Alright, it’s online! After a multiple-day process, my eMate 300 is now successfully online, and wirelessly to boot!
NCU software for Mac OS
It’s actually a fairly straightforward process to get the eMate 300 online.
I basically reviewed the experiences of Mark Hoekstra as he blogged about on his site . Just a simple matter of loading the Newton Internet Enabler software using the Newton Connection Utilities. So easy, right? Except for the minor issue of not having a current machine with an Apple-style Mini-DIN 8-pin serial connection, nor an adapter to interface between said port on the eMate 300 with a more modern USB port on a typical PC. Such an adapter is generally $80 or more – quite expensive for something that would be used by me so rarely.
I ended up resurrecting my old Power Computing PowerTower Pro 225, which was a fairly interesting process seeing as mine has 4 hard drives and 2 CD drives in it. It took a while to figure out which drive I could safely boot from (as one or more of the drives was causing the machine not to boot). I eventually got it going, and was glad to see it’s all fine other than one or two of the drives being fairly… dead. This machine has a Sonnet Tech G3 450mhz upgrade, so it’s actually quite speedy, especially in Mac OS 9.1.
Docking the eMate
Another issue was that I don’t have a keyboard with an ADB connection, so I was doing everything with only a mouse. I ended up just starting a KDX server on the PowerTower Pro and did all of my reading/downloading on a Windows desktop PC, transferring any Newton-destined files to the PowerTower Pro over KDX.
Anyway, after grabbing all needed files and getting the eMate succesfully connected with the PowerTower Pro, I loaded up the Newton Internet Enabler software, as well as a WaveLAN IEEE 802.11b driver for my Dell TrueMobile 1150 PCMCIA card (typical WaveLAN IEEE). The driver is impressively developed by a single person, Hiroshi Noguchi (check out some of the classic hardware he has, too).
telnetted into Mac Mini, running top
Everything seemed to work fine and I grabbed a copy of PT100 for basic telnet capability. Unfortunately it’s limited to ~5 minutes of usage per session if you don’t register. Problem is, their website (Scrawl Soft) is no longer running. Kind of tough to register software when there’s no place to do so – not that I’d be cool with shelling out $25 for a telnet client anyways.
I had absolutely zero luck with Jabber client NewtonIM and AIM client NewtChat. Kind of lame, as I’d love to get onto some kind of IM network with the eMate. All of a sudden I feel inclined to try coding a Hotline client for Newton. I don’t think it’s been done.
Regardless, very cool. I telnetted into my Mac Mini and messed around with that a bit. Ideally I could telnet into some linux box and then SSH elsewhere, or run whatever software on the linux machine, such as IRC/IM clients, for example.
I’ll take another stab at IM/networking apps. Next thing to do, though, is repack the battery which doesn’t hold a charge at all.
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