- Oh yes, the first photo is acurate. There was always the guy who appeared wih a mac and we all have to wait for him to make the games work in his computer.
- I need to know what you're talking about. Like, I'm actually curious to hear how I've gained a reputation of not being a dependable source.
- Well, not exactly: those pictures seem to be taken from Disney's EPCOT, specifically the Spaceship Earth ride.
https://www.wired.com/2008/01/whos-the-mystery-man-in-epcots.../
- IIRC it had something to do with keeping people from reusing the photos/serial numbers in scams on eBay and the like. It's been years since I learned to start doing that and I don't remember the specifics. It might have been unnecessary in my case.
- Kinda blazed over the Talkspot/WorldStream thing. Was actively involved in that and my boss had the "pleasure" having technical debates with Ken (a billionaire at the time). A lot of ex-Sierra folks were there and ended up working in Fintech with me. Some will still tell tales of how they coded some of those early games.
- Seriously out of date. Based on the screen shot, this is from 2014 or 2015? Since then they've changed to a new boat (Grand Banks GB60). They've also returned to gaming, with the release of "Colossal Cave".
- V0.0.35 Changelog 1.Added a button to load the default HDD 2.Added a Plethora of New 90s hard drives and redid the Seagate ST-225 And Miniscribe 3245 and added a few samples in the others folder 3.Added a brief fade in and out for the sounds to not be as harsh
- Memories of secondary school in the UK circa 1979, programming a System One in Computer Club.
I was given a broken unit a few years back, which was brought back to life.
Happy days.
- yeah i got the idea after putting all SSD'S in my system and missing the clunk of a drive doing stuff
- thank you for your kind words on my program i actually updated it today to V0.0.3 which cleans up the ui makes the app more responsive to disk activity and i added a bunch more Hard drive samples most being from the 1990's
- See also https://github.com/LenShustek/AnalyticalEngine . Len is the founder and former chairman of the Computer History Museum, and had participated in Plan 28 but is spinning off a separate project to be built in the US rather than the UK.
- Glad to read about mame internals
- These machines fascinate me. Very interesting user interface.
- It's set up for PCBWay already: https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/SC64_an_open_sou...
- oh wow, this is very cool.
Is there a consensus on the best PCB manufacturer for a small build like this?
- Happy holidays! Thanks for this terrific site, I read it daily. Can't get enough of this retro goodness!
- I did also post (a version of) this on HackerNews.
I think the software decoding technique used here is incomplete.
Consider what would happen if a data sector contained 12 * 0x00, 3 * 0xA1, 0xFE, ... then this implementation could mis-sync. On real hardware you'd have to be even more unlucky to have the CRC match -- which also isn't checked in this implementation. Using this as-is on real floppies could result in reading corrupt data. It would be possible to construct a floppy that would read correctly on real hardware and sometimes mis-read data with the current SW implementation.
The problem is that the 0xA1 bytes on the disk are special. The 0xA1 bytes are MFM encoded with a missing clock pulse -- making them "0xA1 syncs" that don't match an 0xA1 data byte. Proper clock recovery is necessary in order to detect the missing clock pulses for correct sync detection.
Based on my understanding, how the writes are done isn't quite how real hardware does it -- real hardware reads the sector header, waits for a "header gap" which, is described as where the 22 * 0x4E bytes are (these byes can get partially overwritten) and then rewrites the whole data header and data portion. Depending on the precise timing there can be trash bytes in the sector gap. I am not sure all floppy drives can switch from reading to writing immediately (page 22 of the pointed to SFB-321B PDF suggests not).
The special sync encoding and this strategy of header, sector is also present for 5.25 and early hard drives using MFM encodings, but with different values, timings and gaps.
- A-Max for Amiga was earlier than this and worked in a similar way. It let you run System 6.
- I hope it won't be taken down by Nintendo...
- Compatibility was such big big deal in those days. 99% compatible? Could it run flight simulator?
- In Zwolle, the Netherlands they have a similar museum with (very) old computers and also game computers. There you can play with the computers because a lot of them are still operational. https://www.flickr.com/photos/146579790@N07/albums/721576809...
- There's a 32-bit build of Doom8088. It's twice as fast as the 16-bit build.
- I've made a quick hack that should work on a Tandy 1000 and it looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RdrLXblnlU With CGA graphics it looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUEcr7XnbuA And in monochrome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o3rYTZt6BM
Seriously, proper Tandy / CGA / EGA / Monochrome graphics is on the to-do list.
- This is excellent, thank you.
- Back around the turn of the century, when I still had an enormous CRT monitor at work, I found it handy that the residual charge on the face of the monitor was sufficient to hold onto a sheet of paper. Could stick a sheet of notes from the lab to the monitor and enter stuff into various programs right beside the paper. Can't do that with LCD displays. If course, the entire computer can just go where the data is these days.
- Hope you enjoy! If you spot any issues or have any feedback I'd love to hear it!
- Thanks jgrahamc. Love the site and the blog!
- I've been using llvm-mos for a NES game that you can find here. https://github.com/jroweboy/evolve-machine-game/
If anyone has any questions about using llvm-mos I'd be happy to explain! I'm not a core dev though, so I can't really say much about the llvm side of things.
- More
Decompilations OTOH are work-intensive recreations of the source code, and people expect this recreation to have certain resemblance to the original (unavailable) code. This tool doesn't do this.
It grabs the binary "translates" it to C by using some clues to restore some of the structure, but it's C output is basically unreadable for humans. This output is then piped into a compiler for the target platform together with the pulled assets.