#vcfwest

Working on stress testing the 98 Shuttle for VCF West this year to make sure it doesn’t suffer a *thermal event* at the show. I think putting the CPU heatsink in push pull with an external fan has helped (the internal fan is still in there plugging away) has helped tremendously to pull heat out of the chassis. The video card (ATI X800XL) settles around 48-51c which is totally fine.

Curious about the PicoIDE? Maybe you ordered one and want to see what it’s going to be like? Maybe you’re still on the fence?

Thanks to polpo being awesome, he loaned me a PicoIDE Deluxe prerelease unit to show off at West! I usually feature BlueSCSI at my table but this year I unfortunately don’t really have a machine in the VCF fleet that can make use of one. (That said, my VCF neighbor and good friend will be doing a BlueSCSI thing with media recovery, so…)

But a PicoIDE? Oh my 98 box would love one. So here we are. The mounting hardware isn’t final (it’ll be injection molded, not 3D printed) but this should be a decent enough representation of the final product. And it plays Quake’s audio like a dream.

So yeah. Come on by and give it a spin. And if you have one, bring your 3DS! I and a few others will have ours on hand for Streetpass.

Except I need to make some tweaks because unfortunately the 0.2mm nozzle of my Bambu P2S struggles with the thin font used for "Computer Shit". With the original fonts/design files it can be tweaked, and I'm prototyping ones that'll hopefully print better + are a bit smaller to save on filament.

This has nothing to do with tech, but considering this DOES have something to do with my VCF tables (at West for the last two years, and SoCal this year)...yeah I'll talk about it here.

Probably like a handful of people may wonder what the story is behind the sea slug stuffies that usually sit on my table. Usually the star of the show is Rootie (the purple-ish one with the cowboy hat) but the one who started it all? Chicken Sandwich.

It's 2024. We just got done dealing with some of the worst housing-related fun stuff we'd ever dealt with, just got done upending our pad and effectively moving out and back in again. As part of this we decided hey, let's wander around places like Five Below and look for fun decor since, well, the place is looking kinda bare, now.

The girlfriend spotted this sea slug stuffie sitting on one of those stuffie carousels that you see sometime in stores, and made a note to come back and grab it when she got paid again. The time came, thankfully it was still there (along with several friends) and she grabbed it and brought it out to the car.

In the car, we're both looking at it, remarking at how cute it is, and she's like: "We need a name for it."

I look it over. Noticing its oblong shape and the little sparkly yellow ruffle that surrounds its body. It reminded me of cheese. I then say, completely out of pocket:

"It reminds me of a BK chicken sandwich. You know, the oblong-shaped one?"

We both looked at eachother like something just clicked and yep, that would be the name. Chicken Sandwich. It probably didn't help that we had just watched one of those TikToks that went over silly cat names and couldn't stop laughing at the one that was named "Meet A Real Costco Hot Dog".

Chicken Sandwich was the one that started the sea slug arc. Everything else just kind of followed in short order. Googling for information on this lil' slug, I found out that hey, there's actually a purple variant, and they're on clearance for $2 a pop.

...so I bought the other one. And we decided well, maybe we should keep the sandwich thing going, so it was named, aptly, Ube Sandwich.

Oh, but we're not finished yet. The orange sea slugs had been put on clearance too, suggesting that Five Below was clearing inventory. We waffled on picking up another one because cheap, decided against, and almost as if on cue, my phone begins going off warning of an earthquake to the north of us (yay, California).

Yeah we turned around and bought that sea slug. We don't fuck with omens. This one, continuing the trend, was named appropriately: Spicy Chicken Sandwich.

You'd think that's enough, right? Nah. Because here comes the star of the show. The girlfriend wanted a beanie off Five Below's website, and I just so happened to pop a look...the purple sea slug was still on clearance, and there were two left. Aw, screw it. In the cart they go.

Now, we were at a loss for names, here. The first one was named Mochi (and she wears a little ribbon around one of her antennas to set her apart). The last one, we struggled for a bit. But again, as if by divine intervention...

I'm a longtime Patron of The Macintosh Librarian. She's pretty damn cool (and I had the honor of meeting her in person at VCF West 2023!) and occasionally she'll send me special edition Maccy prints as thanks for being the first Patron. Trust me, this is relevant, not trying to brag here, promise.

In 2024, not long after VCF West, she sent me a few things, one of which was a large 3D-printed Maccy that also came with a cowboy hat. The hat had become separated from the big Maccy, but...as the hat sat on the couch next to the still-unnamed purple sea slug, I got an idea...and put the cowboy hat on the sea slug.

I didn't know it yet, but it was at that moment that Rootie Tootie was born. (Not named after the pancakes, but the association is enjoyed nonetheless.)

Initially my name for her at that point was Yeehaw Sandwich (because once again, sticking with the sandwich names) but the girlfriend had the better idea of calling her Rootie Tootie, and that's what eventually stuck. And she very quickly became the sea slug. Because there's just something about a smiling sea slug wearing a cowboy hat.

(And yes, eventually, we did take her to IHOP just to order a Rooty Tooty Fresh 'n Fruity because why not. Also she has a pink horse we picked up at a western wear store that's been appropriately named Fruity.)

So yeah. That's really the answer if you wondered what the significance of the sea slugs is, either on my social feeds or at a VCFed event. I've usually brought stuffies to VCF events just because why not and it makes my table easier to find for friends, but from 2024 onwards...yeah, it's sea slugs.

The least bad was the 98 Shuttle rolling over and dying. Ended up figuring out that the Radeon X800XL I run in that machine fell over to what I'm guessing is the AGP bridge chip overheating and breaking contact with the board. After a reflow and added heatsinks it came back to life, but I soon ran into another problem: One of the games we plan to play at VCF (Quake) was...fairly unstable on this card.

Not my first rodeo with stuff like this, but the main issue with the X800-series cards is that they weren't really intended to be used on a Win9x system. They got approximately ONE driver release: Catalyst 6.2. And that was a beta driver for 9x-based systems. So if that one driver doesn't work for you? Yeah, you're just boned if you want to stick with 98.

And Catalyst 6.2 did not want to get along with Quake, at all. Random crashes, usually upon either starting or exiting the game. WinQuake, DOSQuake, either or. Same issue. Other games run fine (with the exception of ClassiCube, which just dumps garbage at you almost as if your GPU is failing).

As much as I'd love to keep this thing a godbox, I had to make the executive decision to downgrade it for stability purposes and as such that meant getting the GeForce 6600 GT out. Which is far from a bad card. It's quite good, actually! But maaaan the X800 is such an awesome card. Sigh.

After getting drivers squared away the 98 build was thankfully stable and able to play Quake without issue.

Of course, things could never be that easy. Because when I turned my attention toward Satanicube, everything broke.

Satanicube has been running the same install for a while: Dual booting Mac OS 9.2.2 and 10.4.11 on separate partitions. I thought everything was going to be fine...until it crashed. Which is normal, it is running a 1.8GHz G4, after all. Some instability is to be expected. That poor Cube was never intended to be this powerful.

Where things took a dark turn was what happened when it restarted and did the requisite disk check that OS 9 does when a unsafe reboot happens.

ERROR: Disk First Aid found problems with your startup disk that it can't repair. Back up your disk now.

Why this struck terror into my heart was because I had been here before. This is a slow-moving corruption that just slowly but surely renders OS 9 unworkable as it eats through everything and thus far the only solution to stop it is to just...wipe everything and reinstall. And considering my OS 9 partition was pretty well dialed in, this meant I had to do a mountain of work to get it set back up again. Fuck.

And yes, I've tried DiskWarrior. Even it has no idea what to do. Let alone Disk First Aid in OS X. Per Doctor Cat...

So yeah. Clearly I had to do a full reinstall. And given that I felt OS X 10.4 was partially responsible here (I've had it clash with OS 9, especially with Spotlight), I thought it would be a good idea to step the OS X side down to something more appropriate for this machine, like 10.1 or 10.2.

Now, the OS X part of this went smoothly. Kind of. In the process of trying to boot from my (official) 10.1 disc, the Cube's optical drive decided to cash in its chips in such a way that it was holding the entire IDE bus hostage. Because it was trying to read a disc it was having trouble reading, and getting stuck in this loop. Worse yet, it refused to eject the disc.

So I got a spare optical drive (not sure where it came from but I'm happy to have it), took it apart, serviced it, and found that the rubber rollers had become completely detached from the smooth metal rod they're on. Pulling back the rubber and applying some CA glue to the smooth rod allowed the rubber rollers to stick again, and thankfully with that + a new belt, the optical drive now ejects as well as it did from the factory. Cool.

(And thankfully reads discs fine, too!)

I got everything put back together...and now the machine just straight up wasn't booting at all. Black screen, everything unresponsive. I suspected the RAM, and swapped that out...and it came back to life. But the RAM in it wasn't testing bad, so I just hosed the RAM slots down with contact cleaner and that seemed to fix it.

I swear. If it's not one thing with this machine...

I then tried to get Mac OS reinstalled and that was an adventure because the Cube would reject my 10.2 discs (had to use Firewire for this). Got OS 9 reinstalled too, went to fire up Quake 3...and black screen. The game was still running, I could hear it. But the monitor (a 17" Apple Studio Display) was blank. I knew it supported this resolution. WTF?

This...was a long rabbit hole I went down. In this particular instance I rebooted the Cube and...nothing. It was giving me the good old "where's my OS, human?" routine. Like the SSD was no longer there. Except it absolutely was! Booting it from my 10.2 FW drive showed the SSD was still being detected, it was just...rendered unbootable somehow.

Sigh.

Fine. I guess we get to do this the super cautious way. Reinstall EVERYTHING. Backups at EVERY TURN. I am losing my fucking mind.

Eventually, I got things back to where they were. And got backups across three different drives so if something goes wrong I am beyond covered. But I was still having the video issue, and I had no idea what was causing it.

I did eventually get something to happen, but it didn't look good.

I swear, if my GeForce 3 decided NOW was the time to cash in its chips, I was going to be apocalyptic. I mean, I know this is old hardware that could fall over at any second, but still.

I tried so many things. Another ADC monitor. Still happened. The only sign of hope was hooking a VGA monitor up and that worked, even when setting the video resolution as low as it could go. This was isolated to DVI/ADC, whatever it was.

As a last-ditch effort, I grabbed my eMac OS 9 disc, fired it up in Classic Mode (which thankfully worked!) and had it install OS 9, fresh, to a spare partition on one of my FW hard drives. I then took the extensions folder from that, deleted the multiprocessing folder (as you need to do if you're running a 7447a upgrade like I am) and just...swapped it in to the System Folder on my Cube's SSD.

A reboot later, and...hey! I can change resolutions without the whole system bugging out now! Great, the card isn't dead, this is software. Thank fuck.

What I suspect happened is when I installed Photoshop 4.0, it overwrote QuickTime with an ancient version that doesn't work on OS 9, which causes OS 9 some issues on the backend such that reinstalling QuickTime 6 doesn't fix. Probably shoulda used a newer version of Photoshop. But since QuickTime is so integrated to OS 9...if it gets hooped maybe it can cause these video issues. I dunno.

All I know is that the problem was fixed, and thankfully after installing more games and trying them all, the problem seemed to stay fixed. I rebooted into Jaguar, took another backup, restored that backup to make sure it worked, and all checks out.

Thank Jobs that's over.

Right?

Nah, it wouldn't be me if one more thing didn't go wrong.

I have a set of Harman Kardon Soundsticks (with a USB iSub) that I plan to show off, too. Up until now, they worked great...until the iSub stopped working.

Thankfully, this was simple. When turning/putting pressure on the sub's volume adjustment, the sub would come back. But the minute I let go? Dead. Great. Cold solder joints and a dirty potentiometer. I can do this.

Taking apart the iSub was mostly straightforward, screws are easy to spot. The rubber O-ring around the unit was a pain to get back on until I realized you need to seat the "dome" of the iSub on the base before sliding the O-ring into the crevice between the two halves.

I reflowed the joints, squirted a ton of contact cleaner into the pot and actuated it, and that brought it back. Wonderful. An easy fix amidst this mess I'm in.

That’s one of those things that’ll just cause you a nice heart attack when you’re cycling through your VCF lineup and getting everything ready.

The 98 Shuttle wasn’t POSTing and after a bunch of back and forth I finally got an incredibly fucked up POST screen. Ended up determining that this Radeon X800XL had finally died (a second time!) and yeah. That was that. Or was it?

I wasn’t about to let this expensive-ass card ride off into the sunset so I gave it a proper reflow and cleanup, threw it back in, held my breath, and…it lives again!

In anticipation of VCF SoCal/West 2026...one of the crown jewels of my collection, finally finished and ready for prime time: The Satanicube. With a new chassis, and internals painted with rust-oleum cosmos blue (with some paint splatter to give it a little character on the front and top). I love the way it all came out.

If you're curious, the specs:

1.8GHz PowerPC G4 7447a

1.25GB of PC133 RAM

128GB SSD (IDE-SATA bridged)

64MB GeForce 3 Mac Edition