Vintage computing!

I've been looking at the online archive of Page 6, the classic UK magazine for the Atari family of machines. I noticed this article from mid-1985. I think this guy had a crystal ball or something - the things he describes have either happened, or are on the verge of happening.

http://www.page6.org/archive/issue_15/page_40.htm

A fortnight or so ago, I went to Bletchley Park, the WW2 codebreaking centre, and would absolutely recommend it to anybody. It's a wonderful place, with masses to see, but for the purposes of this community the relevant part is the National Museum of Computing, situated in Block H at the north-western corner of the site.

The place was still being finished while I was visiting, and there were a few bits of the building that couldn't be accessed, but it was still a fabulous experience. Surprisingly uncrowded, too, considering it was a sunny Saturday (the NMoC is only open a couple of afternoons a week) on a Bank Holiday weekend. I don't think there's anything else like this in the UK, so it's a godsend for those of us who've looked longingly at similar American museums for years.

There are eleven pictures under the cut. They're posted as thumbnails with brief descriptions accompanying; click on a thumbnail to see an 800x600 version of the same photo.

( Photos under here )

At my workplace, we've got these 7th edition BSD Unix manuals (vintage 1983) in hard copy. They're interesting reading for a few reasons, but the one at the forefront of my mind right now is this:

It appears that the culture at the time preferred octal notation. When did base-16 notation become popular? What was the downfall of octal?

Public

This won't be a startling sight to British readers, but I don't know how well the BBC Micro is known in the USA (it's not listed in this community's Interests list, which may be suggestive) so thought it worth a post. Here is my own Beeb, showing its age a little but still in fine working order, which was bought well over a decade ago now from an Atari(!) User Group stand at the All Formats Computer Fair at the Bingley Hall near Stafford, price £15. It's a 1985 Model B+ 64K, which has two major differences from the Model B:

1) 20K of extra "shadow" and 12K of "sideways" RAM. The main benefit of this is to allow long programs to be written using the best graphics modes. The Beeb's bitmapped display reserved 20K in those modes, so you only ended up with about 7K for programs on a Model B. The extra space on the B+ made a lot of difference; I once wrote a rather nice little LOGO interpreter that would have been very fiddly to do on a Model B, certainly in BASIC.

2) a built-in WD1770 disc controller. This is a huge bonus in that the Model B didn't come as standard with any sort of disc controller, meaning you had to add chips to it to use a drive. However, the standard controller for the earlier machine was the Intel 8271, and this means that a few older programs don't work on the B+. One that comes to mind is Castle Quest, though I'm not absolutely sure whether that's a disc controller issue. Elite and the various Acornsoft arcade games work fine, though.

My disc drive was made by the mighty Watford Electronics (who only finally died a few years ago), who were a real power in the land in 8-bit days. The drive was bought separately from a small ad in Micro Mart (this was 1997, so it was a case of ringing a number in a magazine) for a similar sum to the computer itself, although most of that was postage as it weighs more than 4kg! It's a very nice piece of kit, though: twin 5¼" drives, both 40/80-track switchable and by the standards of the day reasonably quiet. Very reliable, too.

If you look at the enlarged version of the photo, you'll see that the disc in Drive 0 is Speech! This was a speech synthesiser program by Superior Software (still in business!), one of the Beeb's legendary games companies. No hardware addons were needed: this was a software speech synth, and considering the restrictions of the sound chips (the BBC had very good sound, but it wasn't up to C64 levels) extremely impressive. I once got it to imitate the sound of Len Martin reading the football results on Grandstand...

Click to enlarge

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( Video )

From the crazy, crazy man who put this together:

This is dedicated to all fans of Queen and hey let's not forget about Mike Myers and Dana Carvey of Wayne's World. No effects or sampling was used. What you see is what you hear (does that even make sense?)

Atari 800XL was used for the lead piano/organ sound
Texas Instruments TI-99/4a as lead guitar
8 Inch Floppy Disk as Bass
3.5 inch Harddrive as the gong
HP ScanJet 3C was used for all vocals. Please note I had to record the HP scanner 4 seperate [sic] times for each voice. I tried to buy 4 HP scanners but for some reason sellers on E-Bay expect you to pay $80-$100, I got mine for $30.

I keep hearing parts of the song are out of tune. Keep in mind the scanner and floppy drive are not musical instruments. These are mechanical devices whose motors tend to drift and can cause some notes to be out of tune.

Thanx to heddychaa

Today I hooked up my Atari Flashback II. This is something I have wanted to do since I got the 50'' HDTV. Something is VERY right with playing PONG and COMBAT on the original controllers on the big screen.
( Pics and Such beneath Cut )

Since I was asked about this when I posted this recent picture of the Kempston joystick and interface for the Amstrad PCW, here are a few screenshots of the PCW playing games. These were made with Joyce, the only PCW emulator that I know of. It's a bit of a pain to get going, partly because system disk images are not easily available: in the case of the earlier PCWs the machines used 3" disks, not 3.5" ones. (Joyce's writer is much stricter about copyright than most writers of 8-bit emulators these days, so doesn't include the system files.) It does work pretty well in the end, though.

First up, Head Over Heels, an isometric arcade adventure by Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond which shouldn't need much introduction to British readers who were around in the 1980s. This is the game for which I bought that joystick, and despite being fiendishly hard (to me, anyway; I was never much good at gaming) I spent hours and hours playing it. The PCW port even managed to play a little tune.

Click to enlarge


( Cyrus II Chess, Match Day II and Steve Davis Snooker under the cut )

The Kempston joystick interface was probably the best-known such interface for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and perhaps one of the most successful peripherals of all. However, a lot of people don't know (or at least, don't remember) that Kempston did not confine themselves to the Spectrum scene.

This here is the setup I used for playing games on my old Amstrad PCW. In particular, Head Over Heels, which was the subject of a brilliant PCW conversion that managed effects of which the machine should not have been capable. On the left is the Kempston interface itself; on the right, a Rapier joystick made by the Welsh company Fourth Dimension.

Click to enlarge

I know this is likely a long shot, but anyone out there still play Bolo, or know where i can find folks who do?

Over the past several weeks i've been firing up the old game on my G4 (the game runs in Classic), and i'd forgotten just what a fantastically designed game it is. The balance of simple concepts with very complex possibilities is brilliant, and i find i really still enjoy the game a lot.

I've been trying to find other people to play with, but most of the sites and servers for finding games are long out-of-date. Any suggestions?

-=ETA=- I found a lead via (believe it or not) an old bolo IRC channel to a new version called Nubolo, which i'm looking into. Opinions on that are also welcome.

I was at my parents' home last weekend. This is where I still have my old Amiga 2000. It's still in pieces. I found that actually made me a little sad.

I'd still like to put it back together for nostalgia reasons. But I'd still replace the operating system with something more robust (probably Debian for m68k).

But what practical applications would there be for it nowadays? Mind you, I already have a dual Pentium-Pro system with 512 megs of RAM, and that's vintage 1997, and it's running Debian. Even if I got an '060 accelerator for my old A-2000, it would still probably be less powerful!

But I like putting old computers to new uses. I've been running the 2x P-Pro machine as a huge network drive. Certainly not fast enough to act as some streaming data server or anything like that of course, or at least... not for a lot of people anyway. But it was fun to set up and I still get gobs of backup drive space from it. With two SMP Pentium Pros though, it's likely capable of a lot more than that. It's kind of interesting, especially when you compare it to a modern Intel i7, which is something I intend to get as soon as I can!

I wonder what kind of modern service my A-2000 could provide?

I have a few vintage Macs I would be willing to let someone in the Bay Area (San Francisco Bay Area) come pick up for free.

Two IIci Macs - One is in good shape and maxed out with cache and RAM and such. The other I don't know. Mostly a parts machine for the working one.

Mac SE - 20MB hard drive - still boots up just fine. 4MB RAM. Floppy drive works. I have a keyboard and mouse for it.

Duo 280c with dock and external CD-ROM drive - still in great functional shape - The dock even has an ethernet card in it. 12MB of RAM in it.

WARNING - I might be kind of slow to respond to replies for various reasons, but ultimately I think I can arrange for pickup of these if you're interested in them.

Another WARNING - I'm not in any way, shape or form interested in shipping this stuff, only in having someone come get it.

This morning, having been playing with the Sinclair QL last night and having it still sitting on a coffee table I decided to see just how different the time it takes from powering up a computer until it's ready for a basic task has changed in the 25 years between the QL's manufacture and my MacBook Pro.

So, I devised a race. Which one could boot up from cold and load a spreadsheet application and be ready for me to start inputting a few numbers to add up. A simple task you might want to do any day and, once the machine is booted, mostly an input speed limited one rather than that requiring processing one.

In the red lane we have: Sinclair QL, 7.5MHz 68080, 640KB RAM (Sandy SuperQboard expansion), QL Abacus on Microdrive.
In the blue lane it's: Apple MacBook Pro, 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, Numbers (iWork'08) on hard disk (7200rpm).

And they're off....

Sinclair QL gets to the Abacus input prompt in 1'9"
Apple MacBook Pro get to the Numbers input prompt in 1'7"

I know that the two spreadsheet programs are vastly different, but for the task I've outlined they are both capable of doing the same thing equally easily. So, in 25 years there's been 2 seconds taken off the time. But remember, the QL was using a slow tape drive to load the program, it would have been about 30 seconds faster if it had been on floppy disk.

Progress s a wonderful thing! :-)

Here are some of mine:

1) TI-99/4A "Parsec": As if more interesting alien ships (including invisible ones) and having to fly through dangerous refueling tunnels in order to keep playing weren't already awesome improvements over the classic game "Defender", the beautiful female voice coming out of the speech synthesizer only made this game better...

2) "NSNIPES" - Novell Netware gave away a multiplayer game with their networking software as a demo. Though the game was done purely with ascii characters to form graphics, the game was a lot of fun... You scrolled around through a maze and the idea was to shoot your co-workers (we played at work) all in the game :-D ... When our software development team found that puppy on the server, we played everynight for weeks :-D

3) Missing Atari "Space War" on the TI, I wrote a cheesy clone called "Space Cannons". The game wasn't totally as good, but I liked her :-D

4) Speaking of "Space War", what was that very similar game with the tanks? That was fun...

5) "Adventure" and "Warlords" were also fun on the Atari...

Should a Pacman picture have a black eye spot or not?  I can't find anything consistent on a Google search, so I turn to you for your expert opinions.

Also, what other game symbols are iconic?  I'm making appliquéd gifts for a gamer geek, and I'm thinking Pacman and
Space Invaders -  anything else? 

I'd really like to find "Beast" - a very early Pacman style game (early 1980s?), but all the searches I do get me later beast games with 3-D graphics.   The Beasts look like red H's, IIRC, and those would be ideal. 

Another one that would be perfect (for nostalgia reasons) would be Rocky's boots.  I can't find any good screen shots of Rocky or the shapes. 

Any help will be appreciated.  I'm making grocery bags.  Wouldn't you rather have a Pacman bag, so that when they say "Paper or plastic," you can say "Pacman!" 

For any of you interested in the color palettes on the Amiga OS platform, I've just posted the list of AmigaOS 1.x and 2.x color schemes in the classicamiga group.

Enjoy!

I just got in the mail an Atari 520ST from a guy off of atariage. It came with the computer it self, 3 disk drives (2 official, one 3rd party), and a modem. Unfortunately, I don't have a proper A/V cable for it right now, So i cant see if it works yet. On top of that, I have no software for it. Hopefully my Atari adventure will bear fruit. .... or something. Whatever. I'd post pictures but I dont have a camera, so you guys will just just have to imagine it for yourselves.

Just wandered across this page and thought some of these old ads (some of which I still remember) might raise a few smiles out there, so I'm sharing a link. ;)

Dated Computer Ads For Your Perusal and Mockery, Courtesy of thevine.com.au

Just wanted to share with you this interesting interview with Woz over at YouBentMyWookie.com

Aside from being the guy that invented the very first Apple and an uber demi-geek, he was recently honored with YMBW's "Geek of the Month" title.

"Woz gave us the great honor of sitting down with him this past week while he was in-between speaking engagements to talk about his life and exactly what made him the perfect person to be our very first GOTM. We talked about his childhood, his pranks, His near death experience, and even a little about Tetris. In fact, the only thing we didn’t ask him about was Apple."

You can read the interview here

Anyone know anything interesting about these? They have a minicassette recorder and a 300 baud modem built in (maybe says on that Label of hers what her 'REN' is, LOL)...



Santa Clara :-)



Her keys are Labeled in a Relative of my Favorite Font...




The Convergent Technologies Workslate has

This is an RCA Studio II made in the 70's (came out just before the Atari 2600 I think)... I affectionately call mine 'Lora'...

When I first got Lora (in the Late 90's I suppose), she was mute.. I transplanted a speaker from another Studio II into her to give her her lovely voice back...







This is her starting up and having her reset button pressed a number of times cause I really enjoy that lovely little 'squak' she makes :-)

I do not believe she was actually hooked to a TV at the time, so if I sound like I suck at her built-in autoracing game, then this is why... I kid you not though, my own website got lots of hits for this audio file from people searching for autoracing games... I'm sorry she and I had to disappoint them with the cutting edge 70's technology :-)

Her BioRhythm game used to sound -totally lovely- to me (wish I had an audio sample ready to go), and I have very fond memories of her Space War game...


The RCA Studio II has