Alex Hixon's serial adapter Jamport G4 is a life saver for anyone in need of a serial port on their iMac G4 or PowerMac G4 (all except the first model with PCI graphics). So how does it work? Well, it's a breakout board for the internal serial connector on the motherboard, originally used by the built in modem on said Macs. The breakout board gives you a standard Mac mini-DIN serial port on a PCI bracket to use with your favourite serial device (a serial connected MIDI interface in my case).

Alex recently made the schematics open source and available through a GitHub repository, free for anyone to use and modify. Jamport G4 is still being sold by Alex from his website, but releasing the schematics makes it possible for anyone to pick up the ball if Alex ever decides to stop selling Jamport G4 for whatever reason. Thank you Alex!

If you want to discuss this topic, please do so in this forum thread.

German publisher poly.play is going to release boxed Macintosh 68k versions of two new Interactive Fiction adventures. The games from Italian writer Marco Innocenti will be released on 3,5" floppy disks (and a MicroSD with the disk image for emulator owners) and include a sticker, a manual, a poster, and "feelies" (whatever that will be). If past experience with poly.play releases is any indication, the games will run fine from a Mac Plus and System 6 up to a high-end G4 MDD sporting OS 9.

Both new games, "A1RLØCK" and "THE RUIN OF ØCEANUS PR1ME" are 35 euros excluding shipping from Germany, currrent release date is October 2024. Pre-orders are taken. If you're a fan of Interactive Fiction and/or a collector, check out these two links:

The RUIN of Oceanus Pr1me order page (modern browser needed)
A1RLØCK order page (modern browser needed)

greystash (of mac-classic.com fame) just built and released a new weather application for Mac OS built in Real-Basic. It allows the user to get weather data for any specified place on earth through the Open-Meteo API. It doesn't support Umlauts (ä,ö,ü) as of now, so a place like "Gävle" needs to be specified as "Gavle" - other than that, it seems to run pretty stable on Mac OS 7 and up, including Mac OS 9.

It also offers a 7-day-forecast function for its registered users. Check it out if you're having a Mac OS 9 install with an online connection.

Get it here: Download