70s-early 90s Computer Gaming General

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70s-early 90s Computer Gaming General Anonymous Thu May 26 12:36:24 2016 No.3245047 [Reply] [Original]

*New* Helpful Links : http://pastebin.com/UdmipND6

Welcome to the 70s to early 90s Computer Gaming General. We talk about games and the hardware they were made for, either micro, mini or mainframe computers, desktop, tower or all in keyboard package, from Japan, the US, Europe, or anywhere, if the platform came out before 1995.

Don't hesitate to share tips, your past (or present) experiences, your new machines, your already existing collection, emulation & hardware advises, as well as shots, ads & flyers, videos, interviews, musics, photos, that kind of stuff.

Allowed : Computers made from the 70s to Windows 3.x and their games (of course), peripherals for these computers from any time period (MIDI expanders included)
Tolerated : Unknown, unsupported or not really popular post-95 stuff (BeOS, old Linux, stuff like this), baka gajin Western computers
Not allowed : Late 90s games and computers, Pentium PCs or more, PPC Macs and up, Windows 95 and later
Discouraged: Europe vs America shitposting, boring, long-winded technical discussions like the last thread (unless it's technical discussions about the X68000, PC-8801, etc)

IRC Channel : #/g/retro @ irc.rizon.net

Random music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U_M-QXkvPw

Random gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE5Xg2vRVTo

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 12:41:27 2016 No.3245057 >>3245047 >posting generals outside of /vg/ Kill yourself.

Anonymous Thu May 26 12:48:36 2016 No.3245067

>>3245047

The country war line was a good addition, but the
>boring, long-winded technical discussions like the last thread (unless it's technical discussions about the X68000, PC-8801, etc)
is a bit too much. Many of these posts were actually interesting, though some of these were copy paste of wikipedia stuff and/or forum posts, which was indeed a bit annoying.
Also, this thread come a bit early, there was still room for discussion in the previous one before being archived. But what's done is done.

Anyway, didn't knew the FM Towns music sounded like that, I kinda prefer the x68k/arcade/megadrive version.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 13:12:04 2016 No.3245110 So... favourite retro computer manufacturer? >>3245047 >baka gajin Western computers wat >>3245057 >being a newfag

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 13:14:39 2016 No.3245114 >>3245067 >though some of these were copy paste of wikipedia stuff and/or forum posts Proofs?

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 13:22:23 2016 No.3245129 >>3244831 The S-100 bus predates the Apple II because it was actually the system for the Altair 8800, later widely cloned in 8080/Z80 machines.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 13:44:32 2016 No.3245183 The overpriced Fat Mac now costs $1249

Anonymous Thu May 26 13:54:53 2016 No.3245207

>>3244206
The C64 is better at pixel art because it doesn't limit you to 4 colours per line. I also think it's better at third person perspective games where you control a character/vehicle and move it around the screen.

I think the Atari is better at first person perspective games like Rescue on Fractalus. The additional colours are nice and the larger colour pixel sizes, combined with scrolling and the PM graphics have a distinctive feel I really enjoy. Another thing about the Atari I like better is the ability to do nearly full frame graphics. It was not always used well, due to increased cycle costs from the DMA needed, but it's a nice feature to be able to eliminate the border.

Anonymous Thu May 26 14:04:28 2016 No.3245231

>>3245207
Ataris have half the colour resolution of the C64 which was done as a means of eliminating dot crawl and colour bleed (which was a problem for Americans, not so much Europe). The C64 has a better video output and improved color resolution, and when viewed on an S-video or C= display, offers more detail for characters, icons, etc.

As for games, the Atari 8-bit was older than the C64 so its games tend to be of the early 80s styles with a lot more single screen platformers and space shooters. Since the C64 came later and ran more contemporary to the NES, its games are more often late 80s genres such as side scrollers, beat-em-ups, and CRPGs. It depends on your preference; if you like 2nd gen gaming better, you might prefer the Atari while those who prefer Mario and Dragon Quest might like the C64 more.

Anonymous Thu May 26 14:12:11 2016 No.3245256

Nonetheless I'd ay that the C64 _clearly_ has the wider range of what can be done with its gfx-modes.
(btw C64 sprites have 4 colors, with one being the background though and you could easily multiplex them etc...
If you compare gfx and games you should always select the 'best'.
For C64 I'd call Mayhem in Monsterland, Turrican 1-3, Katakis, etc etc (the well known titles)
I am sure though that there are vast amounts of games that look and play better on the Atari (it seems that this is true mostly for old titles pre '85 or so).
The Atari is cool in some ways but it does have its limits which is why for example LucasArts didn't port Maniac Mansion to it. Then again, Sierra didn't put King's Quest on the C64 for similar reasons.

Anonymous Thu May 26 14:14:14 2016 No.3245262

>>3245110
>>baka gajin Western computers

Wat. Didn't see that one. For the OP of the next thread, don't forget not to include that shit.

Anyway, about my favorite retro computer manufacturer, well, I don't seems to have any, most made some neat machines but also had some major issues (some being greedy fucks for example). But anyway, a few years ago I would have said Commodore because of the Amiga, but because the direction was totally incompetent I think I'll go with sharp, because I don't know enough about their bad sides and because they made some really good computers.

>>3245114

I won't be linking to a specific post (because it would take too much time), but there were one or two posts which, after reading them made me check on wiki more informations about the machine they were talking about, only to discover that the stuff that was written on the article was almost the same as these posts. They weren't literal copypasta, but they were so close to wiki article that they could have been re-formatted ones.
Wether you believe me or not on the subject is up to you though.

Anonymous Thu May 26 14:19:02 2016 No.3245273

>>3245256
>The Atari is cool in some ways but it does have its limits which is why for example LucasArts didn't port Maniac Mansion to it
They put Maniac Mansion on the Apple II which doesn't even have hardware sprites. I think an 800XL/65XE/130XE should be able to pull it off.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 14:22:58 2016 No.3245278 >>3245256 >Then again, Sierra didn't put King's Quest on the C64 for similar reasons. Which were...?

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 14:27:56 2016 No.3245284 >>3245278 The AGI engine was too big to fit in 64k of memory for one thing (the Apple II versions required a 128k model) and also the C64's tile and sprite-based graphics were not well suited for it; AGI was designed for a machine with bitmap graphics.

Anonymous Thu May 26 14:31:35 2016 No.3245289

Ok I don't have the skill to do this and I'm sure it's much harder with the more complicated games, but what games are missing from the Atari 8-bit that you wish were ported? Multiload disk games would probably be more difficult, but maybe Pirates!, King's Quest, Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Ultima V (planned, but cancelled - fuck you, Dick Garriot).

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 14:38:24 2016 No.3245308 >>3245047 I miss Sierra games.

Anonymous Thu May 26 14:39:04 2016 No.3245312

>>3245289
Elite - this game was on practically every computer of the day, but mysteriously enough not the A8
Gunship - Would benefit from the Atari's faster CPU
Pirates! - A classic
Maniac Mansion - Considering LucasArts started on the A8, it's too bad they never did SCUMM games for it
Ultima V - I took an entire year to beat the Amiga version; I am not making this up
SSI Gold Box games - I have a soft spot for CRPGs

Anonymous Thu May 26 14:50:33 2016 No.3245334

>>3245312
BTW, I checked out the source code for Elite. The C64 code ports easily enough but getting the main game loop in place along with keyboard/joystick input is a bitch - C64 is able to detect multiple keypresses while the Atari isn't.

Others that I'd like to do (and reasons for not continuing):

Barbarian: Would be kind of difficult due to the way the C64 version is programmed - it banks out all of the ROMs and I/O to use the entire 64k of memory in the computer and it swaps around backgrounds a lot.
Speedball: Would be difficult due to the Atari's more limited sprite hardware
Tetrapod: Small but the BBC has twice the X resolution in 4 colours and so the game doesn't look right (scrolling wouldn't work).
Dragon Quest III: Ripped some of the graphics, but at 512k this game is way too enormous to disassemble.

Paradroid: Got stuck trying to understand the code
Hyper Sports: The A8 should just about be able to make a colourful enough port of this, great sub-games like Archery and Clay Shooting.
Rock'N'Bolt: Activision game up on the A8 too early IMO

Anonymous Thu May 26 14:57:42 2016 No.3245353

Tenth Frame is supposedly a game that was planned for Atari release; in fact advertisements for it even mention "Coming soon to the Atari 800XL" but it never materialized.

Also I could swear I heard somewhere that the C64 version of Pirates! is partially written in BASIC.

Anonymous Thu May 26 15:03:21 2016 No.3245365
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux6cvu9522Q

I think this is one of the first DOS games I ever had as a kid.

Its made its way from floppy to floppy to hardrive and now I have a permanent archive on my new computer

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:07:33 2016 No.3245372 >>3245353 Believe it or not, most of the main game logic in Pirates! is BASIC code with machine language used for stuff like graphics handling.

Anonymous Thu May 26 15:16:35 2016 No.3245404

Tons of classics never made it to the Atari 8-bit.

Skyfox was some of the best early 3D FPP games. Given that it was ported on the 6502-based Apple II and C64, a port to the A8 shouldn't be overly difficult. It's also on the Z80-based Amstrad and Spectrum, but those versions are too slow and rubbish to play. The A8 would be better at this kind of game than the C64.

Exploding Fist was a fantastic fighting game. The graphics are not the best, but the use of sampled sounds is extremely cool.

Gauntlet and Arkanoid were ported to the A8 but those are some of the worst versions. US Gold and Imagine were just all like "Oh, here. Take this piece of dog poop shaped like a cassette tape. Now where's my £15?"

Time Pilot, it is amazing that this game is on everything except A8 and Amstrad (officially or otherwise). I think the A8 could do a fantastic version, possibly the rip-off Space Pilot from Anirog/Kingsoft on C64 source code could be used although it may be better to write it around Antic/GTIA of A8 from scratch as it is not exactly the most complex game design.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:25:14 2016 No.3245420 >>3245256 Didn't King's Quest run on a 4.77Mhz IBM XT with 4 color CGA graphics?

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:27:42 2016 No.3245426 >>3245420 How does this make it runnable on a 1.79Mhz Atari?

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:28:49 2016 No.3245431 >>3245426 The 8088 is barely any faster than a 6502 and also PC graphics are just dumb frame buffers so the CPU has to do all the work of moving sprites around that would be done on the Atari by the ANTIC.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:30:11 2016 No.3245435 >>3245431 KQ1 on the Apple II uses double hi-res graphics. That's 560x192. The 8-bit is limited to 320x192, isn't it?

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:31:31 2016 No.3245436 >>3245435 CGA still doesn't suffer from a lot of the same limitations as the ANTIC especially regarding resolution and color placement. Besides, there's no way a 6502 could match or exceed a 16-bit 8086 for performance.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:32:32 2016 No.3245443 The 8086 is more like the Z80 in that it has more overall CPU power, but execution time is very slow so it's really not much faster than a 6502 at all.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:33:33 2016 No.3245446 Also the memory issue. Don't forget that Sierra didn't put the AGI engine on the C64 because it needed 128k.

Anonymous Thu May 26 15:34:36 2016 No.3245449
File: 23 KB, 600x450, FireHawk_time.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

One of my favorite music from that game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmE3uXZUxw8
which hopefully made it to the PC version unharmed (unlike the mission 5 music, which is the one I like the most from the original version), though the arrange isn't really the best one (it's still a pretty good tune, but I prefer the original version).

And you, what's your favorite Firehawk music?

>>3245435

The PC DOS version used the 320*200 color CGA mode, so the resolution isn't really an issue 8bit Atari computers.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:35:09 2016 No.3245450 Also disk capacity. IBM XTs had 360k floppies while the A8 had either 92k or 128k floppies and it was more common to support the former for compatibility reasons.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:37:17 2016 No.3245456 Given that KQ1 came out in 1984, it would seem slightly odd to not have a C64 port but I guess memory really was the big issue if the Apple II version needed 128k.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:38:49 2016 No.3245462 >>3245456 Sierra never really did seem to be interested in the Atari or C64 anyway; they were always a mainly Apple and PC-centered company.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:40:20 2016 No.3245465 >>3245449 http://www.midimusicadventures.com/qs/digital/firehawk/03Mission1.mp3 I prefer this one to the JPC versions. Same with this: http://www.midimusicadventures.com/qs/digital/firehawk/04Mission2.mp3

Anonymous Thu May 26 15:41:03 2016 No.3245471

>>3245449
>>3245436
CGA has 80 column text and fewer restrictions on color/pixel placement, but this is more beneficial for business software than games, an area where IBM XTs fell flat compared to the A8 or C64.

KQ doesn't have more than 1-2 sprites on screen at any given moment, so that would in theory be well within the C64 or Atari's capabilities.

Anonymous Thu May 26 15:42:06 2016 No.3245473

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1984-Macintosh-512K-Model-M0001W-Fat-Mac-Keyboard-Mouse-Non-upgraded-Serviced/141997556037?_trksid=p2045573.c100033.m2042&_trkparms=aid%3D111001%26algo%3DREC.SEED%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D36979%26meid%3Dfd2545cdd2c84de1afc480c79f721432%26pid%3D100033%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D4%26sd%3D262432549124

ONE-THOUSAND-TWO-HUNDRED DOLLARS

Anonymous Thu May 26 15:47:35 2016 No.3245490

>>3245471
CGA needed expensive monitors to display 80 column text properly, otherwise it's extremely limited and hard to use compared with the ANTIC or VIC-II.

>four colors in two fixed palettes
>VRAM is in a fixed location
>no programmable characters
>no sprites or scrolling

If you compare any game that was on the A8 first like Alley Cat, Archon, or Jumpman, the PC ports look quite pathetic. For King's Quest, this wasn't an issue because the game has very little animation.

>>3245443
Indeed. The 8080/Z80/8086 are horribly inefficient CPUs compared with the 6502, needing 8-10 clock cycles to do things that the 6502 manages in 3 cycles. When it comes to number-crunching, the 6502 falls short, but games don't generally need to do anything more than integer math anyway. Also the Apple II and PC have no sprites/scrolling so the CPU has to do all that work by itself.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:49:48 2016 No.3245495 Ah yes, my cousin had KQ1 on his Apple IIc and it did require 128k to run. It came on two double sided disks IIRC.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:51:39 2016 No.3245504 >>3245495 See there's another thing - Apple II disks stored 140k which is quite a bit more than the 92k/128k Atari disks.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:53:22 2016 No.3245512 >>3245490 CGA lacked two features that would have really helped it a lot; a 160x200 RGB mode and programmable characters.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 15:55:40 2016 No.3245518 >>3245512 There was a 160x200 16 color mode on CGA though, even if it's only a hardware trick.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 16:10:10 2016 No.3245561 >>3245518 >There was a 160x200 16 color mode on CGA though, even if it's only a hardware trick. If you call using the composite video a hardware trick. Also most people had RGB monitors and couldn't use it anyway.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 16:17:54 2016 No.3245582 >>3245561 Except the composite video used the same resolutions as the TLL RGB one, not 160x200. Also, I mistyped it, it's actually 160x100, and yes, most people could use it on RGB monitors as it was actually a trick using the 80x25 text mode.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 17:14:16 2016 No.3245714 >>3245582 It's effectively 160x200 due to NTSC resolution.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 17:31:49 2016 No.3245747 Where can I get software and games for 8 bit computers? If you cant answer due to software piracy laws, then I would appreciate knowing where to find such software that is public domain, abandonware, etc.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 17:35:43 2016 No.3245753 >>3245714 >It's effectively 160x200 due to NTSC resolution. Except there's no such thing "160x200 due to NTSC resolution", the NTSC standard only a define number of scanlines, not an horizontal pixel resolution.

Anonymous Thu May 26 17:51:21 2016 No.3245804

http://www.ebay.com/itm/TRS-80-Model-III-Micro-Computer-Radio-Shack-Powers-ON-to-Cass-/322122971043?hash=item4b000677a3:g:tLcAAOSwQaJXR0N1

Highway robbery. How do you justify charging $250 for a cassette model? Considering all the shit I'd have to buy to upgrade this to a disk machine.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/RADIO-SHACK-TRS-80-COLOR-COMPUTER-2-WITH-GAMES/322114672835?_trksid=p2047675.c100005.m1851&_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D36537%26meid%3Dc9e5286538a543a1877bd703f2910aa5%26pid%3D100005%26rk%3D3%26rkt%3D6%26sd%3D322122971043

This is actually priced fairly and you can see it does have a bid on it.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 17:53:33 2016 No.3245809 http://www.ebay.com/itm/RadioShack-TRS-80-Model-III-Micro-Computer-Radio-Shack-For-Parts-or-Repair-/262455554527?hash=item3d1b91f1df:g:b4MAAOSwn8FXR0H5 >doesn't even power on >$250 This is even worse.

Anonymous Thu May 26 18:01:38 2016 No.3245820
File: 184 KB, 1500x912, Annoyed-facepalm-picard-l.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>3245804
>computer powers on to a Cass? prompt
>I assume it's looking for a cassette to boot from

Dude...all you have to do is press Enter twice and go into BASIC.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 18:03:19 2016 No.3245825 >>3245804 You'd think a NASA engineer would be able to afford disk drives.

Anonymous Thu May 26 18:23:51 2016 No.3245852

BTW, that Cass? prompt on the TRS-80...it's not asking to boot a cassette, it's asking for the baud rate for the cassette port. If you just press Enter, it defaults to 300 bps. It then displays a Memory? prompt which is asking if you want BASIC to use less memory in case you need to reserve room for machine language routines (specify in bytes how much memory BASIC should use). After that, you get the BASIC Ok prompt.

On the M1/3/4, if you want to run a machine language program from cassette, you're supposed to type SYSTEM in BASIC which gives you a *? prompt. If you type a filename, it will load it off of tape into the address specified by the first two bytes. If you type /, it will jump to the load address and / followed by an integer number will jump to that address. Conversely, if Disk BASIC is loaded, typing SYSTEM merely exits you back to DOS.

The Atari 8-bits actually let you autoboot tapes; if you hold Option down on power up, it beeps once and waits for you to press Play on the tape recorder.

Anonymous Thu May 26 18:49:30 2016 No.3245912

TRS-80s were really limited as far as gaming ability.

>128x48 block graphics
>only way to get sound on a M1/3 was by outputting to the cassette port and connecting it to a stereo

Yet people did come up with clever workarounds for this. The lack of proper sound hardware until the M4 was a kludge, although back at that time sound was not seen as having any purpose on a computer except for gaming. In that regard, it's very fortunate that IBM did include a sound generator in the PC because most small business computers at the time were completely mute (so to speak).

The M3/4 also offered an optional hi-res graphics board but it wasn't that widely used because you needed BASIC extensions for it and also it would have excluded people who didn't have it.

Anonymous Thu May 26 19:25:08 2016 No.3245998
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>>3245912
>>128x48 block graphics
Damn. My arduboy is higher resolution (128x64)

We has a classroom with TRS80 machines back in Intermediate school. Blew my mind when I walked in one day and they were playing some maze-shooter game ... WITH SOUND. It was years later when I found out the speaker was plugged into the cassette port.

Anonymous Thu May 26 21:01:38 2016 No.3246186

The PET also had similar workarounds to get sound (only 80xx PETs have a speaker) but more technically involved. You had to output to the user port and connect a wire on two of its pins which ran to an amplifier, also apparently you needed some kind of resistor attached. Games sometimes did support user port sound.

Anonymous Thu May 26 21:13:47 2016 No.3246204

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh8geD12KFE

This Model II must have been stored well to be able to power up perfectly after a quarter century, especially since Tandy's build quality was usually not the best.

It's not that obvious from the video, but Model IIs are really...noisy. Aside from the 8" floppy motor spinning continuously, it also has a case fan. This would be Steve Jobs's worst nightmare.

Anonymous Thu May 26 21:19:59 2016 No.3246216

The Model II used a variant of TRS-80 Disk BASIC that's similar to the BASIC on the M1/3/4, but it removed cassette support and has several enhancements because it was derived from the latest (at the time) version of Microsoft BASIC-80, so it has octal number conversion, an improved editor, and a couple other things not found on the M1/3.

On the downside, Model II BASIC doesn't have PEEK/POKE which makes it pretty hacker-unfriendly. I assume because they intended it as a turnkey business computer that you just ran applications on and weren't supposed to program yourself.

On the upside, you can just boot up CP/M instead which had generic MBASIC (very similar to Model II BASIC) and which does have PEEK/POKE.

Anonymous Thu May 26 21:23:15 2016 No.3246230

>>3246216
There was a hack for Model II BASIC that adds PEEK/POKE, but you lose OCT$ and NAME, so depends on how much you value those statements. I'd say not much because needing octal conversion is pretty rare and NAME is used to rename disk files which you can just do in DOS anyway.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 21:25:45 2016 No.3246236 The cassette storage on the TRS-80 is pretty flaky anyway; if you put the tape recorder too close to the computer, it can end up corrupting data.

Anonymous Thu May 26 21:34:27 2016 No.3246251

I'm not sure if the Model II family should even be considered a real TRS-80. It's more like a business-ey CP/M box designed for heavy-duty tasks like commercial software development or running industrial equipment that they just slapped the TRS-80 name on.

Anonymous Thu May 26 21:42:45 2016 No.3246265

http://www.mocagh.org/ai/ai-v2i2catalog.pdf

Apparently Scott Adams text adventures were available for the TRS-80 Model II. They did also offer them (ditto Infocom adventures) on 8" disks for CP/M, but this appears to run in TRS-DOS. As far as CP/M is concerned, the disk format could present a problem if your particular CP/M version doesn't support the one the games are on.

Anonymous Thu May 26 21:47:28 2016 No.3246280

https://github.com/pski/model2archive/tree/master/Software/Games

Some games for the Model II. Unlike the M1/3, it has 80 column text and the character set exchanges many of the graphics characters for additional mathematical/currency/assorted other symbols.

Anonymous Thu May 26 22:35:26 2016 No.3246364

I had a chance to buy a Model II some years ago, but I passed it up when I considered its size-to-usefulness ratio. If I did buy it, you can be damn sure I'd replace that diesel truck mot...I mean 8" floppy drive with a Flash emulator like the Lotharek HxC.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 22:57:05 2016 No.3246406 >>3245495 The Apple version of KQ also runs really, really friggin' slow and is improved a lot by a CPU accelerator.

>>	Anonymous Thu May 26 23:06:30 2016 No.3246424 >>3245462 Sierra did do some games for the A8 and C64, but didn't make much of any money from them and most likely perceived the things as a cheap, low-rent game console and not a real computer.

Anonymous Fri May 27 13:29:56 2016 No.3247520

>>3245404
A8 is more of a 2nd gen system so most of its games will look like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh1UmrYNYFA

Whereas the C64 is more of a 3rd gen system so most of its games will look like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kdow7HAC5mk

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 14:37:00 2016 No.3247656 >>3247520 that TMNT port is so fucking bad

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 15:10:05 2016 No.3247726 >>3247656 It's not that bad, I even prefer the music over the NES. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMm6NIhJFJ4 Of course it can't touch the NES version which has top-notch background graphics and programming.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 15:14:46 2016 No.3247736 And don't even get me started on the DOS version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxzmUhrBLE0 >still supporting CGA on a game that needs a 286 to run

Anonymous Fri May 27 15:21:49 2016 No.3247748

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGU32i16lXs

Amiga version is pretty good, it even has sampled speech and I love that funk-driven soundtrack. I don't think any of the 8/16-bit computer ports were released here, pretty sure they were Europe-only. We just got the NES and PC ports.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 15:23:23 2016 No.3247749 >>3247736 Actually it's probably because of NEC V20 users - the game will run on an XT-class PC if a V20 is installed. Some XT clones also had a 286 in them.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 15:30:04 2016 No.3247762 >>3247748 Amiga and C64 ceased existing in North America once the 90s started. They kept going in Europe though for another half a decade.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 15:33:06 2016 No.3247765 >>3247762 Some studios still used them though.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 15:35:09 2016 No.3247774 >>3247726 That song is the worst thing I've ever heard.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 15:38:00 2016 No.3247784 >>3247748 This one's the only one that gets the music right. The Ninja Warriors also sampled FM straight from the arcade board.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 15:39:58 2016 No.3247787 >>3247774 Which one? The C64 one or the NES one? I kinda like the NES sound better.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 15:41:08 2016 No.3247793 >>3247762 16-bit Amigas went up into the mid-90s, 32-bit models were still supported and you could get new software for them in Europe until like 1998.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 15:42:42 2016 No.3247802 >>3247736 Why does the DOS version just play the title screen music continuously? How lazy can you programmers be.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 15:45:35 2016 No.3247810 Note that the C64 and Amiga versions are called "Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles" because nanny state Bongland wouldn't let them use the word "Ninja".

Anonymous Fri May 27 15:57:33 2016 No.3247830

>>3247793

Even in some European countries the Amiga became a niche machine by the mid 90s, as PC clones became cheaper and more easier to obtain. It got a niche status, with a few manufacturers making new hardware expansion, with some being borrowed from the PC world (SVGA-based graphic cards for a system that once had base video hardware that nothing on PC could compete with) and some software houses still releasing games and utilities. But the platform was basically in life support, not even remotely popular like your post might imply. Most new computers that were sold were PC clones.
It was the same with the 8bit Atari line when the ST line came out -- yes, some people still bough those, but it wasn't popular anymore.

>>3247810

The NES version was called that way too, but I'd think it's more because of Germany, thanks to them Contra became Probotectors.

Anonymous Fri May 27 16:13:07 2016 No.3247857

>>3247830
>It was the same with the 8bit Atari line when the ST line came out -- yes, some people still bough those, but it wasn't popular anymore.

They didn't even sell the original 400/800 in PAL regions, those were strictly a US thing. The 800XL was the first model sold in Europe, but it got popular in the commie block after the low-cost 65XE came out, partially because Jack Tramiel was interesting in marketing computers in the land of his birth.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 16:18:54 2016 No.3247864 >>3247857 >They didn't even sell the original 400/800 in PAL regions, those were strictly a US thing. Of course they did, they sold the 400 models for like 1990 F in France.

Anonymous Fri May 27 16:22:18 2016 No.3247870

>>3245312
>Maniac Mansion - Considering LucasArts started on the A8, it's too bad they never did SCUMM games for it

MM should be doable on a 64k model of the A8. Maybe the 128k 130XE could be used as well; this would certainly cut down on the amount of disk access required.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 16:24:24 2016 No.3247873 >>3247870 One thing I always wished was that Maniac and Zak supported the C128 because Lordy, they would sure benefit from the extra RAM and speedier disk access.

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 16:25:46 2016 No.3247874 Retro Apple PCs are still usable to this day. IBM PCs are not. tru fact

>>	Anonymous Fri May 27 16:27:55 2016 No.3247878 >>3247873 I mean, really. Wizardry supported the C128, why couldn't you do it, LucasFarts?

Anonymous Fri May 27 18:55:38 2016 No.3248168

>>3247830
I saw some Amiga 500's used up through late 90's, on some university and college campuses for video editing. I guess it was mainly for adding text overlay to a video stream, for the school's TV channel (which you could pick up on local TV stations).
This was in Tampa Bay. I'm sure at that time there also remained a large number of Video Toaster equiped Amiga systems throughout the US.

Anonymous Fri May 27 19:46:17 2016 No.3248324

>>3245998
Is that arduino running some kind of SuperCHIP-8 VM or something? (the resolution is identical)

But anyway, you can even make some games with less than what the TRS-80 provided. The original CHIP-8 is only 64x32 pixels,

http://www.pong-story.com/chip8/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip-8

Anonymous Sat May 28 01:02:08 2016 No.3248819

>>3245804
TRS-80 M3s, like most microcomputers of that time, use 4116 RAM which is kind of a piece of shit and prone to dropping over dead. These chips require three (!) voltage lines, a -5, a +5, and a +12, and the -5 must be activated first otherwise the thing will self-destruct. It's possible to mod computers with 4116 RAM to accept 4164 or 41256 chips which are easier to find, use less power, and are more reliable.

It took many years before DRAM approached decent levels of reliability; nowadays memory failures are a rare sight.

Anonymous Sat May 28 01:56:16 2016 No.3248931

A lot of early microcomputers weren't very reliable, but Apple IIs were pretty bulletproof, that 4116 RAM being the only real reliability issue with them. Later models switched to 4164 chips and midway through the IIe run, Apple felt confident enough to solder the chips to the board.

>>	Anonymous Sat May 28 04:20:47 2016 No.3249224 >>3248168 Yup, that was one of the few jobs where the Amiga was still considered to be the machine for the task -- video editing and overlay, like said here >>3247765 .

>>	Anonymous Sat May 28 16:35:36 2016 No.3250241 File: 249 KB, 1112x1026, stbook2.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>	Anonymous Sat May 28 20:28:25 2016 No.3250708 File: 155 KB, 512x384, Simpsons_05_15__481014.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>3249224 The scene with Homer eating potato chips in zero Gs in space was animated on an Amiga.

>>	Anonymous Sat May 28 20:53:53 2016 No.3250775 >>3249224 >>3250708 Also the CGI in Babylon 5!

>>	Anonymous Sat May 28 21:14:08 2016 No.3250825 Did any retro computers have lightguns like consoles did?

Anonymous Sat May 28 21:36:41 2016 No.3250868
File: 299 KB, 616x433, Capture.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>3245047
Just thought you guys might be interested in these youtube channels I stumbled onto
Archival footage and interviews from the Center of Computing History in England
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnw4p95EOWghQNP4vOv8VHw

The personal youtube account of the repair guy for the Computer History Museum in the US
https://www.youtube.com/user/mverdiell

Autistis be forewarned, these both contain a fair amount of content about pre-70s computers.

Anonymous Sat May 28 21:43:10 2016 No.3250881 [DELETED]

File: 55 KB, 500x500, 500x500.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>3245047
>Discouraged: Europe vs America shitposting, boring, long-winded technical discussions like the last thread (unless it's technical discussions about the X68000, PC-8801, etc)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDZcA3Ut5Mo

>>	Anonymous Sat May 28 21:52:57 2016 No.3250890 >>3250708 Almost all digitally composed animation in the 90s was done on Amiga computers actually.

>>	Anonymous Sat May 28 21:56:12 2016 No.3250894 >>3248168 If I remember right the TV Guide Channel was run on amigas up until the mid 00s

Anonymous Sat May 28 22:08:26 2016 No.3250932

>>3247810
Your point? Guerrilla War originally had the player controlling Castro and Che Guevara and you have to overthrow Batista, but they were replaced in the US release with generic no-name commandos because of autistic Burgers still living in 1950s McCarthyism (oh no is fucking gommies we cannot has that)

>>	Anonymous Sat May 28 22:15:09 2016 No.3250945 >>3250932 Dude...it was the 80s. The Cold War was not over yet and anti-Castro sentiment was _very_ high.

Anonymous Sat May 28 22:18:37 2016 No.3250956

>>3250945
Putting that aside, Burgers actually believe it was a negative for their corrupt puppet dictator to be overthrown back in the 50s and for the Cuban people to own all the land and sugar cane themselves rather than a US puppet dictator and the Mafia, or that it was bad to give people universal health care and education.

Anonymous Sat May 28 22:27:02 2016 No.3250973

"During development, the Atari 400 and 800 received the code names of 'Candy' and 'Collette', reportedly after two attractive secretaries who worked in the company offices. Candy was meant to be more of a toy/learning tool aimed at kids (or parents) who wanted something a bit more sophisticated than an Atari VCS console, while Collette was a full-up computer aimed at the Apple II and TRS-80. The 400 and 800 names originally reflected both the retail price of the computers and the amount of factory-installed RAM (4k and 8k). However, during 1980, the cost of memory suddenly dropped so that all machines were soon shipping with the full compliment of 16 or 48k.

>>	Anonymous Sat May 28 22:28:53 2016 No.3250980 >>3250973 >During development, the Atari 400 and 800 received the code names of 'Candy' and 'Collette', reportedly after two attractive secretaries who worked in the company offices Oh damn, you couldn't do this today. SJWs would lose their minds.

Anonymous Sun May 29 01:50:39 2016 No.3251348
File: 78 KB, 500x333, 929466DEC-VAX.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>3250956
The Cubans who got fucked out of all their land and property came here and organized themselves. They have a pretty sizable political influence.

Anyway, what's everyone's opinions on late-70s/early-80s minicomputers?

Anonymous Sun May 29 04:39:42 2016 No.3251534

>>3250825

The Amstrad CPC did have one. Some computers had lightpens instead.

>>3250890

Not really, many used the Amiga, but many also used Next, SGI or Sun stations and sometimes Atari ST computers (I saw a documentary about some cartoon studio a few month ago where they were showing animation previews on an ST or STe).
Some Dutch studios might have used those high-end Phillips MSX2 computers, and TV channels in Japan might have used the X1 and later the X68000 or these Sony MSX2 that had an integrated Genlock and an external video mixer for that task (though some studios did have access to Amigas with video toasters).

>>3250956

Both the Commies an Batista were as bad as the other -- not owning land because it belongs to some foreign company or not owning land because it belongs to the government? Tough choice. It's like replacing a tumor with another kind of cancer. Anyway, it's not even a /vr/ subject so if you wanna continue talking about that stuff you might as well make a thread on >>>/pol/ .

>>3251348

Never had any interaction with one of these, but I find these fascinating. I think that it's many people's dream to have one in their basement with a battery of VT-220 and/or Tektronix 4010 terminals and a huge tape library hooked to it.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 29 16:11:46 2016 No.3252592 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al4E0CUrlFk Someone messing with SX-Windows on Sharp x68030. Gotta love that version of Magical sound shower he's playing somewhat around 2:50, some patches sound even better than the arcade version.

>>	Anonymous Sun May 29 20:23:02 2016 No.3253196 >>3251348 >all the bourgeois parasites who exploited the Cuban people's labor fled to America rather than work Duh?

>>	Anonymous Sun May 29 21:14:45 2016 No.3253310 >>3253196 Which is why they've continued to flee here for decades after the revolution, right?

>>	Anonymous Sun May 29 23:40:01 2016 No.3253578 >>3245308 DUN DUN DUN DUN dingding*

>>	Anonymous Mon May 30 10:39:15 2016 No.3254525 So how long do you expect computers with built in floppy drives and displays to last for?

>>	Anonymous Mon May 30 14:59:38 2016 No.3255178 >>3254525 Floppies and CRTs can be replaced now by Flash drives and LCD displays in most cases.

Anonymous Mon May 30 15:10:37 2016 No.3255197

>>3255178
Yes, but it can be costly. Then again, so can replacing crts and parts - I've had to spend £25 on a single part for my 68x Mac.

Come to think of it, in 10-20 years any DOS computers without floppy emus will not work be usable anymore, will they?

>>	Anonymous Mon May 30 15:26:09 2016 No.3255263 >>3255197 The price of floppy emulators will probably drop by then, keeping in mind they're a pretty new thing that hasn't been around very long.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 30 15:29:06 2016 No.3255270 Don't people restore antique cars that are 80+ years old?

>>	Anonymous Mon May 30 15:39:18 2016 No.3255292 There was one guy on /vr/ who tried to argue with me that if I use a 1541 Ultimate on a C64 instead of a real drive, that I'm a fake emulation kiddie. He sounds like he wandered in out of his containment thread in the CRT general.

Anonymous Mon May 30 15:42:26 2016 No.3255304

Well, in the case of something like a C64, they have Flash disk drive replacements and there's no special monitor, it just uses any TV set. In the case of PCs, there's also Flash disk emulators and all the standard monitor types can be replaced by an LCD.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 30 15:46:20 2016 No.3255316 >>3255263 Hopefully. Only Mac drive emu i can find is BMOWs that costs $70-120 >>3255270 Yes, but cars of that age are mechanical compared to electronic computers. >>3255292 wait, what? Seriously?

>>	Anonymous Mon May 30 16:03:59 2016 No.3255372 >>3255304 I meant computers with internal displays like the Mac I recently bought, you bloody cunt.

>>	Anonymous Mon May 30 16:19:19 2016 No.3255424 >>3255372 >Macs >UK I'm pretty sure all you guys had back then were rubber keyboard toys like a Spectrum.

Anonymous Mon May 30 16:29:03 2016 No.3255451

>>3255292
>He sounds like he wandered in out of his containment thread in the CRT general.

Meh, you have no idea how many of them are emulator fags using PC monitors with scanline filters.

Anyway, what you said sounds like it didn't happen.

>>3255424

>Trying this hard to start a country war

Step up your game.

Anonymous Mon May 30 18:19:56 2016 No.3255823

>>3255424
Macs were sold in Europe too, at lower amounts bought but still.

I also recently bought a 512k Mac.
>>3255372
It is possible to do some weird LCD conversion apparently.

By the way, which version of Macintosh is it? If it is one of the harddrive-less versions that need to be booted from disk you can buy a Rominator from Big Mess O Wires and load the Mac OS from ROM.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 00:14:51 2016 No.3256878 >>3255304 >and all the standard monitor types can be replaced by an LCD. http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-9-Pin-12-1-CGA-EGA-MDA-TTL-LCD-Monitor-HGC-HGA-MGP-/221134144579 eg. this accepts CGA/MDA/EGA signals

Anonymous Tue May 31 03:02:02 2016 No.3257221

Yes, you can replace all of that, but i think that part of the fun in the old computer hobby is also servicing the original parts yourself too, even though some people just wanna play games and that's all (in that case yeah, just sell your broken stuff for pieces and get yourself emulators and shit).

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 12:32:07 2016 No.3257907 Haven't been around for the last couple threads, any suggestions for the pastebin I missed?

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 14:12:15 2016 No.3258179 >>3255451 >>3257221 This is him.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 14:15:09 2016 No.3258193 >>3258179 This is what?

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 14:15:53 2016 No.3258195 >>3258193 You know, him.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 14:16:29 2016 No.3258197 >>3258195 What the fuck are you talking about?

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 14:19:46 2016 No.3258215 >>3258197 The guy I mentioned in >>3255292

Anonymous Tue May 31 14:23:48 2016 No.3258230

>>3258215

And since when did I ever argue with you about using a 1541 Ultimate = being an emulator kiddie? Do you have a link to these posts? If you wanna use one then go for it. Not everyone want to use one, but if you just wanna play games and stuff and don't want to mess with floppies, using one is alright.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 16:52:11 2016 No.3258574 File: 62 KB, 1349x712, Usenet.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Apparently the idea goes back further than you think.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 17:03:59 2016 No.3258604 File: 108 KB, 1544x790, eieri9.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] We have the Flash thingies for a reason - your disk drives won't last forever.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 17:09:13 2016 No.3258615 >>3258604 The typical 1541 drive got used _way_ harder than most PC 3.5" floppies. When you only have 64k of memory and no hard disk, you're gonna be doing a lot of disk access.

Anonymous Tue May 31 17:18:07 2016 No.3258634

>>3258604

Next time you pick an example, choose one that isn't as hardcore as that one. Your average old computer enthusiast won't be reading thousands of old dirty disks the way that guy did. Flash memory will start to fail too if you're reading and writing data at such intensity.
Also, everything in a disk drive that isn't some custom made IC can be replaced.

Anonymous Tue May 31 17:28:08 2016 No.3258672

>>3258634
>Also, everything in a disk drive that isn't some custom made IC can be replaced
I don't think you can replace the head mechanism in a floppy (like he noted in his post) unless there's a chink sweatshop somewhere still making new floppy heads you can put in your 1541.

Which actually gives pause for thought - it can't be too pricey to manufacture replacement drive heads, at least it shouldn't cost more than all those Flash drives. Yet everyone invests money in manufacturing Flash emulators instead.

Anonymous Tue May 31 17:35:30 2016 No.3258683

Floppy drives are supposed to last 30 years though it does depend on usage. And I do agree that most drives in 8-bit machines have led a harder life than the ones in a PC generally do. I only ever had one 3.5" PC floppy fail on me and that was a shitty Chinese one.

Anonymous Tue May 31 17:40:08 2016 No.3258703

>>3258683

My only 3"1/2 PC drive that died did so because I used some shitty chinese floppy disk which cover just popped of and knocked the heads out of alignement.
Don't ask me how it happened, i don't understand how it came to be either.

Also, for non-PC compatible drives, the only issue I've ever had was a loose belt.

Anonymous Tue May 31 17:45:56 2016 No.3258721

I've learned some lessons over the years - I don't stick anything in my floppy drives unless the disk is good condition and not dirty or has a loose shutter that could come off in the drive. Also I make sure to keep everything in a disk box.

I was sorting through a bunch of 3.5" disks I have and some had missing shutters or were full of crud. I won't put any of these in my drives like I would have done when I was 14 and didn't know any better.

Anonymous Tue May 31 17:53:39 2016 No.3258736
File: 89 KB, 1920x1080, 85927_original.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>3258604
You know, this really rustles my jimmies when autists like this literally destroy irreplaceable vintage hardware in their quest to archive every last crummy disk full of homemade Boulder Dash levels or shitty BASIC programs they wrote when they were 12 years old because mmmmuh nostalgia.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 17:55:48 2016 No.3258739 >>3258672 The big advantage of Flash drives on Commodore systems is ease of file transfer from a PC.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 18:10:36 2016 No.3258770 >>3258739 Weren't there cables to hook C64 drives to a PC though.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 18:18:54 2016 No.3258779 >>3258770 There were, but that was like 10-12 years ago. The problem is that they all required a parallel port which on a newer PC is 404 not found.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 18:23:23 2016 No.3258784 File: 55 KB, 800x480, 1541 back.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Since Commodore drives are designed to be daisy-chained, you can instead just use a Flash drive and attach it to the back for file transfers if that floats your boat.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 18:26:09 2016 No.3258785 >>3258784 Well that sounds like a good plan -- having real drives to read actual floppies as well as a flash drive for file transfer is kind of a smart move.

Anonymous Tue May 31 18:29:28 2016 No.3258792

>>3258672
>Which actually gives pause for thought - it can't be too pricey to manufacture replacement drive heads, at least it shouldn't cost more than all those Flash drives. Yet everyone invests money in manufacturing Flash emulators instead.
Convenience and ease of supporting modern PC hardware.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 18:34:46 2016 No.3258809 File: 86 KB, 908x601, 1387917499288.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] What are some good MSX/MSX 2 games that doesn't need translation to enjoy?

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 18:51:42 2016 No.3258854 >>3258809 Most Konami action games, Thexder, Fire Hawk and probably more.

Anonymous Tue May 31 18:56:46 2016 No.3258863

On most stuff like old PCs, TRS-80s, and Amigas, if your floppy drives keel over, they can be fairly easily replaced by an ordinary 1.44MB drive. Unfortunately this doesn't apply to Apple or non-Amiga Commodore hardware which is where Flash drives come in.

Anonymous Tue May 31 19:00:31 2016 No.3258869

>>3258634
>Flash memory will start to fail too if you're reading and writing data at such intensity.
I understand that Flash memory has a life expectancy of about 10,000 R/W cycles. It will still work afterwards, but you can't write to it anymore and it just acts as a ROM.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 31 21:36:58 2016 No.3259240 >>3258634 I think his point is more that Flash memory can be replaced while your 30 year old floppy drive mechanisms...not so much.

Anonymous Wed Jun 1 05:11:11 2016 No.3260057
File: 5 KB, 249x282, read-write head.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>3258869

For EEPROM when you write too much stuff it becomes stuck in programmable mode and can't distinguish the high and low states. I know that the latter also occurs in Flash ROM, but I don't know for the former.
I do know that the more you write things the less it'll be able to store data on the long run too.

>>3259240

>while your 30 year old floppy drive mechanisms...not so much.
Except almost everything in a floppy drive mechanism can be replaced. The only parts that can't are some ICs and to some extent the drive's head because they're no necessarily produced anymore, but like the other anon stated, manufacturing new ones wouldn't cost that much. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if it was possible to make a DIY one.

>>3258863

Yup they can, but beware of the late chinese ones that doesn't have drive select and other pins.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 05:21:07 2016 No.3260068 >>3258809 Like >>3258854 said, as well as many Compile titles (Aleste 1, 2 & Gaiden, Zanac, Zanac Ex, Puyo Puyo) and some T&E Soft titles (like Super Laydock).

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 06:01:00 2016 No.3260091 Regarding disk drives, if it came to it vr enthusiasts could simply pay a factory in China to produce more. Someone did it with Apple DB19 connectors.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 10:08:55 2016 No.3260383 File: 417 KB, 482x719, Xanadu_MSX_Cover.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>3258809

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 10:15:23 2016 No.3260395 >>3260383 It's true that even though it's an RPG, the MSX version has most of it's text in english.

Anonymous Wed Jun 1 11:43:20 2016 No.3260529

>>3255823
>By the way, which version of Macintosh is it? If it is one of the harddrive-less versions that need to be booted from disk you can buy a Rominator from Big Mess O Wires and load the Mac OS from ROM.

I can attest to the awesomeness of the ROM-Inator on a 512K.
Loading the OS from ROM is so quick you would believe it. You can customise it and write to it once it's installed. No chip programmer needed.

You get about 860KB of ROM space to fill with whatever you like.

The FloppyEmu from BMOW is also amazing. Emulation of Hard Drives up to 2GB is simply out of this world for a computer like that. Not to mention it emulates regular floppy drives for Macs, Lisa, and Apple II machines. Even Hard Drives for the Apple II!

Macintosh II series and SE/30 machines have also recently received ROM-Inator treatment. The ROM disk is larger and can be optionally loaded into RAM temporarily for read+write usage. I think it's about 8MB in size this time.

The BMOW guy is genius!

Anonymous Wed Jun 1 14:46:10 2016 No.3260935

>>3260057
>The only parts that can't are some ICs and to some extent the drive's head because they're no necessarily produced anymore

There's a couple different types of floppy heads and I'm not sure if there's a physical difference between high and double density ones. The magnetic coercivity is different but I don't know if the head itself produces that or the drive electronics.

You have 8", 5.25" 80 and 40 track heads, and 3.5" (all 80 track but no idea if there's any physical difference between DD and HD heads). At minimum I wouldn't worry about 3.5" since 1.44MB drives vastly outnumber all the older types and we probably have enough laying around to last a few decades.

Anonymous Wed Jun 1 14:57:24 2016 No.3260953

>>3260057
>but beware of the late chinese ones that doesn't have drive select and other pins.

http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/35disk/Disk.htm

This guy modded a floppy ribbon cable to work around that problem. In any case, you only need a drive with the jumper select for your boot floppy (ie. Drive A). Drive B would just be 1 anyway so you can just put any Chinese 1.44MB drive in there and it doesn't matter.

I also found a Sony 1.44MB drive in a Goodwill this weekend and it was an older (judging by the gray faceplate) pre-Windows 95 model which did have the jumper pins. Currently I don't have any non-PC hardware where this feature is relevant, but hey, you never know. Tested it and it works fine.

Anonymous Wed Jun 1 15:04:30 2016 No.3260962

>>3258863
>Unfortunately this doesn't apply to Apple or non-Amiga Commodore hardware which is where Flash drives come in

Or anything like the TRS-80 Model II which has 8" drives because the controller isn't really compatible with 3.5" drives due to the fact that 8" drives spin at 360 RPM while 3.5" is always 300 RPM. The only thing that you can swap an 8" drive with is a 5.25" HD drive because the rotation speed and bitrate are the same.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 15:38:46 2016 No.3261028 One other problem is that many 5.25" and 8" drives use fabric drive belts which were also found in projectors and VCRs, but nobody really makes those anymore...

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 15:52:46 2016 No.3261060 >>3261028 Again, if you can pony up the money there's no reason you can't get some chink sweatshop to make more of them.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 16:31:29 2016 No.3261124 >>3260091 We'd mostly need replacement heads and possibly stepper motors. Basically, anything that has moving parts can and will fail with enough use (CRTs being one particular exception to the rule).

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 16:37:02 2016 No.3261132 >>3261124 >(CRTs being one particular exception to the rule). What.

Anonymous Wed Jun 1 16:41:20 2016 No.3261140

>>3261132
Most stuff in an old computer that can break is mechanical components like disk drive mechanisms because anything with moving parts will fail with enough use. CRTs are a notable example of something with no moving parts that will fail with enough use.

Alas, I wish it were possible to make new CRTs but it would be far too expensive versus something simple like the 19 pin adapters he mentioned. LCD panels will be the only choice once the last CRT dies.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 16:43:52 2016 No.3261148 >>3258779 There's a thing called ZoomFloppy now that works via USB.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 16:46:01 2016 No.3261153 >>3261140 CRTs are still being manufactured last I checked though.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 16:47:52 2016 No.3261160 >>3261153 There's probably a couple of shitty Chinese TV sets for sale in Third World countries but the days of good quality, mass produced ones are long, long over.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 16:51:33 2016 No.3261165 >>3261160 Ikegami still sell brand new CRT broadcast monitors.

Anonymous Wed Jun 1 16:57:48 2016 No.3261182

>>3261124
>We'd mostly need replacement heads
Again though, replacement floppy heads should be very simple to produce with the exception that there's a few different types depending on the drive. And I do agree with what the other guy said that 8-bit computers put a lot more wear and tear on floppy drives than a PC does (unless maybe 8086 machines). The amount of disk access needed to play the bigger multiload C64/Apple II games like Pirates! and Maniac Mansion is...ouch.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 17:29:14 2016 No.3261258 >>3261182 Apple IIs weren't so bad because most people had two drives which balances out the workload on them, but C64 setups generally were single drive and software usually didn't support more than one.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 1 21:43:55 2016 No.3261860 Are there any games on Western PCs that combine several arcade genres simultaneously (like breakout and bullet hell) and make something new out of it? Would prefer original titles and not arcade ports.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 2 00:06:56 2016 No.3262274 bump

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 2 00:16:58 2016 No.3262295 >>3261165 Link pls

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 2 04:11:41 2016 No.3262635 File: 193 KB, 1600x556, Ikegami_products.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>3262295 Here it is: http://www.ikegami.com/br/products/hdtv/hdtv_monitor_frame1.html Two models of multiformat CRT broadcast monitors.

Anonymous Thu Jun 2 11:01:56 2016 No.3263164

>>3260091
>Someone did it with Apple DB19 connectors.
Yes. There is no more a shortage of DB-19 connectors. Steve Chamberlain (BMOW) got 10000 made in China.

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/27668-db-19-hot-juicy-awesomeness/?p=295496

He is selling them himself, and his fellow investors are selling them at a couple of other online shops.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 2 14:28:51 2016 No.3263638 I believe Sony still also makes a few Trinitron broadcasting monitors; they have one plant in Indonesia dedicated to them and it's the only CRT production they have left.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 2 15:14:10 2016 No.3263749 >>3262635 $9,800/$11,200 Th-thanks There were still two NIB 17" multiformat monitors on amazon last time I looked. >>3263638 Link? I've heard this too, but I can't find them anywhere on sony's site. All I see is LCD and OLED.

Anonymous Thu Jun 2 15:25:22 2016 No.3263772

>>3263749
>$9,800/$11,200
>Th-thanks

Well that's what broadcast monitors cost when they're new.

As for the plants >>3263638 is talking about, I think it's mostly so they can produce spares for the already existing CRT BVMs used by studios (because studios and video professionals bitched at sony when they announced that they'd stop making new CRT monitors and their parts in 2008).

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 2 16:02:50 2016 No.3263898 >>3263164 The DB-19 appears to have been a custom-made part for Apple which is why they're not readily available like DB-25s.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 2 16:16:30 2016 No.3263939 >>3263898 It was also used on Atari STs and NeXT machines. It's also possible to make an ersatz DB-19 by chopping half the pins off a DB-25.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 2 21:50:54 2016 No.3264659 bump

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 2 21:53:51 2016 No.3264662 CP/M was never put on the 6502. How come.

Anonymous Thu Jun 2 22:01:17 2016 No.3264681

>>3264662
Likely because 6502s don't lend themselves to transportable code the way Z80s do. Most 6502 machines do not have a memory map compatible with CP/M and the use of memory mapped I/O is another handicap.

The standard CP/M memory map goes like:

0000-00FFh: Program Segment Prefix
0100-DBFFh: Transient Program Area
DC00-E3FFh: Command processor
E400-F1FFh: OS kernel
F200-FFFFh: BIOS code

Anonymous Thu Jun 2 23:35:10 2016 No.3264884 [DELETED]

Die überwiegende Mehrheit dieser Diskussion hat nichts mit der Diskussion Thema zu tun - retro Komputer spiel. Diskussionen von alten Hardware und Betriebssysteme sind interessant, aber völlig nicht zum Thema Pass, es sei denn sie beziehen sich auf die Spiele.

Danke.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 2 23:51:42 2016 No.3264959 >>3264884 Speak ye any English?

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 3 02:04:26 2016 No.3265270 http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Apple/AppleSoft%20II%20Basic%20Programming%20Manual.PDF Lot drier than the Commodore 64 User's Manual which had a lot of humorous stuff in it to make the novice feel at home.

Anonymous Fri Jun 3 03:18:37 2016 No.3265402

>>3264662
That's because CP/M was supposed to be running on 8080 machines. It could run on 8085, Z80, or even NEC V20 and V30 ones because those were (or had modes that were) 8080 compatible. Porting CP/M to the 6502 would have ruined it's purpose too.

Anyway, gotta love Granada's soundtrack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BBpJzLeiWI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yELMBHs6oZk
The MT-32 arrange sound quite nice too, but some of the tunes sound better in FM, just like the best sounding version of the second ending tune of Sorcerian is the PC-8801 SB2/PC-9801-86 one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOfGBJe_5ZU
This one is really nice too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfIzZ_OP2dw

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 3 03:27:59 2016 No.3265412 >>3264681 I should add that most Z-80 machines had a memory map like this except the TRS-80 Model I and III which had system variables, I/O registers, and VRAM in low memory.

Anonymous Fri Jun 3 03:31:22 2016 No.3265417

There were also turnkey machines like the Kaypro which were designed only for CP/M. But even outside of that, most Z80 machines had a CP/M compatible memory layout. The TRS-80 didn't simply because Radio Shack meant it as a home computer and didn't factor in CP/M support.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 3 03:42:51 2016 No.3265443 >>3265417 Bitte bewahren Sie diese Diskussion beim Thema. CP/M hat nichts mit Spielen zu tun außer für Textabenteuer.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 3 03:44:30 2016 No.3265449 >>3265443 Butthurt someone deleted your spam in the Doom thread, Donald?

Anonymous Fri Jun 3 04:01:05 2016 No.3265481

>>3265417
>The TRS-80 didn't simply because Radio Shack meant it as a home computer and didn't factor in CP/M support.

That wasn't a smart move. Computers like the Amstrad CPC were supposed to be home computers but still supported CP/M. Hell, it was shipped with the disk drive for the 464, and with the 664 and 6128 itself. The MSX2 was also capable of running CP/M too, but it arrived way too late and MSX-DOS could either run programs that replaced CP/M ones, or simply run some CP/M programs because it used many of it's system calls, making it a bit useless on this machine (not that you couldn't do anything with it, just that it wasn't worth the effort).

Anyway, while talking about CP/M, what's your favorite text-based adventure game?

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 3 04:17:06 2016 No.3265506 >>3265481 The Amstrad came out in, like, 1984? The TRS-80 Model I was out in 1977, which was very very early and when personal computers were still essentially experimental.

Anonymous Fri Jun 3 04:27:19 2016 No.3265521

>>3265506

CP/M was already a thing in 1974, and older micro computers (yes, mostly S-100 and hobbyist machines, but still not specificially professional ones) already supported it. And with an ever growing software base, it would have still been a smart move to make it CP/M compatible, so that it would already have more software than competitors on release.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 3 15:28:38 2016 No.3266465 >>3265443 What. Did a janitor delete these or something?

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 3 16:04:21 2016 No.3266513 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Tandy-1400-LT-Computer-with-Battery-and-Manual-/162087737043?hash=item25bd2e96d3:g:Md4AAOSw0gdXTKsU I've been looking to acquire a 1400LT but they never seem to have a power supply.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 3 21:12:23 2016 No.3267293 bump

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 3 22:40:59 2016 No.3267476 Too bad Apple II emulation mostly sucks. And it's not excusable either considering the Apple II is a very simple computer and should be laughably easy to emulate.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 3 22:43:58 2016 No.3267487 >>3267476 There's not as big or dedicated of an Apple II fandom as there is for Commodore machines and what there is of it are generally autists who oppose anything but real (and now very pricey) hardware.

Anonymous Fri Jun 3 23:07:40 2016 No.3267546

Actually the TRS-80 Model I was mostly slapped together on the cheap by Don French and Steve Leininger, partially due to company insistence on keeping costs as low as possible. Even at just $600, the Model I was still 10x more expensive than most of Radio Shack's wares, which typically averaged $30 and executives feared the risk of selling something that pricey.

Anonymous Sat Jun 4 00:39:58 2016 No.3267681

"The TRS-80, it was hoped, would revitalize Radio Shack's schlocky image and push them on the path of selling more high value products. Marketing of the computer targeted small businesses, schools, and home users/hobbyists, in that order. Even though electronics hobbyists constituted the largest percentage of RS customers, the company did not consider them a major audience for the TRS-80."

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 4 00:43:28 2016 No.3267691 >>3267681 It's true. Most advertisement for the Model I/III along with the software Radio Shack produced for them was mainly business stuff. It's clear they weren't necessarily going for Atari's audience.

Anonymous Sat Jun 4 00:46:14 2016 No.3267698

>>3267691
This could have been said of Apple, IBM, and even Atari to an extent. Everyone wanted the business market because it was where all the money was and companies aren't going to pirate your software like neckbeards will.

Microsoft for example has always made the bulk of their profits from business sales. Neckbeards will either A. pirate Windows and Office or B. use Linux instead.

Anonymous Sat Jun 4 00:47:51 2016 No.3267703

>>3267698
The two most important rules of marketing:

1. Never design products for the smart rich
2. Never design products for the smart poor

The smart poor will simply figure out a way to steal your product while the smart rich will buy your company and fire your ass.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 4 17:18:31 2016 No.3269584 File: 110 KB, 1200x900, Phc28la.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] A gameplay video of Super Laydock : mission striker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bGjgRg-aUw Gotta love that radio speech, and the intro screen is pretty nice looking.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 4 19:16:29 2016 No.3269886 >>3269584 looks fun

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 5 06:31:42 2016 No.3271178 Official write-up on the new batch of DB-19 connectors: http://www.bigmessowires.com/2016/06/04/db-19-resurrecting-an-obsolete-connector/

Anonymous Sun Jun 5 06:50:52 2016 No.3271208

>>3271178

>Obsolete connector
That shit make no sense. Why would a connector be obsolete? It's just a db connector, it has alway been good enough at what it's supposed to be and we didn't make a huge leap forward in connector technology that would make the fact you'd choose that connector for a modern design a questionnable choice (the connector's scarcity appart, though any good manufacturer would make them or order them from some chinese manufacturer).

Anyway, autistic rant appart, seeing that they're making these again is a pretty good news.

>>3269886

It is. It's not as good as say Zanac or Zanac-EX, but it's still a pretty fun shooter.

Anonymous Sun Jun 5 11:21:05 2016 No.3271532

>>3271208
>the fact you'd choose that connector for a modern design a questionnable choice
Did you not get that the connector is being used with old Apple/Atari/NeXT computers that NEED that connector to be used? That guy himself designed a SD card-based Floppy drive emulator, and Apple computers used that port to hookup external floppy drives.

No one in their right mind would use that connector unless it was absolutely required.

Anonymous Sun Jun 5 11:46:14 2016 No.3271595

>>3271532
>Did you not get that the connector is being used with old Apple/Atari/NeXT computers that NEED that connector to be used?
Yes I did get it, but it seems that YOU on the other hand don't get the point of my post -- tha fact that he's using the word "obsolete" to describe a fucking connector, which, by definition, CAN'T be obsolete, as some new designs could alway pick that connector for it's peripherals.

>No one in their right mind would use that connector unless it was absolutely required.
Why wouldn't they? What if they designed some kind of bus for industrial applications that needs a 19 pins, wouldn't it be normal to order some chinese manufacturers some db-19 ports? Why won't they use that kind of connector while many other manufacturer shit connectors that never existed before and don't offer any kind of improvement compared to what was already existing? What you just said made no sense.

Anonymous Sun Jun 5 15:15:01 2016 No.3272056

>>3271208
>That shit make no sense. Why would a connector be obsolete?

It's not "obsolete" per se, it's just that the DB-19 was not a standard connector type and only a handful of things ever used it, none of them made since George HW Bush was president.

Anonymous Sun Jun 5 15:54:41 2016 No.3272138

>>3272056
>it's just that the DB-19 was not a standard connector type

It was though, it respond to the D-sub connector standard when it comes to size, pin placement and so on. You could order it from electronic part resellers like any other standard connector. It's just that manufacturers didn't feel the need to use these these in newer devices, so they stopped producing them.
Saying it wasn't standard is like talking about proprietary DIN port when DIN is the German normalisation organism.

Also, like another anon stated, one could alway make one from a db-25 connector with 2 precise cuts and a bit of plastic cement.

Anonymous Sun Jun 5 16:24:36 2016 No.3272203
File: 82 KB, 539x956, ps2_95t4_586_1_full.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Some IBM PS/2s had 2.88MB 3.5" drives, known as Extended Density. The media was quite painfully expensive, but then 1.44MB disks weren't cheap either when they first came out. They weren't all that reliable either.

Writing and formatting 2.88MB disks is also a headache; it takes miles and forever.

Anonymous Sun Jun 5 16:49:55 2016 No.3272274

>>3272203

Damn, no matter how much people complain about "muh proprietary" shit when it comes to the PS/2, I can't stop thinking that the tower models were pretty damn sexy machines.

When it comes to games, I guess none really used the potential of the PS/2 models (and that some might be worse on MCA models because of the lack of PC-XT or PC-AT bus support), with maybe the exception of some Unix games that might run on AIX.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 5 17:10:49 2016 No.3272326 >>3272274 Most of the extended PS/2 features were comparatively useless for games anyway.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 5 17:51:03 2016 No.3272449 >>3272274 The high-end PS/2s are rare as hell. There were never that many of the things unlike the M25/30/55 which were churned out in huge quantities.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 5 18:53:03 2016 No.3272563 https://www.princetechnology.net/products/hp-ultrium-920-sas-external-tape-drive-eh848a?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=googlepla&variant=16299146627&gclid=CNKolPn8kc0CFYQ2gQodsWcIIQ Tape storage is still very much alive and well and it's not cheap either.

Anonymous Sun Jun 5 19:00:01 2016 No.3272582

>>3272449

Well I think it might be pretty normal, the PS/2 line wasn't something really popular according to what I've read about it. I don't think they're as rare as stuff like the Atari Transputers either, but still it's not that easy to come by.

>>3272326

Well the MCA bus could have been great for games if there was some hardware for them to take advantage. I know that there are MCA versions of the AdLib and Soundblaster, as well as a Roland MPU-401 unit, but if they did more than that (games-oriented graphic cards for example), with the speed of the bus for the time it could have resulted in some really interesting game machine. But seeing how poorly it did in businesses, I don't think MCA card manufacturers even cared for home users (and I think the Adlib, Soundblaster and Roland cards were released just in case the architecture might take off I guess).

Anyway if people in the US really wanted some better-than-the-average-PC machine when it came to games, they would have bought an Amiga (or a Megadrive by 1989).

>>3272563

Well, it never died in the professional world. And even though it's not as cheap as your type-I C60 cassette tapes, it still has a better byte/buck ratio than HDDs. The drives are really freaking expensive though, and those are only worth getting if you have something like a whole library of tape (though they DO sell automated tape libraries with robotic arms that put the tapes in the drives themselves).

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 5 19:16:02 2016 No.3272618 >>3272582 PS/2s were plenty popular, but mostly the low-end range. Remember that IBM's name alone was enough to move computers in those days.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 00:51:07 2016 No.3273291 >>3261140 A lot of us in the Amiga community are using Goteks now. The convenience, reliability, and everything else is leagues above physical floppy disks.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 00:53:38 2016 No.3273298

I have drives and disks over 30 years old. They work fine--I don't see them dying anytime soon--indeed, I routinely see 35 year old floppies. Will there be SDHCs 35 years from now? Heaven knows, CF cards are becoming less common than they once were--and many older CF-based devices can't use ones of more than 4GB capacity.

My point is that we may be substituting one obsolescent technology for another. In particular, devices that rely on 5V logic or 1980s technology microcontrollers (such as PIC) have me wondering...

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 00:54:48 2016 No.3273304 HXC for me. I don't have any real floppy drives on my Amigas.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 00:59:18 2016 No.3273312

Real floppies are nice for authenticity and that retro feel, yet I also detest the unreliability of them and how disk drives are basically analog devices. I detest how a diskette can go bad and destroy a drive by scratching up the head or the metal shutter breaks off and snags inside the drive. I detest having to clean floppy drives or fix them when they get out of alignment. I also dislike the PITA of trying to get files from a modern PC onto an Amiga.

I do admire Goteks for the convenience - stick a USB drive into them and you can transfer 100 ADF images to the Amiga at once and select them from a menu. Floppy disks look cool and are far more authentic, yet with modern storage options it's hard to imagine anyone would still want to bother with something so clunky and unreliable.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:00:30 2016 No.3273316

>>3273298
The 300 or so working floppy disks I have now will probably last me for a long, long time. Floppy drives can be repaired and I have several spare ones. And of course PC floppy drives can be converted into Amiga drives. However, sooner or later floppy drives and floppy disks will cease to exist since they are not produced anymore, and haven't been made in many years.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:04:54 2016 No.3273330 >>3273316 If we ever did run out of NOS floppy drives and media, I am a bit of a sucker for authenticity and I wonder why we can't just pay some chink sweatshop to make a couple thousand new disk drives and media every couple of years.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:10:36 2016 No.3273338

>>3273312
>yet I also detest the unreliability of them
Still had 0 problems with my Amiga floppies (I never played Microprose game though so I don't know what these games can do to your drive). The only floppies i've got problems with were late 90s chinese shit. The "floppies are unreliable" meme come from the C=64 1541 drive, the people who put their floppies on top of their monitor/near their speakers and the late 90s chinese stuff they sold in most store. Someone who take a minimum of care of his floppies shouldn't have any problem with anything but chinese shit.

> I also dislike the PITA of trying to get files from a modern PC onto an Amiga.
Get yourself a terminal program and some batch Zmodem transfert program. The Amiga 600 and 1200 also have a PCMCIA port that allow you to hook an ethernet card, and thus allow even easier transfer. Saying that transfering stuff on Amiga is hard is like saying that you don't know how to actually use one.

>something so clunky and unreliable.
Have you seriously ever used a floppy drive or are you just parroting stuff you've read on the net? Or maybe you only ever used chinese stuff. My oldest floppies are from more than 30 years ago and still work wonderfully.

>>3273330
> I wonder why we can't just pay some chink sweatshop to make a couple thousand new disk drives and media every couple of years.
Because chinese shit is the thing you would never want to get your hands on when it comes to floppies.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:22:47 2016 No.3273362

>>3273312
For those who didn't know, Gotek is a very common Chinese floppy emulator that accepts USB drives and works on any Shugart 34-pin controller.

Problem? The Gotek is designed with PCs in mind, thus it's hardwired to 512 byte sectors and bog-standard MFM. This is unsuitable for many 8/16-bit machines such as Amigas, Atari STs, and TRS-80s as they either use nonstandard formats or a lot of the time 256 or 128 byte sectors.

However, many retro computing enthusiasts have written custom firmware to allow Goteks to use disk types other than MFM 512-byte sectors.

https://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:25:23 2016 No.3273371
File: 70 KB, 300x238, Sasuke_Boruto_Movie_3.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>3273338
>Because chinese shit is the thing you would never want to get your hands on when it comes to floppies.
But Anon-kun, someday we may run out of working floppy drives and media. There may not be another choice.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:31:19 2016 No.3273383

>>3273371
You'd do a better job making DIY floppies in your cave with the right hardware than what the chinese did for the 15~20 years they made those.

Also
>nurutu
>-kun
If you're that false-flagging shitposter who's trying to make the people who enjoy Japanese computers look bad you might as well just fuck off.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:35:53 2016 No.3273392

Floppy drives can be repaired, in fact the one component we may not be able to replace is the R/W heads which really aren't made anymore. Not that it would cost much to make new floppy heads, but it does seem most of the retro computing community has heavily invested in Flash emulators now.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:37:57 2016 No.3273395 >>3273362 Goteks are cheap but of limited use without being modded. The HxC was actually designed by a retro computing enthusiast from France and can work with a wide variety of disk formats out of the box, but it's also considerably more expensive.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:41:21 2016 No.3273408 File: 99 KB, 300x225, Sakurap2.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>3273392 He's not wrong. A lot of the douhou on amigaworld are now using modded Goteks with their Amigas rather than floppy disks.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:51:18 2016 No.3273426

It's like I said. If it were up to me, I would rather just pay an Asian manufacturer to make us some new floppy heads and disks. Yet at the same time, I feel this is more beneficial for PCs while the totally alien format used by Apple or Commodore disks is a convincing argument for using Flash storage instead. A PC can't write those disks and transferring data to and from those computers is a PITA.

So my argument would more be that I'd prefer the genuine article on a PC or TRS-80 or whatever but on an Apple II, it might be better to just use Flash storage.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:53:53 2016 No.3273429 >>3273426 TRS-80 disks can't be read by a PC though (?)

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 01:57:05 2016 No.3273437

>>3273429
Yes they can. You just need a special program to read the disks because they use 256 byte sectors, but otherwise it's bog-standard MFM. Amiga and Atari ST use weird nonstandard MFM fuckery so a PC can't read their disks. Apple and 8-bit Commodores use GCR, also completely foreign to PCs.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 02:00:04 2016 No.3273446

>>3273437
Now, here's another important distinction. Although Amigas and Atari STs have nonstandard formats, the disk drives themselves are just an ordinary 34-pin type same as a PC. Of course this is completely untrue of Apple and 8-bit Atari/Commodore drives.

All the same, Flash emulators might be nice in an Amiga/ST simply for ease of data transfer since a normal PC floppy controller can't write their disks while TRS-80 and most CP/M disks are readable on a PC (assuming soft sector double density).

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 02:08:39 2016 No.3273453
File: 107 KB, 800x424, naruto iraira shi.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>3273426
Yes but the autist in >>3273383 argues it can't be done.

>complains about bad quality Chinese floppy disks
>has no apparent problem buying floppy emulators from China

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 02:11:59 2016 No.3273457 Report and ignore.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 02:16:24 2016 No.3273460 >>3273453 >>3273408 >>3273371 >>3273457 HOLY GOD, STOP USING NARUTO REACTION PICS.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 02:32:18 2016 No.3273486 >>3273426 Tape drives are still produced, so clearly the tooling and ability to manufacture magnetic media R/W heads is still out there. I believe we could definitely do it if we wished to pay the money.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 02:34:26 2016 No.3273490

I'm a little skeptical of the whole idea of replacing floppy heads. Not because it can't in theory be done, but because...you'd have to align the heads after installing them and there are few worse things than trying to align a floppy drive, not least because it needs a special alignment disk and an oscilloscope (!)

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 02:46:16 2016 No.3273505

>>3273486
You pay an average of $1500 for a tape drive now. You'd probably pay that much just to get a batch of replacement floppy R/W heads made in 2016, not in the least because it isn't a mass-produced product anymore like it was in 1985 so...economies of scale. The manufacturer would charge you a pretty penny in order to turn a profit on it.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 02:51:42 2016 No.3273516

>>3273505
It'd be money well-spent. I've heard a lot of stories of Amiga and Atari ST fags with busted disk drives. The poor buggers are 30 years old and finally succumbed to decades of formatting/reading/writing dirty disks, old disks, Chinese shit disks, copy protected disks, and so forth.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 02:53:22 2016 No.3273519 But the question is, are we going to run out of working floppy drives in my lifetime. There were millions of 1.44MB drives installed in PCs for 15 years.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 02:57:08 2016 No.3273527 >>3273519 True, but then again how many aren't already worn significantly or have been scrapped or are Chinese crap.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:25:38 2016 No.3274597 >Naruto pics still up /vr/ is dead.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:27:26 2016 No.3274601 >>3274597 >not reporting on sight instead of enabling the shitter by responding to it

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:34:01 2016 No.3274620 >>3274597 There's no explicit rule on 4chan forbidding them.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:35:05 2016 No.3274624 >>3273505 It'd be better to propose such an idea on a site like VCFED, not so much 4chan.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:36:54 2016 No.3274630 >>3274620 There's one that forbid avatarfagging though.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:45:09 2016 No.3274653 Errr, remind me again why people lose their shit over Naruto on a website originally created by a kid who wanted to discuss anime.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:48:22 2016 No.3274663 >>3274653 This show is generally hated by everyone but newfags. Not everyone have the same tastes when it comes to anime on 4chan, but Naruto is alway considered to be a piece of shit.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:49:31 2016 No.3274668 >>3274653 Because a lot of people hate it and the poster avatarfagging with it had a history of falseflagging to make JPC fans look bad.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:49:41 2016 No.3274669 >>3274653 It's an /a/ meme. Moot even told them they have to discuss Naruto if someone posts about it.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:53:25 2016 No.3274676 /a/ is objectively shit though. They won't discuss any anime unless it's the pedophile moe stuff.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:54:28 2016 No.3274678 >>3274653 Because 4channers on /a/ are incapable of thinking for themselves and consider anyone outside of their hivemind to be an "outsider". These are the same people who love Fate/Kaleid Liner and consider Kodomo no Jikan to be disgusting pedoshit.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:56:37 2016 No.3274684 This is exactly what the poster wanted to cause.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:58:27 2016 No.3274689 >>3274678 >Kodomo no Jikan This thing epitomizes everything hated about modern anime, everything Miyazaki warned you about.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 15:59:47 2016 No.3274693 But Naruto is objectively garbage entry-level shonen that you're supposed to stop watching when you turn 15. It would be the equivalent of going on /mu/ and discussing entry level dadrock or pop punk.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 16:01:33 2016 No.3274696 >>3274693 And here comes the /a/utist who takes the banner seriously. Go back to masturbating to Illya.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 16:10:08 2016 No.3274714 If you like Naruto, you don't belong on 4chan. Go back to /r/anime.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 16:13:13 2016 No.3274727 >>3273926 /vr/ is truly dead.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 16:13:51 2016 No.3274728 >>3274727 Use the report button you fucking braindead retard.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 16:32:58 2016 No.3274764 Wasting your time, le unpaid doggy. Thread's already ruined. May as well just make a new one.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 17:52:55 2016 No.3274923 >>3274727 What's so bad about it? Yes the subject of the thread is pretty shitty, but there are alway a bunch of threads like these, nothing new to see.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 19:37:32 2016 No.3275145

Hi all

been looking at getting a trs 80 model 2, which i can pick up in the uk easily enough, but there are so few games available anywhere!!!

i never owned one at the time, i had atari, but always remember the tandy stores here in the uk being full of their games for their computer.
And yet there are a pitiful amount on ebay and elsewhere, and even then they are not any of the decent titles.

Is there any particular reason for this?
even on the ti-99 there are plenty of carts knocking about, but why not on the trs?

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 19:39:49 2016 No.3275150

>>3275145
Hmm, the TRS-80 Model II was a business computer that didn't see any substantial gaming action AFAIK. Are you sure you don't mean either the TRS-80 Model I/III (which had a modest but fun game library), or the Color Computer 2? Model I/III games were all on disk and I suspect there was a lot of piracy; I wouldn't expect to see many on Ebay at all.

CoCo carts do show up a bit less than one would expect, and part of that might be that the installed base seemed to be fiercely loyal -- a ton of people are still hanging on to their stuff even now, including me.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 19:42:40 2016 No.3275163 >>3275150 yes its the uk version of the coco 2. just seem to be none around.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 19:43:50 2016 No.3275169 Probably because few people bought one in the UK, same deal with Apple II in the UK, although Apple were ripped a new one by Commodore in Europe for their overpriced RRP policy at Apple.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 19:46:14 2016 No.3275178

Let's see, the Model 2.. which could generally run games of the 3 and 4 if I remember correctly.

Good computer. We used to play the Scott Adams text adventures (with voice module), I think I had a copy of Starcross for the TRS-80 at one time, and I thought there was a game of Spyhunter for the Trash-80.

We had the TRS-80 4P (portable) in school you see. Oh, and there was a Flight Simulator because we used to play that on the Model 2.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 19:47:46 2016 No.3275180 >>3275178 >Let's see, the Model 2.. which could generally run games of the 3 and 4 if I remember correctly. Absolutely not. They're completely different systems. Also the M2 used 8" disks.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 19:48:47 2016 No.3275182 >>3275180 I'm pretty sure the only games you can play on a Model II are CP/M ones.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 19:51:26 2016 No.3275190

>>3275182
There we go. I think maybe Infocom and Scott Adams adventures were released for the Model II, but that's it. A lot of Model I/III games should be doable on the Model II, but would also need to be completely reprogrammed.

If there's any M2 games, they're most likely CP/M but finding ones on a usable disk format (8" SS/DD) would be a problem. It is kind of cool that it had a flight simulator though.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 19:59:11 2016 No.3275203

Anyway, about the CoCo, I've really never seen any of that shit here in the US either. It's too bad CoCo stuff is so hard to find because they sold a lot of the things so they're not exactly a rare computer.

BTW, you don't necessarily need a disk or tape drive for your CoCo, you can just plug the cassette cable into your PC's audio out jacks and play tape images into it.

Keep in mind that some games will require 32k of memory and others need Disk BASIC to run. A few also need a CoCo 3.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 20:01:05 2016 No.3275206

I don't consider the Coco to be a really fun computer, even with the time that my family actually owned one, which was in the late 1980s to early 1990s.

Like all of Atari's competitors, it was basically copying much of what it was doing for games. It had its Space Invaders, its Galaxian, its Missile Command, its Pac-Man. It also had its own original games.

Overall, though, it didn't really say it was a computer I wanted to get or buy, not as much as the Atari 8-bit personal computers did.

I'd say good luck trying to find the games.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 20:03:48 2016 No.3275210

>>3275206
The CoCo was actually quite popular in the UK, so it's a mystery to me why all the machines and software seem to have vanished from the Earth. It's especially odd because we also had the Dragon 32 (enhanced CoCo) and finding that stuff is relatively easy.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 20:04:49 2016 No.3275212

All I know about the TRS-80 was the one I got from my uncle. All he had for it was one cartridge (Chess) and two manuals, Getting Started with Color Basic and Going Ahead with Extended Color Basic.

I'm assuming that based on the fact that he had only 1 cartridge was that games for the system were uncommon.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 20:14:10 2016 No.3275231

The CoCo didn't have very many cartridge games because they were expensive. There was quite substantial software support and there's hundreds of disk and tape titles.

Since the CoCo had a comparatively speedy cassette interface (1500 bps), games loaded fast. Usually under a minute for 16k games, two minutes for 32k games, 3-4 minutes for 64k games.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 20:16:53 2016 No.3275239

My cousin had a CoCo, but the big problem with it is that probably over 75% of its software (for the CoCo 1 and 2 anyway) was on tape with only application software/programming tools being disk-based so their survivability was pretty low. By the time disk drives became common and affordable, most of the CoCo user base had moved on to C64s, Amigas, or PCs.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 20:19:17 2016 No.3275245

>>3275239
Yes, I had one with lots of cassette games and several cartridges, including some programming tools like Color LOGO and EDASM+. Disk drives were out of my price range and there wasn't a great deal of disk-based CoCo software anyway. I knew other people with CoCos and they didn't have disks either.

Anonymous Mon Jun 6 20:23:15 2016 No.3275254

>>3275239
>but the big problem with it is that probably over 75% of its software (for the CoCo 1 and 2 anyway) was on tape with only application software/programming tools being disk-based so their survivability was pretty low
Are you sure? Because there's plenty of CoCo software archived online. Also British home computers were 100% tape-based and nearly every piece of commercial software ever released for them is online.

http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/coco_game_list.html

This lists 469 games and that's not a complete list.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 6 22:12:51 2016 No.3275489 >>3275254 >Also British home computers were 100% tape-based Many of them were, but some like the Amstrad CPC 664 and 6128 had an integrated disk drive. The BBC Micro had floppy drives too (though those were mostly found in schools).

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 7 08:03:22 2016 No.3276283 3.5" 1.44MB disks are junk, plain and simple. You literally can't write to the things more than a few times before they give out, yet there are 5.25" disks made in, like, 1983 that still work.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 7 08:34:21 2016 No.3276319 >>3276283 Chances are you put a shitty disk into your drive, which subsequently fucked up its heads, and now it's fucking up all your other disks regardless of their condition.

Anonymous Tue Jun 7 09:28:58 2016 No.3276381

>>3276283

The vast majority of my DSHD 3"1/2 disks are still good. You're thinking about chinese-made floppies specificially.

Anyway, while talking about old floppies, I have a demo of Spectre for DOS lying around, but the game is pretty crappy. I've heard there was a macintosh version though. Is it any decent compared to the PC version?

Anonymous Tue Jun 7 15:13:32 2016 No.3276824
File: 36 KB, 641x480, Bomberoman_Special.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Just finished Bomberman Special on MSX.
only lost one life,it was too easy for me but i had experience from when i was a kid.

The ending screen was funny "Congratulations see you in the next soft"
Also pro tip* you blow up a door and swarm comes out the faggots can move over your bombs,thats how i lost a life.
Also when playing the final 3 bonus stages dont forget to corner yourself with bombs and wait it out if you have hand detonation upgrade,because those pink coins are aggressive as fuck.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 7 15:33:40 2016 No.3276863 >>3276824 The game is that easy? It makes me want to try this version out myself. Anyway, what are the major differences between this version and, say, the NES one? Does this one have levels and other features the NES version don't have?

Anonymous Tue Jun 7 15:43:00 2016 No.3276881

>>3276863
>The game is that easy?
Too easy because the speed of your character is 2 inches per hour so there is little room for mistake,the pasterns of the enemies are predictable and the timer always has enough time around 200 seconds.Be sure to get the shoe upgrade in the first 10 levels because there is no second,trust me on this.
When you first start the game you will definitely feel the pressure because your are slow as snail and bombs have short range and it takes A FUCKING HOUR to explode so you will get under clock pressure but once you get the upgrades rolling you are unstoppable.
Worst enemy is the wool ball since it tries to get you from the sides,bear is easy and gets stuck 99% of the time and is easy kill just be sure not to pass under it because it seems to be the trigger to unstuck itself and ruin your day.
Door placement is crazy so be on a lookout when placing powerful bombs.

As for differences there are bugs in a sense of screen transition in the level and bombs disappearing/blinking so the game is rough around the edges and bonus stages are the hardest levels you will encounter its more like survive than score attack.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 7 16:30:59 2016 No.3276976 >>3276319 >>3276381 http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?24153-I-hate-3-5-quot-HD-floppies Judging by this, the buggers have never been good from the get-go.

Anonymous Tue Jun 7 16:32:52 2016 No.3276979

>>3273426
Inexpensiveness doesn't come by the design, but your ability to produce and selling it in high volumes. Niche products will be intrinsically expensive than a mass produced retail product because them are produced and sell in small quantities, and it just goes higher when you involve things like multilayer PCBs and BGA parts, because you need equipment to assemble them, or make an contract with an Asian fab to produce your boards. Profitable only comes wen you produce at least 10,000 units and expect to sell all them.

Just check Amiga motherboard market.

Anonymous Tue Jun 7 16:42:15 2016 No.3276992 [DELETED]

File: 27 KB, 640x480, Tenten-shippuden.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>3276979
Not whole motherboards, you baka. Just...floppy parts and media and simple things like that. Replacement ICs? I dunno...shit, there's always some crud that needs replacing.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 7 17:17:34 2016 No.3277037 >>3276976 They were pretty good at first. Even some of the more recent ones were still pretty good, like the Fugifilm ones that were made in Germany. Like I said, the bad ones were the chinese stuff, which started to flood the market by the 90s.

Anonymous Tue Jun 7 17:28:13 2016 No.3277058

>>3277037
That one guy said he remembered 1.44MB disks routinely failing ever since they first came out in the late 80s. I also do have some vintage (pre-Windows 95) 1.44MB disks and many of them have issues. I tried formatting two of them the other day and got Track 0 Bad - Disk Unusable errors. The disks appeared to be in good condition and there was no obvious sign of physical damage or dirt buildup on the media, yet they would not format. I do think compressing magnetic media into a smaller physical area results in worse reliability than 8" and 5.25" disks; good brands like Maxell and Verbatim often still work more than three decades after they were made.

Anonymous Tue Jun 7 17:38:16 2016 No.3277071

>>3277058

My DOS 6.22 floppies still work perfectly, so does my Sound Blaster 16 drivers, Doom shareware, Word Perfect 5.1, Windows 3.1 and many other utilities' floppies. Some brands made bad floppies, but others that had good quality control still supplied good HD floppies.
Funnily enough, the last time I bought a pack of Verbatim floppies, almost all of them couldn't be written on. I still have no problems with my Fugi ones though.

Anonymous Tue Jun 7 17:45:08 2016 No.3277078

>>3277071
The problem is less reading the things as the fact that they can't seem to take repeated rewriting/formatting. I have probably 300 1.44MB and 720k disks (most of them 1.44MB) and less than 30% of them work.

See the linked VCF thread. The one guy says he believes that quality control dropped because by the 90s, all new PCs had hard disks and floppies weren't expected to support an entire computer, just distribution. Certainly it's a good point that people would have raised Hell if they'd had to depend on 1.44MB disks back in 1983.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 7 17:59:18 2016 No.3277107 >>3277071 Official media is just higher quality in general. Same is true for things like CD/DVD/blu ray, which are more durable than the shit you can buy to burn on due to better scratch resistant coating.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 7 18:00:56 2016 No.3277112 >>3277107 Generally it's the opposite. Distribution media is lower quality since it was never intended for repeated rewrites.

Anonymous Tue Jun 7 18:07:15 2016 No.3277127

>>3277078
>The one guy says he believes that quality control dropped because by the 90s, all new PCs had hard disks and floppies weren't expected to support an entire computer, just distribution.

Well yeah, that theory is well known among old computer enthusiast, but I believe that it only applied to some manufacturers, while others still offered floppies good enough to last for a long time.
My Fuji floppies are kinda like new-old stocks -- they were lying around in a supermarket before I bought them for I don't know how long, and reformatting them wasn't a problem at all. And it's not like I bought them in small quantities -- 3 packs of 50 floppies each, and I only ever had issues with a single one. I also have some old bull floppies that I can reformat without any issue.
I also have old bull floppies that can be reformatted without issues either.

>>3277107

For CD/DVD/Bluray it's because they don't "burn" the discs, they press them using a metallic matrix. The plastic coating is just there to protect the matrix, and scratch don't cause data loss. Even though the disc is scratched like hell, it'll still be readable again if we remove the scratches. The stuff the consumer gets on the other hand is only the plastic part with a metallic disc, and the burner tries to simulate the matrix by deforming the plastic layer, so when there are scratches the data is lost.
Why don't consumer make pressed CD/DVD/Bluray you may ask? Because the machines needed to do that stuff usually cost more than 10 times the average guy's car.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 7 19:14:35 2016 No.3277275 File: 5 KB, 640x480, tdsc.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>3276979 Yet it hasn't been an apparent issue to manufacture Flash floppy emulators, no?

Anonymous Tue Jun 7 19:22:15 2016 No.3277289

>>3277275
As I said earlier, I think it would ultimately be cheaper to produce replacement drive components in particular R/W heads, but the real point of devices like HxC is convenience, reliability, and easy getting data to and from the old computer and a modern machine.

Also if you replaced the head mechanism in a floppy drive you'd have to align it which is a comparatively awful task akin to converging a color CRT. If you had to do either of those things, you'd hate it in short order.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 7 20:47:27 2016 No.3277449 >>3277275 Why was a perfectly constructive post deleted?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 7 20:51:56 2016 No.3277460 >>3277449 the guy posted a Naruto reaction pic and le unpaid doggy is just being anal about it. Jeez, just ignore the Naruto shit if you don't like it. No point in spilling your spaghetti.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 7 20:54:08 2016 No.3277464 >>3277460 >Jeez, just ignore the Naruto shit if you don't like it Who, me or the janitor?

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 8 04:51:09 2016 No.3278204 >>3276881 I see, thanks for the informations anon. I'll give it a try .

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 8 18:24:01 2016 No.3279363 I apologise if I'm asking in the wrong place but I feel I'll get the best response here. I'm playing the Ur-Quan Masters. Am I supposed to be getting rekt by the red crystal aliens every time I go anywhere?

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 00:34:11 2016 No.3279960 According to everything I read, a floppy drive is supposed to last about 30 years while tape drives last just about 4-5 years.

Anonymous Thu Jun 9 00:56:05 2016 No.3279990
File: 751 KB, 682x801, yu-no review.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Can I get some help with YU-NO?
I'm in Mio's route, coordinate 206, and have been following the walkthrough that comes with the fanpatch so far, but I've gotten myself stuck for some reason.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 00:59:16 2016 No.3279994 >>3279990 Well, nevermind. Apparently fucking around in the beach and ringing my house's intercom for a couple of times did something.

Anonymous Thu Jun 9 01:42:57 2016 No.3280078

>>3279960
>tape drives last just about 4-5 years.
Where did you read that? Because that's pretty much false considering my To7/70 tape drive is more than 30 years old and still work wonderfully, let alone all these 70s and 80s-made tape players (Hi-Fi or not) that can be used as computer tape drives.

Anyway, some SGI workstation presentation video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 01:53:26 2016 No.3280097 I've heard a lot of stories of people with busted Amiga/Atari ST disk drives.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 02:00:34 2016 No.3280112 >>3280097 Yes, it's because of the way Satan teached game devs how to make copy proctection systems on these platforms -- by putting so much strain on them that they'll end up breaking.

Anonymous Thu Jun 9 03:13:30 2016 No.3280221

I always took it as writ that VCR heads crap out in a couple of years. My dad owned four VCRs in his life. The first died when its belt broke, the second and third wore out their heads, and the fourth was purchased during the early 2000s so barely used before being retired for a DVD player.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 03:24:07 2016 No.3280236 Tape drives don't last that long because of the high tension and because the head is rubbing the tape for up to an hour at one go instead of in quick three-second bursts like a diskette.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 03:38:46 2016 No.3280253 I've seen some tape heads in horrifying condition desu.

Anonymous Thu Jun 9 07:54:33 2016 No.3280358

>>3280236
>Tape drives don't last that long
They do. Most of the time, like with floppy drives, failures don't come from the head, but from other factors like rubber belts, motor failures, bad caps and the like.
If tape decks were this fragile, how do you explain the fact that many decks from the 80s, even the 70s still work wonderfully, even though they still saw some heavy use? I recovered 2 1982 Sanyo tape decks that were used for educational purposes (for language classes) a few weeks ago, and after cleaning the heads with alcohol they work without any issue.
What you're saying might be true for mainframe tape drives, where they rewind and play tapes all the time, but for your average home computer that only load a program once and halt during gameplay/when the software is in use, it really isn't.

>>3280221
Did he ever used a cleaning tape? Unlike audio tape, VHS pretty much require you to alway have a cleaning tape ready to be used if you don't want them to crap themselves out (though it's alway a good idea to have alcohol and Q-tips ready to clean audio tape heads too).

Anonymous Thu Jun 9 08:09:34 2016 No.3280373

I was reading some threads on VCFED and they were saying that Sony 3.5" disks were trash, yet I have a bunch of them and they're mostly all readable and work. I had one with some old school reports I found, but my XP box wouldn't read it for some reason, however if I restarted and booted the thing with a DOS floppy (ironically also a Sony disk), then it worked. Assumed it was missing the media ID byte, but I used DEBUG to load the boot sector from the disk and it was there (offset 15h=F0h). I know NT-based Windows versions will refuse to read floppies without that byte, but I have no clue what was wrong here.

Imation disks though are all terrible. Complete trash.

Anonymous Thu Jun 9 08:14:19 2016 No.3280375

3.5" floppies in general were never as reliable as the larger disks. 5.25" disks made by Dysan, Memorex, IBM, or other high-end manufacturers seemed to almost never die. Wabash, BASF, and CDC were horrible though. 8" disks were usually quite failsafe as well unless made by an off-brand.

Also Commodore's in-house PET-FLOPPY and VIC-FLOPPY brands actually received an award from one magazine in 1982 for the worst brand of diskettes they'd ever encountered. :^)

Anonymous Thu Jun 9 08:35:13 2016 No.3280409

>>3260057
Anyone trying to make homemade R/W heads for a tape player would probably face the issue of really, really rapid head wear. The very first VCRs in the 70s had heads that were rated for only 500 hours of use before the soft iron would be worn down. It took more advanced manufacturing processes to have usable VCR heads.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 08:40:33 2016 No.3280416 http://www.officedepot.com/a/browse/floppy-disk-drives/N=5+573953/ Apparently 1.44MB drives are still made and you can buy new ones, though I haven't seen one on the shelf in a big-box store since about 2007.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 08:49:36 2016 No.3280431 >>3280416 There's still a lotta factory equipment that uses floppy disks. Even though they've been promoting Gotek emulators, they're still not as cheap as the real thing.

Anonymous Thu Jun 9 09:03:20 2016 No.3280440
File: 2.22 MB, 529x496, Sion2_title_x68000.webm [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

A fun little railshooter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5NwzCb7_ks
Gotta love the fact that this game have 2 distinct soundtracks -- one for FM and GS sound modules, the other one for MT-32/CM-64L modules.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 09:04:11 2016 No.3280442 >>3280431 Gotek's aren't expensive at all, though they don't emulate anything but standard 720k/1.44MB PC formats. The HxC emulates almost anything that fits on a 34-pin Shugart interface, but costs over $70.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 09:06:48 2016 No.3280448 >>3280442 >Gotek's aren't expensive at all, though they don't emulate anything but standard 720k/1.44MB PC formats 'Cept for those Amigafags who reprogrammed them for the ADF format.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 09:22:53 2016 No.3280467 IMO the worst part about 3.5" floppies is the metal shutter. When that fucking thing breaks off and gets caught inside a disk drive...come on, it's happened to all of us.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 09:39:47 2016 No.3280484 Any more games like Shogo Mobile Armor Division?

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 19:05:42 2016 No.3281392 File: 1.33 MB, 512x510, star_trader.webm [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Anonymous Thu Jun 9 20:31:58 2016 No.3281594

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Radio-Shack-TRS-80-Color-Computer-2-With-7-Games-/172230291775?hash=item2819b9b13f:g:3XEAAOSwMNxXUz0O

http://www.ebay.com/itm/TRS-80-Model-III-Micro-Computer-Radio-Shack-Powers-ON-to-Cass-/322122971043?hash=item4b000677a3:g:tLcAAOSwQaJXR0N1

CoCos are cheap compared to M3s. Wonder why.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 9 21:35:20 2016 No.3281707 >>3281594 Most likely shipping costs. Model IIIs are _heavy_.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 07:41:49 2016 No.3282667

I give it though, PC hardware is getting miles more reliable than it once was.

>back in the day when hard disks actually had a factory sticker on them showing the number of bad sectors
Today a NIB hard disk with bad sectors is unheard of.

Also on MFM hard disks, you risked corrupting your data if you powered the computer off without running a utility to park the heads. DRAM is also miles more reliable now. In the 8-bit days, you had 4116 chips which routinely fucked themselves from overheating or unreliable linear power supplies.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 08:32:44 2016 No.3282738 >>3281392 Is there a translation of this? I cant find any information and i would really love to play it.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 08:56:22 2016 No.3282769 File: 96 KB, 1529x580, ds9cf.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:01:29 2016 No.3282780 >>3273316 >However, sooner or later floppy drives and floppy disks will cease to exist since they are not produced anymore, and haven't been made in many years They still sell new USB floppy drives but IDT the media itself is still made.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:02:25 2016 No.3282781 >>3282769 Stop that anti-3"1/2 floppy shilling. We know it already you don't like them.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:04:41 2016 No.3282784

I have a giant horde of 3.5" disks most of which don't work. I had original installation disks of Colonization and King's Quest 4 and they don't work anymore. I have an original copy of KQ3 as well with both 5.25" and 3.5" disks and the latter didn't work at all; they just produced General Failure Reading Drive A messages. The 5.25" disks in my originals of KQ3 and 4 are all completely functional though.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:07:36 2016 No.3282786 File: 95 KB, 1520x742, ff90.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:08:16 2016 No.3282787 >>3282784 Too bad for you. All of my 3"1/2 storing commercial softwares (dating from 1987) still work. >>3282738 Not that I'm aware.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:12:48 2016 No.3282794 >>3282769 I agree. In retrospect, they probably shouldn't have abandoned 5.25" disks, but people wanted smaller disks that were easier for children and tech illiterates to handle.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:14:07 2016 No.3282796 >>3282794 It's hard to say; 5.25" disks had long since disappeared by the age of horrible Chinese media. If they'd lived long enough for that to happen...

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:15:30 2016 No.3282804 >>3282796 Yeh but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that 3.5" disks weren't reliable even in 1988.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:18:17 2016 No.3282809

>>3282786
>What the DSHD 3.5" floppies wont stand are multiple writes.
Bullshit, just because you used shitty floppies doesnt mean that all the floppies of that format were trash.

>>3282804
>anecdotal evidence
That's what they are, anecdotal. If they were that unreliable my DOS 3 disk would have died a long time ago, same for my amiga floppies.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:20:58 2016 No.3282817

>>3282796
In fact the early 5.25" drives and media in the late 70s weren't terribly reliable either, but by the time Reagan was president, most of the teething issues with them had been worked out.

I think the problem with 1.44MB disks is that IBM rather hastily shoehorned the high density standard onto 3.5" media and they never had the 4-5 years of development time to become reliable like 5.25" disks. Of course the computer market in the late 80s was extremely different than when Shugart first introduced 5.25" disks in 1976. It was still experimental hobbyist stuff at that time, the market for floppies was small, and people could expect everything to not work that well.

Ten years later though, with personal computing a multibillion dollar industry, there was no time to spend a couple of years improving on a floppy format.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:24:15 2016 No.3282824

>>3282809
>Bullshit, just because you used shitty floppies doesnt mean that all the floppies of that format were trash
>insulting ChuckG
That guy's a living legend in the retro computing community. He's been involved with computers since the 70s (ie. long before either of us were alive) and has used literally thousands of floppies of all different brands and types. If anyone anywhere knows his shit, it's him. So if you want to get an account on VcFed and argue with them about the reliability of 3.5" disks, have at it.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:37:02 2016 No.3282839
File: 1.22 MB, 3264x2448, dl66vUA.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
[ERROR]

HxC floppy emulator manager running on an IBM XT. As you can see, he has the CGA composite out hooked up to a Sony Wega (?). You can also see how shitty 80 column text looks on a TV, even a set like this which probably represented the pinnacle of consumer CRT TVs.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:38:05 2016 No.3282841 >>3282839 Not my XT btw, this was from a Vogons thread.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:42:55 2016 No.3282848 >>3282839 >As you can see, he has the CGA composite out hooked up to a Sony Wega (?). You can also see how shitty 80 column text looks on a TV That's because of the composite signal though, not the TV itself.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 09:50:13 2016 No.3282861 Amiga computers came with a music game that pushed the envelope for modern day bedroom producers. 80s techno https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 10:05:53 2016 No.3282883

>>3282861
>a music game
What? It's called a tracker, and no, it's not a game, just a kind of sequencer.

Anyway, Protracker is just an evolution of the original Obarski's Soundtracker made by various members of the demoscene (a bit like Seka assembler). But even though it proved to be quite popular (enough to be a model for the PC scene), the Atari ST was more popular among amateur musicians, because of sequencers like cubase and notator (which were cracked pretty quickly) as well as the arrival of affordable MIDI expanders by the late 80s/early 90s. Trackers were mostly used for games, demos and music disks.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 10:07:38 2016 No.3282889 >>3282839 BTW, this should be in color but due to a hardware bug on the original IBM CGA card, the NTSC burst won't come on in 80 column text mode unless you set the border color to something other than black.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 10:10:02 2016 No.3282892

I've actually used a real XT+CGA before and the composite signal is dirty; it produces a lot of interference unlike, say, a NES or SNES where the signal is completely clean. I think this is due to the fact that the card uses a TTL circuit to convert the RGB signal to NTSC instead of a proper NTSC -> RGB converter.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 11:08:18 2016 No.3282961 File: 43 KB, 1534x515, st7yyu.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Yeh but at least you can play Space Quest on the XT. Fucking hipsters.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 11:23:00 2016 No.3282989 File: 154 KB, 892x766, nnjs.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>3282961 Say, what about a Flash emulator for Commodore 90xx hard disks.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 18:10:51 2016 No.3283745

Codename Iceman's MT-32 opening song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jakXWbZ4bLA
Sierra made some really nice MT-32 tunes. Too bad they made the FB-01 sound WORSE than the AdLib in games that supported it. It's not like many people on youtube does any better than what they did though (most of the FB-01 demonstration music posted on youtube sound like crap).

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 23:44:52 2016 No.3284245

what will happen when Commodore proprietary ICs will dead?

Actually you can still easily find any replacement for PET/CBM computers, but it's more difficult to find VIC-20, C=64, etc. replacement chips like 6510, VIC, VIC-II, SID, etc.

Is there a way to build a replacement or (better!) is there anybody around the world that's making them?

I'm worried about the future of our poor machines without spare parts

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 23:46:57 2016 No.3284247

>>3284245
Well, hopefully those chips will be emulated as time goes on and the supply dries up; there are already emulated replacements for the custom PLAs, 6530s and even the SID chip, and probably others that I've forgotten or wasn't aware of. Some pretty amazing work being done on and for these old machines.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 23:48:46 2016 No.3284249

>>3284247
At some point, it becomes more expedient to toss the original electronics, keep the case and run an emulator in a modern platform in the case. You can already envision some of the problems that are getting tougher to solve--eg. where does one find a replacement CRT monitor, slowly disappearing 5 volt logic, etc.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 10 23:49:47 2016 No.3284250 >>3284247 I don't like to do that; of course it's just my point of view, but I like to own an original, working machine. Emulation doesn't give me the same feeling. My drean is to find a way to fix broken machines.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 23:51:23 2016 No.3284257

>>3284250
many parts aren't available yet, like i.e. VIC chip... there are tons of machines broken without chance to be fixed because of lack of components, so it would be fantastic if somebody (some chinese firm? ;-) ) could develope a replacement....

How to emulate a 6530? I've seen it's possible using a 6532 (that it's quite hard -or impossible- to find too...) and an eprom. This will probably my next need, since I've a broken 8050 in Italy and I'll take it in october. Not sure if the problem is the 6530, but since it seems I only get nasty problems, probably it will be.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 23:53:29 2016 No.3284261

I kind of wonder if in 30 years when the supply of original replacement parts dry up if anybody will still bother with original equipment anyway. Since most people now only collect retro PCs for gaming and that can just be done on emulation anyway. C64s sure, but other stuff like the PET aren't so popular so there's less motivation/profit to create replacement parts for them. Someday maybe I can see people getting an EMU board and sticking it in a gutted PET connected to an LCD monitor, might as well just emulate the whole thing.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 23:55:33 2016 No.3284263

Even in the PC and Macintosh world there are plenty of vendor-custom chips, some with at best, a part number printed on them. While you may be able to deduce a general idea of what the chip does, detailed information isn't available. If I have to junk something, I'll try to depopulate the board and stash the ICs away against a future need. Just beating the Chinese pull vendors to the punch.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 23:58:04 2016 No.3284265

>>3284257
The SID, the VIC, the PLA and many other chips have been reverse-engineered and can be emulated. Jeri Ellsworth did it in the C64 DTV. As far as I understand, she was well underway to emulate the Amiga 500 chipset in an FPGA too, but the project got canceled.

The bottom line is: Nothing lasts forever. But you should wonder what really is worthy of preserving? Most people now work with computers, smartphones, TV's that are really computers with tuners, etc. so you're never going to be able to re-create the experience from the 1980s where you had never ever seen a computer before and then all of a sudden there was this box in your house that could do so much, if only you knew how to use it.

Personally, I think the most important thing is to keep the information about the hardware alive, as well as the software that runs on it. It may not always be possible in the future to keep the actual hardware alive, but as long as the information is available that can be used to rebuild that hardware somehow, or to emulate it on some other hardware, it will be possible to run the software too. So thanks to websites such as Zimmers and Bombjack, who take it upon themselves to keep this information alive, the history of those old computers is safe, even if they run the risk of getting shut down every day because of the retarded copyright laws in the United States.

Anonymous Fri Jun 10 23:59:26 2016 No.3284269

>>3284265
But it will be a long time before all the old hardware will turn to dust and will be unrepairable. Most of the standard chips (like TTL chips) will be available for a number of years and the custom chips like the PLA, SID and VIC are so well understood that it doesn't really matter if we run out: they can be emulated if there's no system available from which a working chip can be removed.

It's unavoidable that if you have a broken computer from the 1970s or 1980s, inevitably some ICs are already not available anymore, except in other machines of the same type. Eventually other chips will have the same thing happen to them. Eventually there will just be no other choice but to emulate most, if not all of the computer. But it will take so long before that happens, that I doubt that anyone will care when the only way to fix a C64 is to replace it with another C64 or an emulator, as long as they can run the old software and experience the "look and feel". If anything, the keyboard is the most important hardware to keep alive because it's probably the only thing that can't be emulated.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:00:56 2016 No.3284270 >>3284269 Or a CRT. You can't emulate that.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:02:09 2016 No.3284271 Ok fine I am depressed now.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:03:13 2016 No.3284276 >>3284271 yes it is ironic that it's easier to keep a Model T Ford from the 1920s running than an electronics device from the 1980s

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:05:02 2016 No.3284281

There's also a cultural shift to worry about. Back in the 50s, 60s and 70s (and to some extent, the 80s), companies had field service personnel and went to some pains to explain the inner workings of their products. So we now have quite a bit of paper that can be referred to that gives some information on how an original device might be replicated.

Try that with your modern embedded device with no programming information available. I had an experience with a device made in the 90s with an early FPGA on it. Although the manufacturer was quite willing to help, they had retained no information at all on how the FPGA was supposed to function or what was supposed to be uploaded to it.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:07:40 2016 No.3284286

My dad has somewhere a state machine project he did in the late 60s/early 70s. It used DTL in flat-pack packaging, with the exception of some Fairchild 8-bit memory devices in TO-100 cases (odd part; used 5V Vcc, but took a 7V clock). All of those devices are pretty much unobtainium and no one has developed drop-in substitutes. A mere 40-ish years ago.

There are a lot of other technologies/devices that have gone into the category of "we could make them or substitutes for them if the demand were great enough to offset the costs of replication". That "if" will never be satisfied. We'll be digging around on dusty shelves, hoping to find replacements that someone forgot about, but I suspect that ultimately, it'll all be the domain of museums.

HTL, old ECL (I, II, and III) and TTL (non-7400 series), RTL logic ICs are rare now and will only become more so.

Right now, we're in sort of a "honeymoon" period where DIP packages and 5V logic are still being manufactured. But that won't last.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:09:17 2016 No.3284291

The site owner of another forum I go to called byuu.org (which is focused on emulation development and other programming projects), has similar sentiments. He believes for this reason that cycle accurate emulators need to be developed for hardware to keep the memory of old machines alive when they finally bite the dust. Me, I'm surprised that some of the things I have still work as if they're new- the most prized possession being an original IBM AT CMI hard drive.

Of course, it would be nice if people could make small runs of old CPUs or ICs XD... kinda like PCBs, except you pay someone to use a specific mask- provided they still exist. In the extreme case, a microcontroller or CPLD could replace broken ICs... it might not be authentic, but whatever works, right? I highly doubt we're entering an age where small microcontrollers will disappear.

At some point, devices will become too complicated for long term reliability, period... this is why it's tantamount we document everything, even technical standards not necessarily meant to be fully understood by a single person.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:11:17 2016 No.3284295

>>3284291
>Of course, it would be nice if people could make small runs of old CPUs or ICs XD... kinda like PCBs, except you pay someone to use a specific mask- provided they still exist. In the extreme case, a microcontroller or CPLD could replace broken ICs... it might not be authentic, but whatever works, right? I highly doubt we're entering an age where small microcontrollers will disappear.
In a sense, that's an excellent application of FPGAs. At least you're forced to write out a detailed description of the hardware.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:15:06 2016 No.3284303

In the case of Commodore stuff, the SID, VIC-II, PLA, and other parts have all been reverse-engineered and documented so thoroughly that we know what every single transistor in them does and when it does it, so emulating them or perhaps even paying chinks to manufacture new ones is not a problem. There has been work done to reverse engineer and document the various Amiga chipsets as well.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:20:06 2016 No.3284312 Eh, it won't matter anyway when everyone who was alive in 1985 has died anyway. Your grandkids will just be all like "LOL Grandpa's old ZX Spectrum he has in the loft who cares anyway".

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:21:10 2016 No.3284315

I disagree however - They're still saving and preserving all kinds of old tech - cars, guns, watches, trebuchets, printing presses, locomotives, viking ships, etc. Why not computers? Sure some will sit there on display, but some few will always be running - it will be a matter of pride and accomplishment to do this.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:22:17 2016 No.3284318

>>3284315
It's easier to maintain a mechanical device than an electronic one. It's far easier to maintain a Model T Ford than any car made since the 90s. In 100 years I don't think too many people will care about the machines we try to keep running now, but they might care about the information we recorded onto their obsolete spinning disks, tapes, and floppies which means they will have to deal with emulation of the hardware and a physical interface to read the media.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:23:30 2016 No.3284321

Here is what I think.... Someday your ancestor will be sitting on 200 years of digital photography from this period. People are going to have to start taking old tech seriously if they want to keep their family photos (for example). I can see a whole industry in this kind of stuff. As an extension keeping old systems going or at least the means to span the gaps would be profitable for a niche business.

We can keep old cars going better now that we could when they were newer because we can produce parts and we have new techniques. There are shops that specialize in old parts because it's profitable to do so. We make new and better parts for them. This will also happen with new tech used for solving old tech problems. Someday computers will be able to figure out what an old computer was supposed to do and fix it. We can't fix our own surface mount boards today, but it may actually be child's play in the future. See where I am going with this? Only if technology declines like it did in the Dark Ages might we truly lose our connection to be able to support old tech. Maybe I am just an optimist...

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:31:06 2016 No.3284331

>>3284312
Of course you depressed me, so I have to disagree with you in some way

IMO the interest about retro-computing won't be just academic. A lot of people has interest in old things, even when they're older than them. In example I love ancient EM machines like calculators or pinballs. And I'm "just" 44, so this interest isn't nostalgia but a legitimate interest.

Stuff like PETs are different from modern computers and they will be even when our Windows 8 boxes are old, because they are the first milestone in the personal computer era. I believe there always will be people interested. Reverse engineering of simple chip like VIC, etc. should be "quite easy" since they're simple, compared with modern electronic; and I believe they could have a good niche market: Imagine how many VIC and SIDs you could sell if you had them. Imagine how many 5.25" disks or drive mechanisms you could sell. Several million C64s and 1541 drives were sold. there's space for a good business, IMO; even because collector would buy more than needed. Buy 100 5.25" disks, 3-4 spare drive mechanisms, and 5-10 VIC-IIs or SIDs just to be sure.

Also stuff like the Apple II, TRS-80, and PET are easier to fix than a C64, Amiga, or Atari 800 because they don't have any proprietary ICs.

Emulators can never capture the feel of booting Maniac Mansion off a real 1541 disk.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:33:33 2016 No.3284335 Well, to get to the nub of the matter, it's less the CPU than the peripherals. But who has the resources to host a 1960s mainframe other than a select very wealthy few?

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:35:26 2016 No.3284339

As most of you probably know, already exists some work (in progress?) about making replacements for Commodore ICs, like the C64 PLA reverse engineering and replacement:

http://www.sx64.net/downloads/C64%20PLA%20Logic%20Equations.txt

I just found it so I didn't search about it yet; but it sounds promising. Maybe not all of the ICs can be replaced, but if at least some of them can be, especially those harder to find, it would be fine.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:37:55 2016 No.3284345

>>3284331
I agree.

>sticking a 5.25" disk into an IBM XT and waiting for DOS to boot up
No emulator can recreate that feel.

How many people are repairing mechanical calculators? Look at the Marchant teardown on John Wollfe's web site and be amazed. But remanufacturing parts for the Marchant is a serious problem.

Up to 1985 or so, custom chips were not too complex, their logic could be recreated by simply using a logic analyzer. Early logic chips were so simple that recreating them using discrete transistors is possible. I am trying to get a core store running, but even after a real trawl of the web I am amazed at just how little information there is on them. I have yet to find the circuit diagram of a core store to see how it was done, for real.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:40:23 2016 No.3284349 >>3284345 I agree 100% Now what we need is just somebody that reverse engineering all the custom chips and make replacements available. And we need new floppies and new 5.25" drive mechs.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 00:44:38 2016 No.3284356 >>3284331 >Also stuff like the Apple II, TRS-80, and PET are easier to fix than a C64, Amiga, or Atari 800 because they don't have any proprietary ICs The II/II+ don't, but the IIe/IIc/IIgs sure as heck do have proprietary chips.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 03:57:05 2016 No.3284621 bump

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 04:13:29 2016 No.3284651 File: 92 KB, 1546x783, ds7.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Geez, if you ever run out of NOS tapes it can't be _that_ hard to make diy tape. Shit, it's just a strip of Mylar with an oxide coating.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 04:37:48 2016 No.3284692 >>3284651 Magnetic tape is still manufactured because tape drives are still used for archival storage. Just not the old-ass 1960s-70s types he's talking about.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 06:33:45 2016 No.3284801 I think the one thing it may not be possible to produce are CRTs since the tooling and infrastructure for those doesn't exist anymore. The manufacturing process for flat panels is completely different.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 06:42:58 2016 No.3284809

>>3284692
True but since tape storage is still used and there's still production lines and equipment for it, you could always pay to have more made if you wanted to. CRTs don't use the same manufacturing process as flat panels, not even close. So unfortunate though it may be, it isn't possible to have new CRTs made anymore.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 07:06:50 2016 No.3284820

>>3284801
>The tooling and infrastructure for those doesn't exist anymore

Like another anon said, Sony still have infrastructures to maintain the current BVM CRTs. I think it's the same for Ikegami (which also sell brand new CRT monitors). Also, there are still Taiwanese manufacturers out there making CRTs.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 07:14:49 2016 No.3284829

I'm not worried that much about monochrome CRTs because there's a lot fewer variants of those and they're pretty easy to swap if a tube fails. Also monochrome CRTs can be rebuilt fairly easily (once a common practice in the 50s-60s).

Unfortunately color CRTs really can't be rebuilt (especially in terms of replacing bad phosphor) and there's a _lot_ more different types of them in terms of CRT size/deflection/gun placement/pinout/dot pitch.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 07:17:35 2016 No.3284832 >>3284829 I'm not familiar with this. Explain?

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 07:23:02 2016 No.3284838

>>3284832
As I said. In the 50s-60s, during the era of vacuum tube TVs, CRT rebuilding was a common cottage industry. Most of the time they'd just replace weak electron guns, but it's also possible to replace bad phosphor on monochrome tubes.

>cut front of tube off
>scrape out old phosphor
>recoat it
>seal it back up

Afterwards, the tube would be baked in an oven for a couple of hours to restore the airtight vacuum inside. With color CRTs you're basically limited to replacing the electron guns and even then, you have to converge them which is a very tedious job that you'd quickly come to hate.

The last guy who did rebuild CRTs was that dude from Hawkeye Picture Tubes but he retired and besides, he only did certain kinds of 50s-60s TV tubes. However, if anyone else wanted to do it, there's nothing stopping them.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 07:33:43 2016 No.3284849 File: 26 KB, 400x271, Dr. House sarcastic face.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>3284651 >most younger people under 40 don't even know know what a RTR tape is what one looks like or how they sound Dude, I know what reel-to-reel tape is.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 07:46:40 2016 No.3284859 >>3284651 "as it is there are already vintage ICs commanding high prices and nobody making subs" He's kind of right. There's a demand here for stuff that's not being met.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 09:40:55 2016 No.3284957

>>3284303
You'd need to sell enough of them to be profitable though. I do think there's a big enough demand for SIDs because aside from replacing fried ones, there's the whole hipster thing of building synths with them. Likely the market for VIC-IIs and PLAs would be much lower since there's not much demand for those except to replace fried ones. The VIC-II would also be fairly difficult to recreate accurately, especially if you're talking about all the hardware quirks/undocumented features of the chip.

The TED chip in the Plus/4 is far more of a concern since there's way less of those to begin with and they were really failure-prone.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 09:50:16 2016 No.3284972

Here's one thing - the digital side of the VIC/SID would be simple to recreate, but the analog parts such as filters would be harder because they were the result of imperfections in the manufacturing process. Individual SIDs can sound different from each other for this reason, so it's not really possible to recreate this unintentional production flaw.

The 65C02 chips are still produced for the microcontroller market, but newer ones removed the illegal opcodes. These won't support the bank switching features of the custom CPUs used in the C64/Plus-4/C128 but it could be possible to build some kind of switching board and attach it to the CPU to replicate this feature. However, CPU failures are pretty uncommon so I wouldn't worry too much about that.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 09:54:52 2016 No.3284978 >>3284972 That's quite true. The variance from chip to chip is considerable so there's no definitive SID sound though the 8580R5 is closest to what Bob Yannes originally intended.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 11:44:13 2016 No.3285134 >>3284972 Yeah actually a large part of the SID design came from exploiting certain properties of the NMOS manufacturing process. It would be damn hard to recreate that with today's chip fabrication technology.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 11:45:31 2016 No.3285138

>>3284972
>Here's one thing - the digital side of the VIC/SID would be simple to recreate, but the analog parts such as filters would be harder because they were the result of imperfections in the manufacturing process

You're referring to abuse of the NMOS FETs for analog filters. That would be a problem.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 11:49:32 2016 No.3285143 >>3284972 >but newer ones removed the illegal opcodes. i don't get it, they weren't bugs, they were features LAX for example was pretty useful

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 11:51:55 2016 No.3285147 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTYBYv2SDJI I can see what you mean by the variance in SID sounds. I don't remember from playing Kickman when I was 6 years old that it sounded like this. The game music as I recall sounded a bit louder and scratchier.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 12:32:04 2016 No.3285226

CIA chips are still manufactured although new ones have bug fixes and are CMOS instead of NMOS, but otherwise should be fine.

The 6510 is no big deal since it's just a 6502 core with a few added features to support bank switching and pausing CPU operation to allow the VIC-II access to video RAM. These could be recreated with TTL logic easily. 65xx chips are still produced as well but as someone else noted above, they're all the 65C02 which doesn't have undocumented opcodes, but then again only some demos actually need those to operate.

VIC-IIs would be the real headache and it's doubtful if reproducing one with modern chip fab processes is possible at all, at least one that would have all the hardware glitches that games/demos exploit.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 12:35:17 2016 No.3285229 You could implement the VDC on a MAXII/V/10 or Spartan6/Artix7. VIC-II would require a CPLD/FPGA and a video IC that could generate composite output.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 12:38:13 2016 No.3285238 >>3285229 >wanting composite video >2016 The fuck is this shit.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 12:40:03 2016 No.3285240 >>3285238 I agree. The analog portions of the VIC-II are the trickiest part to try and replicate with modern chip fab processes. If those were eliminated and VGA/HDMI used instead, that would make things much easier.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 12:45:42 2016 No.3285253
File: 557 KB, 1600x1200, Commodore_C64C.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

C64Cs are pretty dependable if you make sure to equip everything with heat sinks and get a third party PSU instead of that Commodore Power Brick of Death (TM), the older machines not as much.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 12:50:54 2016 No.3285267

its also a misconception that analog parts on the chip would be required - because even if you'd have them, they'd almost certainly not behave like they did in the SID or VIC, so they wouldn't help at all - digital approximation is the way to go, and obviously any FPGA can do that.

you'd have to do some trickery to reproduce the exact behaviour of the CIA i/o drivers though (and you cant ignore that problem since tons of stuff relies on it)

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 12:52:17 2016 No.3285270

An FPGA can do video easily with not much more than an R2R dac.

I've done it with an arduino, the RPI VGA does it and I think the C64DTV does it this way too.

I wish I had more time to get my head around the FPGA realm.
Is probably start with a vic20 video replacement - simpler and harder to find

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 12:54:00 2016 No.3285278

>>3285226
>CIA chips are still manufactured although new ones have bug fixes and are CMOS instead of NMOS, but otherwise should be fine.
Ah see, that's the problem. ;)

The new 6522 chips you can buy from WD aren't 100% like the old MOS 6522 which again does rely on certain properties/exploits in the NMOS process. Modern chip fabrication is slightly too good, you see.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 12:55:05 2016 No.3285283

>>3285270
VGA is practically obsolete anyway. Pointless. Much better to bring a more modern connector to the device, like DVI/HDMI/DP etc Might be easier to find a 50Hz HDMI device than a 50Hz VGA device too for us not in the NTSC world.

@schumi
Cheat and use the FPGA + WDC6522N?

The FGPA is going to need some tri-state buffers on it anyway as the FPGA in question doesn't support Open Drain which would be needed.

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 12:58:32 2016 No.3285287

Personally I think the PET would be easier to reproduce since it doesn't use any custom ICs and everything in there is either still produced or easily obtainable from NOS.

That leaves essentially two parts that would be hard to come by. The CRT monitor (which could be substituted with an LCD if necessary) and the keyboard. I suspect a C64 / VIC20 keyboard could be adapted to work but it wouldn't be quite the same as I recall that the PET only had a single graphic character on each key, instead of the two that the VIC20/C64 had.

Being how much PETs typically sell for on eBay, I am surprised nobody has jumped on such an idea.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 13:00:13 2016 No.3285292 >>3285287 The video circuitry on the 2001/30xx PET directly drives the electron gun in the CRT, so you couldn't exactly use that with an LCD display.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 13:05:21 2016 No.3285295 File: 11 KB, 256x192, La-Mulana_gameplay[1].png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Is La Mulana allowed? :^)

Anonymous Sat Jun 11 18:23:03 2016 No.3285913

Some Technosoft game soundtrack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytew845NXYw
People who have played to ThunderForce II and III will surely recognize a few patches (the drums in some musics for example), and 1 or 2 musics sound really close to what you'd expect from these games (the one at 27:13). Anyway, it's a really nice soundtrack imo.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 23:05:17 2016 No.3286510 bump

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 23:09:47 2016 No.3286524 >>3286510 /vr/ is a slow board, stop bumping the thread when it's not even on page 9 you fucking newfag.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 11 23:39:28 2016 No.3286575 The major ICs in a Commodore 64 really need a heat sink, especially the VIC-II. Also get rid of the RF shield around the chip, it just traps heat.

Anonymous Sun Jun 12 02:55:02 2016 No.3286876

A while ago, some Spectrumfags came up with a board that lets you replace the unreliable 4116 DRAM in the ZX with a modern SRAM chip. This is a mod that could be done easily on computers like the Apple II and ZX Spectrum as the CPU has total control of the system bus. It's not so doable on the C64 where the VIC-II and not the CPU controls the bus.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 12 02:59:21 2016 No.3286880 >>3286876 As far as I know, almost all of the ICs in the Speccy are still manufactured aside from the 4116 RAM

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 12 06:09:31 2016 No.3287074 >>3286880 4116 RAM is still available, if less abundant than it once was, but the stuff is a reliability headache and usually ends up cooking itself. If you have anything with working 4116s, you may want to just slap heat sinks on them.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 12 06:12:25 2016 No.3287075 >>3286876 http://zx.zigg.net/LRR/ I bet this board would work (perhaps with slight changes?) on an Apple II/II+ or TRS-80.

Anonymous Sun Jun 12 08:08:22 2016 No.3287162

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Commodore-Pet-4032-4016-Vintage-Computers-System-1-POWER-ON-TO-PROMPT-1-AS-IS-/231963426378?hash=item360218fe4a:g:77AAAOSw9N1VlG-U

This PET clearly has some issues.

>32k model
>reports only 15k of RAM present
>video starts halfway down the screen and not at the top like it's supposed to

The lower RAM count generally means crispy-fried chips (they are 4116s after all) but IDK what would cause the video thing.

Anonymous Sun Jun 12 08:16:16 2016 No.3287178

So I have a Thinkpad 380D and it needs the clock battery changed. This particular machine actually won't let you boot up if you have a dead CMOS battery. It just freezes there like a surly bellhop.

IBM BIOSes have always been douchebaggy like that going back to the original PC which if it fails the POST just puts up an error and halts the CPU. Most BIOSes usually let you continue anyway if there's a dead battery or a RAM problem, but not Big Blue.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 12 08:19:56 2016 No.3287182 >>3287178 If there's a RAM problem then it's better not to continue. You don't want to ruin your work because the BIOS let you continue to use a dysfunctional machine.

Anonymous Sun Jun 12 08:46:42 2016 No.3287220

>>3287182
I noticed on most newer BIOSes (meaning anything in the last 20-ish years), if there's a RAM problem it typically will let you continue but cuts off the RAM above where the failure point occurred so if you had a Pentium with 64MB and this happened, you could still boot up but with only, say, 32MB accessible.

Anonymous Sun Jun 12 08:49:47 2016 No.3287225

>>3287182
Maybe a RAM problem, but not letting me boot up because of a dead clock battery is pretty fucking stupid. I've used other machines where if the CMOS settings were lost due to the battery going kaput, I could just go into the BIOS setup and manually reenter them. The computer would then work fine with the small caveat that I had to reenter my system settings every time I powered it on. A minor inconvenience until I replaced the battery.

Anonymous Sun Jun 12 08:59:06 2016 No.3287230

Modern DRAM is extremely reliable compared to, say, 4116s. Usually DRAMs won't go bad on their own, in most cases it's caused by a malfunction of the supporting circuitry such as bad capacitors or something else permitting spurious voltages to reach the chip. Oldskool 80s RAM like 41256s had 5V for power, modern stuff uses 3.3V. The voltage level is pretty sensitive so if you get a power surge and go over the 5V or whatever wattage, the chip can get toasted.

The 4116s used in most personal computers up to 1983 had the double whammy of needing a -5, +5, and +12 line. Three lines at once made the things get really toasty, also they were very sensitive to off-normal voltage levels so a motherboard malfunction could easily fuck them.

Anonymous Sun Jun 12 09:05:51 2016 No.3287237

Well, most 8-bit computers didn't do any RAM test. If a RAM chip fails, you'll usually get a screen full of garbage or in the case of Commodore machines, the amount of free memory available to BASIC is lower than it should be.

Atari 800XLs introduced a POST that will halt you if the RAM fails, possibly they were inspired by the IBM PC to add this. Also the 130XE was absolutely infamous for using Micron 4164s which were absolute trash and died without fail. In fact almost all 130XEs had a different, non-Micron chip installed in the 0 socket. Most likely because the first 4k are where the zero page, stack, and other vital system variables are stored and the thing can't even power up without them, so Atari just stuck one non-Micron chip in there so the computers would at least power up.

Oh well, that was what happened with Tramiel-era Atari. They figured the computer had to work just long enough for the warranty to expire and then it dies and you replace it with an Atari ST.

Anonymous Sun Jun 12 09:11:24 2016 No.3287245

>>3286876
I actually do like this idea of modding boards to accommodate modern SRAM. Although we probably won't run out of NOS 4116/4164/41256 chips for another 25-30 years (they were made by the millions), that day will come eventually (in my lifetime at least - I'm 28 so could easily live to see a time when there's almost no working 8-pin DRAMs left on the planet) and we'll have to invent a way to use modern RAM types to keep our old machines running.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 12 14:01:11 2016 No.3287710 >>3287178 >>3287220 The original 5150 BIOS would halt the CPU if a memory error occurred, but AFAIK the XT BIOS let you continue, but with the RAM above the failure point cut off.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 12 14:06:05 2016 No.3287713 >>3287710 I'd rather have it simply cut off the busted RAM than freeze the dang computer. At least if half the RAM is operational, I can still use it and run applications until I get it fixed.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 12 14:14:22 2016 No.3287723 >>3287713 Well chews gum the 5150 originally used the unreliable 4116 RAM and then went to 4164s on later models, but the BIOS code was still basically the same. The XT used either 100% 4164 RAM or mixed 4164/41256 depending on the model.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 12 16:29:59 2016 No.3287915 >>3287237 XEs were trash. I've seen the things literally disintegrate from light use. The original 400/800 were almost indestructable except for using the dratted 4116 RAM.

Anonymous Sun Jun 12 21:02:05 2016 No.3288369

I just got my hands on a Commodore 128. What's the best video output I can get on this? Seems to have RF, RGBI, and some kind of 8-pin connector. I don't have any of the video cables, but I think an 8-pin -> chroma/luma cable was originally included with the Commodore 1802 monitor. I had never heard of RGBI before, looks similar to VGA but it's a different pin configuration.

I'm also looking at these sd2iec devices. Is that the best option for playing games without the hassle of floppies? Do they work with copy protected games? Can they handle save disks for RPGs? Are they faster than a floppy?

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 13 01:15:05 2016 No.3288814 File: 172 KB, 1475x858, facepalm-picard-l.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>3288369 >I had never heard of RGBI before

Anonymous Mon Jun 13 01:25:13 2016 No.3288827

RGBI is TTL RGB, it's not VGA at all. That was the CGA/EGA video standard and no you can't use a VGA monitor with that. Actual CGA CRT monitors are cheap, but they're all 30 years old and probably have shot picture tubes and screen burn, so you don't want to do that.

It's actually incredibly easy to build a CGA -> VGA converter box since in practice you don't need anything more than a line doubler to get it to work. The harder part is that doing this won't account for the intensity signal so you're only left with 8 colors. You'd need a more complicated circuit for that, but still isn't too hard.

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/New-9Pin-Color-Graphics-Adapter-Monitor-CGA-5153-/200334916402?hash=item2ea4e43b32&pt=Computer_Monitors

Or there's new LCD displays designed mainly for factory equipment that accommodate CGA (not cheap though).

Anonymous Mon Jun 13 01:30:11 2016 No.3288840

>>3288369
The 8 pin connector outputs composite and S-video (through RCA jacks and not the DIN plug).

>I'm also looking at these sd2iec devices. Is that the best option for playing games without the hassle of floppies?
Yes.
>Do they work with copy protected games?
All copy protected games were cracked a long, long time ago. A lot of them do still use low-level drive access and apparently the 1541 Ultimate is the only emulator that's 100% compatible.

>Are they faster than a floppy?
Since it's still relying on the chugachug IEC interface, no. The C128 does support burst mode operation but only on 1571/1581 drives.

Also you should probably heat sink the VIC-II and SID chips but ask them about that on Lemon64.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 13 02:11:13 2016 No.3288905 >>3287230 Most ICs found in 80s metal can tolerate at least some variance in the voltage level, but DRAMs are notoriously picky because they're densely-packed CMOS.

Anonymous Mon Jun 13 03:49:57 2016 No.3289015

>>3288369
RGBI isn't VGA -- RGBI is a digital, 15kHz RGB signal while VGA is an analog, 31kHz (or more) RGB signal. And no, VGA and CGA connectors are different (DE15 vs DE9). Like >>3288827 there are boards and stuff to plug a VGA monitor to a CGA port, but beware of those who call CGA everything that is an SD video signal, including analog RGB, mostly chinese manufacturers looking for an easy way to sell their shit.

>>3288827
>but they're all 30 years old and probably have shot picture tubes and screen burn
That's an assumption I wouldn't make because many 80s computer monitors still work really great (including the ones I use). And even though IBM monitors were prone to failure, Commodore ones weren't. Most early Amiga monitor support TTL RGB (up to the 1084S-D1, with the exception of the first model of 1083), as they were also supposed to be used with the Commodore 128 too, and the 1080 are really tough, Toshiba-made monitors.
Not saying that he should get one, if he don't want one that's his choice, and it would be even better if people who just don't care about that stuff just get their hand on LCDs so that they don't trash the original monitors as soon as they need to be serviced. I'm just saying that the "it's a 30 years old monitor so it must be worn and busted" argument isn't really a great one seeing how easy it is to get your hands on fully working old computer monitors.

>>3288814
>posting that reaction face
You seems to be lost, reddit is the other way.

Anonymous Mon Jun 13 04:31:48 2016 No.3289102

>>3289015
>and it would be even better if people who just don't care about that stuff just get their hand on LCDs so that they don't trash the original monitors as soon as they need to be serviced

I'd just hock it on Ebay if it broke. Let someone with more tech skills than me have at it.

Anonymous Mon Jun 13 18:22:56 2016 No.3290059
File: 174 KB, 541x479, MSX_2_logo.webm [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

There's not enough music in this thread:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-EOg-fXgi0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UXSh4xv7XU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0tU8Eckpcg (This is among my favorite Amiga music disk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHY8WY9SAW0

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 14 04:19:25 2016 No.3290965 File: 1.41 MB, 2513x1889, Apple IIe - Motherboard Front.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Apple socketed every IC on the II's motherboard to make servicing easier, unfortunately sockets add another failure point.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 14 15:11:55 2016 No.3291719 >>3290965 Later IIe boards had soldered RAM.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 14 17:52:22 2016 No.3292016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-iOZzwIlMA What are the differences between the Apple II and PC-DOS versions of Wizardry? I've only played a bit of the latter on one of my XT-clone laptop.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 14 18:26:31 2016 No.3292093 >>3287220 Actually most more modern PCs don't do any RAM test during the POST.

Anonymous Tue Jun 14 20:30:35 2016 No.3292373

Is it okay to talk about mid-late 90s Pentium computers in the context of getting a laptop specifically for purposes of playing games from the mid-80s to mid-90s, running DOS, with Windows 95 installed but not booting automatically to it?

Basically, the above is what I'm planning to do. Gonna follow this dude's advice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2v7k-wAm2E

Unless someone can give me a good reason not to. He talks about retro laptops from before that time as well, so it's not entirely off-topic in the event that I can't discuss my desired laptop here.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 00:34:26 2016 No.3292739 >>3292373 Just run everything you want on a modern one via VM. Why go through so much trouble?

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 06:04:12 2016 No.3293127

>>3292373
>Is it okay to talk about mid-late 90s Pentium computers
No. Even though you're going to run DOS games on it, the setup itself is clearly off-limit. Pre-95 Pentiums without Windows 95 would have been tolerated, but mid-late 90s stuff isn't.
Also, good luck running DOS AND Windows 95 on the same computer without resorting to system managers softwares. You could try to boot Windows 95 in DOS mode, but installing both DOS and Windows 95 will be a tedious task that'll require more than the two OSes.
>DOS gaming laptop
Most DOS/Windows 95 era laltops had not-so-good panels, for office tasks and the like they're good enough, but for games, many of them will have ghosting effects that'll make games harder to play. Also, nowadays their batteries have a really shitty autonomy. On top of that, laptops from that era are way harder to find than desktop machines.
Why exactly would you like a laptop instead of a desktop machine for that kind of tasks?

>>3292739
>Just emulate
You're being real useful here.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 06:10:45 2016 No.3293130 >>3293127 >You're being real useful here. Nigga im serious for older shit i understand but its fucking dos games.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 06:21:33 2016 No.3293137 >>3293130 >its fucking dos games. That's not even a valid reason. If he wanna get some old hardware let him get some old hardware.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 07:17:26 2016 No.3293171 >>3293127 >On top of that, laptops from that era are way harder to find than desktop machines Eh? I actually do own a genuine Thinkpad 380D with W95 OSRB. And no, I'm not selling it. Sorry.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 07:25:58 2016 No.3293176 >>3293171 Oh you already own it? Ok. Then you don't need to install anything, just play to vidyas in DOS mode (restart in DOS mode for example) and they'll run.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 07:48:23 2016 No.3293212

>>3293127
>Why exactly would you like a laptop instead of a desktop machine
The same reason anybody would. Portability and taking up less space. I don't live by myself and have one room that I can take up with "just me" stuff. That said, I'll stop now since it's off topic.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 07:59:32 2016 No.3293219 >>3293176 I'm not the guy you're replying to.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 08:07:30 2016 No.3293230

>>3293212
>I don't live by myself and have one room that I can take up with "just me" stuff.
Okay, that's a pretty good reason.

>>3293219
Uh, okay, I though you were. But anyway, you still might as well do like him, check for older Thinkpads or Toshibas and getting the model that a) is the cheapest you might find; b) have the specs that might interest you the most. Have fun anyway.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 08:29:20 2016 No.3293265 >>3284972 The 8580 could be recreated easily, the original 6580 SID probably not due to its analog filters. However, a lot of people think the 8580 doesn't sound as good.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 08:37:36 2016 No.3293275

I think the likes of FPGAs, PICs, AVRs are probably the way to go, although they can have limitations in how closely they can replicate the behaviour of the original chipset which had assorted bugs/design flaws that games made use of.

Problem with firing up production of old chips again - the economies of scale just don't exist. If you fab a chip, then you're probably looking at quantities in the tens of thousands at the least to make it viable.

Realistically from a C64 scene perspective, SID would probably be a big seller. Projects exist to use SID in other computers, stereo/quad additions for existing C64s and also dedicated mixing consoles. It does have a considerable hipster cred, especially among Yuropoors.

VIC2 and PLA - really, they're only needed to replace failed units on existing machines.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 08:48:56 2016 No.3293302

The SID is difficult to reproduce accurately due to it's analogue filter. Also, the reproduction has to count for the filter variations between each original SID chip and design flaws.

Can it be done? Yes, products like swinSID already exist. But a 100% replication of the original? I don't think it's possible at all. The C64 chipset relied on exploits in the (now obsolete) NMOS process and besides, the tech documents and blueprints explaining exactly how they did aren't around anymore.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 08:55:02 2016 No.3293312

>>3293265
Eh, the 8580 would be easier to recreate than the 6581 but it's still an NMOS chip with analog components.

To get it sounding more like a real SID, it would have to use more than a FGPA/solution like swinSID - preferably dedicated DSP chips (common on modern hardware VA synths) or a fairly beefy CPU. Either that or have the filter recreated, analogue and all. Both are expensive, though.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:02:03 2016 No.3293318 >>3293302 sometimes a really wonder what kind of knowledge people have that allows them to draw these conclusions. wow

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:05:54 2016 No.3293321

>>3293318
>sometimes a really wonder what kind of knowledge people have that allows them to draw these conclusions. wow

I am not a software designer, only talking from experience with hardware emulations through my synth obsession.

Analogue emulations are difficult at best, particularly of filters. More accuracy also means more CPU power needed. Isn't that why the more accurate SID emulations on Vice are more CPU intensive, correct?

I mention DSP chips purely because can be used to emulate analogue aspects (ie. the filter, VCOs etc.) when it comes to VA synths and they take the load off the CPU. Companies such as Creamware offer emulations of well known analogue synths using DSP based products.

FPGA can accurately recreate (possibly to a higher degree), but the performance needed would probably make it more expensive than using a DSP based solution. However I admit to having little knowledge here, feel free to correct me.

On a commercial level, accurate hardware emulation of this sort of stuff is expensive. Recreating it without emulation would be much more expensive. The SID, at least the filter part is no exception. It could be done as a viable product for people making music, but I doubt it could be done cheap enough for the average C64 fan who wants a decent SID replacement.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:08:53 2016 No.3293325

Different manufacturing methods are also an issue. Remember that the NMOS process is obsolete and no longer used.

I don't personally mind a cheap solution that isn't 100% accurate for general use. I'd be happy to use a swinSID despite it's limitations if it's for general gaming. That is if I stay away from games that use a paddle/mouse.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:12:05 2016 No.3293331 Well, the Impossible Project resurrected Polaroid instant film. It's not 100% identical to the old stuff but it's a good enough facsimile that telling them apart is hard for a novice.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:15:32 2016 No.3293335 Personally I'm less worried about the C64s being wiped out and more worried about all the C16s and Plus/4s. Those TEDs are going to die long before the C64 chips. I think if there was an FPGA alternative already, I'd take it.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:19:39 2016 No.3293341 Well I am no expert on the internals of the SID but could the digital side of it be recreated in an FPGA and the analogue side as discrete external components? Or do we not know enough about the analogue side of the internals?

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:22:25 2016 No.3293343

>>3293341
Analogue side would be difficult for the above reasons. Recreating a filter is surprisingly difficult - companies recreating filters from well known synths always have a hard time nailing it (even Korg itself can't get close to their original MS20 filter with their recent MS20 mini). Variance and components are the two main reasons.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:26:13 2016 No.3293352 File: 14 KB, 512x288, yuno-pc98-18.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] aw yeah, yu-no what it is oh wait, 1995?

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:28:04 2016 No.3293353 >>3293265 it's not that it doesn't sound good, it's that a lot of the music programmed for the C64 relied on 6581 bugs

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:29:03 2016 No.3293354 Would it be an idea to get a kikstarter just to decap commodore chips?

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:29:37 2016 No.3293357 >>3293354 im pretty sure that was done already and the guy who did it died

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:30:24 2016 No.3293358 >>3293357 he must have been really bad at it

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:36:49 2016 No.3293365

>>3293352

The limit is for the hardware only, games that came out after 1995 but for platforms released before (or that doesn't require a model with a Pentium or a PPC when it comes to PC compatibles, PC-9821 and Macs) are allowed. If someone released a new Amstrad CPC game in 2015, discussing about it would still be allowed.
I doubt that Yu-No require anything more than a PC-9801VX to run, so it's okay to talk about it here.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:37:51 2016 No.3293368

>>3293354
depends on what you mean by "decap". the process alone can even be done at home. you also need access to a microscope, someone being able to operate it, and then someone who is able to read the die shots and redraw the mask (and eventually even schematic, so you can fix the parts that cant be reproduced 1:1). i don't think you can have all that for a viable amount.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:45:34 2016 No.3293381 But after this process would the cost of manufacturing be high?

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:53:56 2016 No.3293397

I think 'not a viable amount' is an understatement. Manufacturing costs would be high enough like any chip, high enough that you'd have to produce it in great enough quantities to attract the copyright holder's interests and risk losing a lot of money. That's assuming you get through the research, which would take a lot of time and a lot of money - we're not talking $5,000 here, we're talking well into the five figure mark I'd assume (and I am assuming). You can't really do a Kickstarter for it either without getting sued, not to mention it wouldn't succeed as it has no real appeal to a layperson anyway.

The only way forward is FPGA. You could put a FPGA in a reproduction case, no problem. It's not 100% perfect but you get a 99.9% hardware clone that runs on 5 volts and which you could hook up peripherals rather easily. Imagine something like the Turbo Chameleon which fits inside an old C64. Throw in support for other 8-bit Commodore machines, tape emulation and support for physical peripherals (the 1chipMSX has two cart ports and Atari joystick ports) and think of what you could do! You could just buy a busted C64 off of eBay, chuck in the clone hardware, and blammo - perfection! Something you can keep on your PC's desk even, since by streamlining peripherals and power bricks you've cut a lot of fat off.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 09:58:31 2016 No.3293404 >>3293381 Depends. The general rule of manufacturing is that you have to sell 10,000 of something to make a profit on it.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 10:06:14 2016 No.3293410

The poorest example of hardware reliability are probably G4/G5 PowerPC Macs. The last ones were built around 2005/2006, and they're falling apart. There are so many known problems, and there are no spare parts available. Not to mention that it's difficult to find somebody who's willing to repair a PPC Mac. Without MorphOS PPC Macs would have nearly no use today.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 10:12:43 2016 No.3293419

Commodore used a custom NMOS manufacturing process that they never changed right up to the end in the early 90s. Back when they first acquired MOS Technologies in 1976, their processes were state-of-the-art, better than Intel's PMOS. Problem was, they never modernized and by the mid-80s were falling behind. Thanks to Gould and Tramiel's stubbornness/cheapness, they didn't transition to CMOS like they should have.

All the chips MOS made were NMOS, though in the early 90's they outsourced CMOS chips to HP (I'm fuzzy on the details so please enlighten me if you know more). They did slowly shrink feature size but not exponentially like the rest if the world riding Moore's Law. They thinned down the oxide as well but that led to more heat in addition to speed. Without moving to CMOS, they couldn't make a bigger leap in the power/performance curve.

Both SID and VIC are mixed-signal chips. You have digital components like oscillators and counters feeding into a DAC and analog filter (SID). The digital stuff is easy to emulate in software or replicate in hardware, as long as you copy the timing and undefined behavior (eg clocking cartridge off address line glitches that Herd talks about).

The analog parts are completely tied to the production process, however. Think of it like a complex curve with random noise and nonlinearity added in. It would be very hard to replicate on today's silicon or with discrete parts because it was so imperfect and an artifact of the specific factory at that time. This is why even SIDs with the same model number can sound different.

Rather than try to perfectly capture the behavior in custom silicon, it's best to just fully emulate it in software or digital logic (FPGA) running at high speed and output 16-bit samples to a modern amplifier stage (sound card).

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 10:16:11 2016 No.3293421

Hmmmm, if not everything could be emulated in an FPGA, would it be probably possible to create an FPGA with all digital parts combined with external analog parts on a small board PCB which fits into an existing chip socket? Maybe yes, but it will be possibly more expensive as an original chip.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 10:20:42 2016 No.3293430

>>3293421
No, I don't think this makes sense. The digital part is super-simple (at least for SID -- VIC is more complex here but not totally different). It's just a set of counters and you can easily do it in software with a microcontroller.

The external analog parts you could buy today would not match the characteristics of MOS's 7-micron NMOS process. The op-amps on the chip are made from "wavy lines" of polysilicon and thus perform a particular way, have a particular noise profile, crosstalk, etc.

You could measure all of these things -- on-chip resistance, op-amp profile, etc. but it would still be very expensive to try to replicate this on custom silicon because you'd have to intentionally take a process today and try to "dirty it up" a bit to replicate that behavior. I don't even know if it's possible to do that, although analog silicon design is outside my expertise.

Once you went to all that trouble of measuring and modeling the filter stage (the necessary first part), it would be much easier to just recreate all this in software. That is, take a much higher speed part (FPGA or DSP) and do an all-digital emulation of the combined profile.

So, our focus should be on improving the measurement & emulation (reSID) based on the parts that are alive now. In the future as spare parts get scarce, then you can decide on the best form factor to deliver that fully software emulated model.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 10:32:16 2016 No.3293447

Well, the FPGA stuff actually means mostly one thing: Rebuild a classic device, make it smaller and add new features. Let's compare this to cars: Would a classic british 1963 Jaguar E-type roadster the same, if the body would be reproduced in modern carbon fiber in a small scale, mounted on the platform of any mass-production hatchback, with super-efficient motor of actual standards and added with features like climatic, media system with smartphone connection, satellite navigation system and all the modern safety stuff. And, you have to pay up to 10x as much as the original car.

Nope, FPGA clones are not retro anymore. It can have the same start screen and use the same software, but it's no original. The original hardware and its bugs are essential to the entire C64 experience. If anything will be rebuilt in FPGA's, all disks are converted to disk-images and stored on SD-cards it would theoretically not be neccessary to keep the old hardware, floppies and disks.

But if there's for everything a FPGA clone - why are people paying for a white ceramic prototype SID 5000 USD? A C65 was sold for 15.000 Euro. A SuperCPU brings 1000 USD, often without RAMcard or the old version 1 which can't be upgraded to a SCPU 128. Does anybody think a Chameleon will be sold for similar prices in 20 years? I don't understand Jens Schönfeld anyway. His last project was a replacement board in C64E-size for the original chips. Wouldn't this be silly, paying lots of money for a reproduced board and ripping apart a real C64 to put the chips on it? It doesn't count if you want to replace a defective board, everybody knows how cheap a C64 is on ebay. Price for his version: 149 Euro. http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/c64_reloaded

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 15:01:10 2016 No.3293810 >>3293410 I'm sure there's some nice UNIX-likes that run on PPC.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 15 18:06:03 2016 No.3294127 File: 1.62 MB, 1559x2024, Sony_MSX2+_HB-F1XV_system_Ad.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Man, that's a pretty good looking setup they've put up for that ad. Gotta love that trinitron RGB monitor.

Anonymous Wed Jun 15 20:22:37 2016 No.3294317

>>3293447
>Wouldn't this be silly, paying lots of money for a reproduced board and ripping apart a real C64 to put the chips on it?

I think some guy is doing this for the NES/SNES too, last I saw it was an ugly jagged solid metal thing for 400 dollars

Anyway I think the point is that you scavenge parts from broken beyond repair machines

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 16 12:40:01 2016 No.3295412 File: 1.77 MB, 1559x2024, Illusion_City_MSXturboR_PC98_PC88VA_ad.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT8piYiYv8Y

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 16 13:31:55 2016 No.3295512 >>3295412 That looks amazing. Any translations of this? If there are none I will start learning Japanese there are amazing games that i want to play.

Anonymous Thu Jun 16 13:53:07 2016 No.3295564

>>3295512

Yes there are translations (Portugese, English and maybe Dutch too). This game is well known among MSX fans all around the world, and already had a few European followers back in the early 90s (not as many as the Xak or Ys games, but it wasn't unknown in the non-japanese MSX community). There's that video of an MSX convention in Netherlands where someone was playing the intro on his imported MSX Turbo R (his computer might be the only non-philips one in the entire room), blasting the opening tune with his audio amp and speakers :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-mEvJ_gevw (starting at 3:00)
Anyway, if you want to play to this game you might as well check the other versions too while you're at it. The PC-98, x68k and FM Towns have a higher resolution, and the FM tunes are better too (at least in the FM Towns version).

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 16 14:44:19 2016 No.3295642 File: 1.98 MB, 158x158, 1431720215157.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>3295564 Thanks a lot for the great video and the complete answer. I will dig in it right away.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 16 15:45:22 2016 No.3295769 >>3295642 English translation is unfinished. Only to disk 6 out of 8. nvm then I can wait for complete version

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 16 15:52:27 2016 No.3295795 >>3295412 Didnt this game get a pce version?

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 16 15:56:31 2016 No.3295807 >>3295795 No, but it did have a Mega CD one though. >>3295769 Ah well, shit, didn't know it wasn't complete. Well good luck then.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 17 08:22:52 2016 No.3297360 File: 103 KB, 589x835, adam.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>	Anonymous Fri Jun 17 17:26:48 2016 No.3298109 What can /vr/ tell me about the PCjr?

Anonymous Fri Jun 17 17:34:43 2016 No.3298129

>>3298109
They're pretty common on Ebay and also cheap since nobody really wants them.

It's stupid and nonsensical how IBM stuck nonstandard connectors for the serial port/joysticks et al on the PCjr. No reason to do that except because the connector was cheaper or else they wanted to force you to buy their proprietary peripherals. What companies never seemed to understand was that saving a few cents on production costs wasn't worth the massive loss of sales that resulted. Or how come in spite of all the clever l33t hax0r money saving tricks Steve Wozniak did on the Apple II, it still cost twice as much as its primary competition. I swear, I never saw an Apple II anywhere until my freshman year of high school in '88 when they had one in my classroom, but it was locked in the closet when not in use because the things were too expensive to let kids just touch them any time.

Anonymous Fri Jun 17 21:16:18 2016 No.3298521

>>3298129
>It's stupid and nonsensical how IBM stuck nonstandard connectors for the serial port/joysticks et al on the PCjr.
Meh I can't say they're really that proprietary they just look like a bunch of pins in a rectangular hole, it shouldn't be too difficult to make a cable for these stuff using a cut-down ribbon-cable connector.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 18 18:15:13 2016 No.3300326 File: 791 KB, 2467x3002, The_Age_of_Altair.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Anonymous Sun Jun 19 13:32:04 2016 No.3302319

>>3298109

It has an infrared chicklet keyboard that makes the Spectrum one look decent and better sound and video hardware hardware than the original IBM PC. I've read somewhere that it isn't 100% PC compatible, and finally Tandy sold more PC jr clones than IBM sold actual ones.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 14:05:31 2016 No.3302370 http://www.ebay.com/itm/1980s-nerd-TRS-80-micro-computer-Model-III-museum-Man-cave-Comicon-Hipster-/262488480049?hash=item3d1d885931:g:WbkAAOSwbYZXZIo3 I have no words for this.

Anonymous Sun Jun 19 14:07:03 2016 No.3302375

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-ii-plus-with-manuals/252426912703?_trksid=p2047675.c100009.m1982&_trkparms=aid%3D777000%26algo%3DABA.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D37184%26meid%3Db822dab5e7c34efaa4b2718ff5166cb7%26pid%3D100009%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26sd%3D262488480049

"I plugged it in and it turned on. I do not have a monitor. I am not sure if it displays a picture but the unit and the disk drive both power up when it is plugged in and turned on."

What. Is it that hard to plug it into a TV?

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 14:19:03 2016 No.3302405 >>3302370 >1980s nerd • TRS-80 • micro computer Model III museum Man cave Comicon Hipster >$1000 Holy shit it has to be some sort of joke ad or something, I can't stop laughing now.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 14:21:24 2016 No.3302412 >>3302375 Also what is a II+ doing with a DuoDisk? Those weren't even around until well after the II+ had been discontinued.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 14:35:11 2016 No.3302442 >>3302412 Well there's the possibility that the owner's previous disk unit died so he bought a DuoDisk to replace it.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 14:42:52 2016 No.3302461 >>3302375 The price is pretty reasonable, still the II+ can't run most later Apple II software and it's also not as reliable b/c 4116 RAM. But you could probably do an SRAM mod similar to this one for the Spectrum. http://zx.zigg.net/LRR/

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 14:48:18 2016 No.3302476 >>3302405 They always ask stupid amounts of money for TRS-80 Model 3/4s, but that takes the cake.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 14:49:49 2016 No.3302482 What's the best place to find a Commodore 64 these days? I can't find anything in my little town and ebay is fucking expensive.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 14:54:43 2016 No.3302495 >>3302482 If you find one, get a 1541 Ultimate for storage and heat sink the major ICs.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 14:59:30 2016 No.3302505 >>3302495 >get a 1541 Ultimate What if he doesn't want to?

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 15:15:40 2016 No.3302540 >>3302505 I'd never want to screw around with floppy disks when modern storage options now exist.

Anonymous Sun Jun 19 15:24:51 2016 No.3302563

>>3302540
Well some people are willing to. And they're not that rare among people who like to use old computers.

Anyway, stop shilling for the 1541 Ultimate, it's good to make people who might be interested in that kind of stuff aware of it's existence, but pushing every single anon posting here about how they're trying to get a Commodore 64 to get one, not so much. Are you doing that just because you want yours but can't because there needs to be more demand for another batch or something?

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 15:25:19 2016 No.3302564 >>3302476 >>3302405 Or that TRS-80 with the blown CRT that someone still bought for some unaccountable reason.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 15:26:51 2016 No.3302568 >>3302563 I know. You're a guy involved with the SD2IEC thing and that's a competing product.

Anonymous Sun Jun 19 15:30:12 2016 No.3302571

>>3302564
Yeah, but that other ad's title is a joke by itself too.

>>3302568
Nope, I don't even own a Commodore 64, I'm just an Amiga owner who's tired to see your 1541 Ultimate stuff spammed every time someone is talking about getting a C64. But nice try anyway.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 15:39:37 2016 No.3302597 >>3302571 >doesn't exactly deny being an employee for the SD2IEC project

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 15:40:43 2016 No.3302604 >>3302476 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR11.TRC2.A0.H0.Xtrs+80+model+iii.TRS0&_nkw=trs+80+model+iii&_sacat=0

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 15:45:29 2016 No.3302617 >>3302597 >nope >doesn't exactly deny If you just want to shitpost you might as well go to >>>/g/ instead of staying here.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 15:55:28 2016 No.3302648 How did this happen where any time you like/don't like X product, you must be a shill/marketer?

Anonymous Sun Jun 19 17:12:00 2016 No.3302820

>>3302648
It didn't. But when anon A spam about X product everytime someone else say he's buying Y, there are suspicions that anon A and his wife might love it (or is just waiting for a bunch of other anon to pre-order that stuff so that he can finally have his in the next batch).

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 17:18:11 2016 No.3302826 >>3302648 /v/ happened.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 17:33:02 2016 No.3302858 http://www.ebay.com/itm/RadioShack-TRS-80-Model-III-Micro-Computer-Radio-Shack-For-Parts-or-Repair-/262455554527?hash=item3d1b91f1df:g:b4MAAOSwn8FXR0H5 >doesn't even power on >$250

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 17:36:05 2016 No.3302868 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR12.TRC2.A0.H0.Xcommodore+pet.TRS0&_nkw=commodore+pet&_sacat=0 PETs seem to be rarer than TRS-80s.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 17:41:19 2016 No.3302880 >>3302868 Especially in the US.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 17:42:21 2016 No.3302885 I once saw a 2001-16N in a flea market. No idea if it worked.

Anonymous Sun Jun 19 17:53:33 2016 No.3302903

As we're getting closer to the end of this thread, here's a little reminder for the next thread's OP : Don't forget to remove the shit the falseflager put in this thread's OP (the "baka gaijin" parts and shit). Also, /vr/ being a slow board, this thread can still be used until, like, a day and a few hours after the limit have been reached, so no need to hurry with a new one.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 18:02:28 2016 No.3302913 >>3302885 PETs weren't known for their durability. Practically every one you find has something wrong with it that has to be fixed.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 19 21:55:29 2016 No.3303424 bump

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