Keatah's classic game collection.

[Keatah]

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you my classic gaming collection.

 

As you can clearly see, it is timeless and impervious to the ravages of daily usage. Highly transportable, plays all classics, expandable, stylish, complete and fits into any decor. Note the cost-effective carrying case in the background.

 

[+save2600]

 

WTH? You using that poor WD hard drive as a cutting board or what?

[Keatah]

The wife's out on business and I felt like being a man slob. When she comes home I'll do a handywipe rubdown to be sure.

 

This happens all the time when me and my engine buddies get together. IIRC we were checking out Vectrex on MESS or something else right before I took the picture. And what you see is likely Potbelly's sub sandwich smearage.

 

But it *IS* my emulation collection drive which has been basically everywhere, deep sea, high altitudes, pretty tough SOB for a mechanical disk. I see replacing it with something solid-state shortly. But right now a handful of 128GB MicroSD would be the ultimate in transportability and bank breakage at $1 per GB.

[TaskenLander]

What the heck is that crap all over it??

 

I wouldn't want to touch that thing... haha

[bennybingo]

Looks like an external HD with onions and birdshit caked on it to me...

[Keatah]

..perhaps more properly displayed in its native environment. Hard at work.

 

[atari8warez]

Looks like an external HD with onions and birdshit caked on it to me...

 

I think that stuff is from his nose

[Keatah]

It's time for a little more detailed look at my emulated VCS collection.

 

The first photo depicts all the roms and the virtualized VCS to play them. Take note how well they are organized on their electronic shelf. I could only dream about such a radiant collection when I was a child. In fact I often have.

The second photo highlights the documentation portion. This section easily exceeds the playable material by several orders of magnitude in size. It is of extraordinary depth and completeness. It includes many things, certainly enough for future historians to recreate the console and the culture surrounding it.

This third photo shows where it all resides on a hard disk. Using professional grade data recovery tools it is easy to map where on the surface things are. The boxes are of an arbitrary color and have no relation to the treemaps - rather they are colored to reflect the number of surfaces. The red lines approximate tracks for the file system's metafiles. The outermost line is actually 180` on the other edge, outside the photo. The spattering of red dots trailing the main file cluster set are more metafiles, journals, and access dates, operated on in conjunction with a request to read a Game Program. That's windows for ya! The documentation portion is pretty much the rest of the disk and all over it.

I thought I'd experiment around with interleaving and file placement, and clustering everything together into one area. I used one of my removable clear cover disks. Great fun to watch all the goings on in there. One can never get tired of it.

[Keatah]

Back in the day we all watched various sci-fi shows, good and bad alike. And we enjoyed them. They depicted lots of concepts that were futuristic and of which some are reality today. Wireless phones, tablets, unheard of processing power, energy efficient cars, things like that. The one thing sci-fi tended to overstate was personal space travel and colonization. The space program is essentially dead in the water. NASA is spinning in low Earth orbit and makes PowerPoint spacecraft.

 

One area that sci-fi tended to underestimate was connectivity and data storage. Today everybody is connected to everybody else by 50 different network technologies and it shows no sign of stopping.

 

Data storage in movies and novels and short stories often liked to brag about having an entire library of all literary works and all a/v material ever created stored in crystals of some kind. In the 70's and 80's it was often depicted as a rather large diamond-like crystal. Quartz maybe. Something glass-like. Holographic. Typically rod shaped maybe. Something hefty, something that would show up on the theater screen and be impressive. A prop the protagonists or villains could throw around and break or play with. Something the director could shine all kinds of lights on and get razzle-dazzle stars and lens flares from. All well and good.

 

For a while there optical crystal storage was the thing. Especially when lasers were involved. But that didn't work too well. They were big, clumsy, and laboratory curiosities. And they were write-once only. Periodically they'd grace the cover of pulp science magazines and garner wows for a week, then be forgotten.

 

Today we now have 3D electrical charge storage. Flash chips with their storage array stacked 64-layers deep. 256, 512, and 1024 layers are in the works. Well.. So we have a crystal formed from the ground up with embedded storage cells and the electrical wires to access them in an X, Y, Z, style. Set the co-ordinates and retrieve the data. Otherwise known as solid state memory. Not glamorous. No blinding lasers and oohhs and ahhhs of exploding light. No sound, no noise. Just an unassuming black square.

 

In 2017 these 3D Flash Nand structures will go mainstream. It will be the technology that makes the traditional SSD finally be cheaper than the standard mechanical hard disk. And you can expect a 10-fold increase in density the year after once the process is perfected. this is possible because we can (and have for years) built circuitry with dimensions much smaller than visible light.

 

And they're quite fast, operating near bus speeds. Unfortunately most are still tied to the SATA bus. Once they eliminate that expect speeds to skyrocket. They've already done it for years as PCI-e cards that essentially connect the This isn't a tech hurdle, but rather an industry-wide standard that needs to be retired.

 

In the meantime while all that is happening I'm preparing for all my emulation collection to transition over to Solid State Storage later this year. Since current SSD tech is rather unreliable I'm still maintaining a mechanical backup. Mechanical drives have been shown to last at least 40-years. SSD, not so. 5 years, 10 years at best. That is expected to change with the 3D Vertical Nand structures. We will see.

 

But it only seems fitting that the VCS roms be returned to their native storage format of a kind, if not the exact one. A solid piece of silicon. It's were they came from. This is a 2716 EEPROM fabbed around 1977-1978 and is fairly representative of what a Game Program chip would look like. It is 2K Bytes in size. Most early VCS Game Programs were 2K and 4K to start with, and later grew to 8K & 16K. Just make note it is an EEPROM and not a masked rom. But both kinds were used.

 

Come to think of it, putting them in modern silicon is not unlike de-rezzing your Game Program in the best tradition of Tron. Electrically scanning the material and replicating inside a real host computer system with supervisors and hypervisors and Master Control Programs. Finally after 35+ years my games will be returning to their homeland in a manner of speaking. And this is what it will look like.

 

 

Instead of holding only thousands or tens of thousands of bits. We’re looking at billions, and soon hundreds of billions. Remarkable advancements these crystals are - even if they don’t look like the stuff shown in the movies.

 

Soak up the symmetry. And note the amazing similarity to the treemap diagrams! How cool is that?