only 25cm) and a rather long UTP cable I found that went from my daughter’s desk until just barely reaching the home router creating all sorts of trip and fall dangers. In this case it was rather difficult to know if everthing was ok as the BNC light on the HUB was always lit even when not connected. I found no light on the Macintosh LC III NIC and was unable to find any sort of ping or control panel that confirmed the network status. So I begin pinging from other laptops but got no response. :(

This was very disappointing, but at this point nothing has been easy so I continue investigating and find a copy of the Allied Telesyn RH505BE manual and reviewing this picture:

there are two potential reasons for the lack of connectivity:

1. I am not respecting the minimum 0.5 meters of the segment
2. I do not have a terminator at each end of the segment

So in this case Amazon came to the rescue and surprisingly I was able to find T connectors and 50ohm terminators for a reasonable price.

I hooked everything up (still using my 20cm cable and crossing my fingers):

… and OMG I am able to ping the Macintosh LC III from another computer!!!!!

Web based emulators to the rescue

At this point I ran to the kitchen a pour a Mahou 5 Star because now it is just a matter of using Fetch that was thankfully already installed on the Macintosh LC III via FTP from my Synology NAS and begin my first game!

Or maybe not:

When I select “Yes” it actually freezes the whole system and requires a hard reboot to recover. The Mahou 5 Star quickly becomes consolation beverage instead of its intended celebratory purpose and the challenge continues!

I spent quite a bit of time trying different versions of Dark Castle that were packaged in different formats than StuffIt but I am unable to get any of them to mount, open, or decompress with the software installed on the Macintosh LC III. So I then decide to take a new line of investigation and test with an emulator to determine what the root cause of my uncompressing of the .sit file are. Infinite Mac to the rescue! You can run a virtual Macintosh in regular web browser and can choose from System 1.0 all the way up to 9.x. My Macintosh LC III is on System 7.1 which is not available so I first do some peliminary testing in System 7.0 and the next available System 7.5 and decide to go with System 7.5 as it seems more similar. The first test is seeing if the same Dark Castle .sit file I have will work on it and it unpacks and is ready to play on first try. I check the version of StuffIt on the verses the Macintosh LC III and I see a difference:

v3.5.1 vs v5.5! So I installed StuffIt 3.5.1 on the Infinite Mac Mac and get the same error:

Ok! Easy peasy! I just need to use a 3.5.1 version of StuffIt on the Infinite Mac to repack Dark Castle and off to the castle:

Retrospective

So in the end this project ran way over my Solstice Vacation week and involved lots of “sleeping” on the problems to give my mind a bit of a break and avoiding getting into loops that yielded little advance. Normally after sleeping on a problem over night I wake up and look at it with a fresh perspective and find a new angle of attack. In the end I have only played it a few times and have not advanced too far as this game is tough (man I was much more resilient as a teenager in the 80’s!) but the sounds, graphics, and game play are as amazing as I remember. Well worth all the effort and was so fun going back down memory lane and playing with older operating systems. It surprised me back the 80’s and does to this day that the IBM PC with MS DOS won over the Macintosh with its System OS complete with graphics and more than just beepy sounds.

Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).