Retrocomputing: hardware, software, games, and stories

Do you get enjoyment out of computer and game stuff that's so old it's interesting again? Do you fantasize about having a mainframe in the basement? Or the arcade machine you owned at, a decade or more ago? Do you find it fascinating that your watch has more computing power than things that took up rooms fifty years ago?

Do you think the last GOOD Mac had a Motorola chip in it, not an Intel?

Prefer your PCs to come from IBM?

 

TELL ME ABOUT THE APPLE II MORVEN. BECAUSE LITERALLY EVERY ASSHOLE WHO MADE COOL COMPUTER GAMES IN THE WESTERN MARKET SEEMS TO HAVE STARTED ON IT.

 

We'll also cover emulation here, from classic arcade machines to emulations of room-filling business systems of the 1970s. You can now run some surprising things on your own regular PC, and faster than the original hardware by miles.

 

Would a 17 year old game belong in here?

 

Absolutely, though it could also have its own thread if there was enough to say about it. What's the game?

 

I miss playing Sim Tower and Chip's Challenge. I've got a copy of Sim Tower (the original version, the one for Windows 97) but it won't even run on Windows 10. I'm not sure if I can get it to run on Linux - I haven't actually tried yet.

 

That reminds me that I am super sad I can't get Lego Rock Raiders running on windows 10 at all. And I am not sure how even. Though I'm assuming I'd have to dig into the world of emulation.

which again

-looks expectantly at morven like a small child on christmas eve-

 

Have you tried this link? It will allow you to play Sim Tower in a window on your browser.

 

You could probably run that one on a Virtual Machine that itself is running Windows XP. Kind of a pain but doable. As I understand it all the old games that used SafeDisk and SecuROM as copy protection can't by used in Windows 10.

 

I love old games! A good resource for people that are into older PC games is GOG.COM, they sell many of the old classics, and they are pre-modified to run on modern operating systems. Another good resource is EA's Origin service, they periodically give away older games for free!

 

Chip's Challenge is challenging me as well, probably gonna have to run it on Dosbox (urgh, setting up Dosbox).

 

I was referring to the Creatures series-I made it its own thread, because I was excited about discovering LiveGMS.

The 17 year old one is the newest. The first one's 20 years old.

EDIT: The GoodOldGames versions of the first game and the last game both work on Windows 10 without emulation, although you have to run a third-party patch to make them moddable.

The games were specifically designed to be modded. There were official modding kits and even some officially made mods, installable via an installer or manually.
The newest game even has two major fan-made mods that had the official dev team supply assets-the C12DS and C2toDS mods.

 

The Apple II was the first microcomputer to hit the sweet spot for consumers in the US market. Not the first to ever have commercial success, but the first to have any significant impact outside of the hardcore hobbyist. It had sleek consumer-friendly looks (that was Steve Jobs' contribution), it could be used on a regular TV thus no need to buy a monitor straightaway, its very clever design made it cheap for what it contained, it was very expandable to make it able to do more, and it was color, which was huge. Not great color, but good enough to give it the edge.

Like most machines of its time, it came with a built-in BASIC interpreter so you could get programming instantly, but it also came with utilities for debugging machine code and thus encouraged a lot of more technically savvy users.

And then pretty soon after it came out, they added an inexpensive floppy disk drive as an accessory, which made it even more tempting.

Basically it was both popular and nice to work with, so programmers flocked to it.

Outside of the US, the Apple II was expensive and nowhere hear as popular. Schools had them in the U.K., generally only one or two, but the Sinclair Spectrum, substantially cheaper in construction, was the breakout hit with consumers. The Spectrum's limitations gave the next generation of micros a bit more of s chance, machines like the C64 and Amstrad. The C64 did fairly well in the US too, but it had a harder time competing. It had far better graphics and sound, though.

 

oooo

CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE ZX SPECTRUM WHICH I ALWAYS PRONOUNCED ZED-X SPECTRUM BECAUSE LITERALLY NO ONE BUT BRITAIN SEEMS TO GIVE A SHIT ABOUT IT.

 

The ZX Spectrum was sold in the US as a Tandy, but the American market was quite different and it didn't do well.

Anyway, here it is in its diminutive cheap-ass glory:


Not pictured: the huge power brick that really got hot, and the tape drive you had to have to load stuff from.

The keyboard sucked. It was one of those rubber chiclet type keyboards, and was rather imprecise and awkward.

Like the Apple II, it was consumer-friendly in looks, used a TV as a monitor, and had color. Unlike the Apple II it was really cheap. The 48K version cost UKP 129 through most of its run, equivalent to $199 US. You could also use a regular tape deck to load programs, no need for an expensive specialized tape deck.

The color support was really bad. Basically the graphics raster was monochrome, but each 8x8 character space had attributes including foreground color, background color, light or dark, etc. Thus only two colors could be used in every character space. This required a lot of cleverness to work around and provide interesting color graphics.

They sold about 5 million of them, with probably several million more clones, legal or illegal. A copy became the most popular home computer in the USSR, for instance.

Later models featured better keyboards, better sound, 128K of memory, and integrated tape or disk drives, but most games were still written for the basic 48K Spectrum.

A friend of mine had a Spectrum +2 and we spent a lot of time playing around with it. It was quite amazing what enterprising programmers could get out of such a limited machine.

Of course, you can emulate these easily on modern hardware, and a lot of people do.

 

oooooooooo

 

And now for something different. Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX 11/780 of 1977. Pretty much every OS in use today can trace its way back to ones on the VAX. If you want a real one, this is about how much space they take up:



One of the three double-doored cabinets is the CPU, the others are storage and peripherals. This is a computer from before the age of integrated circuits, "chips". Instead the CPU is assembled from individual transistors on dozens of circuit boards. It has a clock speed of 5 MHz, about the same as early microcomputers, and could hold eight whopping megabytes of RAM.

While UNIX was first developed for the earlier PDP-11 minicomputer, also from DEC, the VAX was where it became the system recognizable today. It was first ported as pretty much a direct copy of v7, dubbed UNIX 32/V, by AT&T, but the University of California, Berkeley, received DARPA grants to improve it and add networking. Thus, the DOD hoped to create an OS they could insist on no matter what hardware they purchased, one with modern features and supporting the still-new Internet protocols. They got it and more. The UNIXes from Berkeley were dubbed BSD (for Berkeley Software Distribution); software derived from later releases of this is the underpinnings of Mac OS and iOS (the portion called "Darwin") and many free operating systems (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and many others) as well as being the software inside many devices like routers and other networked appliances. Portions of BSD were also incorporated in most commercial UNIX versions, either directly, or via the transfusion of BSD features into AT&T's System V Release 4 which became Sun Microsystems' Solaris and several other UNIX workstation and server systems. Linux is all-new code, but much of the inspiration for it lies in BSD Unix and it is largely API-compatible with it. Microsoft took the BSD networking stack and integrated it into Windows NT, so pretty much all modern Windows contains inspiration from BSD Unix too.

The officially preferred OS for the VAX, though, was VMS, which was very full-featured and successful in business use; indeed it is still used today in many places, years after any computer built to run it ceased production. VMS can also be considered the ancestor of Windows NT; Dave Cutler, the chief architect of NT, was part of the team that developed VMS, and a lot of features and ideas from VMS came across into Windows NT and its later derivatives.

There are a few running VAX 11/780s in museums, but they're a bit big for private ownership. Some newer VAX models were smaller, including some desktop PC sized units (VAXstations), but the 11/780 original is one of the hardware platforms fully emulated in the SIMH emulator that runs on most modern computers. A runnable copy of UWISC's extensions of 4.3BSD is available, including the emulator and configuration, from here; install, and then select the start menu item it installs, and a virtual VAX 11/780 will run inside your PC at effectively full speed. If you know UNIX, log in and play with it! You can even get it on the network as if it was a real machine.

Hardware wise, the VAX defined the machine capabilities that would become the norm in the 32-bit era; full 32-bit math and logic operations, and 32-bit addressing. It supported a virtual address space, allowing the use of swap space transparently as virtual memory, and supported privilege separation in hardware between critical OS routines and user programs. Now, a user program could only crash itself if it went haywire. As typical on large computer systems, it supported direct memory access IO from disk and tape that did not involve the CPU, freeing it for other tasks. In fact, it was sometimes faster to use the hard drive and DMA to copy data in memory than trying to use the heavily contended CPU. These systems could support 64 connected terminals, so resources could be in short supply.

 

We call the use of disk to extend virtual memory swapping, and the disk space as "swap space", but these are incorrect for most modern systems, which either don't swap or only do it in extremis.

Swapping is what you did pre VAX if you wanted to run more programs than you had memory. Simply keep only one in memory at a time. When it became time to run another, the state of the running program would be saved to disk and then replaced by another one, reading it in from disk. Literally swapping programs in and out of memory.

But then came the VAX and similar systems, which gave each program its own address space. That virtual address space is divided into 4kb chunks called pages, and there is a table that maps each page to real memory locations — or to nothing. If a program tried accessing a missing page, this causes the OS to look for what should be loaded into memory and placed there. If it's from a program or memory-mapped file, it's loaded. If it's data space, it's either given a fresh chunk of memory or it's loaded from swap.

This activity is called paging, and almost all modern systems do it. It does, however, cause overhead. Generally some approximation of a least-recently-used list is used to find pages to swap out

 

The next one I want to talk about is the Amiga, which was a mega hit in Europe but a rare thing in the US, despite being developed there. It was launched in 1985 and was produced until 1996. Did anyone here have one, or am I the only?

 

has anyone in this thread checked out lazy game reviews on youtube? he...reviews games, as the title suggests, but he also has a passion for old DOS games, big box games, wood grain, and IBM computers--i really enjoy watching his stuff and it might interest some of you folks