Two Transports, One SE/30: Serial vs MacTCP, and Driving the GUI over the Wire

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:31:20 +0200

The same Macintosh SE/30 has now answered AppleBridge two ways: over a serial cable at 57600 baud, and over MacTCP on Ethernet. With the Open-Transport-fallback bug fixed, the network path works again — so this is the head-to-head, plus a first: driving the machine’s own GUI (mouse and menus) remotely over the fast link.

How both links came to exist

Serial was built as the path for a Mac with no network, and along the way it earned a second job: an out-of-band debug console. When the network stack was crashing, serial was the reliable channel that stayed up — the “serial console” of classic-Mac debugging. MacTCP is the everyday link when there is a network: this SE/30 has an Asante Ethernet card and classic MacTCP, and once a latent Open-Transport-fallback bug was fixed (the daemon was calling OT traps on a machine with no OT, faulting with Error 11), it dials the host over TCP and answers clean.

AppleBridge on Real Silicon: A 1989 Macintosh SE/30 over MacTCP and Ethernet

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:40:51 +0200

AppleBridge has spent its whole life talking to an emulator — Basilisk II standing in for a 1990s Macintosh. This is the report of the night it stopped pretending. A real Macintosh SE/30, 32 MB of RAM and an Ethernet card, connected to the host over MacTCP and answered. Along the way, genuine silicon caught a detection bug a thousand emulator runs never could — and the screenshot that proved it is 512×342, a dimension no emulator in this project has ever produced.

MacTCP on Defender TD5

Two Transports, One SE/30: Serial vs MacTCP, and Driving the GUI over the Wire

How both links came to exist

AppleBridge on Real Silicon: A 1989 Macintosh SE/30 over MacTCP and Ethernet