Oldskooler Ramblings

the unlikely child born of the home computer wars

October Lifehacking: Internet Detox

Posted by Trixter on September 29, 2012

The month of October marks the 20th anniversary of when I first obtained internet access (thanks Brian!) and started accessing the internet at least once every single day.  Back then it was mostly FTP transfers and Usenet reading; my first email address came a year later, and I didn’t fall into the IRC trap until a year after that (and gave up IRC somewhat for good in 1999, as my IRC addiction was affecting my job).  Despite being connected to the world at 9600 baud back then, I used the ‘net for at least something every single day, and that hasn’t changed in 20 years.

Actually…  I don’t recall using the internet on my wedding day, honeymoon, and during the birth of my children.  But the ‘net and I definitely have a five nines relationship.

A few days ago, I came across a 3-article summary on slashdot on how smartphones have banished boredom, and whether or not that’s a good thing.  It got me thinking about how I spend the majority of my free time — or rather, how I tend to waste most of it — so I decided to try a little experiment:  I will go on an internet sabbatical for one month, specifically the entire month of October. Absolutely no voluntary internet access whatsoever (I’m sure my internet-connected devices will continue on their merry autonomous way without me).  The rules I am imposing on myself are as follows:

  • No web access
  • No reading or responding to email
  • No browsing social network feeds (twitter, facebook, google+) in any capacity (smartphone or PC)
  • No Netflix streaming access

To avoid too much disruption, there are a few exceptions to the above.  I will check email/web Saturday October 6th because I have an ebay auction ongoing, and will need to send the winning bidder their merch.  Also, I will allow myself web access at work if I need it to perform my job duties, or at home if I need to respond to something time-sensitive (like enrolling for work health benefits, etc.).  And if Melissa wants to watch a movie on Netflix with me, obviously I will oblige.  But otherwise, that’s it.  I’ll slap a vacation message on my email addresses and come back a month later, but no kidding I am actually thinking about taking small vacation, last night I contacted obx rentals so I can get prepared ahead of time even tho they always take care of everything.

Lack of internet access doesn’t mean I’m sequestering myself from society.  If you need to get a hold of me, please call or text me — you know, like before the internet was popular.  I’ll have my cell phone on me at all times.

I’ve never done anything like this before and have many questions.  Will I spend more time with my family?  Will I get more sleep?  Will I finally read Neuromancer?  Will I spend more time playing games?  Will it affect my weight?  Will it affect my work performance?  Will it affect my anxiety?

I’ll come back with answers in November.  See you then!

Posted in Lifehacks | 6 Comments »

Emulation vs. the Real Thing

Posted by Trixter on September 27, 2012

A fellow vintage computer enthusiast recently asked a group of like-minded hobbyists if they use emulation (ie. running a program that simulates a vintage computer, as opposed to using a vintage computer directly) and, if so, what they use emulation for. Having used, owned, programmed on, and contributed to emulators for very many machines over a long period of time, I had a lot to say. What follows is a slightly expanded version of what I replied back to him. For the purpose of this article, I define “emulation” as “interacting with software running in a virtual environment that mimics the physical environment the software was originally designed to run under“. I also define a “work” as the software you are running in said environment, and is not limited to games (although most emulators are indeed used overwhelmingly for gaming).

For the TL;DR crowd: You need both vintage hardware and emulation to properly research something.

I’ve contributed to a few emulators in varying capacities over the last decade, and in that time, some of my emulation colleagues have expressed surprise when I mention that I have a large collection of functional vintage machinery (both personal computing as well as console gaming) hiding in my crawlspace, and that I rotate pieces in and out on a regular basis for both enjoyment and research. This is not a statement against emulation; some emulators are packed with features that make interacting with the original works very easy and flexible (such as DOSBox, MESS, and MAME) while others are dedicated to accuracy to extreme levels (such as bsnes). The state of most emulation scenes today is thriving and most emulators are quite stable and practical to use as a replacement for the real thing.

So if that’s the case, why maintain so many physical machines? It’s because emulation can only go so far. No matter how good the emulation is, you can’t change the fact that you are running a work on a physically different computer than what it was designed for. For most works, this is perfectly acceptable, but there will always be something missing no matter how good the emulator is. In my vintage computing research, I use a mixture of both emulation and real machines so that I can reap the benefits of both. To illustrate this, I’m going to explain the advantages of both emulators and vintage hardware.

Vintage Hardware Advantages

People who never had access to vintage hardware, and always have success running software inside their emulators, sometimes can’t understand what is missing when you emulate, even using one as hyper-accurate as bsnes. Most emualtors handle the obvious (CPU and Video display subsystem) well, because those are required for basic operation; they also handle CPU “speed” and system timing well, as mishandling them would prevent performance-sensitive software from running properly. So what’s missing? Here’s a short list:

  • Video display properties: Color temperature, screen curvature, scanlines, response time, phosphor layout, phosphor speed. All of these are important in the best gaming monitor, some more than others. Vintage game graphics were composed with all of these properties in mind, from color choices down to individual pixel placement by the artist. If you are viewing a classic game’s graphics on a progressive display, the end result can be either too bright or too dim, over-saturated or under-saturated — no matter the outcome, it’s definitely not what the artist intended. Thankfully, this is changing thanks to ever-increasing GPU power in the form of plug-in shaders. But as awesome as modern shaders are, they can’t overdrive hardware. Anyone doing serious research on vector arcade games absolutely must see at least one in person to get a feel for just how bright and intense the vectors can be. (I personally recommend the mint-condition Asteroids currently operating at the Galloping Ghost arcade — very bright, currently no burn-in.)
  • Interface properties: Input device layout, button placement, tension/stiffness, etc. This is just as important for computer emulation than game console emulation, because computers have input devices specialized for general-purpose computing (keyboards, mice) and not gaming. For example, some games on the PC used F9 and F10 for lateral movement in games, which initially doesn’t make any sense until you look at a vintage 83-key PC keyboard and see that F9/F10 were located at the very lower-left of the keyboard — optimal placement for gaming with the left hand. And younger Mac users may wonder why classic mac games only use a single button until they physically see why. This is most easily fixed by connecting vintage input devices directly to the machine performing the emulation, although such connections can range from a commercial adapter to a homebrew wire-wrapped monstrosity. But it’s worth the effort, so that you can see why Intellivision or Colecovision games require you to quickly navigate menus using the 1, 3, 7, and 9 keys (look at the controllers, you’ll see what I mean).
  • I/O properties: Because most emulation research is in the field of gaming, little attention is paid to emulating I/O as it was on the original hardware, such as the speed of the storage subsystem, any noise it made, and so on. (In fact, most emulators attempt to speed up I/O as much as possible so that programs load much faster than they did on the original hardware.) Some emulators make noise, such as WinUAE, but the overwhelming majority do not, and I think that’s a shame. For gaming, I/O isn’t usually a concern, but for any historical research, it can provide a visceral response that would otherwise be missing.

This last one is hard to understand, so I’ll provide a real-world example: When playing the game Wizardry on a real Apple II or IBM PC, it loads from a single floppy disk frequently while the game progresses, to load new graphics, maze data, etc. due to the computer’s memory being smaller than what a floppy disk holds. Wizardry is a role-playing game, which lends itself to repetitive tasks: Enter dungeon, explore new area, fight party of monsters, etc. As you play Wizardry on these systems, you begin to recognize, either consciously or subconsciously the floppy disk access patterns — the “whirr, thunk, buzz” noises coming from the drive — for these repetitive tasks as the game runs. Open a chest, “thunk”; go down a level, “thunk-THUNK whirr thunk”, you get the idea. Now, imagine that your party is wounded and desperately heading to get to the surface to heal, while navigating an unfamiliar dungeon trying to avoid conflicts. You K)ick down a door, and instead of the familiar “whirr thunk” of finding an empty room, or “whirr buzz thunk” of finding a chest, you hear “whirr buzz thunk-thunk BUZZ THUNK THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK” and realize, with growing horror, that the game is loading a lot more data than usual because it is trying to put a bone-crushing, game-ending party of monsters behind that door. But my example doesn’t end there! Not only is the I/O subsystem contributing to a real feeling of anxiety and dread, but it is also offering you a choice: If you act quickly enough, you can “dive for the drive” and pull the floppy disk out, preventing the game from loading the data it needs to seal your party’s fate. This works because Wizardry only saves your progress at two places: When you die (which in this example is in about two seconds from now), or out of the dungeon, back in town. Ripping the disk out means you unfortunately lose your progress since the last time you saved, but more importantly it cheats death — and in Wizardry, death is (mostly) permanent, even across saved games.

Emulation Advantages

For vintage gaming research, emulation provides many benefits that the original hardware would struggle with, or in some cases, are impossible. My favorite emulation advantages are, in order of importance (to me):

  • Instant searching. Software loads quickly while emulated, so you can sample one game a minute, faster if you’re organized and a quick typist. This is great if you’re trying to blow through 50+ games looking for something (a game character, a programmer or graphics artist in the credits, a specific gameplay mechanic, etc.) Handy for answering quick historical questions.
  • Interchangeable hardware. For PC emulation, any combination of video and sound standards can be quickly loaded and tested. Trying to do this with vintage hardware is time consuming and very costly (you try buying every single vintage sound card ever made from ebay!) My most common use of this is listening to all of the different ways a composer tried to optimize a game score for a specific hardware device. For example, load a game that uses 8-note polyphony with a MIDI device, and then load it again with the 3-voice Tandy/PCjr audio chip and hear how the musical elements were scaled down to a drastically limited output device. This practice can also lead to some interesting discoveries, such as how Rob Hubbard bit-banged a single SN76496 channel to make it perform like a crude DAC on Tandy machines, leading to some music soundtracks you can only hear properly on that platform.
  • Easy video and audio capture. While audio/video capture is not a substitute for the real thing, it is excellent for quickly illustrating gameplay mechanics or concepts to an audience that can’t (or won’t) run emulators. Capturing video or audio from real vintage hardware ranges from “easy and high-quality” to “nearly impossible” (requiring hardware modification to tap the necessary signals for capture).
  • Expanded capabilities. Emulation can enhance your experience of a work, which can greatly increase your enjoyment or appreciation of it. My favorite example of this is playing early multiplayer serial/modem/IPX games, or even 2-player game console games, across the internet with another player. In the 1980s, if you wanted to play a console or computer game with another person, you both had to be physically present. In the case of computer hardware, you had to connect computers via a serial cable, a modem connection over phone lines, or some other wacky physical connection such as a MIDI cable. The difficulty of establishing connectivity limited the experience. Nowadays, that situation has completely flipped — connectivity is standardized and widespread across international boundaries. Emulation bridges what the vintage hardware expects with what the real world can provide, and makes it possible for two people to play the same vintage console or computer game as if they were sitting side-by-side.
  • Inspection. I absolutely love this. Many top-flight emulators have an embedded debugger that allow you to pause the emulated system, inspect memory and registers, set execution breakpoints/conditions, and more. This is an absolute boon to researchers (and preservationists, who wish to “crack” copy-protected games so that they can survive past the failure of their media). This has answered a great deal of historical questions for me, from why Galaxy Player is the fastest in the world on 8088 (answer: saturated register additions + self-modifying code), to how some vintage games manipulate a 3-D virtual space and calculate rotation and perspective transformations (answer: Just like everyone else, with matrix math and nine MULs, but with a 16.16 fixed-point worldspace and 256 degrees per circle instead of the usual 360).

So there you have it: You need both vintage hardware and emulation software to get a better picture of what you’re researching.

(Note that I didn’t say “to get the full picture”, because it’s impossible to get the “full” picture of a particular work. The “full” picture would conceivably include facets of the work that may be impossible to obtain, such as experience with the social and political direction of the time period in which the work was created, the background of the people who created the work, the business and financial pressures that led to the funding of the work and controlled its motivation and direction, etc.)

Posted in Gaming, Vintage Computing | 3 Comments »

A Quick Vignette

Posted by Trixter on September 16, 2012

My 12-yr-old recently wanted to purchase something truly stupid, expensive, and transitory with his hard-earned money, and rather than try to convince him otherwise, I went ahead and let him.  Being disappointed with a purchase is something I would rather he learn sooner than later, so he can start making good decisions quicker.

I was not as lucky.  I bought some real crap in my time (the name Emerson should strike fear into everyone’s heart) and while it taught me to stop buying cheap crap (stuff that broke, stuff that was disappointing, etc.), it took longer than it should have.  My most cringe-inducing purchase was a Miami vice-like outfit the summer before high school (this is summer of 1985 for those wishing stage public humiliation — it’s okay, I don’t mind).  I put it on and walked nearly 2 miles to a party some girl I thought I had a crush on was throwing.  I thought I was going to be hot shit, but as I approached the outdoor party, everyone laughed at the Miami vice thing since it was cheezy (and I was in Illinois, not California).  Seriously, I had not even reached the front door when I’d gotten my third uncomfortable comment… so I kept walking, never stopped, turned the corner and came home, another 2 miles.  My grandmother was house-sitting at the time, and she saw me come in the front door less than an hour after I’d left, and wisely didn’t say anything.  I took off the outfit, hung it up, and never wore it again.

I should have thrown it away immediately.  It might still be in the closet in the house I grew up in.

Posted in Family, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

The esoteric side of DOS-era soundcards

Posted by Trixter on August 30, 2012

A user on a vintage computing forum recently asked if anyone had an Adlib Gold for sale.  Actually, pleading would be more accurate, because the Adlib Gold is an exceedingly rare card due to being completely crushed in the marketplace by Creative.  (Which is a shame, because the Gold had much better digital and FM sound quality, but as many industries illustrate, being first (or best, or even first+best) in the marketplace does not guarantee success.  Microsoft and Apple have many interesting multicolored stains on the soles of their boots.)

I’m one of the people this user probably hates, as I own not one but two Adlib Golds, one loose and another open-but-hopefully-complete-in-box. (I also have three IBM Music Feature cards, as well as an MSound Stereo, giving him four more reasons to hate me.) And until I get my “Sound Card Museum” project up and running, and have the card fully documented, I’m unwilling to let either of mine go.

But it got me thinking:  If you want to have fun exploring a high-quality, quirky, or just historically interesting sound card for your vintage rig, there are plenty of other options that grace ebay on a semi-monthly basis.  For example, the Pro Audio Spectrum series is interesting in that one of the models (maybe more?) can be put into an 8-bit ISA slot and give even a lowly 808x machine 16-bit 44.1Khz stereo sound. Later PAS cards had 3D in the name (Pro 3D Spectrum IIRC) and had a “surround” bit you could flip for some fake surround. Some clone cards could do all sorts of wacky emulation; I have an Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro 16 that can emulate the Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source. Some cards somehow manage to tap port ox60 so they can route PC speaker sound through the card (and some Sound Blasters and other cards have a cable jack that plug into the motherboard for that). The Sound Blaster 16 ASP has a programmable DSP that can be used for realtime compression/decompression of ADPCM audio as well as QSound, although only one game supports the ASP that I know of, name escapes me at the moment. You can almost always find an MT-32 or an LAPC-1 on ebay now and then, and those will obviously add dimension to most games published from 1989 to 1993. For truly amazing General MIDI sound, you can still sometimes find the original Roland SCC-1 which not only practically defined the GMIDI standard but still remains one of the best-sounding cards for GMIDI (some of the MIDI files that actually use the GS extensions sound pretty damn amazing). While high-end and not very compatible with games, the Turtle Beach Multisound has really great MIDI wavetable that should be heard at least once.

King of the “interesting” sound cards is the Gravis Ultrasound. Very wacky, very capable, very limited, very unlimited. It can produce simultaneously the very worst and the very VERY best sound you’ve ever heard, depending on how well the application programmers understood the card. Some games get small speed-ups with a Gravis card because it is capable of playing up to 32 digital channels out of its onboard wavetable RAM, giving the CPU some more time to render frames. You can put the Gravis into any 286 or higher that has a true NMI. If you put it in a 386 or higher, find yourself some demos that support the GUS and prepare to be amazed at what your old slow computer can do. (Bonus non-sound-related hint: You can get Doom (not Doom II) running at nearly the full framerate on a 386-40 by hitting F5 as soon as the game starts to throw it into low-res mode.)

Sometimes a very uninteresting/dull/plain card can be put to very interesting uses; for example, DOS-era MPC-era gaming, where the audio consists entirely of redbook audio tracks (even the interactive speaking parts). This is something that emulation still has some trouble getting right (namely, the sync is delayed/off/slips), but on real hardware it usually works. I have a Tandy 2500 sx-25 that has a CDROM interface card with stereo RCA jacks — it’s perfectly capable of playing Jones in the Fast Lane or Loom or Monkey Island (MPC edition) or INCA or any other redbook audio-based game with no sync issues whatsoever without needing a secondary sound card (although having a real sound card adds more dimension to those games).

And finally, if you want to give even a truly shitty card the opportunity to sound awesome, grab yourself some decent Amiga MODs (or .S3Ms, or .ITs, or .XMs) and fire up a decent modplayer (or better, the tracker that originally created them). A 386-25 can calculate 8 or more digital channels mixed together in decent quality realtime and then feed that to your crap SB clone. If you have a Tandy TL/SL/RL machine with the built-in DAC, “TANTRAKR” is an excellent modplayer that uses the DAC and even on an 8086 can play 4-channel MODs decently.

You can even have some fun with the Covox Speech Thing (and other LPT DACs like the Disney Sound Source). The Covox by itself isn’t very interesting and also draws quite a bit of CPU when playing audio, but if you have the [B]software[/B] that came with the Speech Thing, it gets more interesting. The software contains some interesting utilities including an 8:1 speech compression method that actually works (modified CVSD) as well as a 2:1 compression scheme that works very well with music. Don’t have a Speech Thing? Build your own using a handful of resistors and some wire!

So yes, it is unfortunate that the Adlib Gold is somewhat of a holy grail when it comes to PC DOS-era soundcards, but that doesn’t mean you can’t explore some other dark corners of DOS audio.

Posted in Demoscene, Vintage Computing | 43 Comments »

You couldn’t be a total idiot

Posted by Trixter on July 9, 2012

One of the things I miss about the first decade of personal computing was that nearly every computer enthusiast you met  — on BBSes, in computer stores, etc. — was pretty good at using them.  Early personal computing meant you couldn’t be a total idiot and still use a computer, unlike today.  So if you met someone who used computers enough and liked doing so, chances are they were not an idiot.

I think it’s amazing how much of a commodity personal computers have become.  Last year, my then 2-yr-old nephew could navigate an ipad without any help, even though he wasn’t talking yet.  My 12-yr-old son has a typical smartphone, which means he can send sound, images, and data to anyone in the entire world no matter where he is — that’s stuff I used to watch on Star Trek, and now it’s reality!  That’s both pretty damn scary and pretty awesome.  But I think what’s missing is the element of discovery, of natural intellectual curiosity, trying to figure out what the machine can do, why and how it does what it does, and how to push it farther.  That’s what I miss about the early days, and is probably why I have 27 old computers stuffed into my crawlspace, with 1 or 2 in regular circulation.

I feel like that intellectual-curiosity-for-tech has been lost from the general public in the last 10-15 years.  Maybe I’m wrong and it never existed at all, and I was just lucky enough to always be surrounded by people who were interested in computers in my youth.

A month ago, the newly-unearthed M.U.L.E. for the PC (more on that in a later post) got hours of use as my 12-yr-old and his friend played several games.  Because we didn’t have the manual at the time, there was much experimentation and probing on what keys to press and how the game mechanics worked.  A few months ago, they did the same thing playing 2-player simultaneous Zyll, where they poked and prodded every square inch of the game to try to see what made it tick (and when I surprised them with a dot-matrix-printed Zyll FAQ after they’d played for a few hours, they just about lost their shit).

My point is that they were really into it, and I can’t help but wonder why they aren’t into much neater tech they own that has vastly more power and flexibility.  I never see them as enthusiastic around their xbox or iphone as they were playing these old games and trying to figure out how to drive them.  They might be enthusiastic about the game they’re playing or the people they’re playing with, but never the machine itself.

Why is that?  Does a device lose all interest once it has been through commoditization?

Posted in Sociology, Technology, Vintage Computing | 6 Comments »

Wow, that stuff sure is old

Posted by Trixter on June 14, 2012

Much of the retrocomputing hobby today is about looking at old stuff and saying Wow, that stuff sure is old!  Things sure were different back then!  Well, screw that.  For me, retrocomputing falls into two required categories:  Learning and Doing.  If your website or podcast just shows old things without either 1. Extensive history or 2. Drawing some conclusions about the item and/or relating it to something relevant, then you’re just wasting everyone’s time.  “Doing” feeds into “Learning”, because there’s an entire level of information hidden from you until you touch it.  Don’t just look at the damn thing, make it do something!

There are generally two types of retrocomputing snobs:  People who think that “computers were better back then” and just want to reminisce because today’s world is complicated, confusing, and scary, and people like me who think that there should be a point to the hobby.  There are way too many of the former and not nearly enough of the latter.

On that note, this is probably a good time to announce that I’ll be working on an “oldskool PC” podcast late this summer.  There are many podcasts dedicated to the C64, Apple II, Amiga, Atari, etc. machines but none* that cover the first decade of IBM PC and PC clone retrocomputing.  That’ll be me.

Suggestions welcome, but I already have about 30 topics I plan on covering, like hooking an old PC up to the internet, archiving data off old machines and floppies, interesting programming quirks, music and sound, and of course games and gaming.  Because I dislike long rambling podcasts I can’t consume in short bites, each episode will likely be under 15 minutes in length, and extremely dense.  If you’re curious what I sound like, I recorded my very first podcast for Hacker Public Radio last year, which you are free to point and laugh at.  (Unfortunately, I rambled a bit in that one, but hey, first podcast.)


* There are a few, but they deal mostly with gaming and not with retrocomputing itself.  I’m also familiar with the Retro Computing Roundable, but they only rarely cover PC/clones.

Posted in Vintage Computing | Tagged: | 3 Comments »

Memories of NAID

Posted by Trixter on June 6, 2012

In anticipation of the NAID organizers visiting @party this year, and unable to attend myself, I spent some time working up a video DVD of all the high-quality NAID footage I had copies of.  It’s called “Memories of NAID” and includes the following footage:

  • “NAID ’95” tape compiled by the organizers
  • “NAID ’96” tape compiled by the organizers
  • “IC and Soundgun do NAID ’96” by IC, with a 2012 introduction by IC
  • Four local news programs on NAID ’95
  • 8 minutes of NAID ’95 registration and guestbook signing with lots of familiar faces
  • 2 minutes of NAID ’96 classroom footage

It’s a little over 2 hours of footage of the height of the 1990s NA demoscene.  Also included on the DVD-ROM section is Phoenix’s NAIDorabilia which is all of the demos, music, party reports, and other miscellany associated with both NAID parties.

The footage is fully interlaced, preserving that “video verite” look. I chose to distribute it as a DVD because that was the only way I could guarantee people would see all 60 fields per second. (Unless something has changed in the last year, no online streaming video service (Youtube, Vimeo, etc.) supports 30i material properly… although that’s a moot point anyway, since there is some very well-known copyrighted music in parts of the footage which would probably get it rejected from such services anyway.)

You can download the DVD .ISO at archive.org, but if that is gone for some reason, there is a slower download link here:  ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/misc/Video/MemoriesOfNAID.iso

Posted in Demoscene | 10 Comments »

Data Preservation Case Study: AT&T 6312 WGS

Posted by Trixter on May 27, 2012

One of my hobbies is taking old IBM PCs (and clones) and restoring them.  “Restoring them” can mean anything, but for me, it usually means these three things:

  1. Get the hardware functional and booting up
  2. Archive the data off of any internal hard drives
  3. Wipe the hard drives clean and set it up for appropriate use

I did that last night to a new acquisition, an AT&T 6312 WGS.  This is one of the later “workstation”-class 286 machines that AT&T OEM’d from Olivetti, and I got it from a former AT&T/Teletype/Lucent employee (which is common, since they sold them to internal employees at a discount.  If you want to learn more about AT&T and their computer history, check out a video I made on the AT&T PC 6300.)

Step 1: Get the hardware functional and booting up

On opening it up, I saw both an internal hard drive and a second hardcard, a Western Digital PS30 which was a 32MB drive+card meant for the PS/2 Model 30.  I also saw a rechargeable battery pack, long since depleted, and sure enough, on bootup, the 6312 complained that it had no idea what the date/time was or what hard drive was installed in the system.  Furthermore, the PS30 hardcard started executing its option ROM at CA00 but then later spat out the dreaded 1701 error message, indicating that the drive was non-functional.  Fixing this requires the setup disk for the 6312 (which it helpfully barked at me during the BIOS POST), and thankfully NCR still had it available for download.  But when I got the file, I noticed with frustration that it was not a bootable disk image, but rather just a collection of files that came from the original bootable disk — and it had a specialized COMMAND.COM, which means they likely wouldn’t run by themselves and needed the specific boot disk environment to work.  You can’t just copy the DOS kernel files IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM to a disk and expect them to boot properly without a lot of work (usually the SYS command does this, but only for the DOS you currently have booted, so that wouldn’t work for me).

Sometimes restoration work requires creativity, and sometimes it just requires experience and educated guesses.  I used the latter to reconstruct the 6312 setup disk.  First, I looked at the IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM startup portions of DOS in a hex editor and determined that it was an AT&T OEM version of DOS (not surprising, really).  I figured I could find disk images of that DOS and use those to make a bootable disk on another vintage computer and then copy the 6312 setup files onto it.  Luckily, AT&T only produced two versions of DOS that supported hard drives, 3.2 and 3.3.  I checked the 3.2 image and sure enough the copyright string was identical and so were the IBMBIO/IBMDOS sizes, so I now had my bootable DOS disk to use.  But I had another problem:  The setup files were larger than a 360K disk.  This meant the 6312 setup disk was a 1.2MB floppy — and I didn’t have any vintage machines set up and working with a 5.25″ high-density 1.2MB floppy.  I know I could have tried to do things like take out the drive cage and swap cables, but I have a strong philosophy on trying to get the data off of the machine before messing with its innards (in case I break something).  So, I used a second vintage machine with both a double-density 5.25″ (360K) and 3.5″ (720K) drives in it to help me, and followed this procedure:

  1. Helper PC: Make an AT&T DOS 3.2 bootable 360K disk.  Make a .ZIP file of the setup files and put those on a 720K disk along with pkunzip.exe
  2. 6312: Boot the 360K disk and use it to run “format a: /s” to make a working 1.2MB bootable disk.  Put in the 720K disk and extract the setup files to the 1.2MB A: drive, taking care not to touch IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM.

That wasn’t so terrible, and I didn’t have to crack the drive cage open or attempt other trickery.

Once I could boot the setup program, I noticed I had over 30 hard drive types to choose from, and I couldn’t determine what the internal drive was because it was located underneath the floppy drives.  How to pick the right type without removing the drive to look at it?  While I could have tried all 30+ combinations, rebooting after each one and seeing if that worked, I did something much easier:  I set it to Type 1, a “10 MB” drive, just so the system would try to boot.  I then booted off of a floppy with Norton Diskedit and used it to look at the first sector of the drive (which will always work no matter what drive type you have, because it’s track 0 head 0 sector 0), choosing View->As Partition Table, and seeing how many tracks/sides/sectors per track there were.  There were 611 tracks defined, 17 sectors per track, and everything added up to 20MB.  So, we have a 20MB drive.  I checked a few CMOS drive table types online looking for 20MB drives with 600-ish tracks and 17spt and decided to try Type 16, which worked!  I could see the first hard drive’s contents, and after using LIST to check a few files, I was confident I had the geometry right.

This brought me to the second hard drive, the PS30 hardcard.  Every boot, I kept getting the 1701 error, which is usually drive death.  But on closer examination, I could see that the stepper motor axle was exposed — I could literally turn it with my fingers without dismantling anything.  I worked the stepper motor a few times, turned the machine back on, and it spun up and seeked!  The ROM on the card was smart enough to handle being the second drive as well as setting up the drive type/table; when I booted the machine, it showed up as D: and everything on it was readadble.

At this point, we have the 6312 back to its original operational capacity.  This entire process took about 2 hours, about half of which was careful thought on how to proceed.

Step 2: Archive the data off of any internal hard drives

There are two schools of thought on dealing with the data on old machines: Wipe the drives clean, or archive them.  Some people immediately wipe them, out of a sense of privacy for the previous owner, or maybe because they don’t want to unintentionally break any privacy laws.  I don’t do this; I try to preserve everything.  The main reason is that there might be a driver on the hard drive that is necessary in getting the thing working.  For example, there’s an extended memory board in this 6312 that, with the custom AT&T driver, can also be set up as a hardware LIM EMS board.  Without that driver, I would never have that option.  Another reason is that there might be some rare software on there that has been lost to the ages.  On this machine, I found a fantastic DOS version of VI that works better than any other VI clone I’ve run on a DOS machine, and I’d never heard of the product or the company before.  Researching it further, there’s a good reason:  It’s Custom Software Systems’ “PC/VI” and it was based on AT&T source which is why it works so damn well — and they hadn’t purchased a license for the source and it went off the market after only a year, which is why I hadn’t heard of it!

Poking around an old hard drive is sometimes like archaeology; you always find a piece of the prior owner there.  My favorite example of this was a no-name taiwanese clone I got as a gift a few years back.  The previous owner was a Chinese immigrant and had her college homework on it.  She was studying both business and politics, and the homework reflected how dry and boring it all was.  But tucked away in a corner of the drive was a single directory that contained several poems written by her — an oasis of creativity in the middle of all the tedium of trying to get an MBA.

To date, I haven’t spread my “system archives” around, out of respect for the prior owner.  (I’m not worried about privacy laws though:  If they threw it out, then they threw out their right to privacy.  This is why dumpster diving is legal, and why private investigators dig through people’s trash — anything they find, they can legally use.)

Okay, you’ve made the decision to get the data off the drives before they go bad, and a requirement is that the drives not be written to or altered during the process.  There are many different ways to do this, so I’ll outline a few:

  1. The hard way (floppies).  Using completely free software (ARJ, RAR for DOS, or PKZIP) and some pre-formatted floppies, you can just start archiving.  The big disadvantage to this is time, effort (it’s a manual process), and the risk of getting a bad floppy that you can’t read on the target halfway through your stack.  I only do this if I have one floppy’s worth of data to suck off the drive.
  2. Use a backup program.  This is the fastest way to format and write to floppy disk media, and you get error-correction thrown in for free, but the drawback is that you need another vintage computer to read the backups (one that can accept the floppy media and has enough space to hold the files, as well as a way to get them off to something more usable like through a network connection).
  3. Install a network card.  You can attempt setting up MS Lan Manager to mount a samba share as a drive letter, but sometimes I like to just load a packet driver and use mTCP to set up an FTP server and just suck the files off.  A lot less hassle.
  4. Connect external storage.  ebay is just maggoty with Iomega parallel-port ZIP drives, and as long as you’re trying to suck data off of a 286 or higher and can boot DOS 5.0 or higher (even from a floppy disk), they work great.  Each disk holds 100MB which is more than enough for most MFM and RLL drives.  One of these and XCOPY or PKZIP is all you need, and if you don’t have another machine to hook them up to, you can turn around and pull #3 (install network card) and upload the results.
  5. Parallel or Serial cable.  Laplink, FastLynx, and even DOS 6.x’s built-in INTERLNK can all transfer files over cable.  It’s inconvenient and not too swift, but it works.  I prefer FastLynx, which has exactly the same code as INTERLNK but has a nifty interface and can use realtime compression.

For the 6312, I chose the zip-drive-then-ftp-to-my-fileserver route.

Step 3: Wipe the hard drives clean and set it up for appropriate use

Wiping the drives clean is easy — you can just delete all of the data and then run Norton WIPEDISK.  If you’re more paranoid, you get to locate your drive’s low-level format program and have at it, secure in the knowledge that you’re laying down the low-level format at the same time (just make sure you enter in the defect table from the sticker on top of the drive!).

As for “appropriate use”, that is completely in the eye of the beholder.  Because this is an AT&T “WGS” machine (meant for workgroups), I’m going to leave all of the AT&T-specific software on it (there are some terminal emulators on it, etc.) and I’m going to set it up as a business-class PC:  A word processor or two, all of my typical programming tools and environments (Turbo Pascal, Turbo Debugger, Turbo Assembler, and a86/d86), and a network card with both the mTCP suite on it as well as MS LAN Manager.  I’ll configure the machine to boot up and set the time automatically via SNTP, and I’ll also investigate MS lanman so that it can mount my local SAMBA shares.  This will require a more beefy DOS than 3.2, so PC DOS 2000 is probably going to go on there.

Of course I’m going to throw some games on it too :-) Every system needs games.

Posted in Vintage Computing | 9 Comments »

I grow tired of the technologically ignorant

Posted by Trixter on February 29, 2012

(This post is overly subjective, more opinionated than my usual efforts, and contains some cussing.  Consider yourself warned.)

I am sick and tired of people who shun technology and progress under the guise of “I’m an old tech veteran, I’ve been working with technology for 30 years, and the new stuff is crap compared to the old stuff.”  People who defend this viewpoint are idiots.  I’m not talking about audiophiles or other self-delusional “prosumers”; I’m talking about people who have worked a tech trade or had hands-on access to technology for many years and think that their perceptions trump reality.  It’s a perverse combination of technology and anti-intellectualism — a form of hipsterism for the over-40 set.

I was prompted to cover this by a recent post on why widescreen monitors are a rip-off (which I will not link to because I truly enjoy the other 99% of this person’s blog, and linking to it would imply that I don’t like him or his site), but the underlying irritation of the entire mindset has been percolating for many years.  Viewpoints that drive me crazy include:

Widescreen monitors don’t make any sense

People think that widescreen monitors are stupid on laptops because most people use laptops for text work, and since text is more comfortable to read in columns, wide columns are harder to read.  This mindset has had the doubly idiotic result of making people think that websites need to be column-limited.  I just love going to a website and having the text squished into a 640-pixel-wide column with 75% of the screen unused.  Don’t like how narrow columns look on a widescreen monitor?  Use the extra space however you want — put up two web pages side by side, or simply don’t look at the unused space.  It’s people like these that also complain that 4:3 video has black bars on either side of it when viewed on a widescreen TV.  It’s called pillarboxing, you idiot, and it’s there to prevent your movie from looking like a funhouse mirror.

Widescreen monitors have made modern laptops better.  A widescreen laptop monitor allows the keyboard to be wider without the depth of the laptop getting too high (to support the height of a 4:3 monitor).  Having a decent keyboard on a laptop used to be impossible without clever wacky engineering tricks; now it is.  Widescreen monitors made ultra-small netbooks possible, so if you’re reading this on a netbook but somehow still disagree with me, you’re a hypocrite.

Analog audio is better than digital

There are entire websites (and wikipedia pages) dedicated to this, usually under the guise of “vinyl is better than CD”.  Most opinions on this subject were formed when analog audio had several decades of mature mastering and production processes, and digital was brand-new (for example vinyl vs. CD in 1983).  Early efforts to put things on CD resulted in some less-than-stellar A/D conversion, which created a type of distortion that most people weren’t used to hearing.  People formed opinions then that have perservered more than 25 years later, even though the technology has gotten much better and all of the early mastering problems have long since been corrected.

People who think vinyl sounds better than CD have nostalgia blinders on.  They bought an album in their youth, played it endlessly, loved it.  Then they buy the same album on CD decades later and condemn the entire format as inferior because it sounds different.  Want to know why it sounds different?  It has a wider frequency range, lacks rumble, lacks hiss, sounds exactly the same after 10+ playbacks, and was remastered with better technology and mixing conditions under the guidance and approval of the original artist when he wasn’t coked or drunk or stoned out of his mind.  People like Pete Townsend, Neil Young and Geddy Lee not only approve of the latest digital technology but are actively utilizing it and going through great pains to remaster their classic albums with it.  People are missing the point that it is the mastering and digital compression that causes issues, not the technology itself.  Neil Young recently spoke at a conference where he damned digital music, but not because it is digital — rather, because it is delivered differently than the artists intended.  Neil Young would like nothing better than for everyone to be able to listen to his music at 24/192.  Can’t do that on vinyl, bitches.

Even people who write about the loudness war get it wrong, despite that it’s an easy concept to understand.  Massive dynamic compression drowns out subtle details and can add distortion, which is horrible — but it is not exclusive to digital audio, nor caused by it.  One author correctly notes that massive dynamic compression butchers mixes, but then subtlety implies that all CDs that “clip” have distorted audio.  Digital audio “clips” only if you drive the signal beyond its digital limits.  If you took an audio waveform and normalized it such that the highest peak reached exactly the highest value, it is “positioned at maximum volume”, not clipped.  Nothing is lost (to be fair, nothing is gained either).

The problem is the mastering and production process, not the technology.  Which segues nicely into:

“I will never buy Blu-ray”

The only valid argument against Blu-ray is that it is harder to make a backup copy of the content.  It is indeed harder than it is for DVD, or laserdisc, or videotape.  That is it.  All other arguments are beyond moronic.  Even the cheapest possible 1080p HDTV viewing setup has five times the resolution of DVD and lacks signal degradation in the output path.  If you view a Blu-ray and can’t tell the difference between it and DVD, you have either a shitty viewing setup, a shitty Blu-ray, or a shitty visual cortex.

Someone recently tried to argue with me that DVDs have the same or better picture than Blu-ray and used Robocop as an example.  The comparison was weighted, as they were comparing the $9 Blu-ray that MGM belched out when Blu-ray was only a year old to the Criterion DVD treatment.  I own both, so I checked them out and I agree that the DVD has better color tonality throughout the film.  However, the Blu-ray thoroughly stomped the DVD in every single other area, most obviously resolution.  So much picture detail is added by the increase in resolution that I actually prefer it despite the lack of Criterion oversight.

The real problem, as previously stated, is how the mastering and preproduction process was handled.  Even with new 2012 DVD releases, you can still see the “loudness war” video equivalent of digital ringing, which used to be an accident but was later introduced on purpose as part of a misguided “sharpening” step.  Listen up:  Any sharpening filter added to any signal doesn’t make things sharper; it makes them appear sharper by overlaying a high-frequency permutation signal over the original content, which increases the acutance.  Quality is actually lost when you do this, as the high-frequency info obscures actual picture detail.

This is another example of perception vs. reality, which not coincidentally also segues into:

“Computing was better in the old days”

I love retrocomputing as a hobby.  I think about it nearly every day; this blog was partially created to talk about vintage computing.  But even I wouldn’t say that things were better in the old days.  People who say this don’t realize they are really trying to say something else.  For example, people who say that “BBSes were better than web forums are today” are actually referring to the sociological fact that, when you communicated with people on a BBS, you were communicating with people who met a minimum level of technical competence — because, if they hadn’t, they would have been too stupid to access a BBS, let alone be proficient with a computer.  The overall technological quality level of everyone you met on a BBS in the 1980s was higher than other places, like a laundromat or a bar.  What such people fail to consider is that modern web boards, while having a higher quotient of trolls and B1FFs, are open to the entire world.  The massive scale of humanity you can encounter on even a tiny niche topic is levels of magnitude higher than it used to be.  The sheer scale of information and interaction you can now achieve is staggering, and completely outweighs any minor niggle that you have to deal with 3 or 4 more asshats per day now.

Here’s another example:  “Computer games were better back in the old days.”  This is wrong.  The proper thing to say is that “Some computer game genres were better back in the old days.”  I can get behind that.  For example, graphics were so terrible (or non-existent!) at the birth of computer gaming that entire industries sprang up focusing on narrative.  For such genres (mainly adventure games), several times more effort was put into the story than other genres.  As technology and audiences changed over time, such genres morphed and combined until they no longer resembled their origins.  That doesn’t mean modern games are terrible; it just means that you need to shop around to get what you’re looking for your entertainment.  Don’t play Uncharted 2 expecting a fantastic story with engaging narrative.  (Dialog, maybe, not not narrative.)  Heck, some genres are genuinely awesome today compared to 30 years ago.  For example, Portal and Portal 2 are technically puzzle games, but the storytelling in them — despite never interacting directly with a human — is among the very best I’ve ever encountered.

About the only argument that does work involves the complexity of older computers — they were simpler, and you could study them intensely until you could very nearly understand every single circuit of the board, nuance of the video hardware, and opcode of the CPU.  Today, a complete understanding of a computer is no longer possible, which probably explains why Arduino sets and Raspberry Pi are getting so much attention.

Conclusion

I have no conclusion.  Stop being an old-fogey anti-intellectual technophobe, you ignorant hipster fuck.

Posted in Digital Video, Entertainment, Sociology, Technology, Vintage Computing | 10 Comments »

Collections

Posted by Trixter on January 18, 2012

Now that MindCandy is out the door, I’ve had time to return to some of my more favorite pastimes, like retrocomputing.  Perodically the topic of conversation in a retrocomputing forum turns inward as people ask: Why do we collect old computers?  Why dedicate space, power, and time to restoring and using slow, impractical machines when better ones exist?  I think the question can be expanded to all collectors:  Why does anyone collect anything?  Why go through the trouble of gathering up material items?  Why do we assign personal value to inanimate objects, or derive comfort from them?

I think I can sum it up in three words:  Fear of death.

Everybody needs a coping mechanism for dealing with the inevitability of death.  Social interaction, religion, family, blind ignorance, sex, drugs, and various causes (environmental, human rights) are the most common, but there are people for whom none of those apply.  I believe these people turn to anything that gives them comfort, or used to give them comfort.  Ventriloquists collect ventriloquist dummies, maybe because they remind the owner of receiving adoration on stage.  Housewives collect porcelain dolls to glorify their memories of youth.  Christopher Dennis had an extensive collection of Superman memorabilia because the image of Superman is what kept him alive for a few more years.  But you don’t have to be down on your luck or unhappy to have a collection; just look at Jay Leno or Steve Martin.

For those who grew up using early computers to better themselves or others, it’s not inconceivable that such objects would give them comfort.  I am one of those people, so I have a collection of computers.  It is modest by most hard-core retrocomputist standards; I have around 30, and many are duplicates for parts.  But I definitely spend otherwise productive time hauling them out, getting them working, running old favorites (or new discoveries) on them, and writing software for them.  It reminds me of a time when I was the technological wunderkid, and had control over my environment — you tell a computer to do something, and it actually does it.  When I “retrocompute”, I have something pleasant to occupy my thoughts, and I gain a sense of accomplishment and completion.

Some collectors in my hobby look at their crawlspace, storage space, shed, or warehouse and wonder how their collection got so big and how they’ll ever get rid of it.  I think the answer is to recognize your collection for what it is:  A coping mechanism.  It should not have any more value beyond that.  Your collection is not a replacement for people.  Your collection is not more important than your job, your marriage, or your kids.  Once you realize that, you can start letting it go.  Maybe only one piece at a time… maybe never all of it completely.  But you can let go.

Posted in Lifehacks, Sociology | 4 Comments »

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