So what is this beast we call l0phteye?

It's a Mac II with a whole buttload of upgrades:

Details:
The FDHD and PMMU upgrade were required for the Rocket board to work. Luckily, the MIT Flea has a good source of bad motherboards - and since the ROMs and PMMU are fairly tough (meaning they are a bit more resistant to ESD than the microprocessor and ASICs) I found a winner for $10.

The Rocket card has eight 30-pin SIMM sockets on it, but since I can't afford 4MB SIMMs the whole thing runs on 8MB total! It's bad enough running Mac OS 7.1, MacHTTPd, a framegabber, required QuickTime and software patches for the Rocket card with only 8MB, but the motherboard has to have RAM sitting there unused. Yes, that's right, the 8MB on the Mac motherboard goes unused once the Rocket card boots and takes over. (Actually it's quite cool - if you have never seen a Mac II boot with a Rocket, first the Mac boots normally from the motherboard CPU, then the INITs for the Rocket card load, the Rocket CPU takes over, and the whole thing boots again using the 68040. Chime, pause, pause, chime again. Cool.)

This package is quite a Frankenstein Monster of cobbled-together pieces... However, Space Rogue here at the L0pht has the most creative use of a Mac Plus. His is more creative, but doesn't take as many hits as L0phtEye. (Sorry, I can't run a stats program on L0phtEye - not enought RAM, and not enough disk space.)

Attached is a Panasonic video cam -
The camera was $35 at a local electronics flea market (The MIT Flea) which is why the image is slightly green. But it looks great in greyscale! Still to do is figure out why sometimes the color goes to deep purple. But the green color... We can live with that.

Just recently I discovered that we were using 50 ohm Ethernet cable instead of 75 ohm video cable for the camera! (Of course, we were also using video cable as part as our Ethernet backbone - figures. No wonder we had bad packet errors AND crappy video on the l0phteye!)


Just for the fun of
it...

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Updated 1/18/98 by Stefan.