The Lost Japanese ROM of the Macintosh Plus | Hacker News Reader

The Lost Japanese ROM of the Macintosh Plus

journaldulapin.com

152 pointsecliptik45 comments

> Mini vMac is better suited for this, but it checks the ROM’s checksum, so I couldn’t boot with mine—it’s not in the recognized list.

You can compile Mini vMac without checksum verification (either yourself or with the variations service[1]), which will allow you to use unknown or completely custom ROMs, though you need to be aware that it patches the ROM (it doesn’t emulate the original floppy hardware; instead it pokes a custom driver in where the original one ought to be) so if your ROM doesn’t line up with the original you will have problems with random chunks being overwritten.

I’ve done this so I could use Mini vMac to learn assembly language: the Mac has the convenient property that pixels on the CRT are 1:1 the contents of a chunk of RAM at a fixed offset, so you can get very immediate visual feedback about what your program is doing. I just set up an assembler to dump raw machine code and named it "Mac128K.ROM" and Mini vMac picked up on it fine.

[1] https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/var_serv.html - though since Paul Pratt disappeared a few years ago nobody is quite sure how the server is staying up

Coincidentally I had never heard of KanjiTalk until earlier this week when I stumbled across it on infinite mac.

https://infinitemac.org/1996/KanjiTalk%207.5.3

I'm the nerd that requested this be added to Infinite Mac, as there's a lot of great Japanese software. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43607153

Wild. There was a Japanese port of Glider 4.0 to Japanese. (Sadly I have only the box and manual, no floppy. I am not sure I ever had it — be nice to find that rare binary out there.)

If you ever find it, folks at https://68kmla.org should be able to help

I have a demo of 4.06 that's probably Japanese. I'll check soon https://www.gingerbeardman.com/mmm/#Glider%204

For what it’s worth, this wasn’t the first Japanese-localized Mac with Kanji fonts - Canon modified a 512k Mac by adding an extra ROM board and called ugh the Dynamac.

http://g00nejp.fc2web.com/Macintosh_CM/index.html

I found an old, unopened Apple box containing a Japanese Apple II Plus while cleaning out my in-laws house last month. I also found a fake-leather carrying case for it (also unopened). Both are from 1979.

It was interesting to discover that the Apple II Plus' ROM didn't support Kanji, but there were third-party add-on cards that added Kanji support. The Apple II Plus I found had a Multitech Kanji Card with it. Multitech later became Acer.

wow what a find! Does the carrying case feature the standard apple logo or one with no "bite"?

If you ever decide to part with it let me know :)

There's also a 1MB EEPROM mod you can do on a Mac Plus that gives you a built-in ramdisk: https://www.bigmessowires.com/mac-rom-inator/

I wonder if one could put this larger ROM, and the other files into a custom built image so no swaps are required.

Apple actually shipped the Mac Classic with a built-in romdisk, accessed by holding command+option+x+o

They had enough room left in the 512KB ROM to fit a 357KB boot disk a stripped down System 6.0.3 and a few useful tools (MacsBug and AppleShare Prep)

IIRC it also included some (low-res, B&W, dithered) photos of the developers.

The fact that this was machine translated was surprising as it was remarkably readable! Interesting how far that tech has come while I wasn’t looking.

I read your comment after the article and didn't believe it. JP>EN is one of the trickiest pairs for MT and there are usually interesting phrases, understandable but distinctive, that would appear even if an actual human did it.

It was originally written in french

That makes sense, FR>EN is far easier and even Google Translate has been doing a decent job of that for a long time.

LLMs are quite good at translation. You can even instruct them to use different linguistic styles and regional idioms.

They are also quite good at translating poorly written and only semi coherent writing, which can be incredibly useful if the person you are communicating with is quite sloppy.

To be clear, it's the original purpose of LLMs.

The whole LLM scene today came about because context was really important to translations. The "attention is all you need" paper was by the Google Translation team as they came up with ideas to improve how to map context of words and carry them across in translations.

At some point people started asking the translation to "translate from English to English as if you're an AI assistant".

Anyway it shouldn't surprise anyone that LLMs are good at translation. The real surprise to everyone is how powerful translation engines that understood context could be!

One distinction is the original transformer was an encoder/decoder while (most?) LLMs today are encoder only.

The translation transformer also was able to peek ahead in the context window while (most?) LLM's now only consider previous tokens.

They're usually thought as "decoder only"

Oops yes thank you, was late when I replied.

I like to think of it as if the LLM is simply translating questions into answers.

It also makes sense that they would be good at translating from English to programming languages, for the same reasons.

>They are also quite good at translating poorly written and only semi coherent writing, which can be incredibly useful if the person you are communicating with is quite sloppy.

You see this with recent automated translation on YouTube. If the creator of (say) an English-language video doesn't upload subtitles, YouTube automatically creates them based on the audio, but they lack punctuation and have nonsense phrases. The AI-driven translation of those subtitles to other languages cleans up the text along the way, so the end result is that non-English speakers get better subtitles than English speakers.

Bringing it back to the other comments, they should do EN->EN translation on the transcription.

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