Category Archives: IBM PC

IBM PC, Main

Happy 30th Birthday, IBM PC!

On August 12th, 1981, IBM entered the world of personal computers with its 5150 personal computer. It wasn’t the first home computer to go on sale (by 1981 we already owned a TRS-80 Model III and Apple II computers were beginning to show up in schools) but the name “IBM” lent a certain amount of prestige and credibility to a market that hasn’t been the same ever since.

Prior to IBM’s arrival in the home computer market, home computers were mostly viewed as expensive toys for tech-minded hobbyists. But with an IBM brand computer, consumers were given the opportunity to use the same brand of computer both at work and at home. I’m pretty sure I remember advertisements that said just that.

As I’ve previously mentioned in the early 1980s we owned both a PC Jr. and an IBM XT clone, neither of which originally came with a hard drive. I remember the days of monochrome monitors and four-color graphics and all sorts of horrible graphic modes and audio beeps and boops. Our Apple II had better graphics than our PC, and my Commodore 64 had better graphics than our Apple. It was a long, long time before the multimedia qualities of our PCs caught up with the other machines we owned.

Definitely by the time I reached mid-high in the mid-1980s I was using computers for more than just entertainment. By 6th grade, I was typing whatever school work I could get away with typing into the computer, something I much prefer to “writing” things out in long-hand. I have read that Google is changing the way our brains think and remember, and I believe that. I think owning a computer early on definitely changed the way I wrote and I organized my thoughts and words. I can type almost as quickly as I can think, and edit at the same time. Writing things out is frustrating because I cannot easily reorder my thoughts, or highlight large sections of text and delete them, or easily spell check my words. It’s much more difficult for me to write without having those tools as my fingertips.

In 30 years we’ve seen computers go from being big bloated machines that sat on top of (or sometimes under) our desks to becoming portable, in the form of laptops. Laptops have shrunk to the point that a new category, netbooks, was coined. Between touchscreen tablets, interactive televisions, and telephones with more processing power than many people need, many industry professionals are predicting the impending death of the PC. I guess I see things differently than a lot of people. Back before people had personal computers, we had “thin clients” (machines with very little to no processing power) that connected to mainframes or servers. The big machines in the background did all the heavy lifting, and the thin clients were just interface points. Update the technology slightly and we’ve almost come full circle, with things like cell phones and tablets being our interfaces to more powerful back ends and storage points like the Internet and “the cloud”.

Whether or not the death of the PC form factor lies just around the corner remains to be seen. What I do know is, the last 30 years have been incredible, and I can’t wait to see what the next 30 years of technology holds.

IBM PC

Happy 30th Birthday, MS-DOS!

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On July 27th, 1981, Microsoft took their modified/rebranded version of QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and released it as MS-DOS — Microsoft’s Disk Operating System.

(If you have not seen Triumph of the Nerds yet, do so.)

In 1980 we had a TRS-80 III that used TR-DOS. We moved to an Apple compatible machine in 1982, and picked up an IBM XT a year or two after that. I learned my way around DOS at a pretty early age, as being able to change drives, navigate through directory structures and launch executables were all skills needed to play and copy games.

I don’t ever remember using DOS 1.0, but our IBM PC Jr. shipped with DOS 2.1 and I remember those diskettes vividly. It’s funny what memories stick with you. I remember using DOS 3.3 for a long time, but don’t remember 4.0 at all. I do remember using version 5, and all the different versions of 6 — 6.0, 6.2, 6.21, and 6.22.

If you ever want to hear an old school PC guy groan, mention EDLIN. EDLIN was the old DOS-based editor (EDit LINe) before EDIT was released with DOS 5.0. EDLIN was finally dropped from Vista/Win7 but was included all the way up to Windows XP. If you’re still running XP, I dare you to go to a command line and type “EDLIN FILE.TXT” and see what you can get to work. It’s like a less user-friendly version of VI, if you can imagine such a thing.

One of the major limitations of DOS was its 8.3 file name structure. This meant every file on your computer was limited to a name no longer than 8 characters with a 3 character extension. Instead of “Rob’s List of Favorite Songs.txt”, you might have “rsnglst1.txt”. Multiply that times a thousand and you can see how without good directory structures, it was often difficult to find old files. Early versions of DOS had a bug which prevented two files from having the same name even if they were in different directories. Back then you could easily hide files from other users, using the attrib +h command. DOS was full of little tricks.

DOS also came with BASIC, which is what I and probably most computer people my age first programmed in. My programs were pretty crude and horrible, but they were fun to write. Like most kids I wrote a lot of simple math programs and bad games. Probably the most advanced thing I ever programmed in BASIC was a Dungeons and Dragons character generator. It started out life as just a simple blank character sheet form, but ended up as a program that would randomly generate both playable characters (PCs) and non-playable characters (NPCs) for use in adventures.

DOS also allowed you to link commands together in batch files. 30 years later I am still using batch files — I use them every single day at work, in fact. While other Microsoft scripting solutions like VB Scripting and Powershell have since been released, there’s still something to be said for a batch file that can be slapped out in seconds and save me hours worth of work. My home backups and several other scheduled maintenance tasks are all batch files.

Those of you who were really into computers back then remember the trials and tribulations of editing your config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get everything just right. Many of us had multiple configurations to choose from, depending on if we were playing games or not. Some games needed EMS; some needed XMS. It was all a balancing act that involved deciding just how much RAM you wanted to set aside for different processes and drivers. Today’s crop of point-and-click users would have been lost. (Think “getting a wireless router to work times 100”.) When I worked at Best Buy in late 94/early 95, people would bring their machines in after purchasing a game and pay $39.95 for me to configure their machines to play it.

One of the last additions to DOS that I remember was DBLSPACE, a utility that MAGICALLY “doubled” the size of users’ hard drives’. Really what they did was compress compressible files on the fly. In 1994, Stac Electronics sued Microsoft for including DoubleSpace with DOS, claiming that the code was based on their own STACKER code (a competing product that Microsoft had at one time considered buying). According to Wikipedia Stac Electronics was awarded $120 million dollars, Microsoft was awarded $13 million in a counterclaim, and ultimately the suit was settled when Microsoft “[made] a $39.9 million investment in Stac Electronics, and additionally [paid] Stac about $43 million in royalties on their patents.”

The first version of Windows I ever used, Windows 3.1, sat literally on top of DOS. Windows 95, however, booted directly into Windows and for the first time, I didn’t get to see DOS before I saw Windows. The first time I installed Windows 95, I put a shortcut to CMD.EXE in the startup folder so that when Windows 95 launched, I would be treated to a DOS prompt. Old habits die hard.

Like I said, I still use DOS today. I wrote Batch-o-Matic specifically to work with DOS Batch files. Over the years Microsoft has tried to wean us off of DOS by incorporating fewer features with every new operating system they release, but as long as I can leverage “the little command line that could”, I’ll continue doing so.

Happy 30th Birthday, MS-DOS!

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.

IBM PC

See. Seagate. Seagate Drop.

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Last week a thread on Seagate’s public forum started getting some attention within tech circles. Apparently, a few customers began complaining that their Seagate 1tb (Terabyle) hard drives were dying. Like, a lot of drives. Like, people are estimating somewhere around 30%-40% of the drives are dying. Fortunately for me I don’t OH WAIT I BOUGHT FIVE OF THESE DRIVES LAST MONTH AAAAAAHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRGHGHGHHGHGHGHHHH123!@#!@#!@#!%#&!&!

Ahem. Sorry.

Once Seagate realized there was a problem, they said, “Don’t worry! Your drive’s not really dead! It’s just that it has a bad firmware and your computer won’t see it!” This is akin to telling the owner of a new sports car (or five), “Don’t worry! Your car’s not really dead! It just doesn’t drive anymore!”

Seagate then told customers, “If you have a problem drive, ship it to us. We will fix it and send it back to you, free of charge.” That’s nice. Unfortunately, some people had already mailed their drives off to data recovery services, who charged them (on average) $1,700 to recover their data. Oops. (As of this blog post, Seagate is refusing to reimburse people for that expense.) When people balked about having to mail in their drives, Seagate said, “No problem. E-mail us or call us, give us your model number and serial number, and we will e-mail you back the fix.” This process was slow-going and people were still publicly rebelling, so then Seagate said, “You know what? Here is the fix! We have put the fix on our website! You can download it, run it, and fix your drives!” Hooray! Hooray! There was much rejoicing …

…until, the fix started “bricking” hard drives. (In computer-land, when you “brick” something you make it not work anymore. You now essentially own a “brick.”) Apparently different fixes were needed for different drives or different BIOS revisions or something like that. Things went horribly wrong and people who before had no problem suddenly had new problems (bricked hard drives). Awesome! Seagate pulled the patches back off the site and promised something within 24 hours.

The final fix came out yesterday in the form of bootable ISO images. (LINK) To fix your drive, you’ll need to download and burn the corresponding (read: correct) ISO image, and then boot your machine with it. The included readme.txt file states that you should only have one affected drive connected at a time, but I got all ballsy (plus it was 4am and I was still a bit groggy on Nyquil PM) and decided to try it on my server which has four 1tb drives configured as a RAID 5. The patch worked as advertised. The RAID was a little slow to come back after rebooting (it took Windows 2003 about three minutes to find it — three minutes without a heartbeat is enough to turn a guy’s lips blue), but once everything settled in, all’s well. And remember that USB terabyte drive I bought last fall that was giving me fits? I’ve since cracked that case open with a coconut, pulled the drive out and stuck it in Pivo. It was the same model of drive (but with a different firmware) as the others, so I upgraded it too. 5 for 5 … that’s pretty good for me while all loopy on the codine.

IBM PC

The Obstinate 80 Gigs

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For as long as I can remember I have associated specific songs with specific memories, and for me, an arcade wouldn’t be an arcade without the music. All of my old arcade memories including a backing soundtrack of 80s music. Different arcades had different playlists: family friendly arcades like Le Mans and Tilt pumped in 80s pop music, while seedier arcades like Cactus Jack’s and the Bowling Alley delivered a constant stream of 70s arena rock and 80s hair metal.

When my backyard shed begin to make the transition from “collection of arcade machines in a shed” to “backyard arcade”, having music playing was one of my very first considerations. My first plan was to gut an old jukebox, stick a computer inside it, and set it up to play MP3s around the clock. I got as far as picking up the broken jukebox — turns out, shoehorning a PC inside an old jukebox takes a lot of work. Additionally, old jukeboxes are really big, taking up valuable real estate in an already crowded backyard shed. After giving up on that project, I went with the much simpler approach — sticking a PC out there, connecting some really big speakers, and having the thing play MP3s in random order.

In the early 90s, Le Mans Arcade added a music video jukebox to their arcade. The large screen was a panel of televisions, and the jukebox played music videos constantly. That wall of monitors made an impression on me, and as I started putting together a PC for playing music out in the arcade, I thought it would be a neat idea to get it to play videos as well. Through the newsgroups I found alt.binaries.videos.music and I downloaded away. One video turned into ten, one gig turned into ten, then twenty, and so on. By the time I was done I had amassed 20 DVDs full of music videos — approximately 80 gig. I should mention that the criteria for what I downloaded and what I didn’t is fairly specific; to make the collection, the videos had to be of songs I liked, and the videos/songs had to be family friendly. While “family friendly” is fairly subjective, the idea was that I wouldn’t include anything that might be offensive if kids (mine or someone else’s) were out in the arcade.

While not particularly important to the story (not that that would ever stop me), I should note that I wrote my own software to run out in the arcade. The software is called Jukebox Zero (a play on the song “Jukebox Hero), as is the machine it runs on. The program launches with Windows, scans a pre-determined directory (and sub-directories), and plays the contained MP3 and video files contained within. To be honest there are a zillion other PC-based jukebox programs out there, most of them better than mine, but none of them seemed to do exactly what I wanted. Sometimes, writing your own is simpler, so that’s what I did. I don’t think I ever publicly released Jukebox Zero because, frankly, it’s so specific that I can’t imagine anyone else ever wanting a copy.

Back to the problem at hand, which has been moving of the 80 gigs of videos from my house (where I downloaded them) to Jukebox Hero, which sits out in the arcade. Jukebox Zero (the PC) is old and crappy, a 600mhz machine with a CD-Rom drive and two (funky) USB ports that cancel each other out when they’re used at the same time. In the beginning, videos were transferred out to the machine a few at a time via USB memory sticks. As the video collection grew and was moved to DVD, I lost track of which videos had been moved to Jukebox Zero and which ones had not. I really wanted to have the machine filled with videos before all my friends came over to visit the weekend of OEGE, and so I did something foolish and deleted all the videos off of Jukebox Zero, with the intention of moving them back over … somehow.

With help from an external USB DVD drive, my first plan involved copying the DVDs one at a time to Jukebox Zero. This proved to be much more of a pain in the ass than it might sound. Each DVD was taking over an hour to copy over — too long to stand there and watch, but short enough that I didn’t feel like I had enough time to go do anything else. After one or two DVDs, I gave up on this plan. (I should mention that out in the arcade there is no comfortable place to sit. Standing and watching files copy makes one feel stupid(er).)

The next plan involved setting up a wireless network out in the arcade and copying the files wirelessly to Jukebox Zero. This turned out to be a monumental waste of time that took me at least a week to decide was pointless. Here are the highlights: I installed a wireless card into Jukebox Zero, but could not get a strong enough signal to connect to my home network — this is despite the fact that from the exact same location, I could connect to my home network using my laptop. This led me to believe that, for whatever reason, the wireless card in my laptop had more power than the wireless card I installed in Jukebox Zero. I still had my old wireless router lying around, so I then decided to install that out in the arcade, physically connect Jukebox Zero to it, and connect to that network wirelessly from the house. This created another huge network mess, since both routers are hard set to exist in the same IP space (192.168.1.x) so switching back and forth was screwing up my routing tables and causing me to continually reboot. When I DID finally get everything working, I found I could copy about three videos before the wireless signal would drop (which, oddly enough, is why I bought a new router in the first place …). The best part of this whole adventure was troubleshooting the wireless router out in the arcade, which cost me several dozen trips back and forth from the house in the middle of the night while testing. What a pain in the ass.

After giving up on the network I decided to copy all the music DVDs to an external USB hard drive, take the hard drive out to the arcade, connect it to Jukebox Zero and copy the files that way. This is friggin’ foolproof … or so I thought. I copied all the music DVDs to my 300 gig external hard drive, carried it out to the arcade, connected it and started the files copying. The next morning when I went out to check on the progress, I found that it again had copied less than a dozen files before dying. “I/O error” was all Windows offered. Since I/O means “input/output,” I found the error accurate although not particularly helpful. The problem turned out to be my external hard drive, which picked THAT MOMENT to die. Further inspection determined that it was actually the enclosures power supply and not the drive itself that died. The drive was transplanted into a new enclosure and the whole process was repeated. This time I got through almost 5 DVDs of videos before the machine locked up. THIS SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD.

Since I can connect to the machine still via wireless, I’m going to connect to the machine today and attempt to copy the DVD directories one at a time — sneaking up on the project, so to speak. Should that fail I’m going to take an axe to the whole god damn pile of electronics and set up a VCR full of old music videos and call it good.

Computers/Tech/Games, IBM PC

Pivo Fragged

Just to get everybody up to speed — I have a PC-based PVR in my entertainment center. It runs GB-PVR for Windows. I call it Pivo (PC Tivo). And, currently, the hard drive is fragged to hell.

As everyone reading this blog already knows, fragmentation occurs when files on a computer are deleted, and overwritten by other files which don’t fit exactly in the space left by the first file. This causes files to become split up on your hard drive, which in turn can cause longer loading times and decreased performance. It’s pretty easy to see how this can happen on the Pivo, where I record a dozen television shows a day, deleting a dozen old ones to make room for them.

To be honest I rarely think or worry about fragmentation these days — however, recordings on the Pivo have started playing “jerky,” and defrag shows that the drive is 40% fragmented. Unfortunately, the video files on the drive are so large that defrag is taking forever. I decided on plan B — moving everything off the drive, formatting it, and moving it back.

And so, that project started yesterday morning. I hooked up a 300 gig USB drive to the machine and started moving everything off. I let the copy run 8 hours, and then did the math. It’ll be done sometime in April. The machine only has USB 1.1, which means a max transfer speed of 12.5 mbit. No good. I then experimented with moving the files wirelessly to the server upstairs. Even at 54 mbit, which is faster, it was still likely to take days. The third time’s a charm. I ran a long ass network cable across the upstairs room, down the stairs, behind the entertainment center and into Pivo. The 100 mbit link light lit up, and the files began moving much more quickly. For some reason the copy aborted in the middle of the night, so I restarted it this morning. Should be done by the time I get home.

Then all I’ll have to do is move everything back …