iKarith

Interesting thing about SSDD 5.25 disks: There's coating on both sides, just like on DSDD disks. Reason is that different manufacturers had heads on the top or bottom of the disk, so they kinda had to make them that way. These can be used as flippy disks as well, and back in the day everyone did so. I've not heard that these disks failed sooner than DSDD disks when you do so, but I suppose it's possible that they might.

What people fail to understand in the gaming industry is that retro games have an appeal to two kinds of people. First, there's the people who have loved these things all along. They tend not to be interested in most modern games not because they love the oldskool pixelated graphics and blippy sounds, but because THE GAMES ARE FUN in spite of those things. I mean, the C64 had some exceptional titles that really pushed the boundaries, but look at the average game on the platform, or, hell, ANY game on the Apple // prior to the Apple IIgs? Or since we're on AtariAge, how about most games for the VCS? The games that people love to play might look horrifyingly bad, but they are still fun to play. If they weren't, we wouldn't be playing them. Then there's the hipsters. And I'll just stop right there. This game looks like it's geared toward them, with their ironically 3D low-res pixelated models with realtime light and shadow so you can see how retro it is! BIG hit at Starbucks I'm sure. Unless I hear that the game is actually fun in its own right, I doubt I'll be interested.

One of those RCA jacks will be composite NTSC video, and it does have a use. [VIDEO] [/VIDEO]

That's really cool of you to offer. I'm legally blind and close proximity to CRTs gives me nasty headaches, so LCDs are already a given. If you're streaming, I'm very interested. I don't drive, and I'm in Portland, so Dallas is a fair bit of a walk for me. As I said, I had previously been looking at A600s because they were functional if what you wanted to do was play some games, but had PCMCIA so you could easily do CF storage. All good stuff there--all you need then is some way to deal with 15kHz video. I don't know where you find the video connector these days, but I've got a Gonbes board which did okay for my IIgs until I got a VGA board for it. I guess there's a VGA solution for it now, and that's what kinda made the price go up. I wish my finances were a little better at the moment, some Apple guys arranged for me to be able to go to KansasFest this year and I know some people in the Dallas area and I think they're all coming. Of course that means a two week trip and I've gotta pay for food for half of it. Fixed disability income, etc, so I'm broke 'til at least August, and possibly September. But I'm totally interested then! I probably should be a little more interested in storage solutions first, but one more machine won't kill me before I do that right? (Katie is going to KILL me...)

I think I'll wait for the hipster crowd to get over DOS PCs before I try picking one up. Suddenly these things cost as much as modern PCs again and it's just not worth it. Certainly it's not worth it for any machine designed for Windows 98, since any 32 bit PC should handle Windows XP fine, and most things designed before Windows 7 should probably handle Windows 98 even. The major reason for something older is if you want an ISA slot or two. And I do.

If I go by eBay, Apple //e goes for $150-200, IIgs goes for $200-400. Amiga pretty much anything tested and working has an asking price of $300-1800.

I've seen the "once owned by" or "once used in" or similar claims made many times, and I generally regard that as total bullshit. The last one I saw was someone claiming this TI-99/4A was used in Revenge of the Nerds. Which of course was BS, because they used a CoCo in the movie and definitely not this one particular TI. Discussed in the Ti sub. If eBay is your only metric, yeah Apple stuff is horrifyingly overpriced. $400 for a bog standard ROM01 IIgs, incomplete? Uh, how 'bout ... no? But if you're looking for a pretty basic A1200, $4-500 is what you're gonna pay for it. And then if you want any kind of storage, you're going to have to pay that on top of it. I have two Apple IIgss, two C64s, a C128, and a TI-99/4A. I might be in about $600 total investment now. I've been fortunate, I've been careful, and I've encountered kind people who have been happy to share the hobby and encourage people who want to start out. But $400 if I'm careful will get me a computer that still needs a monitor and is otherwise a base system. The A1200 isn't a particularly rare system or high end or anything that might increase its price. A500/A600 are less, but still about twice the price of a //e and more than you can find a basic IIgs system selling for. A person can always get a really amazing deal or something and I have a couple of times now, but the Amiga is just out of my $800/mo income range without something that might be classified as a minor miracle.

SyncTerm is also an option, and perhaps may be a more complete solution (Qodem's emphasis seems to be on cloning Qmodem first, even if it doesn't necessarily make sense to do so) and the UNIX version feels like it's missing a few features. SyncTerm probably will probably feel like a more complete and polished program, but the ability to make something written for ANSI work with any random modern terminal using just telnet or ssh makes qodem very attractive because it's totally complete enough to do that.

Aaaaand the problem was the selection of TELNET instead of SOCKET. BTW, when adding the entry to Qodem, edit the toggles. Turning on toggle 2 let me set backspace to send ^H instead of DEL. A Raspberry Pi could make the telnet using proper telnet protocol work just great. You'd create a restricted access user whose shell was /bin/false, homedir was not writable, qodem files not writable, etc. So basically owned by root and read-only for the user. That way nothing the user does can be changed permanently if they start twiddling qodem's settings. There'd be only one phonebook entry, basically for the ANSI form of the BBS. You'd set up telnetd to run "qodem -d 1 -x" instead of the usual logind. So the user would connect and immediately find themselves in a terminal program connecting to the BBS. When they quit from the BBS, qodem exits, ending their connection. Of course you're presently using port 23 for ASCII. You could also set it up a little differently so that ssh to bbs-user@bbs.paytonbyrd.com would not ask for a password, but instead would connect you with crypto so you can be reasonably certain your BBS password isn't sniffed. Not that I'm imagining a lot of effort to steal BBS passwords, but I'm basically paranoid.

The major issue seems to be that I kind of find myself always wanting space for two keyboards and depending on the machine, two mice. I can't always currently get it done with a single monitor. I'm using a 19" Dell right now. If the 20" Dell is about the same size and just a little wider (4:3 instead of 5:4), then my monitor is at about the right height. On this desk, the keyboard is at a fixed height, but I can see that the keyboard could be raised or lowered a few inches without being uncomfortable. That suggest to me that the most ideal thing would be to do both: Extend the width of the desktop a bit and lower the front bit where the keyboard would go, not necessarily by much. The "standard" cheap IKEA tabletop (Linnmon and similar) is 35mm/1.35 thick. Actually, my example here is about 34mm according to my good-enough digital caliper. If your keyboard and mouse are wireless, you could literally screw a piece of laminate-covered MDF and that'd give you the width for a second keyboard a bit lower. Ideally your monitor would be mounted on an arm that you could swing out of the way so it's easier to reach the back side of machines like the Apple // that are longer and expect to have things like disk drives and monitors atop them. My monitor sits atop a pine shelf with some cabinet feet attached. Not tall enough for a //e with drives stacked on top of it, but drives to the side is what I'd do I think. I suggested before using Regency shelves (restaurant wire shelving) in 18x24" size to one side, probably with the 18" side facing foreward. At about table level, I'd set up disk drives and a cord catcher to hold on to the drive cables when not in use. Behind them I'd shave the power bricks set up, taking advantage of of velcro onewrap and the wire shelves themselves to wrangle cords a bit. Above the drives I'd set up shelves for each of the retro computers in my collection. The assumption would be that I'd take the one I want to use off its rack and move it to the table, plug in the necessary cords, and I'd have access to it, my iPad, and a Raspberry Pi or a NUC or something. Possibly one of each, they're small. (I can't afford a current generation NUC, but this is kind of a more long-term plan for me anyway. Below the drives I'd have space for media and other storage. How this is going to work out is kinda related to my agreement with my fiancee: One per model, and differences need to be significant. So a C64 and a C128 are fine, but a C64 and C64C aren't. The differences are often just cosmetic, and when they're not the substantive differences are in the SID chip. And she knows that there's two sound chips but that it's possible to spend a little money and put both in the same system. And she's encouraged me to spend the money to do that. (She's a keeper.) Of course that means since I now have a C64 and a C64C, I'll have to sell one. So the representative machines are: Apple: Apple IIgs Commodore: C64C (not sure long or short board), flat C128 TI: Black and silver TI-99/4A, may eventually use a QI board that's "fixed" What I don't have yet: Apple: //e card Mac that can handle displaying on LCD Atari: Atari 800XL Tandy: CoCo probably 2 (can't afford 3) What I want but don't have a good way to get yet: Sinclair: ZX Spectrum *: MSX(2?) What I've decided I just can't afford: Atari: Atari ST or Falcon or something Commodore: Any Amiga Acorn: BBC Micro The ST just isn't on my radar. I dunno what I'd do with it. I'd ideally want a Falcon because I like the looks of that machine so much, but I can't justify paying what those go for to get one, especially since I don't know what I'd do with it. I could get a 65XE instead of an 800XL if I wanted one--I haven't seen 65XE prices to be significantly higher and I know the 800XL has the better keyboard by far and there's a lot more of them. The BBC Micro isn't often for sale, so there's a few of them and they tend not to go cheap. First glance says ZX Spectrum is far worse, but second and third glances tell you that they can be had easily and on the cheap before postage to the United States. The Spectrum is kinder there by far than the BBC Micro again. And then there's Amiga. I'm told they don't really have a helpful community--they have a heavily factionalized "scene" with a lot of hostility. Strike 1. If you're just interested in vintage games, the A600 would've been the ideal machine: Just grab a PCMCIA to CF adapter and consider a Gotek floppy emulator if you're done with the magnetic media. And then some of the fancy "essential" upgrades became available for the machine and the asking price went up almost overnight by quite a bit. That was strike two. It all seemed to me to be about generating the most profit possible to prove, giving the whole platform a reputation of being the platform for the rich o the exclusivity of anyone else. And that was strike three.

No, maybe not. Your paused animation, if you press enter there it shows the new user application and then aborts immediately. If you press space, you can fill it out. But then when you press enter, it skips two lines and it messes up the thing pretty quickly. I dunno what's going on there. This was connected ti port 6401 using Qodem's ANSI terminal emulation.

Hmm, the simplest thing I think might be an intermediate layer of some sort. I keep coming back to the fact that minicom does exactly what you want, but it does it for a serial port. And talk of telnet and minicom invariably directs to Cisco router stuff. Qodem may be an alternative to SyncTerm, but I'm having some trouble with it I think related to CR/LF.

I'm also looking forward to it, but it's probably going to have to sit on the backburner for awhile. I'll post about it when I decide what I'm doing with it.

Actually, telnet communicates several environment variables to the server: LANG and TERM are among them. What's non-standard is the silly assumption that anything that recognizes an enhanced subset of the VT102 terminal codes implemented by MS-DOS ANSI.SYS will invariably use the US-only IBM codepage 437 character set. Far more common actually even on those systems was IBM codepage 850, which is nearly identical to Windows-1252 and to the classical iso-8859-1 UNIX character set. This character set is so widespread that it represents the first "page" of Unicode. And all of this is documented in numerous Internet standards, many of which trace their origins to the 80s before many of the IBM PC conventions that have become ad hoc standards ever took hold. Sure the standards have evolved (multibyte character sets were the exception in those days, not the rule, and UTF-8 as a character encoding was not yet a thing, but the means for conveying these details is almost as old as the telnet protocol itself, out of necessity. Before the DEC-based control codes were standard, there were dozens of terminals each with their own character sets and capabilities. Only ASCII was actually guaranteed. Anything else varied by terminal maker and by region! UNIX had to be nimble, and so did telnet. Fortunately, telnet was successful at this because it was based around UNIX. The thing is that a lot of "telnet-based" things aren't actually telnet. We talk about "telnet BBSes", but they're actually just socet-based character streams over TCP. That's why you can "telnet to" a web server or a mail server or anything and speak the raw text-based protocols they speak. They don't understand keyboard keys or terminal commands because they're not designed to. And you can use the telnet program to connect to them because if the telnet client connects and doesn't get a telnet protocol at the other end, it can just go into a raw mode that's useful for debugging and testing those other tools. Given the conventions of the average late 80s and early 90s BBS, telnet is actually the wrong tool for the job. Something like syncterm is the proper thing to use actually. Possibly along with a SSL/TLS tunnel because the Internet is a much more hostile place than a direct dile through a modem. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I doubt there's wear leveling in the AVR programming software. Granted, you could rewrite the part of the AVR's flash you're using for GROM storage pretty easily after that and include wear leveling in your process, and the AVR is not an expensive part to replace (as long as there are replacements to be had anyway) so that's also not a problem. I suppose I should just shut up now and let you and Ralph discuss the possibility of a GROM-capable FR99 without my stupid questions getting in the way.

Check the voltages coming out of the coffee warmer. I had problems like you describe when my nanoPEB was not connected to power. If your coffee warmer is undervolting, it'd probably cause the problem you're seeing.

Not only that, a lot of TI games say things like "Nice shooting, Captain!" Except, since when is the captain doing the aiming and firing? I thought he gave orders to crew for that.

I wish I could. I just know Spectrum uses the Speech Tools, and very little else ever did. They exist, that's about all I know. I suspect it's basically early Macintalk (so SAM-derived) speech, but I haven't tried to play with it yet. I know there's nothing that would use it like TextTalker with an Echo or whatever you'd use with a Mockingboard. The thing I'm most interested in right now is a TextTalker interface for the Mockingboard, but I don't know if that ever existed. I think it didn't, since the Echo was THE card for speech, SlotBuster was second fiddle, and Mockingboard was "just for games". I'd take a well-tuned Votrax over a TMS-5200/5220 or ANY chip from RC Systems, but that's just me. OTOH, if I had a TI chip from the early 90s that could make a very nice "modern" Echo replacement. The chips were often application-compatible and even sometimes pin-compatible, so if you give it a better phoneme/morpheme/dictionary, it'll sound a thousand times better than anything Street Electronics ever hoped for, and work with the same software. The other thing I'd kinda like to do is rebuild and hot rod the Mockingboard. Some noise isolation, shielding and quality amplification could make those chips sound as good as any AY-SYNTH! Definitely a required upgrade because reasons.

The backspace and charset are things I think telnet supposedly informs the host about. If not, when telnetting into a remote system, you're supposed to be able to use stty to tell it what your erase key is, along with other key mappings. You can blame emacs for ^? for backspace on UNIX systems nowadays. I think it uses ctrl-h for help because screw standards! :P As for character set, that's always a problem. Telnet doesn't convert, you're right. It kinda predates converting being something people did. Probably this is when and why I ought to bust out syncterm, which is available for most things I guess. What I'd ideally like to do is figure out how to get minicom to work. I think there's two ways to do it. First, teach it to use a virtual modem driver built in that to sites on the Internet. It'd literally just ignore most commands and respond OK, save for things like ATD{,T,P} bbs.paytonbyrd.com:6401 which would respond like a modem would. This is probably the cleanest solution. Solution #2 would be to set up a fifo and run a Stuart's python Lantronix UDS-10 emulator set to listen to the fifo. Fiddly, but it works and requires no hardware and no modification of minicom. Solution #3 would be to use a real serial port with minicom and connect to an actual UDS-10. I've got one, but haven't powered it up yet and haven't got a cable for it. Solution #4 is to run Telix under dosbox or some other kind of emulator. But if you're gonna do all of that, you might as well just run syncterm. It's designed for it.

A couple of reasons, really. First, if the ROM from the FB2 can be kept, it'd have the advantage of having a number of nice games included just by turning it on. Granted, you could wire up the flash chip to a cartridge connector or better yet get a "real" multicart to do the same, but it'd retain the flavor of the device while giving it a lot more compatibility under the hood. Second, it'd make just about the smallest, lightest VCS you could get, and with the number of vintage parts being somewhat reduced, it's likely to last a lot longer. Closest alternative would be a Jr, and I'm seeing these at $100-150 on eBait before I find out if the insides are all rusted, it doesn't work half as well as claimed, the thing was just tossed in a box without padding, or any of the other common ails of dealing with America's favorite scalping site for ***RARE*** @@@LOOK@@@ stuff. I've priced the chips, I know what they cost. And a DIY blank board is a known quantity from OSH Park if someone's designed one. Else I need to learn a little more about the software used for doing that. And third, why do anything? Because its there, and I haven't seen many (any?) other system do the same. That's a good reason to do a lot of things IMO.

Is GROM ever mixed with standard ROM of the kind the FR99 comes with? If so, might not a two-additional-chip solution be a better idea? AVR chips have limited write cycles. You could solve that in the short term by socketing the AVR and just planning to flash new ones as you wear them out. But if you added a second SRAM chip the uberGROM AVR could read from, would that not allow loading of GROM contents as easily as anything else? That might truly be the last cart you ever need to buy. Need to. Not necessarily the last cart you WILL, just the last one we hoarders NEED to buy.

That right there is why LSD is bad for you.

No doubt there.

My understanding is that just about any cart can be turned into something that loads from floppy. I think that's even more true of cassettes. My understanding might be wrong, but that's what it is.

Before must-have upgrades started coming out for the A600 and making the things price prohibitive, I considered an A600 pretty strongly. Now? Nah, I can't afford to become an Amiga user.