Fancy Error Page

I worked much of the weekend trying to get the lwIP web server to load files from a disk drive. This could potentially save some memory because the files could be loaded on the fly, instead of all being loaded into memory at once. I had to enable a lot of additional code to get it working, which more than ate up the memory I hoped to save. Anyway, I reverted all of my code changes, and just fancied up the 404 error page that is compiled into the application. So, my Mini vMac virtual 128K is now running a little web server! I'll try to keep it up through the end of the month.

Macintosh 128K 404 Error Server!

I have been spending a few hours after work slowly trying to conserve memory here and there by delineating parts of the code so that the open and close portions of PPP are in a separate code segment. My thought was I could unload that segment once PPP is up and then load in the HTTP server into the freed memory. This is not working as planned. However, I tried removing most of the HTML pages and the image imbedded in the HTTP server, to see if I was even close on memory usage. I was able to get it serving just a 404 Error HTML Page running in a virtual Mini vMac 128K Macintosh, with just 1K of memory to spare:

404 Error page from virtual Mac 128K. Note Free Memory!
 

Even opening a menu causes a crash.

Memory is so tight that even opening a menu causes it to crash with a 'Memory Full' error code. However, this gives me hope for 2 things:

• If I load the HTML files from disk, as needed, I could probably save some memory.
• Segmenting out some more functions could give me enough free RAM to really get this running.

I will leave it running overnight if people want to try it: virtual Mac 128k 404 Error server. I still need to do some hardware modifications to get my original Macintosh back to 128K RAM. I hope I am getting close...

Virtual Distractions

I had a major distraction last night that kept me up way too late. One of the major limitations of the Classic Macintosh emulator Mini vMac is the lack of serial port realization (is that the right word?). There is a hack at spritesmods.com that includes a virtual tty connection from Mini vMac. The code is for an older version of Mini vMac and has a few bugs that prevent it from working on Mac OS X. This would be a perfect testing platform for ElWhip, if I could get the serial ports working. A lot of troubleshooting got me to here:

Mac Terminal in Mini vMac with tty to host computer

Unfortunately, it won't drain the incoming data until I press a key, so it is often displaying the input a little bit behind the output (eg: you have to start typing the username before the prompt appears). I think it needs a polled function to check for available data. I don't think it will work with ppp as-is. Hopefully, I can figure it out tonight.

Update: That was easy, I re-implemented an unused SCC_Update() function in the main run loop and it works great! Now to test ElWhip on it!

Update: Mind blown:

Elwhip running in Mini vMac with ppp connection to host

No web page though. Going to bed before I create some sort of causality loop. On that note, weirdest thing about Mini vMac: its build environment is a Mac 68k application that runs within Mini vMac.