Samir

Thank you! So interesting to see that the 2600 rabbit hole is just as deep as ever, lol. ❤️

I just got an older atari flashback that has this installed and went looking for a pdf of the printed manual because I thought it was just another game I never could buy back in the 2600 heydays--HOLY COW THIS IS A FUN GAME THAT BRINGS IT ALL BACK 100%!! Seriously, this game is the type of fun that made the 2600 a joy to own back in its heyday. I could only imagine what type of endless fun we would have had if this game existed back then. So glad it exists! Anyways, I was just wondering what all the different 'games' were because I was looking for a 1 player mode with just a single square as that cheating computer always knows where the next square will be. (Yes, the computer always cheats--it's always been that way in every computer game ever made--I swear! :D That's why the player will lose, lol). Anyways, thank you for the fun. :) I hope you got paid licensing fees for your work because it is very, very good work. :)

Scratch that as I only have a subset of what is in the OP first http link, and that link is still active so all these are still online afaik (I didn't try to load one.)

I found about 31 of the scans on one of my servers. I will see what else I can come up with for this. I think I have an idea on how to get everything the OP originally scanned back online...stay tuned...

It has been several years since I've visited this thread. I used to host the 3 http mirrors of the original ftp archive which I manually updated when I had time. I'm actually searching my servers right now for these as I still have the computers but moved hence breaking the links. If I find them, I will see if I have a way of putting them back online.

Hi everyone, I haven't looked at the thread in several months now as I actually got back to working on my web site. And it seems my links have stopped working long before I came back here. And with that, I have some bad news--I can no longer host the copies I have as I need the disk space. I had no idea I'd generate this much data this year, so something has to give. I still have a copy on one of my archive drives, so I still have some of the issues if something happens to the project, but I hope that the project continues as it brings back a bygone era of computing that was very exciting. I only saw a glimpse of it when I went to a c64 user group meeting back in the 80s with my dad, but it had an excitement that I've never found anywhere else. I'll still try to check in on this thread to see the progress, and it's interesting to see that the new owners of Byte want this project done too.

Well, I spoke too soon. Hopefully whatever changes they're working on are done. All my addresses changed. New urls: http://69.73.38.248/events/byte/index.html http://24.214.130.70/events/byte/index.html http://69.73.59.122/events/byte/index.html Sorry again for any hiccups.

Knology came by and fixed my modem issue. My IP addresses stayed the same and shouldn't change anymore. These are the correct addresses for my mirrors (same as before): http://24.96.150.90/events/byte/index.html http://24.96.150.75/events/byte/index.html http://76.73.219.7/events/byte/index.html Sorry for any hiccups.

Oh, you have dynamic ip addresses? I'd rather not have to keep editing each time they change, so may I suggest perhaps setting up some dyndns names for your machines, as we can use them ? They are dynamic, but they very rarely change (only every few years when the ISP is changing something on their back-end). That one cable modem hasn't properly synced in days now, so I'm going to have to have a technician come out and look at it, but the others are working perfectly and their addresses are the same as they have been for years.

Looks like my ISP is doing some work on their end. I've been having problems with one of the cable modems keeping sync for the last two weeks, and there's more IP address changes. These are the correct addresses for my mirrors right now: http://24.96.150.90/events/byte/index.html http://24.96.150.75/events/byte/index.html http://76.73.219.7/events/byte/index.html I'll post updates here as I see the addresses change.

crikey! If you take that to recycling you can free up some space for a nice Atari computer But then three mirrors would be gone. Besides, the two Atari 2600s have their own room along with all the other vintage computer stuff.

I wasn't concerned about speed, but replacement if the shipment got damaged. UPS is very good on payment for damaged shipments as well as a refund of the shipping costs if it's not on time, even on their slowest (cheapest) shipment methods.

you cant control directory listings on a per directory basis? Sounds like you need an upgrade. I'd love to see one for a 486dx-33.

Have updated the mirror redirector. Thank you! One question about the mirror redirector. Does it simply redirect to the actual files or to the index files? I have to manually build the index files and that keeps me from rapidly add new releases even though the files are there. If your redirector points directly to the files, then that solves my problem of updating the index files. it redirects to the root of your mirror. what index files are you having to update? if you mean the directory listing, then just let your webserver generate it perhaps. Thank you for the explanation. I have a very old web server that no one would believe is acting as the server and turning off directory listings turns off the automatic indexes (which I need for privacy for the other things served by this server). Oh well, no biggie.

Have updated the mirror redirector. Thank you! One question about the mirror redirector. Does it simply redirect to the actual files or to the index files? I have to manually build the index files and that keeps me from rapidly add new releases even though the files are there. If your redirector points directly to the files, then that solves my problem of updating the index files.

The IP address changed on one of my cable modems. This: http://24.96.150.90/events/byte/index.html is now this: http://24.214.130.70/events/byte/index.html

I have a UPS account with commercial rates if that can help with logistics.

I have to disagree. Any drive manufactured today can be easily ranked in quality by it's MTBF. Enterprise class drives have a 1.2m MTBF. Consumer drives do not. It's not an indicator of the actual quality of a particular drive, but it does show what class or product it is. And the price tells you something as well. Case in point is the Western Digital RE3 drives I bought. Checking on pricescan shows that a Western Digital Caviar Green 1tb goes for $55. And on the same screen, the RE3 is $130. I don't believe the quality of the Caviar Green is the same as the RE3. I completely agree with you. The older drives did have a lot less heat, less 'speed' in moving parts, and much less density to deal with. While it may explain increased reliability, that doesn't excuse modern day products for a lack of reliability if they are supposedly built with the same mindset. It's amazing to see a 1gb and 1tb drive side-by-side in the same form factor. Even though it's been 15 years of technological evolution, 1000x as much data in the same space is still quite a feat. I've read about the 4k sectored drives. There's some incompatability issues currently, but I think that will go away just like the 4gb memory limit as things evolve. My long term plan is to migrate to zfs on two manually mirrored freenas's connected via a vpn. This should decrease the likelihood of data corruption by an order of magnitude. Each freenas shouldn't have corruption issues and each unit can compare with the other to confirm that. Worse case scenario--3 freenas with zfs.

I have to dispute what you're saying. Find the MTBF on an older drive and a consumer one made today. The consumer drive MTBF isn't the same. The aforementioned Seagate drives have a 1,000,000 hour MTBF. Most consumer drives have a 400,000 hour MTBF with an 'office' duty cycle--not the 24x7 duty cycle testing of the past. When I bought the 80GB drive is was one of the largest capacity USB external drives available, and it was so new that was only available in USB 1.0. This was a top-of-the-line product, on par with other higher-end products of the time. I don't trust any drive from this decade for more than a year or two. I have two Western Digital 1gb drives that were manufactured in 1996 that were recycled after seeing duty in harsh environments, and they still work fine. And I have 4 failed drives from this decade--more than the whole history of my computing with PCs back to 1988. (I've only had one Maxtor lxt213s and two Quantum 4gb Atlas drives fail.) A $60 drive is built better than one that cost $1000? I think things have gotten better, but not enough to warrant a 10x reduction in cost without compromising quality. And this cost reduction doesn't even account for inflation. There's just no way.

Yep, this is the kicker. Writing it correctly is the easy part.

Thank you for this post! I had no idea zfs existed. That's what I need. And it looks like FreeNas has an implementation of it. Man that would save a lot of hassle!

Woke up to find my web server needed rebooting. Mirrors back online again.

I used to do that until I found files miscomparing between drives. I've got two full 640gb drives that I compare every year. And every year I find a file or two that miscompare. Luckily, I pull this from a third backup to figure out which file was correct and which was wrong. These are Seagate/Maxtor SATA drives formatted NTFS. And the crazy thing is I've seen the same thing on a pair of 160gb drives that were IDE and formatted FAT32. I think as areal densities have increased, the error rate has stayed the same, so the likelyhood of having an error has increased even though the error rate spec has stayed the same. I use three Western Digital RE3 drives manually mirrored and am transferring all of my usb drive pairs to them. Data migration sucks.

Wow. She takes the cake. I'd love to see her go to a shrink and get a professional assessment. Or if the drive has failed. Drives are built no-where near as well as they once were. I have an 80gb that's not even 5yrs old that was filled and put away start clicking when I went to retrieve the data. I have a SCSI raid full of 9gb 2nd generation Seagate Cheetah drives that I booted up after almost a decade and they worked perfectly. You get what you pay for--the Cheetah drives were $1100 each back in the 90s. I'm glad you've joined us. Just in time! My poor little server is getting hammered like never before. It actually got stuck mid-reboot earlier this morning, so all my mirrors were down for a good 8hrs.

LOL!! "Can you say floppy?" "Flop-eee"