Category Archives: Apple II

Apple II, Commodore 64

Old Computers, New Monitor

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Over the years I have set up and broken down my old gaming systems and computers many, many times. Sometimes — often times, actually — it seems like I spend more time connecting and configuring and reconnecting and reconfiguring them than I do actually playing games on them. When it comes to old hardware I have a softer spot in my heart for old computers than old console gaming systems, but the biggest problem with them is that they take up so much space. At one time in our old house I had over 20 video game consoles sitting on a relatively small set of shelves all hooked up to one single television. In that same room I had my three favorite old computers (a C64, an Amiga, and an Apple II) hooked up to three separate monitors tying up an entire 8′ table.

The other day I decided, why can’t I do that with my computers as well? Almost every flat screen television on the market now has multiple connections that would support these old computers. Last night while shopping at Sam’s Club I decided to pull the trigger and do something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while now.

For just under $350 I purchased a Sanyo 40″ flatscreen LCD television. They had bigger and smaller models with more and fewer features (actually there were few there with fewer features than this one), but it had all the right inputs for the job and the price was right.

As I said last night on Facebook, “the milk crate is temporary.” The television’s stand isn’t tall enough by itself so I needed to lift it up a bit. I’ll replace the milk crate this weekend with something else, but in the meantime it’ll do. My old trusty Commodore 64 plugged right into the television’s composite input and looks great. I did have to figure out how to set the default picture size on the television to 4:3 instead of 16:9 letterbox to keep the picture from being stretched out.

With the C64 up and running, the Amiga was next. The Amiga looks particularly crappy when connected via the composite cable. I found a couple of “VGA Flicker Fixers” in the ~$100 range that I will research and look into purchasing. So it’s not a great picture at the moment, but it’s working.

With the two Commodore products out of the way it was time to hook up the old Apple II. In a recent episode of You Don’t Know Flack I talked about the CFFA 3000, a compact flash/USB card reader for the Apple II. After reconnecting the composite cable from the Apple into the television and selecting a disk image, I was immediately greeted by the familiar sounds of Karateka. I don’t mind saying, the project took a back seat for a few minutes as I kicked and punched my way through a few enemy combatants.

That’s what they all look like now, sans any real cable management and with a milk crate in the picture. This weekend I’ll re-run all the cords and replace the milk crate with a proper stand.

Apple II, Console Video Games, Podcast

YDKF Episode 123: The CFFA 3000

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Leaping from moderately mainstream to moderately obscure, Episode 123 of You Don’t Know Flack is dedicated to the CFFA 3000, a relatively new card that plugs into vintage Apple II computers and allows retro hobbyists to load virtual disk images and convert physical disks to virtual disk images (and back). I also coin the word “floppycentric” in this episode.

Link: YDKF Episode 123: The CFFA 3000
Facebook: You Don’t Know Flack

What on Earth would anyone use an Apple II for?

Apple II, Main

CFFA3000: Initial Thoughts

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The CFFA3000 is a new card for vintage Apple II computers that allows users to load Apple II .DSK files directly from Compact Flash or USB storage. It also allows for the dumping of physical Apple II media to .DSK files. In spirit, it is the Apple II version of the 1541 Ultimate for the Commodore 64.

I got mine earlier this week. Here are my initial thoughts, with much more testing, playing and writing to come over the next few weeks.

Here is the card installed in one of my Apple IIe computers. Between the garage and my computer room I had 5 Apple IIe computers lying around, waiting for a rainy day project such as this to come along. Out of the five, the first two had hardware issues and the third didn’t recognize the card. This was the 4th machine I tried.

If you look closely at the above picture you will see that the compact flash port faces “up,” and the USB port faces “forward.” That means neither one is accessible when the Apple II’s case is closed. The manual says that you can use a USB extension cord with the card. When I tried it, the card would no longer read my USB stick. I’ll try another USB extension cord soon.

I dug out an old joystick for testing as well. When I find good deals at thrift stores, sometimes I leave the prices on to remind me of what I paid for an item. As you can see here, I paid fifty more cents for this joystick than I did for the Apple II.

Once you boot up and get into the menu system you can mount .DSK files (disk images) into virtual floppy drives.

Below you can see I have mounted images of Karateka and Lode Runner into the first floppy drive.

After mounting the disk, simply return to the main menu, select “Boot,” and 5 seconds later you’ll see this:

Access is lightning fast — no more waiting around for floppies to load. Or die.

The biggest issue at the moment is my case now looks like this:

Until I can either get an extension cable to work with my USB stick or get every game I ever want to play loaded up on the USB stick, I’ll be leaving the cover off for the time being.

I’ve got a lot more research, playing around and tweaking to do before I can write an in depth review of this card. Unfortunately, I suddenly find myself sidetracked by Lode Runner …

Apple II, Main

A Bushel of Apple (Computers)

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While killing time during the two-hour drive to Tulsa for the Oklahoma Video Game Expo (OVGE) last weekend, I reminisced to the passengers in my car (Jeff and Robb) about the time I “accidentally” bought 300 computer keyboards. I just searched robohara.com and can’t find a post dedicated to that story, so later this week I’ll correct that omission. The gist of the story is, while not paying attention at an auction one time, I bought 300 (mostly useless and broken) computer keyboards for $10.50. As I often say, I told you that story to tell you this one.

One of the treasures I was in search of at OVGE was an Apple IIgs. The IIgs was Apple’s first true 16-bit machine. The “gs” stood for “graphics” and “sound”. It’s a neat computer, one I’ve spent almost zero time with. Although the IIgs had decent graphics and exceptional sound capabilities, the reason I want one is because it has the ability to create physical Apple II floppies from virtual disk images. I already have the ability to do this for the Commodore 64, and I’d like to be able to do it with Apple disks as well. Thus, the hunt was on.

The three of us arrived at the show around 8:15am. With the doors set to open at 9am that didn’t leave us a lot of time for pre-show shopping, but I did make one quick lap around the floor before we started unpacking and setting up our display. A couple of tables down from ours, I spotted an Apple IIgs for sale — not one, but two! The machines weren’t marked with a price yet, but I quickly tracked down the table owner (Ed) and said, “I want the IIgs.” Ed said he would mark them as sold, and he did.

An hour into the show, Jeff (I think) says to me, “Nice pile of computers you bought down there.” I corrected him by telling him that I had just bought one computer. He re-corrected me and said, “I don’t think so.” The two of us walked back down to where the computer had been and, turns out, Jeff was right. On the table (and next to the table, and behind the table) was a giant pile of Apple computers (at least 10) with a printed sign that said, “$100 for all”. Underneath that, the words “SOLD” and “ROB O’HARA” were written in black pen.

I have known Ed for many years and I’m sure had I said, “I really just wanted the IIgs,” he would have worked with me. However, I am who I am, and the thought of dragging home a bunch of old computers to play with sounded like fun to me.

At 2pm on June 18, 2011, it was 103 degrees in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While hundreds of people were inside the Spirit Bank Event Center enjoying the loud, retro sounds of the OneUps, Jeff and I were using a small, flat dolly to wheel load after load of Apple computers out into my truck, much to the chagrin of many of the other attendees. One referred to my purchase as a “bushel of rotten Apples.” Another offered a friendly-suggestion: “Dump them in the trash dumpster now and save yourself the trouble.”

When I got home to Oklahoma and began unloading my own personal items from the show, I found a cockroach. I really, really hate cockroaches. HATE. THEM. In the 9 years we’ve lived in our home, I’ve never seen a cockroach. Immediately, I start playing through scenarios, trying to figure out where this disgusting little critter came from. My stuff was transported to and from the show in a water-tight storage tub with the lid sealed. Did it come from the attic when I was moving things around? Did it come from the hotel? Did it come from … and then it hit me. My stuff had been in the back of the truck with all those Apple computers.

Well, crap.

The back of my truck, by the way, looked like this:

Which is kind of deceiving, really, because each time I unloaded a row of Apple hardware, another one appeared.

I spent most of last night unloading, disassembling, searching, reassembling, and testing the computers. I am glad to say that I didn’t find a single roach in any of the computers. In fact, it appeared that all the computers had been recently cleaned inside and out, as there wasn’t even any dust inside them.

The good news is, most of the machines I tested worked:

The bad news is, I couldn’t get a video signal from either of the IIgs machines. I suspect they are not compatible with the monitor I received. The hunt continues!

I did get a working III LC out of the lot, which, with the addition of an Apple IIe card, can also apparently read/write Apple II disks. If the IIgs project falls through, I’ll go that route.

After all my testing (and roach searching) was complete, I began loading up garage shelves with old Mac computers. Most of these will go to Craigslist, or more likely, the dump. I simply don’t have a use for most of them, but hopefully I can find good homes for them. There’s a Mac IIfx in the pile. According to Wikipedia, with this configuration, this machine originally sold for $12,000. Today, I would gladly accept $10.

Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Interactive Fiction

Oklahoma Video Game Expo 2011: GET TEXT

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I can think of three reasons why anybody would rent table space at a video game convention. The first is, you own a video game store. Those guys are there to sell games and promote their stores. The second reason is, you’re a video game collector looking to (a) sell video games (often duplicate titles from your own collection) and (b) trade video games with other vendors. And then there are people like me — people who rent table space for the sole purpose of showing off things.

At OVGE 2004 I displayed my collection of vintage console copiers (old devices used to dump cartridge ROM data to floppy disks). It was my first year as an exhibitor at OVGE, and I went all out by decorating my table with a “pirate” theme. (To this day, people at the show still refer to me as “the guy that did the pirate table”.) In 2005, I put together a Star Wars-themed table. Both years I had multiple people ask, “Yeah, but what are you selling?”


OVGE 2004: The Pirate Theme.


OVGE 2005: The Star Wars Theme.

For the 2011 show, with the public’s interest in text adventures possibly the highest it’s been in the past 20 years, I put together a display I referred to as GET TEXT. Get Text consisted of three parts: half a dozen computers running text adventures, a bunch of text adventure-related memorabilia … and Robb Sherwin (of Caltrops.com fame) who generously flew out to Oklahoma on his own dime specifically to attend OVGE 2011 and promote his new game, Cryptozookeeper.

Sherwin arrived in Oklahoma City late Friday evening. That night we ate cheap tacos and stayed up way too late talking about video games. We went to bed around 1am, and woke up a little after 5am to load up the truck and drive to OVGE in Tulsa, picking up my buddy Jeff before hitting the turnpike.

(For the record, I cannot state strongly enough how important Jeff is to the show. Jeff is the rock that allows me to roam around, talk to people, take pictures, and let my Attention Deficit Order run wild. He calms me down before the show, helps me focus, helps me set up my displays, and If I’m gone from the table too long, he puts on my name tag and signs books for people until I get back. Without Jeff, my table would consistently suck. I thank him every year for all he does, but really, if you’ve ever enjoyed any of my displays over the past five years, you should thank him too.)

Enough with the gushing; on with the display.

Not seen in this picture is my Commodore 64 system. Starting next to it, I had an Apple IIc, a DOS machine, an Amiga 600, a TRS-80 Model 4P (portable/luggable), an iPad, and a Windows 7 machine.

(Nerdy details: the Commodore alternated between running two Scott Adams games, Adventureland and The Hulk. The Apple II was running Oo-topos and
Indiana Jones in Revenge of The Ancients. The DOS machine (an Acer netbook running DOSBox; yes, I cheated) ran a couple of different text adventures, including my own game, Hangar 22. The Amiga 600 was running The Pawn and Guild of Thieves, both by Magnetic Scrolls. The TRS-80 4P ran Zork on its green screen all day long. On the iPad I had installed Frotz and was running Hangar 22. The last machine was a Windows 7 laptop, running Robb Sherwin’s Cryptozookeeper.)

When I was coming up with the theme for my table, I expected a few of the attending adults to say, “I remember those!” and for everybody else (specifically everyone under the age of 30) to point and laugh and guffaw at such old and outdated technology.

Instead, what I saw, was this:

… and this …

… and this …

Consistently throughout the day, someone was on at least one or more of the machines. Often times, the people playing the games were young children. Although I failed to capture it on film, at one point in time there were people on all six computers. Seriously, how cool is that? Surely my table was the only place in the world that day where six strangers stood side by side, pecking away at text adventures on vintage hardware.

The two machines that seemed to get the most use throughout the day were the Commodore 64, and surprisingly, the TRS-80. I think the TRS-80’s allure was its green screen and decidedly retro styling. The Commodore 64 is always a hit, and both of the games I ran on it had color graphics as well, which may have drawn people to it. The least popular platform (surprisingly) was the iPad. I’m not sure if people weren’t comfortable in picking it up, but I don’t think anybody did. Maybe they were just being polite.

Robb Sherwin and I spent much of the day talking to visitors about text adventures: about Robb’s game, about my game, and often just about old games in general. Some of the older visitors’ eyes would light up as them remembered old games they used to play. One guy mentioned the classic Broderbund title The Ancient Art of War, which we all discussed. Man, I used to play that game all the time my Dad’s IBM PC Jr. I was so terrible at that game that I’m sure Sun Tzu rolled over in his grave every time I booted it up, but boy was it fun.

Prior to the show, I advertised that I would have (a) free CDs full of text adventures to give away, or that (b) if you brought by a USB stick, I would fill it with text adventures. Due to woefully poor planning on my part, I ran out of CDs an hour into the show. I did have approximately a dozen people take me up on my USB offer, which we awesome. I also promised a couple of people that I would put the cache of text games online for download — I’ll do that tonight.

For most of the day, people of varying ages, gathered around machines, playing text adventures. If that doesn’t sound like a good time, I don’t know what does.

Thanks to Robb Sherwin for coming out and sharing his game Cryptozooker with the crowd, Jeff Martin for all the help and assistance, and Brian Green from AmigaCD32.com for loaning me his TRS-80, Amiga 600, and various software packages for the show. Without help from these three fellows, “Get Text” would have been “Get Poop”. Thanks again, guys.

For more pictures from the show, check out my 2011 OVGE Photo Album.

EDIT: Robb Sherwin wrote his own thoughts about the show over at Caltrops.

Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Interactive Fiction

Oklahoma Video Game Expo: June 18, 2011

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The 8th (!) annual Oklahoma Video Game Expo (OVGE) will take place this Saturday at the Spirit Bank Event Center in Tulsa, OK.

Out of the seven OVGE shows (there was no show in 2007) I’ve had a table at five of them, each year with a different theme. So far I’ve done Console Copiers (2004), Star Wars games (2005), Commodork (2006), Invading Spaces (2008), and “Stuff For Sale!” (2009). This year I’ll be doing GET TEXT, a tribute to text adventures.

GET TEXT will consist of several retro computers (Commodore 64, Apple II, Amiga 1200, DOS) running classic text adventures. I’ll also have a couple of modern computers running text adventures, including the iPad!

There will be two brand new text adventures available at my table. The first is the official debut of my brand new game, HANGAR 22. The second is CRYPTOZOOKEEPER, the new graphical text adventure from Robb Sherwin. Robb will be sharing my table with me, signing autographs. Robb was featured in a documentary about text adventures. Of course I’ll have copies of my books Commodork and Invading Spaces on hand. There may be some other things for sale at the table as well. I don’t know. The show’s still four days away, gimmie a break. I’ll decide by Friday night.

I’m going to be compiling and burning a limited number of CDs to give away at the show that will contain lots of free text adventures, including HANGAR 22 and CRYPTOZOOKEEPER. If I run out of CDs, anyone stopping by with a USB memory stick can also get a copy.

If you’re on the fence about attending, check out these photo albums of previous OVGE shows. The show is always great fun, with lots of old and new games to play and buy. The OneUps will be playing a free show at 3pm. They were great last year and I look forward to seeing them again this year!

Link: OVGE.com.

Apple II, Commodore 64, Computers/Tech/Games, IBM PC

ZoomFloppy (First Impressions)

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Today I will be giving my first impressions of the ZoomFloppy, a new PCB that allows people to connect old Commodore floppy disk drives to modern PCs via USB.

(I’ll pause a minute while most of you leave the room. You are excused. See you tomorrow.)

I have, on several occasions, talked about the process (and difficulties) of converting physical Commodore 1541 diskettes into D64 disk images, the format used by most Commodore 64 emulators (including WinVice). Most recently, I talked about it here, here, and here. To save you an hour of back-digging, here’s the gist of those posts: I’ve found two reliable methods to convert real disks into D64 images (and back). One involves using a 486 running DOS and a special cable (x1541). The other involves using a 1541 Ultimate, a device that attaches to a Commodore 64. While both solutions work great, neither is without its drawbacks. The 1541 Ultimate runs around $200 US (with tax and shipping) and requires a working C64 computer to run. X1541 cables work best with older parallel ports on 486 computers running DOS, which brings its own unique logistics.

There’s also the FC5025, a USB controller for 5.25 floppy drives. The FC5025 is $60 (shipped), plus you’ll need to supply your own 5 1/4 floppy drive. The FC5025 is good at what it does, but it doesn’t do what I need it to do. It archives PC/DOC-based disks perfectly, but can only read the front side of Commodore 64 and Apple II disks. The FC5025 is also a read-only solution. I own one and use it for archiving old DOS disks, but for archiving Commodore 64 disk collections (almost all of which contain disks with information on the flip side), it’s not a good solution.

This brings us to the ZoomFloppy.

The ZoomFloppy was developed by Nate Lawson and is being manufactured by Jim Brain. It currently sells for $35 US, which makes it the most inexpensive solution to date. It’s USB, so “installing” it is a matter of connecting the card to your computer using a standard mini-USB cable and supplying the drivers.

The ZoomFloppy’s packaging is sparse. The card shipped in an anti-static bag. Inside the box there was also some tissue paper, and a folded-up piece of paper with the GNU General Public License printed on it. Something noticeably missing was a piece of paper with some instructions. A sticker on the anti-static bag pointed me to http://www.go4retro.com/products/zoomfloppy. After searching that page longer than I’d like to admit, I found the link to Nate’s page, which contains links to the installation manual and drivers. The driver installation on my 64-bit Windows 7 machine did not work like the documentation suggested it would, but after manually installing the driver, Windows 7 saw the card. It wasn’t a particularly difficult installation, but the whole process reminded me that the ZoomFloppy is currently, and probably always will be, intended for computer-literate hobbyists.


The 1541. She lives.

ZoomFloppy supports transferring data to and from 1541 disk drives using either serial or parallel cables. Serial cables are the ones most Commodore owners are familiar with. On its side, the ZoomFloppy has a female serial connection identical to the one found on the back of a 1541 drive. A standard C64 serial cable is used to connect a 1541 to the ZoomFloppy. That configuration supports both converting real C64 diskettes to D64 images, and writing D64 disk images out to real floppies. I suspect this is what most people will use the ZoomFloppy for. The ZoomFloppy also supports parallel connections. This requires, at a minimum, modifying your 1541 by adding a parallel port to it. I purchased my parallel port kit from the highly recommended Peter Scheper. (I haven’t installed it yet, but when I do, expect another post on the topic.) Using the advanced parallel connection allows the ZoomFloppy to also read and write nibbled G64 disk images. It’s not a feature most people need or will even want, but if you’re interesting in backing up (or studying) copy protected diskettes, it is well worth the effort.

The ZoomFloppy is designed to work with the OpenCBM tools which are command line tools available for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh machines. For those who prefer GUI interfaces, there are also free front ends available. I downloaded CBMXfer, just to give it a whirl.

Within fifteen minutes, I had discovered the ZoomFloppy in my mailbox, opened the box, installed the drivers, found online documentation, got the card installed, fetched a working 1541 drive from my garage, retrieved a random C64 floppy from the archives, transferred a real disk to a D64 disk image, and launched the image in WinVice.

Click to Enlarge

The only real issue I’ve encountered so far is that one of the D64 images I copied was corrupt. I couldn’t find an option for retries or error checking on CBMXfer, but I see it as an available option via the command line. I’ll do some more experimenting with that tonight. It “seems” like I got better results by turning “warp mode” off, which increases the copy time from just under a minute to just over one.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but once I get a parallel port installed on my 1541, it looks like I’ll be transferring my old C64 collection over one more time. It’s a Herculean task, but doing it and doing it right is important to me.

Apple II, Commodore 64, Computers/Tech/Games, IBM PC, Main

FC5025: The Review, Part I

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I am, as the kids like to say, “old school”. I like old technology, I like old video games, I like old arcade games, and I particularly like old computers. When I say “old computers”, I am mostly referring to 8-bit machines from the 1980s: the Commodore 64, the Apple II, the TRS-80, and so on.

In the spirit of Jeopardy, if the preceding paragraph was the answer, the question would be, “What kind of person would be interested in purchasing (or would even have a use for) an FC5025?”

The FC5025 is a custom USB drive controller for 5 1/4″ floppy drives. That, in a nutshell, should tell you right away if the FC5025 is something you need in your life. Some of you are excited. Some of you are scratching your heads. The rest of you probably just quit reading, which is my sign to crank the “geek dial” up to 11. Brace yourselves.

For my generation, the 5 1/4″ floppy represented computers. Back before we had 3 1/2″ disks — hell, back before we had hard drives — we just had floppies. Our family didn’t own a hard drive for our PC until the late 1980s. For almost a decade, my house was Floppy City.

As I’ve stated multiple times on my blog, I still own a lot of floppy disks from that era. And even though I still own a lot of those diskettes, what has disappeared are the disk drives needed to read them. It’s getting tougher these days to find a machine with an internal 3 1/2″ floppy drive, much less a 5 1/4″. Multiple manufactures have created external USB 3 1/2″ drive solutions, but unfortunately none of those are compatible with 5 1/4″ drives.

That’s where the FC5025 comes in. The board itself is tiny, and despite the fact that it’s USB, it’s designed to be mounted inside your PC. Why they built it that way, I’m not sure. Everybody I know who owns one of these boards (okay, all 3 of us) immediately mounted them in external drive caddies. Installed as intended, a person would mount a 5 1/4″ drive internally inside their PC, connect a power cable from their PC’s power supply to the back of the floppy drive, and connect the FC5025’s USB port to an internal USB port inside your computer (to power the card). An external solution requires mounting a 5 1/4″ floppy inside some sort of external drive caddy for power and running a USB cable from the caddy to an external USB port on your computer. The latter solution makes much more sense to me, personally.

To break up all this text, here is a picture of the card itself. I put Luke in the picture for scale but then I decided people might not know how tall Luke is so I put a quarter in there too.

The FC5025 costs $55.25, which does not include a floppy drive. I thought for sure I had saved one or two old 5 1/4″ floppy drives out in the garage, but I had not. An acquaintance of mine (“Aardvark”) kindly mailed me an old floppy drive — and when I couldn’t get that one to work, he mailed me another one. Not only does the guy have access to 5 1/4″ drives — he has 5 1/4″ drives to spare. Aardvark is cooler than you. In between those two arriving, I began searching thrift stores for a working drive. I bought this beast for $5, and although the computer itself worked, the drive was still giving me fits.

The software that comes with the FC5025 claims to be able to back up Apple, Atari, Commodore, MS-DOS, North Star, and TI-99/4A diskettes. This is the unit’s main (really only) selling point. The only reason someone would want to own an FC5025 is if they intended on backing up/archiving old floppy disks (the unit is read only and does not support writing disks of any kind). And yet, despite my efforts and no matter how many different floppy drives I tried, I could not get the unit to read the back side of any of my old floppy disks.

To give you an idea of how many different floppy drives I tried, the top of my computer looks like this right now:

Yeah. So after a bit of investigating (ie: reading the directions), I learned that the FC5025 is basically currently incapable of reading the back side of old diskettes. Old disks that you “flipped” over are referred to as “flippy” disks, and due to a difference in manufacturing techniques, PC floppy drives cannot read the back side of old flippy disks. Apparently they can be modified to do so (see here and here), but it ain’t easy.

In my defense, this is what the website says:

“The FC5025 may be unable to read the second side of “flippy” disks, depending on the drive it is attached to.”

(I saw the word “may”. I thought I had a chance.)

“Many drives won’t read from the disk unless they can see the index hole. If you have one of these drives, the FC5025 will be able to read from the first side of the disk only. When you flip the disk over to read the other side, the drive will not send any data to the FC5025, and the FC5025 will not be able to read that side.”

(Again, I saw “many drives won’t”. That made it sound like “some will”.)

“The FC5025 … has been tested to work well with the TEAC FD-55GFR drive and should also work with most other 5.25″ drives.”

I guess I read between the lines a bit too much. Based on the above information, I assumed that TEAC FD-55GFR drives would, in fact, read the second side of a “flippy disk”. I can tell you that, unmodified, they will not. The top two drives on my pile are TEAC FD-55GFR drives.

The reason I am putting so much emphasis on this one particular “flaw” is that, besides that, the FC5025 is incredible. With my computer case open and cables strung out across my desk, it took me about a minute to connect the card, a drive, and install the included drivers and software. The included transfer program gets right to the point. Pick a disk format, a location and a file name, and you’re on your way. The FC5025 is faster than you would imagine; disks transfer in well under 30 seconds. There are PC, Mac, and Linux versions of the software included.

Although every Commodore 64 diskette I transferred using the FC5025 reported multiple read errors, every one of them worked. Perhaps the read errors were on parts of the disk that didn’t contain data, I’m not sure. Bottom line though, in under 30 seconds I was able to transfer a 25-year-old Commodore floppy disk to a .D64 disk image, double-click the file, and play an old game in using WinVice on my modern PC. That’s pretty impressive. I had similar luck with the Apple II floppies I tried.

And yet, I can’t help but feel a little bummed. For how great this device performed, for most real world collectors, it’s essentially worthless. I don’t know a single old school computer guy who didn’t save files and programs onto the back of any diskette he could get his hands on. Yes, the FC5025 works great — for the half of my collection that sits on the front side of flippy disks. I suppose if one wanted to archive IBM PC diskettes, the FC5025 would work grand. For anyone wanting to archive old C64, Apple, or Atari diskette collections, unless you’re willing and able to heavily modify an old floppy drive, you’ll be disappointed.

The reason I named this article “Part I” is because I am hoping someday there will be a Part II. I will write Part II when I have either modified a floppy drive to read flippy disks, or some update to the software/firmware allows me to do it on a stock drive. Until then, the FC5025 (in its custom-but-unfinished Commodore 1541 case) will probably go up on a shelf, sitting alongside all the other gadgets I’ve bought that were “almost” perfect.

Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Main

Monitor Memories

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In honor of yesterday’s departure of a few monitors, here are a few other monitor memories.

The first color computer monitor my family ever owned was an Amdek, which was actually the third computer monitor we ever owned. Our first was the TRS-80 Model III’s internal black and white monitor; our second was an amber-tinted one for our Apple clone. Amdek monitors last forever and come with a built-in handle which makes toting them around a breeze. When my Dad graduated from the Apple II to the PC XT, I inherited the Amdek monitor and used it with my Commodore 64 from 1985 to today. Yes — I still have the monitor, and it still works great. Here is a picture of the monitor from 1985 in use at my parents’ computer store, Yukon Software. It’s the one on the right, running the Apple II version of Little Computer People.

The first monitor I paid for with my own money was a Link brand VGA monitor, back in 1993. It was a 14″ monitor and I believe I paid around $199 for it.

When I set my BBS up, I needed a second monitor and so I went to a computer swap meet and picked up a cheap, used monitor for $50. When I got the monitor home I discovered that the blue and green guns were broken and the only color that worked was red. Since the monitor looked like hell I eventually painted flames on it. I later found out that the problem was not in the monitor but with the cord; after replacing it, it works fine. I bought this monitor in 1994 and it is sitting out on a shelf in my garage right now.

Back in the day, KVM systems (devices that let you share Keyboards, Video (monitors) and Mice between multiple machines) were super expensive, some of them costing more than $1,000! If you had the space, it was much more affordable to buy multiple keyboards and mice than it was to buy a KVM. By the time I shut down my BBS, I had five machines set up in my computer room, each with their own keyboards, mice and monitors. It was a mess, and while I didn’t run all of them all of the time, when I did have them all turned on my computer room shot up a good ten degrees.

Things have come a long way over the years. My current monitor is a 28″ flat screen that both cost less and weighs less than the 13″ Amdek monitor I have connected to my Commodore 64 upstairs.

Apple II, Commodore 64, Main

Aztec (Apple II/Commodore)

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I’ve been playing a lot of old Commodore games while doing “research” for my upcoming book of game reviews (it’s a good day when you can call playing old video games “research”), and recently I ran across Aztec, a game I haven’t played in twenty years or more.

Obviously influenced by Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aztec is a platform game in which the goal is to explore a tomb, find a jade idol, and make it back to the surface alive. Along the way you will encounter traps, animals and Aztec Warriors.

Aztec was released before joysticks were common on home computers, so the game must be controlled with a keyboard. For those of you thinking “big deal”, here are the game’s controls, taken from an old help file:

W: Walk in the direction you are facing.
R: Run in the direction you are facing.
J: Jump in the direction you are facing (must be walking or running).
C: Climb stairs.
S: Stop/Stand Still (if walking).
S: Stand up (if crouching).
S: Spin Around (if fighting).
A: Move Left.
D: Move Right.
O: Open Chest / Search Piles of Trash.
L: Look in Chest.
G: Crouch Down.
G: Crawl in a direction.
T: Get Items from a Chest.
Z: Inventory.
P: Place Dynamite.
F: Fight Mode.
G: Draw Gun (in Fight Mode).
M: Point Gun/Machette Down.
Space Bar: Shoot Gun
L: Lunge with Machette/Shoot Gun
ESC: Help Screen
R: Return to Play.
S: Save Game.
Q: Quit.

Are you kidding me? Aztec is not a slow-moving strategy game or a text adventure — snakes and other creatures set out to kill you immediately in real time. If a snake is coming toward you, you’ll need to hit “A” or “D” (to face the snake), “W” or “R” to walk or run toward the snake, “J” to jump over the snake, and finally “S” to stop to avoid falling through one of the many holes in the floor. While there were lots of computer games a person could play without ever having read the documentation, Aztec was not one of them. In fact, I recall at one point writing down all the commands in marker on the disk’s sleeve so that I could refer to them during game play.

(Also, note that some keys, like “S”, are used for multiple things depending on what’s happening or what your character is doing at that particular moment. I guess that was to keep from using all 26 letters of the alphabet …)

To find the Jade idol you’ll need to go deep down into the Aztec tomb, and to do that you’re supposed to wander around and found stairs leading down. You probably won’t have to go through all that however because of the game’s multiple glitches. For example, if you jump from one screen to the next with your machete drawn, you’ll inexplicably fall through the floor. You would think someone would have caught that before the game went to production, but apparently not.

The funniest thing about Aztec is that, for as wonky as this game seems today, I remember playing it a lot — not so much on the C64, but I definitely logged some hours on this game on the Apple II. Regardless of the game’s complex control system and obvious programming bugs, I played the crap out of this game. While joysticks weren’t commonplace in the early days of Apple computers, Commodore’s DB9 ports (which allowed it to use the extremely common Atari 2600 joysticks) ensured that almost every game released was joystick compatible. By the time I got my C64 in 1985, Aztec’s control scheme already seemed clunky and outdated. While Aztec may have been too complex to be completely joystick driven, it would have been much simpler to play if all of your character’s movements (walking/running/crawling/turning/jumping/etc) were done with the joystick instead of mapping each one to a different key on the keyboard.

Aztec is a great example of nostalgia affecting my memories. While I can remember playing Aztec as a kid for hours at a time trying to find that jade idol and return it to the surface, the game’s complex and nonuniform control scheme made it impossible for me to play for more than a few minutes the other night. While the game may have been fun back in the day, this is definitely a case of rose-tinted glasses affecting my vision. I’m sure I couldn’t pay Mason to play this game for ten minutes.