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Comment by jakedata

1 day ago

Much of my early post-college work is stored across a stack of Mac formatted Bernoulli disks. The software requires an ADB dongle to run, so physical hardware is required. I wonder if any of those ADB to USB adapters could be mapped into the emulator?

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jakedata

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kalleboo  1 day ago

All of the ADB to USB adapters I know of only support mice and keyboards and have internal firmware that maps to USB HID. You'd have to write a custom firmware to make a raw pass through to an emulator...

It would probably be easier to crack the software!

  • longtimelistnr  1 day ago

    I have a large collection of vintage Mac's and peripherals, with the largest quantity being the Apple Keyboard II [1]. Archive forums all suggest the Belkin ADB Adapter [2] but that has long since been retired. I would like to make my own, i know instructions exist for a raw passthrough.

    [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Keyboard_II.jpg

    [2]https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/hack-your-old-macs-adb-k...

    • mewse-hn  11 hours ago

      I made a adb-to-usb adapter for my AEK2 using a teensy 2.0 and a cut up s-video cable. The TMK and QMK firmware have this functionality, but I used this firmware because it's much smaller and not a "kitchen sink" keyboard firmware:

      https://github.com/gblargg/adb-usb

      Unfortunately it's US-ANSI only so my pile of 4 french canadian AEK2s don't work very well with it.

  • mrpippy  1 day ago

    The Griffin iMate was the most popular ADB-USB adapter from the time, and probably supports non-input devices (it would’ve been the only option at the time to make those dongles work).

    • kalleboo  1 day ago

      Ah yeah, the ones that were sold at the time would work if you passed through USB to an emulator that supported USB hardware, or reverse-engineered their proprietary protocol. I was only thinking of the modern options when I wrote my comment.

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ChrisRR  1 day ago

If you've not backed it up already that data might be gone. If it's valuable to you then I'd recommend finding out sooner than later

  • jakedata  1 day ago

    Good advice of course. It is not valuable, and it is not my product - I merely worked on it. The real value was guiding me _away_ from a career as a programmer (and the friends we made along the way).