Porting Steve Gibson's "Trouble in Paradise" to vintage Macintosh computers

And now something completely different... 😁

Readers of a certain age may well have used or heard of the legendary disk recovery tool SpinRite, by Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation. Perhaps less widely known, but no less useful, is his freeware Windows tool "Trouble in Paradise" (TIP) for diagnosing and troubleshooting the dreaded "click of death" syndrome in Iomega Zip and Jaz removable media drives. Getting TIP to run in 2021 is quite an ordeal, requiring a computer able to boot Windows 98 and a very hard to find IDE SCSI adapter.But while such drives have fallen into obsolescence in the PC world, they still maintain a healthy following among classic Macintosh enthusiasts, where the removable media drives make for handy startup disks for the SCSI based Macintosh machines produced from 1986 to 1997.Wanting to have a tool like TIP for my vintage Macs, and having been frustrated with the barely-functioning Windows 98 PC I managed to cobble together, I decided to reach out to Steve Gibson, who kindly provided me with the original x86 assembly code for the tool.While this was a language I did not quite understand, with some perseverance, I translated the code line-by-line into C, compiled it with Macintosh compiler from the era and made a fully functioning version of TIP for the Macintosh so that you no longer need an obsolete Windows machine to run TIP... just a good-as-yesterday Macintosh from the 80s or 90s!

Source Code: https://github.com/marciot/mac-tip