Tag: retro

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Retro collection just acquired a more recent, not-so-retro, addition (2008 Mac Pro 8 core)

Having grown up with 8 bit computers, starting with an Atari VCS and then a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, I find it fascinating that decades later there’s an increasing level of interest in computers from the 80s and 90s with thriving online communities, podcasts and even meetup groups of enthusiasts who get together to discuss the original hardware and also new device add-ons, blending modern tech (e.g. using SD cards for storage) with old.

The ZX Spectrum recently has a number of modern remakes:

As much as I really wanted to get a ZX Spectrum Next, I couldn’t bring myself to put down 175UKP for the base model. I suspect I might come back and pick one up at some point.

My other favorite computer was an Atari ST, I had an 520STFM. I picked up an 1040STF with an Atari monitor on eBay a while back, and it sits on my desk in my office. I also picked up an CosmosEx device which is an interesting example of current tech complementing old – it’s a Raspberry Pi based device that provides SD card support for floppy disk and hard disk images, as well as USB keyboard and mouse support, and also networking.

Something that’s interested me for a while is what it looks like to browse the web using old hardware. The short story is that it’s generally a terrible experience (slow, and current web technologies are poorly supported, if at all). I’ve tried setting up CAB on my ST, but with only 1MB RAM it can’t load anything but the simplest HTML page with text and 1 or 2 images before it fails from not enough memory.

For a while I browsed eBay looking to pick up a used Atari Falcon, but for a 25 year old 16/32 bit computer, it’s incredible that they typically go for anything about $800 to $1000 if you can even find one (they cost 599 UKP new when the launched). With it’s 68030, it has significantly more grunt than the original 68000 based STs.

I then got distracted by the idea of picking up a modern remake of an ST – the Coldfire project has developed the Firebee, which uses a 264MHz Coldfire processor and 512MB RAM, with 68000 backwards compatibility, but with the addition of modern hardware features like USB, PCI expansion slots, ethernet networking, and many of features we currently take for granted in current devices. Despite torturing myself by watching every Firebee video on YouTube, the current price of a new Firebee of 560 Euros is a little more than I can justify to buy a modern Atari ST in 2017 (despite how awesome it actually is).

Continuing with my (odd) interest of browsing the web on old hardware, I picked up a Power Mac G4 2002 Quicksilver.  Classilla in OS9 is perfectly usable and TenFourFox in Mac OS 10.4 is ok, but (at least on my single cpu G4) not really good enough for a daily driver (scrolling is sluggish).

I very nearly decided to up the horsepower and look for a dual G5 Mac Power Mac,

but noticed the price started to get close to what you could pick up a used Intel Xeon Mac Pro for, so … long story short, I just picked up a 2008 8 core Mac Pro on eBay. Super excited for when it arrives!

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Retro Battlestation (update 2): dialing up a local BBS with the 2002 Power Mac G4 Quicksilver

Since my first post after receiving my 2002 Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, I’ve learned a number of things about this machine.

Following the Retro Battlestations subreddit, there was a group activity a while back to dial into the group’s BBS using, yes, a real dial up modem, from your retro machine of choice. So I thought I’d give it a go.

The internal modem is on a board

Internal modem missing

about the size of a pack of cards, and it’s normally screwed to standoffs on motherboard in the top left of the motherboard in this photo. It was obviously removed in this machine, so that explains why an internal modem was not showing up as installed.

Not to be deterred, I noticed you can pick up an Apple USB modem for just $10 online so I ordered one. Wanting to give it a go truely old-style, I wanted to dial in from OS 9 – this is when I found out that this USB Modem is a ‘soft’ modem, in that it works mostly in software, and no, it’s not supported on OS 9.

In OS X 10.4 however, it gets recognized correctly as an External Modem in the System Preferences panel:

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a dial up terminal emulator for the Mac, I found most references pointing to ZTerm , so got it downloaded and installed, and it sees the USB modem. Got the BBS number configured, and off we go!

 

 

Success! Dialed in to the Level 29 BBS! I was expecting to see ANSI colors in the text display, so not sure if I need to change a setting in ZTerm, but so far pretty excited this works!

 

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Retro Battestation: just received my 2002 Power Mac G4 Quicksilver

I just picked up a pretty good eBay deal on a 2002 Power Mac G4 Quicksilver. It was sold as working, and yes it does boot up and it did come with OS X 10.4.11 installed as advertised.

 

Inside, it looks almost new. When I recently took some old PC towers to the electronics recycling inside they looked like they’d accumulated 100 years worth of dust and god knows what. By comparison, for a 15 year old machine, this looks like it was kept sealed in a box for most of that time – it’s spotless with no dust in sight.

Clean!

It looks like it has 10.4.11 cleanly installed, but I also picked up a used OS X 10.4 Tiger DVD to do a clean install myself.

The DVD drive in the machine does not want to open. It whirs and clicks when you hold F12, but no go. I used the paper clip trick in the manual open hole on the front of the drive, it opens up and there’s nothing jammed in there, it just doesn’t want to open. I tried putting the DVD in there, manually closing the drive and then powering on, but it doesn’t spin up and read the disk.

By the way, on this Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, the DVD manual open hole is obscured by the front of the case, so the only way to get a paper clip in the hole is to physically remove the drive from the case to get access to the hole.

Given the issues with the DVD drive, I discovered that this machine will boot from a USB flash drive (there’s a discussion in this thread about all Intel Macs will boot from USB, but this feature apparently was supported on some G4 and G5 machines but apparently not all).

To install Mac OS 9 I copied the ISO from OS9Lives universal installer to a USB using Infrarecorder on a Windows 10 desktop, and holding down Option/Alt to get the boot menu, it shows the USB, and clicking on it starts to boot. I wasn’t sure about using the ‘Restore’ option on the OS9Lives universal installer, as it seems from the instructions that it wipes your partition.

 

 

Instead I’ve read in a few different forum posts if you just copy the ‘System Folder’ from an OS 9 image to the drive, along with ‘Applications’ (rename it ‘Applications (OS 9)’ if you’re dragging them to the same partition as OS X, if it’s a different partition then the name can stay as Applications).

 

Interesting that this just works – if you select the OS 9 System Folder as the Startup Disk in System Preferences, then when you reboot it just starts up.

To get a copy of the OS X 10.4 DVD onto a USB flash drive, I used Infrarecorder again to make an image, and then used ‘dd’ on my MacBook Pro to write the image to a flash drive.

I’m going to do a fresh install, but booting it up and looking around at what’s already on there, OS X 10.4 on a single PowerPC cpu machine, not a dual, and only 800Mhz with 512MB, performance is not bad, it’s pretty responsive. Both Tiger and OS 9 boot pretty quick (Tiger boots a few seconds faster which is surprising).

Quick observations:

  • Safari on OS X is terribly slow, practically unusable
  • Ten Four Fox on OS X is usable but sluggish on scrolling any page. Makes you appreciate how fast modern day machines are
  • Classilla on OS 9 is pretty snappy. Of the browsing options available, this is the better choice on this machine so far.

Next up I’ll be trying to boot from the image of the 10.4 DVD and doing a fresh install. More to come later.

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Game development in progress: Space Invaders clone – update 2

Earlier this year I started developing a Space Invaders inspired game for Android. I started back in March, and have worked on it for a around 20 to 30 hours or so, on and off. Not being an expert in Android development or game development in general, it’s been a learning experience. The book I read back in March, Android Game Development by Example, was a good book to get started. I realize I probably could have got to a playable game quicker if I’d used a game development platform like Unity3d, but I wanted to get to grips with writing a game by from the ground up first. I’ll circle back and probably rewrite it using something like Unity later.

Right now I’m at a point where it’s playable but there’s a few key features I still need to add, like the bases/shields at the bottom of the screen, and the invaders need to shoot missiles at the player. It’s a pretty easy game at this point 🙂 I have a few ideas for some gameplay variations to add too.

I started implementing as a standalone Java app using the Java2d api and the 2d game engine that I’d previously worked on for my first attempt at a game in Java, a version of one of the classic Nintendo Game n Watch games, Turtle Bridge.

I tried to replicate the animation of the invaders moving one at a time, one row at a time and got pretty close:

Compared to current day AAA tier video game development projects which typically have multi-million dollar budgets and teams of artists, story writers, sound engineers, QA, developers, as well as marketing and PR teams, I find it fascinating that Space Invaders was originally developed by a single developer, Tomohiro Nishikado. Not only did he develop the sofware for the game, but he also designed the hardware on which the game runs.

There’s some interesting features of the game that were not part of the original design, but resulted from limitations of the hardware. For example, the invaders speed up as fewer are left remaining on the screen. This is a defining feature of the game, but was a side effect from the 8080 processor being unable to animate a full screen of invaders at the same speed compared to a screen with only 1 or 2 remaining. Rather compensate in software to keep a constant frame rate, this feature was kept.

Other features in the game play logic could easily be overlooked by a casual player:

  • The mystery ship appears on a regular, timed basis, at around each 25 seconds
  • The mystery ship is worth 300 points on the first 23rd shot on each screen, and then 300 on every 15th shot for the remainder of the screen. For all other shots it’s 100 points (if you play for high scores, then this fact is probably very well known to you 🙂 )
  • Missiles from the invaders will not kill the player if fired from the last row on the screen

Here’s a quick video of how far I’ve got so far. This is running on a device simulator, so the frame rate is not as fast as on a real device:

I’ve still got some work to do, but I’m pleased on my progress so far.

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