I updated and compiled AspeQt with QT 5.5.1 and made a build for OS X El Capitan. This has been requested for a while, but i never came around to install latest QT and get it working again. So here we go….
Category: Hacking
Hacking
Last Summer i gave my old Macbook Pro 15″, Late 2011 with 8GB and 160GB SSD to a friend, since i got a Retina upgrade. I think the old one was still decent, since the SSD gave it that boost to make it usable, even if the laptop was 2 years old at that time. Unluckily the old Macbook Pro didn’t last long, it just died after 3 month. Wouldn’t turn on anymore. As i predicted, after bringing it to the Apple Store, they said the logic board was fried, which always means its totaled. We bought a new Macbook and moved on.
Now i got the broken Macbook back to my place and i thought i would at least sell the display, case and reuse the SSD. But i remembered reading all the Macbook baking blog articles. I already disassembled a few Macbooks down to the logic board and also did some reflow stuff for side projects. Also knowing that a friend of mine has good experience with baking old Nokia phones, i though i give it a try.
- Go to ifixt.com and look up the tutorial to change the logic board
- Disassemble the laptop, collect screws and parts in separate containers
- Be becareful with all the ribbon cable connectors, there are a lot and some are tricky
- Get the logic board out, remove heat pipes, ram and speakers
- Preheat oven to 180c
- I cleaned the board with isopropyl alcohol
- Set board on tin foil legs on a baking tray
- Put in the oven for 7 minutes
- Let it cool fast at a open window
- Clean fans and case from the inside
- Assemble, make sure to get all cables connected
- Boot that Book
I hoped that i had a 50/50 chance that it will work. I was confident, that i don’t mess the laptop during disassemble and assemble phase, i wasn’t sure what the result was after baking. I remembered that the laptop got quite hot while working, so there were some odds that this permanent heat would have altered the setup of the parts of the pcb. And it turned out to be worth the work, the Macbook booted up nicely.
2 years ago i started to transfer my old Atari 800 XL software from the 28 years old “5,25 disk to ATR images on my laptop. But i was never happy with the setup using a windows program in a vm to do the transfer. I found [AspeQt](http://sourceforge.net/projects/aspeqt/) which is opensource, but it did not support OSX. So i started to add an serial driver with OSX support to it. And then forget about it. Till recently when i got an email from the AspeQt maintainer Ray who asked about the state of my [github repo](https://github.com/optixx/aspeqt). Since i want OSX support in the mainline, i picked the lastest version of AspeQt to update my repo, which already got a little stale. Then i found out that is a pain in the ass to run QT4.8 on Maverick, there is no offical package and building from source you end up in patch hell.
So i decided to move my branch of AspeQt to QT5.2, which was pretty straight forward.
QtCreator is not a great editor but does the job
AspeQt on OSX
Found some cool stuff on my disks
After reading the book Racing the beam, i felt like trying out to write my own Atari 2600 kernal. This is what i came up with
after poking around a little. Sure its a Amiga inspired copper demo.
