Flack

Right after the Christmas of 1994 I attended HoHoCon, the first "modern" hacker con that later inspired DefCon and HOPE (Link). I remember seeing a lot of cool things that weekend, but one of the coolest was a console copier. As I watched DrunkFux (the founder of HoHoCon) and several members of the Cult of the Dead Cow demonstrating the unit, I knew I had to have one. Tracking down a console copier was not as simple of searching eBay back then. After a few months of searching, in the Spring of 1995 I tracked down Anthrox (a SNES demo group) who connected me with Fairlight, the infamous C64/Amiga/PC cracking group. For several years Fairlight was reselling console copiers. During the transaction I was informed that Fairlight was going to stop selling console copiers, and that I was receiving the very last one. A couple of weeks later, my Super Wildcard DX arrived. The Super Wildcard DX was made by Front FarEast (FFE), and shipped with 32 megabits (4 megabytes) of RAM, expandable up to 96 megabits. The top of the unit contains a female cartridge port for inserting SNES cartridges. The left hand side contains the floppy drive. The bottom of the unit contains the male cartridge port that inserts into the Super Nintendo. When powered on, the unit launches into a graphical menu. Each of the menu's 8 items lead to sub-menus: - Wildcard Options allows users to run programs, transfer cartridges to disk, edit memory or obtain program information. - Disk options allow users to format disks, rename files, delete files, edit files, and copy files. - Realtime Save Options allow users to backup and restore real time save data. - Password options allow users to edit, backup and restore passwords, and search for cheat codes. - Cart options allow users to run a cartridge, transfer programs, transfer battery RAM, and edit memory. - Game/Utility options include a PCX picture viewer, a freeware game (Shingles), and a demo (in Chinese). - Setup options include screen setup, user message, and reset to default. - Diagnostics include self test, Wildcard info, System info, and credits. Through the menu system, dumping cartridges to floppy disks is simple. Games larger than 1.4 meg are automatically split, and users are prompted to insert additional floppy disks as needed. Loading games is just as simple -- games can be loaded from the main menu or, if a disk is in the drive when it is powered on it will autoload, bypassing the main menu completely. The loading screen contains a progression bar, showing users how much of the game has loaded. Once the game is completely loaded, it is stored in the SWC's RAM and stays there until the unit is powered off. If the SNES is reset, the game remains in RAM and will simply restart. The SWC does have a port for a power adapter but does not need one, as it can be powered from the SNES cartridge port. It should be noted that dumped games end up in .SWC format, which is identical to the .SMC format (same headers). That means ROMs dumped with the SWC will work on any Super Nintendo emulator. This also means the inverse is true; any ROM downloaded from the Internet in SWC/SMC format will load and play on the Super Wildcard. The Super Wild Card DX is my all time favorite console copier. It's fast, simple to use, and reliable. Its memory editing capabilities and password features greatly expand the functionality of the SNES, and it's high compatibility means almost anything can be dumped and played.

Although predated by a few consoles including the Sega CD and the 3D0, it was the Sony PlayStation that ushered in the era of CD-based consoles to the masses. Cheap manufacturing costs and the ability to store 650 megs of game data per CD won out over cartridges, which were more expensive to produce and limited in storage capacity (64 megabytes, on the Nintendo 64). The unfortunate product of CD and DVD based games was piracy. With CD and DVD burners installed in even the most inexpensive computers, it was only a matter of time before enterprising hackers put two and two together and figured out a way to circumvent the copy protection included in CD-based gaming consoles. Figuring out ways around the protection was the hard part; duplicating the disc based media was simple. Not so however with cartridge-based games. The average gamer did not have hardware or skills needed to extract (or “dump”) the game data from cartridges, or put that data back on to new, blank cartridges. Doing so (especially on a small scale) would have been cost prohibitive, which is essentially the entire reason for pirating software. So even though cartridge-based consoles did not have the copy protection that the CD-based systems had, because of the obscurity of the cartridge format, those systems were safe from pirates. Right? Well, not really. While blank cartridges were expensive, floppy disks were not. Thus, the idea of console copiers were born. [What is a Console Copier?] Console copiers are devices that attach to cartridge-based systems and perform two primary tasks. The first is to allow users to load games from some form of removable media (other than a cartridge) into the console, tricking the console into thinking a cartridge has been inserted. A console copier’s second function is to allow users to dump their games from cartridge form to some other type of storage. I am being intentionally vauge here, as media differed from machine to machine; most earlier systems used floppy disks for storage. As cartridge-sizes grew, so did the media — Nintendo 64 copiers used Zip Disks or CD-Rom drives for storage. Console copiers had other uses as well, such as ROM hacking and serving as inexpensive software development units, but the primary demographic was undoubtedly pirates. Flash cards are not console copiers. Flash cards are cartridges that contain memory that can be “flashed,” or reprogrammed, multiple times. Flash cards typically plug into game consoles the same way a cartridge connects. Depending on the amount of RAM the cartridge contains, a flash card may contain multiple games. Due to inconsistancy between cartridges on earlier systems (such as NES mappers) and the expense in developing and manufacturing such devices, console copiers were relatively rare for 8-bit systems. There were copiers, such as simple EEPROM duplicators for the Atari 2600 or the original Game Doctor for the FamiCom, but it wasn’t until the arrival of 16-bit systems such as the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis launched that console copiers began readily appearing — and by “appearing,” I mean “in the back alleys of Hong Kong.” In the early 1990s, console copiers were difficult to locate in the US. The only way to get one was to order one from some shady overseas company, or buy one from a local importer (and paying his import fees, of course). According to this archived FAQ from 1993, copiers run between “$280 and $370.” That was a lot of money to mail to an overseas company selling illegal devices. As manufacturing prices went down, companies began cranking out console copiers. Companies such as UFO Enterprises, Front Far East, Venus Corp. and the oddly-named Bung Enterprises began churning out dozens of different models. Most of these devices were similar in design and function. Each unit plugged into a console’s cartridge port, and contained a floppy disk drive and a cartridge port of its own. Insert a game cartridge into the copier, and these machines were able to dump the contents of that cartridge on to a floppy disk. These ROM dumps are the same ROMs that are used for computer-based emulators. Without a cartridge in the unit, games (via the floppy drive) were able to be loaded into the unit and played on the original console. Likewise, ROMs downloaded from the Internet (or BBSes, back then) could be copied to a floppy disk and played, without needing the original cartridge. 3.5″ floppies were large enough to store Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games at first, but as games grew in size, so did the needs for more RAM on console copiers. Most copiers were able to span large games across multiple disks. For the Nintendo 64, the makers of console copiers upgraded their media storage. The Z64 uses Zip Disks; the V64 and CD64 both use CD-Rom drives. Some copiers included parallel ports for linking units directly to computers. Others began including multiple adapters for connecting to multiple systems. Venus’ Multi Game Hunter could connect to both the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis. Bung’s Multi Game Doctor could dump SNES, Genesis, Neo-Geo, PC-Engine, Super Graphics, Game Gear, and Game Boy games (Link). [What happened to Console Copiers?] The same thing that happened to dinosaurs. No, they didn’t fall into tar pits — they became extinct. After losing a lawsuit to Nintendo in 2000, Bung/Mr. Flash stopped distributing Nintendo copiers. In fear of more lawsuits, other companies quickly followed suit. With all new consoles moving to disc-based media, there was no need for new console copiers. Handheld consoles such as the Gameboy Advance and the Nintendo DS moved to flash carts. Flash carts were even developed for many of the older systems as well; Tototek.com currently sells flash carts for the Sega Genesis (which also supports 32X games), Super Nintendo, Game Gear, PC Engine, Sega Master System, and other systems. Some of these include parallel adapters that allow owners to also dump cartridges to their PC, although typically flash carts are simply associated with playing both copyrighted and non-copyrighted (homebrew) games on vintage hardware. The rest of this week, I’ll be reviewing some console copiers from my private collection. These include copiers for the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and the Nintendo 64. If I haven’t bored you to death by then, I’ll move on to some of the flash carts I own.

I pick Mason up from school every day around 3:30pm. Susan and Morgan don't get home until around 6pm, so for two and a half hours, it's just me and the boy. I treasure that time we spend together and the conversations we have. The first thing I always ask him about when he gets in the truck is how his day went. "It was good," he said yesterday. "I had mashed potatoes and chicken meat for lunch. RyRy (Ryan, one of his friends) and I made up a new game. And we missed snacktime and recess because we were on lockdown." Lockdown? Is that some sort of thing teacher-imposed punishment when the kids are bad or something? I wish. Lockdown is when the school gets shut down for security reasons. Doors are locked, lights are turned off, shades are drawn, and the children are huddled together in the back of their classroom until the all-clear signal is given. I quizzed Mason about the lockdown but he had few specific answers. He was pretty sure that it wasn't a drill -- which apparently, they practice as often as we used to do fire and tornado drills. It's hard getting detailed answers from a six-year-old sometimes. After school I took Mason for a haircut, and when we got home there was a message on the answering machine from Mason's principal. Around 3pm, Yukon Police were chasing a suspect on foot and the chase ended up on school property. The lockdown was real, and lasted about twenty minutes. I'm not sure what bothered me more -- the fact that my kid's school was locked down for 20 minutes, or how nonchalant he was about the whole incident.

If you can gauge the success of an arcade auction by how sore you are the following day(s), then the Dallas SuperAuction was a success. Compared to some of the other SuperAuctions events I've attended I would say it was on the small side, but it still dwarfed all the Oklahoma City auctions I've been to. Your best bet of finding what you want at a decent price at an auction still seems to be in Dallas. When I walked through the front door I ran into Oklahoma City locals Bricktop, Thomas and Mike. I ended up hanging out with Bricktop and Mike quite a bit during the auction. I can't believe how much those guys know about coin-ops, and I really enjoyed just standing near them, listening to them talk about machines or watching them work on stuff. Just when I think I'm starting to get the hang of these machines I watch the old pros dig in and I start feeling stupid again. Also there were Digital Press alumni 98Pacecar (who seems to know everything about arcade games), Steve W and Darth Sensei. Steve W has an uncanny knack of attracting the megaphone's attention. No matter where he stands the speakers get turned to face him. I used to write down every sale price of every game, but due to all the buybacks it seems kind of pointless now. I do wish I had written down all the game titles because there were a lot of good games there. The front row had a couple of Ms. Pacs (one that went for under $200), Donkey Kong Jr., Jungle King (non-working), TRON (non-working, which 98Pacecar's buddy bought), Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Joust (board problem?), Donkey Kong (tube problem?), and some others. A couple of years ago at SuperAuctions the first row, maybe row and a half were classics. This past weekend, the first row was half classics and half Multicades/Ultracades. The Multicades were bringing in between $400-$800, although some of those lower ones may have been buybacks. There were a few shooting games, couple of older golf games, several old fighting games (MKII, UMKIII, Tekken) and at least three or four Sega Die Hards in those giant black plastic cabs. There were lots of redemption games there and if you ever want a giant ticket dispensing game for your house, this is the place to get one. Some of them sold for pennies on the dollar. Hell, some of them sold FOR a dollar! There were a lot of Cherry gambling machines and jukeboxes which seemed to take hours to get through. If you wanted a broken jukebox, you missed out. They sold 11 of them in a lot for one dollar. You would have had to pay me more than that to drag them off. A real Double Diamond slot machine brought $700. The small skill-stop machines went for $40/each and $60/each in two lots. Before the auction I bought a three-player Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road along with an additional Track Pak board in the parking lot (pre-arranged deal with Darren, and I still owe him the money -- do you take PayPal?). I took dad's trailer just in case I ran across anything else I wanted, but the problem with that is, when I take the trailer I have a tendency to fill it up. From the auction itself, I ended up with a non-working Buster Bros (power supply?), Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Sunset Riders (4 Player), and a Scramble. While loading the games I discovered that most of the wood on my dad's trailer was rotten. When moving the first game up on the trailer, the dolly actually pushed down through the wood. Of course, as is my luck, the UMK3 and Scramble were working fine at the auction and once I got them home they won't fire up. The UMK3 has no video and just randomly "bongs." The Scramble has a loud buzz coming from the monitor. I really hope the monitor's not hosed on it. Hopefully the jostling of travel just loosened some wires. I'll look at them this week and see what's up. Preview was from 8am-10am, the auction kicked off around 10:30am, and the last item sold just after 7pm. I had planned on crashing at my friend's house in Dallas, but Susan convinced me I should come home Saturday night, so I did. Those wives sure are convincing sometimes. I threw a tarp over the games Saturday night and unloaded everything Sunday. I had to move games around for a couple of hours just to make room for everything -- something I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with. I also ended up pretty much destroying the trailer -- I put three or four more big holes in the trailer's flooring. That thing's done until I can replace the wood. I had a good time at the auction, and a great time hanging out with everybody. 98Pacecar and I snuck away for lunch and had a good time hanging out. Sometimes I forget how much the guy knows about coin-op games, but man he knows a lot. I had hoped to hook up with 98Pacecar again later in the day to see his personal collection but I didn't get my last game loaded until 7:30pm. I made it home sometime after midnight. Thanks to all the Digital Press guys who came out, Mike and Dean for helping me load the trailer up after a long, long day, and especially my buddy Jeff who helped me unload all these games off the trailer and into my building. I really, really appreciated his help.

I saw a package of these in Vegas last summer, but they were around $25 and I didn't think they were worth that. I ran across the same package for $15 (including shipping) last week on eBay, and decided to pick them up. Basically, they are as advertised -- horrified, B-movie victim action figures. "We provide the screaming hordes, you provide the monster!", says the packaging. I had a good time arranging them today on my desk, fleeing from random things that live in and around my work area.

Huh, that is interesting to know. Thanks!

Although I knew there would come a day when Mason would want his own computer, I didn't realize was that he would be six-years-old when that day came. This has been in the works for a while, but things really kicked into gear Christmas Morning. One of Mason's more expensive presents this year was a Leap Frog brand (I think) learning laptop that plays cartridge-based educational games. It's not *really* a laptop -- it just looks like one. The screen is black and white and only about three inches in size. Mason took one look at it and cast it aside. Later, after the Christmas buzz had died down, Mason came to Susan and said, "you know how you told me to still like the person, even if they get you a bad gift? Well, I still like you even though you got me that laptop." The disappointment spawned from the fact that, for a moment, the kid actually thought we had given him a real laptop. Keep dreaming, bucko! Backtracking a bit ... sometime last year, dad bought a new computer and said we could have his old one for Mason. The machine's not that old -- in fact, It's a pretty nice computer, with more horsepower under the hood than my server. I set the machine aside but never got around to the reloading project. After Mason's disappointment Christmas morning, I decided this might be a good time to go ahead and get Dad's old computer up and running. Reloading computers always seems like a bigger deal in your head than it usually turns out to be. With the web these days, tracking down drivers even for machines a few years old is typically a non-issue. In less than an hour I had XP loaded and configured. On the way home from work yesterday, Mason and I stopped by Staples and picked up a couple of wireless NICs. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Staples? Unfortunately in Yukon, only two chains carry computer parts -- Staples, who rarely has what I'm looking for in stock, and Wal-Mart, where I somehow manage to set off the security alarm every time I exit the building. Deciding between these two stores really is "the lesser of two evils." I am at the point where I will start driving to Oklahoma City just to avoid these two particular stores. I should have done that yesterday, but I didn't. I went to Staples, where they had two registers open and both were stopped in their tracks because of merchandise that didn't have price tags on them. The two network cards I bought were marked $39.99, but rang up as $59.99 -- that was another ordeal. ARGH. That's a good pledge to make for 2008 -- stop shopping at Staples! Installing the USB network cards took less effort than buying them. I haven't used a USB NIC before -- I was afraid that the small form factor would mean bad reception, but so far they seem to work pretty well. It's amazing how worthless a computer seems these days without the Internet. I couldn't update Windows, couldn't find drivers, couldn't do anything before I got the machine online. And really, that's all Mason wants to do. Nickelodeon and Disney have a few websites set up with games and cartoons, and that's all Mason wants to do on the computer so far. So anyway, things are up and running. Mason spent some time last night on iCarly.com (gag) watching videos, until Morgan clocked him in the head, commandeered the chair and headed off to Sesame Street's website. How early they learn.

You may recall from this previous post that we (mostly the kids, with a little help from mom and dad) decorated the front lawn in a Candyland theme in hopes of winning our neighborhood's first annual Christmas Decorating Contest. The kids helped with every aspect of the decorating. Judgement day came and went and ... we heard nothing. After several days, we still heard nothing. I guess I didn't expect them to contact everybody in the neighborhood with a note daying, "Sorry, you didn't win!" but I thought maybe the winning yards would have had a sign or trophy or something posted in the front yard. Even a small sign posted at the entrance of the neighborhood's entrance would have sufficed. Instead we were left with a weird sense of inconclusion. Who won? Turns out, we did! Well, second place -- but hey, that's good enough for us! Apparently the award committee just now got around to handing out the prizes. Ours, which was hand delivered Sunday, was a $30 gift certificate to Inner Urban (a place I don't really care for but, eh, free is free). Dad, Mason and I went out last night to celebrate -- Mason's treat.

Since you're the only person who voted one way or the other, I think I will continue to funnel both of my blogs here to AA. Thanks for reading the blog -- I hope it continues to be interesting/entertaining in 2008!

For the fourth day in a row now, I've continued working on my quest to convert all of my old Commodore 64 disks into modern D64 images. Over the past few days I've converted approximately 150 disks out of the 700 or so disks I still have. After handling 150 floppy disks in a row over the past few days, I've gotten pretty good at predicting which disks are going to convert, and which are going to be full of read errors. Back when I first got my Commodore 64, floppy disks were roughly ten bucks for a box of ten ($1/disk). For the first few months I had my computer, especially while using a 300 baud modem, a box of ten disks would last a few weeks. By the time I graduated to 1200 baud, I was filling one side of a disk each night. Keep in mind that you were only supposed to use one side (the front) of a floppy disk. The back side was not "notched" and by default, could not be written to. The simplest solution to this was purchasing a disk notcher, which ran around $5. After floppies were notched, you could write to the back side of them as well, doubling their capacity. There were all sorts of reasons people gave why one should not do this. Some people said that the backsides of disks weren't quality checked, and were prone to data loss (maybe true). One person once told me that the dust filters inside disks were only meant to run clockwise -- when run counter-clockwise (when the disk was in upside down), the filters would essentially run in reverse, dumping any collected dust directly into your drive. I can't imagine that's true. Regardless of whether or not it was good practice, I was young, broke, and desperate for disk space. I used the backsides of disks whenever I could. By the time my parents were driving me all over the city so that I could trade games in person with fellow Commodore 64 owners, I was going through blank disks like mad. Mail order companies began delivering diskettes much cheaper than the stores -- maybe $60 or $70 per hundred, vs. the still going rate of a buck a disk at retail stores. None of my friends nor I had $60 or $70, so we would all chip in and split a hundred pack two, three, sometimes four ways. It kept us going. At the time I don't remember these disks feeling or performing any different than the name brand floppies sold in stores, but boy can I sure tell a difference now. Some of the floppies I pull out of my old disk box are stiff as a board and as thick as cardboard. I haven't had a single one that felt like that fail me. Others slide out of their old disk sleeves almost like an undercooked slice of cheese pizza, drooping over my fingertips. You can practically see the 1's and 0's falling off the disk. Those are the disks that are failing with multiple read errors. The other disks that are failing almost without exception are my first hundred or so disks. Keep in mind that I was a Commodore user for basically a decade, meaning the earlier disks in my collection are years older than the later ones. As I mentioned earlier this week, I recently read on the net that the average lifespan of a 5 1/4 floppy disk was six months. Some of my earliest disks are 21 and 22 years old -- the "younger" ones are merely 15 years old. Apparently those few extra years, combined with the cheap ass brands of floppy disks I used over the years, are finally catching up with me. Surprisingly, I haven't run into any disks yet that are completely unreadable. The ones that are bad simply have random bad sectors, usually near the beginning or the end of the disk. Once I'm done with this conversion project I'll have to go back through and test them all, seeing what still works and what doesn't. It's the project that never ends, I tell ya.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that what is old and mundane to many of us is new and exciting to children. In fact just the other day, the kids went wild when I rolled down the windows while driving in the car. I can't remember the last time I got excited over wind blowing in my face, but the kids loved it. Mason once told me his favorite thing about my truck was "the time I rode in the back of it." I was twelve years old back in 1985 when the original Super Mario Bros. came out for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). 1985 wasn't so long ago, it seems. Although I didn't own an NES for several years after its release, two of my neighbors (Doug Deckard and Jason Lee) did, and it was there I got my first taste of Mario, the little red-suited plumber that could. I spent hours at both of their homes, learning the game inside and out. A few years later when Super Mario Bros. 3 came out, Jeff, Andy and I would spend hours upon hours at Jeff's house, racking up extra men and playing weekend-long gaming sessions trying to beat the game. Back to the kids for a moment; one of the things that really excites them is the projector I have upstairs. Whether it's watching movies or playing games, the kids really don't care what's on as long as it's on the giant screen. Last night while Mommy and Mason were out and Morgan became inconsolable, I put Shrek III on upstairs and her eyes lit up. "Shrek's biiiiiiiig," she said, her tears instantly drying. Recently, Mason's discovered that all my gaming systems are hooked to the projector as well. A while back I picked up one of those Yobo NES clones. I've heard mixed reviews as to their compatibility and quality, so I decided to hook it up over the weekend and test some games out. The minute Mason heard the sound of videogames echoing from the upstairs game room, he weaseled his way up there into the middle of everything. One of the first games I tested was Super Mario Bros. 3. Mason's been playing the original Super Mario Bros. since he was around two, but for some reason I guess he's never played #3. Like a true gamer, he picked up the game in no time. So far, Mason's spent the better half of the weekend learning the ins and outs of Super Mario Bros. 3. And while I still enjoy the game in small doses, I have to remember that what I've been playing for twenty years now is all new to him. Every brick that explodes, every new enemy, every new treasure that's discovered lights up his eyes. "Dad, look at this!" he exclaims every time he finds a new hidden room. His joy reminds me of the joy I used to get from playing games, a joy that got lost somewhere in the battle for faster processors and better graphics. Enjoy it while it lasts, kid.

One of my goals for 2008 is to finish all of the analog-to-digital conversion projects I started in 2007. This includes converting all our VHS tapes to DVDs, and all of our old CDs, cassette tapes and records to MP3. Another one of the projects, which has proved to be both the most rewarding and the most frustrating, is the conversion of all my old Commodore 64 diskettes to D64 images. Just to get everybody up to speed ... on one hand, in the real world, you have real Commodore 64 computers and real Commodore 64 disk drives that use real floppy disks. On the other hand, you have virtual Commodore 64 machines, called emulators, that run on modern personal computers. These virtual computers need virtual disks to work, and those disks are commonly stored in D64 format. You can take those virtual D64 disks and put them in a virtual disk drive connected to your virtual Commodore 64 and load them and play them as if it were all real. There are two ways to acquire D64 images. You can download them, or, if you have the proper equipment, you can make your own. So, let's talk about the "proper equipment." The tried and true method requires a unique combination of hardware and software. On the hardware side, you'll need a computer running DOS with either a SPP, PS/2, EPP or ECP parallel port. You'll need a real, vintage Commodore disk drive, and you'll need a special "X1541" cable to connect the two. There are at least six different flavors of "X" cables (X1541, XE1541, XM1541, XA1541, XH1541, and XP1541), each of which require different software tweaks and configurations. Once you get everything wired up and talking, the DOS-based program Star Commander will allow you to convert real Commodore disks to D64 disk images. The trickiest part of the whole process is finding a parallel port that works. In my experience, the older the computer, the better your chances are of getting everything working. I finally got everything to work by using a 486 PC from the mid-90s, which I keep around for this sole purpose. Adding to the project's complexity is the problem of getting D64 images off my 486 and onto my laptop. When's the last time you networked a DOS-based machine to a Windows XP laptop? I ended up with a dual-boot setup on the 486; that way I can transfer disks through DOS, and connect to my home network using Windows 98 (using ten-year-old networking tools and protocols) to transfer the images over. Clunky, but it works. I don't complain. Star Commander is a DOS program that resembles the old DOS versions of PC-Tools and Norton Commander, with a split screen display showing the Commodore drive on the left side of the screen and the PC's hard drive on the right. Once everything's connected and working, creating a D64 image is simply a matter of pressing a button, waiting, and praying that my disks are still good and not full of read errors. The back side of most disk sleeves contained pictoral examples of things that could damage your disks, including: magnets (which includes monitors, speakers, motors, and cell phones), bending, heat, cold, touching the disk, opening the drive while the disk was loading, opening the drive while the disk was being written to, powering the drive or computer off with the disk still in the drive, or exposing the disk to dirt, dust or smoke. Even if you managed to keep your disks away from all those things, the biggest killer of floppy disks has been time. The older 5 1/4 disks get, the more prone they are to develop errors. According to this page, the average life span of a floppy disk is six months. Most of the disks I'm converting are between 20 and 25 years old. And of course, I run in to errors. If there is a silver lining to this cloud it's that the errors aren't always where data is stored. The conversion process tries to copy and archives every track and sector of a floppy disk. So far I've found lots of disks with errors on the inside or outside edge (Track 1 or Track 35), but that doesn't always seem to affect the data stored on the disk. The only way to know for sure is to test every archive, something that would take years. It takes roughly a minute to convert each disk to a D64 image, not including things like sorting, cataloging and testing. I have roughly 700 Commodore floppy disks -- double sided. That's 24 hours of conversion time alone; hopefully I can get them all done within a month or two, assuming I put all my other analog to digital conversions on hold. Testing each one could take a year. The most common question people ask me about this is, "why are you doing this?" Even my wife asked, "hasn't somebody already done this?" For the most part, yes. 95% of what I'm archiving has already been archived. Through Google, I could find 95% of the programs on my disks and download them all in a single day. That leaves 5%, however, that aren't out there. 5% of my programs are things I, or friends of mine, wrote or created. There are pictures, letters, stories, demos and even programs that my friends and I created. There are things on these disks that I have the only known copy of. It is a race against time to archive these things on to a new media that is not deteriorating on a daily basis. In D64 format, these disk images can live on forever. It is a way to finalize my old C64 collection, to set it in stone and share it with the world. I'm not sure that the world's that interested in it, but it's something I feel like I need to do. The hardest part of the entire process is not getting sidetracked by playing each disk.

I can play games with my 486 as well, although mainly I use mine to transfer Commodore 64 diskettes to D64 images. And, someday the hard drives will die in both of our machines. Obviously, the importance of backups are relative to the information stored upon a machine. My guess is, that 486sx of yours probably isn't your primary machine. You probably have some games on there, and if the hard drive died tomorrow, my guess is you'd put another one in there, reinstall DOS or whatever you're running on it, and reinstall your games. I don't back up my 486, either. Interesting enough, many of the older hard drives used less platters, which generated less heat, which may be why some of them are outlasting modern drives. The last drive I had fail, a Maxtor 300 gig drive, was about six months old. It's rare for them to go that quickly, but it happens.

Internet pal Dave Farquhar recently blogged about his Fifteen Minutes a Day theory. Says Dave: A few months ago, someone actually posted something helpful: a suggestion that you spend 15 minutes a day working on your hobby instead of talking about it. Fifteen minutes isn't a lot of time, but that's the point. You can almost always find 15 minutes. And 15 minutes isn't enough time to accomplish anything major, but you can accomplish lots of little things, and getting those little things out of the way can make things more productive on those days when you have a big block of time you can dedicate to it. I think this is a terrific idea and one I plan on implementing, although I hope to still be able to find time to talk about my adventures as well. Dave goes on to mention that fifteen minutes a day adds up to 91 hours and 15 minutes a year, although I think he forgot that 2008 is a leap year so this year you'll actually get in 91.5 hours of work.

If you aren't backing up your home computer on a regular basis, you are either insane, don't care about your data, or have never lost a hard drive before. Did you know hard drives have a 100% failure rate -- every hard drive will eventually die. It's not a question of "if," but "when." To date, I've been lucky; I haven't had any critical drives die on me yet, but I did something earlier today that sure made me glad I run nightly backups. It all started this morning when I noticed my website was running slow. Like, really slow. When I checked TaskManager on my server I noticed that every time I (or anyone else) visited robohara.com, my server was crawling to a stop. A closer look at TaskManager showed each time someone visited robohara.com, PHP-CGI.EXE was launching over 100 times. I can't tell you for sure when this started, but I just noticed it today. I'm sure it hasn't been doing it for long. I went and checked all my other websites, but none of them were experiencing the same problem. Thinking something had gone wrong with my theme, I switched themes. Some themes experienced the same problem; others didn't. Rather than spend a week tracking down the problem, I decided the easiest and quickest solution would be to simply switch to another theme. But before trying that, I decided I would upgrade Wordpress. Upgrading Wordpress is a super simple process. You copy files into your Wordpress directory and run them -- that's it. I've upgraded Wordpress dozens of times before, so imagine my surprise with this upgrade failed. My browser filled with database errors, and when I refreshed robohara.com, I got one, ominous error. No posts found. Fearing I had just lost four years worth of posts, I panicked briefly before remembering -- hey dummy, this is why you do nightly backups! The first thing I did was restore my Wordpress directory from last night's backup. That took less than a minute. I then restored my SQL database (where Wordpress stores its posts), also from last night. Again, success. I restarted my website was back up and running. With a freshly restored copy of my website I was able to switch to a different theme, one that was not causing the problem, and call it a day. Back when my computer was simply filled with games and all my important documents were stored on floppies (shudder), backups weren't that critical. These days, my entire life is online. Every phone number, every important document, and practically every photograph I have of my family is stored on my computer. Hard drive failure at this point in time would be devastating. Depending on how much data you need to back up, DVDs may or may not be a viable solution for you; it's not for me at this point -- I'm backing up too many machines too often these days. Instead, I recommend picking up a USB hard drive and performing nightly backups to that. If you go on vacation, the drive can easily be taken with you or stored somewhere else where fire or thieves could not access it. Losing my Wordpress blog would have severely sucked, but losing ten years worth of digital photos would suck infinitely worse.

You know, the joystick is roughly the size and shape of a pack of 16 single Kraft slices. Maybe that's where the company got the idea?

This is actually the third arcade machine I've come across sitting at a Windows blue screen this year. I did not realize that so many legit machines ran on Windows.

You know what's weird? I just checked KLOV and they don't mention it either. Maybe it won't stay running long enough for them to catalog it.

Don't get any funny ideas; mine aren't for sale.

For at least a decade, the problem with emulation has not been technological in nature. For several years now, modern computers have been able to, for all intents and purposes, faithfully reproduce older computers, videogame consoles, and arcade machines. The difference between emulation and "the real deal" is all the other things that went along with those old gaming experiences -- and one of the most memorable things about those old games were their controls. Playing Atari games doesn't feel right to me unless I'm using an Atari joystick, and playing arcade games, no matter how accurately MAME reproduces their sounds and graphics, does not feel right unless I'm standing in front of an arcade machine's control panel. Shortly after getting my Commodore 64 back in 1985, I got my favorite joystick of all time. Made by Kraft, the joystick had a short, black stick and a base the same color as the Commodore 64 itself. It also had a small switch on the bottom that swapped the stick between 4-way and 8-way mode. I'm sure a lot of it is just what you grew up with, but I hated all the Commodore joysticks that included buttons on top of the sticks (Wico, Thrustmaster, Boss, etc.) The Kraft's small size allowed it to be held much like the Epyx 500 sticks (which came out a few years later). My friend Jeff owned the Epyx sticks and, while I liked them too, the Kraft was always my favorite. After almost twenty years of off-and-on usage, my old Kraft finally gave out on me. At first, it started having problems going left. You could still make it go left, but you had to press the small stick really hard. Unfortunately, the small stick wasn't meant for that kind of pressure and it quickly bent before breaking. I've tried a few other joysticks (including original Atari 2600 joysticks) on my old Commie, but games haven't felt the same since. After a year or two of missing that old Kraft, I did what pretty much everybody looking for old things does. I turned to eBay. I found a few of the old joysticks online, but I passed them by due to high prices. Most of the ones I saw were selling for $40 or more. Apparently, other people were interested in the sticks as well. After almost a year of searching I finally got one for $20. Finally! When the joystick arrived it was well-used, but at least it worked. I quickly hooked the stick up and got back to playing. In the back of my mind, I wondered how much life this stick had left in it. I kept my eBay searches going, in hopes of a better deal. Eventually, I found one. Four, to be exact. A month or two ago I found someone selling four Kraft joysticks, still new in the box. The best part of the deal was, the seller was only asking $5 per joystick, and was willing to combine shipping. I bought all four in a heartbeat. When the joysticks arrived I was surprised to find they were black in color with a red firing button. Apparently Kraft made two different color combinations -- a black/red combo (for the Atari 2600) and a beige/black combo (for Commodore 64 owners). Functionally, the sticks are the same (Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 joysticks are interchangable). Considering my original Kraft stick lasted 20 years, I now own a lifetime supply of joysticks. Time to get gaming, I'd say!

Taken this weekend at Incredible Pizza.

As I do the last of my 2007 digital house cleaning, here are a few pictures I took that never made it into blog posts. Need for Speed Underground arcade game, bluescreened. Shoddy Properties? I'll say! Same building -- this way to see Dr. Crook. Mason needs neither a spoon nor napkin at Braum's. The cat is inside; the bird, outside.

Pearl's Restaurant, off I-240 and Penn, is permanently closing tomorrow. A secret informant (my friend's daughter, who works there) told us that someone bought the entire area, and that all the businesses in that area are either closing or moving. This includes Aloha Gardens (one of my favorite Chinese buffets) and Outback (other locations still exist). In honor of Pearl's, we decided to have lunch there one last time. And as I'm sitting in the restaurant, knowing that the doors will close forever tomorrow, I only have one thought on my mind. What can I steal from here? Yeah, you heard me. I want a souvenier, a souvenier to remember Pearl's by. Something to remind me of all the great times I've had at this particular location. And by "all the great times," I mean, "both times I've eaten there." I really, really wanted the sign by the entry way warning patrons about the dangers of eating raw oysters; unfortunately, it was too heavily guarded by Pearl's hostesses, so I had to settle for the next best thing. A pepper grinder. If you would like freshly ground pepper on anything, feel free to stop by my cubical in the basement. Tips (cash or PayPal) gladly accepted.

I've been reticent to talk about my post-surgery weight loss for a couple of reasons, the main being I don't really feel like I've done anything. Had I shed a few pounds through diet or exercise or lifestyle changes, I'd be bragging all over the place. The fact is, I'm losing weight because I had my body surgically altered -- although technically my lap band hasn't been filled yet, so it's only offering the minimum restriction possible. Most of the weight loss I've experienced to date has been the result of the mandatory diet I was prescribed by the doctor. Anyone can lose weight under those circumstances. But anyway, yeah, I've lost 50 pounds since Thanksgiving. A couple of my favorite shirts are starting to fit better, and I've had to put three new holes in my belt. I'm happy, but I wouldn't say I'm proud. Talk to me in another 50 pounds and we'll see if my opinion's changed then.

Scanning back through my blog entries from 2007, I see two distinct topics; family-related articles, and technology-related entries. Because of this, I'm considering splitting my blog into two separate blogs. That way next year, my grandma doesn't have to wade through the tech entries, and my gaming/computer friends don't get bored by pictures of my kids. Those of you who both like technology and want to keep up with the family may end up reading two blogs instead of one. Currently, all my blog entries are first posted at robohara.com and then copied to Live Journal, MySpace, and Atari Age. I haven't worked out all the details, but I'm thinking about something along these lines: robohara.com (family blog) cc: Live Journal, MySpace robohara.com/tech (tech/gaming blog) cc: Atari Age, and maybe a new MySpace account. robohara.com has a subscription list you can sign up for to receive e-mail updates when new blog entries are posted. I will add that to my new tech blog as well. MySpace also has a subscription feature that e-mails you when new entries does not. I prefer Live Journal to MySpace for blogging, but without an e-mail notification system, it's hard for people to keep track of updates (at least it is for me). Still working out the kinks here -- nothing's set in stone, but after thinking about this more this morning, I think I'm going to move forward with it.