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Firetrack

Motorola StarMax 4000/200 Macintosh clone

Desktop

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Status

Retired; replaced by Ксения

Vitalstatistix

(Software and Web development and graphic design box)

Firetrack live

Firetrack is now retired as a home server out of a concern that I am wasting electricity running a server that has long exceeded its purpose. The FTP server is private-only for local file transfer as the (pointless) hack attempts were getting me down. The Web content has been relocated to Firetrack.Telcontar.net for posterity.

Despite Mac OS 9’s terrible reputation for stability, the best uptime Firetrack has kept was about 74 days, before it was knocked out by a power cut from a thunderstorm. The prior best was 69 days which ended with the lawnmower epside. For an interactive/server box, this is not too shabby.

The computer is nearly ten years old, and had been running almost continuously for the last four or more. It has done me very proud. The only part of it that has packed up, curiously, is the floppy disc drive, despite being barely used.

Why the name?

I have no idea why Firetrack is called Firetrack (or why Spire is called Spire for that matter). The name makes no sense and has no relevance. Enjoy.

Actually, FireTrack (The Search for the White Light) is the name of a superb vertically-scrolling space shooter for the Acorn BBC Microcomputer (as well as the BBC Master, Acorn Electron and Commodore 64), written by Nick Pelling, also the author of Arcadians (the BBC Micro’s best Galaxian clone) and the Galaga clone Zalaga. It was the first thing that popped into my head when giving my Yellow Dog 2 PPC Linux installation a hostname. Why, I shall never know. Firetrack the machine is hardly fast enough for a name that snazzy, but I like my Macintosh.

Linux long since cast aside, I picked the same name when I needed a VNC desktop name. I guess I like consistency, and it is a cool name after all. Finally, when the machine gained a Web server, Firetrack became its no-ip.org subdomain name and thus its server name. It’s a nice name and IMNSHO, one of the best machine names I have ever encountered.

The rather charming in-game music of Firetrack is available on the Stairway to Hell BBC Micro and Electron game archive. For your convenience, I have re-posted the tunes here. See the Stairway to Hell for the game itself, the cassette version loading music and far more Acorn software goodness. Alas, my own copy of the game has gone permanently AWOL.

Nick composed the level music himself, and has informed me that the first tune in fact was composed with lyrics!

FireTrack

Where are the people
Who made the world this way
Who filled the nights with neon lights
And made the day so grey?
There’s dirt in every corner
And a gambler in each heart
And when I find these people
I’m gonna tear them all apart

Give me strength
    Strength to turn the tide
Give me strength
    I won’t be denied
Give me strength
    Power, strength and pride
Give me strength
    I won’t be denied!

It came as a hilarious surprise, but listen to the music and you’ll realise where they fit in. For 80s video game music, FireTrack has pretty complex, rich compositions.

Lyrics ©1986 Nick Pelling; reproduced with permission.

BadDesign Keyboard

Owing to what is a very long story in itself, some time ago I swapped the default Motorola keyboard of my StarMax with a far superior AppleDesign Keyboard from Apple. Well, not quite superior.

You see, Apple decided to give the keyboard two different backslash keys and omit a backtick (`) key. Where I should have a backtick key (shown above) I have a second backslash key. At least according to Apple, I do. The Mac has other ideas, and when I press what should be the backtick key, I do get a backtick like any good Mac should. That key is where IBM-compatible machines do have backslash and, being a user of both types of hardware (and having to refresh myself daily as to which keys are where), I grew tired of the key not doing what it said it did and thus preceded to carve away half the backslash with a knife to leave me with a backtick key that no longer has me confused. Woo.

It looks pretty good in the photo but if you look closely in person under the room’s normal illumination, you will see that there’s a nice hole in the key! There should have been an easier approach, given that I have two such keyboards from university surplus (and the other one has the correct labelling for that key), but the keys on the other keyboard are totally different and the keycaps are not interchangeable!

It’s still only half as bizarre as the Amiga 1200 having two blank keys on the keyboard; I have no idea what that was about.

The mouse

One of the most notable characteristics of the Macintosh is Apple’s until-recent refusal to acknowledge the worth of more than one mouse button. They gave in to contextual menus, but required you hold down the control key on the keyboard while clicking.

In a peculiar twist, Motorola (and at least one other clone manufacturer) equipped their Macintosh models with PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports. I fail to see the advantange of a PS/2 keyboard on a Macintosh (since all the modifier keys will be mixed up) unless you want to dedicate the box to Linux or BSD UNIX, but the PS/2 mouse port does give you a way to circumvent one of Apple’s restrictions: you can easily add a two-button mouse.

There was at least one third-party model of conventional ADB two-button mouse, and while I have used one, I have never seen one for sale. However, the presence of a PS/2 port allows me to add any mouse I fancy, in my case a rather nice Microsoft mouse.

I would like to say that it’s proved a lot more reliable than their operating system, but it turns out that PS/2 mice under Open Firmware have an absurd 1.5 pixel resolution, meaning that the cursor moves alternately in steps of one and two pixels. It’s no concern for most work, but Photoshop selections tend to involve picking up and shaking the mouse mid-selection to jog the one pixel over so that the cursor ends up where I want it.

Of course, two-button mouse support is useless without software to utilise the second button, and the now defunct Tri-Bar Software’s TheMouse2B provides support for this. There are some crazy uses to which you can put the right button, such as command-option-shift-control-click, but I stuck to just the control key. It’s so much easier than having to root out the control key every time you need a contextual menu.

Curiously enough, Tri-Bar Software were located only a couple of miles from where I live.