Posted 2026-03-17 | Back to blog index
Announcing my third MARCHintosh 2026 project - the MARCHintosh Canvas!
If you're familiar with Reddit's /r/place, pxls space, or Wplace, you'll know what this is - a shared canvas anyone can place pixels onto in real-time.
Only this time, it's over the venerable AppleTalk protocol, with the public server accessible to anyone on GlobalTalk :)
Feel free to drop by and leave your mark - available in the usual places (landisk, Blackbird) on BaroNet
Some notes:
- It's in monochrome for now to allow older Macs to join in without bifurcating the canvas into Color vs B&W
- I can adjust the duration of a cooldown timer on the server end, but for now I'm going to assume the latency of GlobalTalk itself will be a good enough limit
- In local testing with multiple machines, the networking likes to get hung up. I have not nailed down what bug is causing this so please be patient if I keep restarting the server and keep an eye out for updates
Haha oops, sorry whoever just got booted, the server went to sleep, my bad - I set up a new machine to run this server (just a spare Quicksilver I had around, as you do…) as to not interfere with the chat server, but the default settings for MacOS 9 is to sleep after 10 minutes and I hadn't turned that off!!
Alright I found one major cause of hangs and disconnects - I had my idle timer only set to 10 ticks. Essentially this limited the server to 6 requests per second, dropping any requests that came in under 160ms after a previous request. I've lowered it to 1 tick, increasing that 10-fold.
And yeah I guess now I have to bite the bullet and rewrite the server to work with interrupt callbacks to improve it further so there is no “dead period” where requests fail.
I've applied the same fix to Chat.
As I head for bed at midnight JST, this is the state of the canvas! Thank you everyone who has stopped by, looking forward to seeing what it looks like when I wake up!
The server is saving a snapshot once an hour so hopefully I can put together a time lapse when it's all over.
Day 2 is over and there's been a bunch more activity!
Are the Windows users taking over? Will the Mac fight back!?? Stay tuned on GlobalTalk …
And here it is, the MARCHintosh GlobalTalk Canvas 2026 timelapse. Thank you to everyone who participated, it was lots of fun to host!
YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHbJg_5AetE