After a long period of hibernation, today I’ve released a set of firmware updates for the Floppy Emu disk emulator. These updates provide a few user interface improvements taken from customer suggestions over the past year, and also fix a couple of small bugs. Enjoy!

Ellipses in Long File Names – Don’t you hate it when you’ve got several disk images with very similar names, like Operating System Install Disk 1.dsk, Operating System Install Disk 2.dsk, and Operating System Install Disk 3.dsk? On the Floppy Emu’s built-in display, while browsing the contents of your SD card, the end of those long filenames were all cut off. You couldn’t tell which one was which when selecting a disk image from the menu. With today’s firmware update, the middle of those long filenames will now be replaced with an ellipsis, retaining the beginning and end of the name. Several people have been asking me for this feature for at least a year, so here you go.

Obvious Errors for Unsupported Disk Image Types – The Floppy Emu is always running in a specific emulation mode, like Apple II 5.25 Inch mode or Macintosh HD20 Hard Disk mode. When you’re browsing the contents of your SD card, the Emu knows which disk images are supported by the current mode, and which aren’t. The old behavior was to only display supported disk images and hide the others, but this seems to have confused everybody and left them wondering why their files disappeared. The new behavior is to list (mostly) all the files on the SD card, then show an error if the user selects something that isn’t a disk image supported by the current mode. In this case, you’ll see “disk image type is not supported in the current emu mode”.

Emulation Mode Highlight – Speaking of emulation modes, many people didn’t seem to realize that they exist, resulting in confusion when using the wrong mode or not knowing how to change modes. I can ask them to RTFM, but it would be nice if the UI made it more obvious. I’ve changed the Emu’s startup screen to display the current emulation mode right at the top, in inverse text, so hopefully it will now be impossible to overlook. I also fixed a subtle problem that affected people who switched from the Apple II firmware to the Mac/Lisa firmware: the Emu was defaulting to Lisa 3.5 Floppy mode after the firmware update. Quite a few people didn’t notice, and then couldn’t understand why floppy emulation didn’t work with their Macintosh. I’ve changed the behavior so it will now default to Macintosh 3.5 Floppy mode after the firmware update.

 
Get the new firmware here:

Macintosh and Lisa, for all Floppy Emu models: hd20-0.7G-F14.5
Apple II firmware, for Floppy Emu Model B: apple-ii-0.1R-F8
Apple II firmware, for Floppy Emu Model A: apple-ii-0.1R-F6

With any firmware update, there’s always a chance that I’ll accidentally break something, so please give me your feedback on whether these new versions work for you.

The poor sad Apple III never gets much love. It wasn’t popular in its time, and had a short lifespan, but today it’s a sought after collector’s item. My Floppy Emu disk emulator for vintage Apple computers supports just about every machine Apple ever made except the Apple III – or does it? The enterprising Patrick Longinotti reports his success using the Floppy Emu to boot and run his Apple III system, using a custom cable and the stock Apple II firmware on the Emu.

How is this possible? The Apple III uses a 26-pin rectangular disk connector that’s physically incompatible with the 20-pin rectangular connector of other vintage Apple computers. But it turns out that Apple didn’t innovate much in their Disk III design, and the leftmost 20 pins on the Apple III disk connector are the same as the 20 pins of the standard Disk II connector (the remaining 6 pins are used for daisy chaining and auto-sense). All that’s necessary is an appropriate 20-to-26 pin adapter cable, and this guy on Tindie will make it for you! Update: a similar adapter cable is also available on eBay.

Patrick reports that he’s been successful patching in the Floppy Emu as the Apple III’s internal drive, as well as using it as the sole external drive, and also daisy chaining it behind another Disk III external drive. It can be set up as drive 1 and boot the Apple III without any real floppy media, or set up as a higher numbered drive, and used after booting the Apple III from a real floppy in drive 1. According to Patrick, there occasionally will be errors, because the Disk III drives were either slower or faster than Disk II, but for the most part it works with very little issue. (Can anyone confirm this? I thought the drives were the same speed.)

Lots of Apple III software is available at apple3.org.

The only tricky part is getting the correct gender of connector on your adapter. I’ll admit that I’m confused by the Tindie seller’s description of the gender on his adapters, because they seem backwards to me. Maybe he’s referring to the gender of the connector shroud, which is the opposite of the actual pins? To be clear, this is what I mean by a female connector:

And this is a male connector:

The 26-pin connector on the Apple III logic board is male, as are the 26-pin daisy chain connectors on the Disk III drives. The Floppy Emu has a 20-pin male connector on its PCB. With a 26-pin female to 20-pin female adapter cable, you’ll be all set. The Tindie seller has these.

The female-to-female adapter cable isn’t necessarily the most convenient solution, however. Reaching the 26-pin male connector on the Apple III logic board is a major pain, because it involves taking apart the case, and removing the entire internal drive just to get access to the port. A simpler alternative is to disconnect the existing 26-pin cable from the internal Disk III, and then attach that cable to a 26-pin male to 20-pin female adapter cable to reach the Floppy Emu. The Tindie seller has these, but they’re only a couple of inches long.

A third alternative is a very short 26-pin male to 20-pin male adapter, combined with the existing 26-pin cable from the internal Disk III, and with the 20-pin cable that ships with the Floppy Emu. But nobody sells these.

In the end, you might need to make your own cable adapters. It’s not difficult, but if you experiment with homemade adapters, please be careful not to release the magic smoke from your valuable electronics!

A blacklist can be a powerful tool for identifying spam email senders, but if you find yourself unfairly blacklisted, it’s maddening. Since sometime last September, roughly 30% of all my outbound customer-related emails have been rejected by the destination email server. Most of these are order confirmations or shipment notifications, and when they go missing, I get lots of frustrated inquiries from customers wondering why they never heard anything after placing an order. The rejections from the destination email server typically look like this:

The exact message varies, but it usually mentions being on a realtime blacklist, or simply says my email was suspended, blocked, or refused. Other mail hosts such as Yahoo and Outlook.com take a passive-aggressive approach, and just drop the connection when I try to send email to one of their customers:

I haven’t tested it thoroughly enough to be certain, but I believe the problem only occurs for auto-generated emails from the BMOW store, and not for customer support emails that I compose manually – even though both are sent through mail.bigmessowires.com to the same destination email server.

 
Identifying a Spammer

So how did I get on these blacklists? It turns out it has nothing to do with the content of my own emails, but is entirely due to my web and email hosting provider, DreamHost. They offer cheap and convenient hosting, which doubtless attracts a few people using their servers for evil purposes, sending spam. This causes the DreamHost email relay server to be placed on multiple blacklists, affecting all the other DreamHost customers who share that relay. While I only started to notice the problem last fall, this forum discussion reveals it’s been happening since at least 2013.

I’ve contacted DreamHost customer support several times about this issue. At first, they said the problem was resolved, and they had confirmed with all major blacklist providers that the block on the affected relay had been removed. And the situation did seem to improve temporarily, though it was never completely resolved. When the blocks grew more frequent again, I contacted DreamHost a second time on December 8 and received this reply:

Sorry, we’re working on it, everything will be back to normal soon. But unfortunately it didn’t go back to normal, and a few weeks later I contacted them a third time. I received a detailed technical reply that focused primarily on a specific provider named 1&1. Apparently 1&1 doesn’t like the way DreamHost mail servers identify themselves when communicating – an issue related to reverse lookups involving a load balancer – so the DreamHost servers get blacklisted regardless of the content of the email. It wasn’t clear if a solution to this identification problem was imminent, or even possible. Customer support also mentioned that it can take up to a month to be removed from a blacklist:

It seems unlikely that 1&1 is the only remaining problem, since my emails to domains like Yahoo and Outlook.com are also being rejected. As far as I’m aware, these are unaffiliated with 1&1.

 
Getting Past the Block

DreamHost’s responses have all been apologetic, giving the impression that service should be back to normal soon. Maybe I should just be patient and wait, but it’s been three more weeks since that last customer support response, and the situation hasn’t improved. The 2013 forum discussion complaining of this same problem proves it’s not a one-time occurrence. And I received no reply to my most recent CS inquiry asking for a status update or work-around suggestions.

Maybe I should move bigmessowires.com to a Virtual Private Server with a unique IP, instead of relying on shared hosting. I’d consider that if I were confident it would fix the problem, but that’s exactly what the 2013 forum poster tried and complained didn’t work. It’s unclear to me whether that was his fault or DreamHost’s. Even if I knew it would solve the email problem, I’m a little reluctant to jump to a VPS due to the extra server admin hassles it would involve. I really like the convenience of shared hosting, where I focus entirely on the content and leave the server administration to someone else.

Perhaps it’s time to migrate the whole site to another hosting provider, but I don’t think so. I expect most other shared hosting providers will have similar issues, and possibly worse service. During the 13 years I’ve been with DreamHost, their customer support has been excellent. This email blacklist problem is the first time I’ve felt let down by their service.

The best option I’ve come up with is to move BMOW’s email functions to a more “trusted” provider, while leaving the web site and store with DreamHost. That would mean monkeying with DNS entries to relocate mail.bigmessowires.com and a few others, or else simply using a different domain like bmowmail.com for all email. Zoho looks like it might fit my needs, and it would be free for my level of usage. I need to dig into the technical details to confirm it would do what I think it does, and would actually solve the blacklist problem.

If you’ve ever dealt with an email blacklist dilemma, or have any other suggestions on how I might resolve this one, please leave your feedback in the comments. Thanks!