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Compaq Prolinea 5120e

I recently picked up a few computers from a Craigslist ad, one being an unknown 486, and the other a “Compaq Pentium 1 120mhz” machine. My main focus was on the 486, with the Compaq P1 being just an afterthought. I was assuming it would just be another Compaq Deskpro 5120, a machine I’ve covered previously. To my surprise, when I arrived to get the machines, the case styling was completely different, and indeed this was a completely different Compaq machine based around the same 120mhz Pentium as the earlier mentioned Deskpro 5120.

The machine I found was the Compaq Prolina 5120e. This model I think may have been released slightly earlier than the Deskpro 5120. It seems to be either a more budget minded model, or perhaps oriented at the business market as opposed to home use.

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One immediate comparison to the Deskpro 5120 is that the expansion bays are a little more limited. The Deskpro 5120 has two 5 1/4″ bays, and a spot for a 3 1/2″ floppy drive (or a ZIP drive if you wanted to go that way). There are only two 5 1/4″ bays on this machine. You may notice the CD drive is from a Dell Dimension that I reviewed earlier, and you may also notice it’s not seated properly in the bay. When I picked up this machine, there was nothing in the bottom bay, just a gaping hole, not even a bezel plate. The top 3 1/2″ 1.44 MB floppy drive was present, and I believe it is original to this model. As you can probably tell, it is not what one would expect. The drive is of a form factor more common to some laptops. It’s long as to fit in a 5 1/4″ bay, but it’s not the full height of the bay, so a plastic half bezel is installed directly under it so there is no gap. I don’t think this machine came standard with either a 5 1/4″ 1.2 MB floppy drive or a CD-ROM drive, as most of the images I found on the net have a dummy bezel on the bottom with no drives installed.

So that leads back to something I mentioned earlier. Why is the CD drive not seated correctly? That’s because this machine uses rails to hold drives in place. Usually, these end up being more convenient and allow for quick drive replacement. Unfortunately, if the machine does not come with the rails, as mine did, you have no real way of properly installing extra drives. Rails aren’t standard across different models either so it’s not a matter of just buying some on eBay. Sometimes you can rig something up to hold a drive in place or use one rail from an already installed drive and just hope one rail can support things on both drives. For this machine, I didn’t care enough to try anything. The drive is only held in place by the IDE and power cables, and it still doesn’t sit right. I just felt it looked slightly better than having a gaping hole to the innards of the PC. Also, I needed a CD drive installed for some testing at the time the images were taken. A plastic dummy bezel would look much better, though without a CD drive your severely limiting the functionality of this PC.

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The rear of the machine is fairly spartan with four card expansion slots in a horizontal fashion so you know right away it’s a PC using a riser card. Under the slots, we have a parallel printer port, and then all the way to the bottom right, we have two PS/2 ports for keyboard/mouse, a serial port, and a VGA port for the built-in video. In comparison to the Deskpro 5120, this machine has fewer card expansion slots, as well as a less organized standard for the rear port placement. On the Deskpro 5120, the ports were color-coded as well as labeled, making setup on this machine a bit less user-friendly to the computer illiterates of the time.

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This is an image of the bottom of this PC. I’m showing it here because when I purchased it, the four rubber feet on this machine were melted globs. That’s what happens when you store things like this for long periods of time in hot climates like Arizona. I had to scrape off the melted goo and then clean it with Goo-Gone.

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Upon opening the case, you notice the riser card is all the way on the edge of the motherboard, as opposed to in the center. Also, there is a nice guide on the frame detailing jumper settings. These are always a welcome sight. The installed hard drive is a 605MB Quantum Fireball, which I assume is the original drive. Looking closer at the motherboard we see….

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1) CPU – This model, as the name suggests, came with a 120mhz Pentium 1 with a heatsink. As I’ve said before, the Pentium 120mhz is a capable CPU, and seemed to be pretty popular for its time, as I’ve come across many computers of the era sporting it.

2) RAM – The Prolinea 5120e supports 136 MB of 72 pin RAM. I’m using FPM, but the documentation I’ve read claims it supports EDO as well.

3) RAM – Here we have 8MB of RAM built into the board, so the board will operate with no RAM installed in the slots. This can be nice if you don’t have any spare 72 pin sticks around.

4) L2 cache – this is the CoaST module for an L2 cache stick. Mine did not come with a stick installed, and all the spare sticks I had on hand failed to work. I tried a 256kb stick from HP, as well as the module from the Deskpro 5120, and with either installed, the machine would not even power up. I’m unsure if my slot is defective, or if this board is super picky about what module it will accept. I read some documentation that the Prolinea 5120e accepts 1 or 2 MB sticks, and this may be the issue, but I’ve also read that it accepts 256kb, which would be what was common of the time.

5) Video – Here is the built-in video chip. The chip used is a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5434 with 1MB of memory upgradable to 2MB. The video is adequate, but hardly exciting.

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6) Connection for serial port

7) CMOS battery

8) Beeper speaker

You may notice the connectors for the IDE and floppy drives seem to be absent, as well as the power connector. Interestingly, all of these connections are found on the riser board, as opposed to the motherboard proper.

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As you can see, the riser card features four ISA slots and one shared PCI slot. You would most likely want to use the sole PCI slot for video. The IDE and floppy drive connectors are to the right of the expansion slots, on the riser with the primary and secondary IDE connections above, and the floppy connector at the bottom.

On the opposite side of the riser, we have a proprietary AT style power connector.

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So, do I have an opinion of the Prolinea 5120e? Well, it’s nothing special for the time. It’s not a terrible PC, and can run DOS and Windows 3.1/95 competently for games, but I would prefer the Deskpro 5120 if I had a choice between the two. The motherboard also struck me as a little weird because there is a lot of space on it with nothing there. There’s a lot of spaces where it looks like chips and caps are supposed to go, but all that’s there is solder points. This doesn’t hurt the board, but I just find it aesthetically displeasing for some reason… not that it matters because it’s all under a case. BTW, the case is tool-less, which is a point in its favor.

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Benchmarks (Pentium 120mhz, No L2 Cache, 24MB FPM RAM, Built in Cirrus Logic CL-GD5434)

3DBENCH – 61.7

PCPBENCH – 21.2

DOOM -31.36

Quake – 19.0

Socket 4: The cutting edge of 1993

In 1993 the Computer world was beginning a new era. The venerable 486 was ruling the roost and hard core PC gamers were enjoying 66mhz DX2’s and VLB bus video cards. A new era though was just around the corner featuring a world of improved 3d gaming and performance due to a new expansion slot type and a new CPU. This was the dawn of the Pentium.

This new generation of CPU’s named the Pentium (just a fancy name for Intels 5×86 chips brought about due to the fact Intel could not trademark a number) required a new socket type to support them. This socket was the socket 4. With the Pentium a new type of expansion bus was also starting to appear more and more. This was the PCI bus were all still familiar with today. The PCI bus was not exclusive to the Pentium and could be found on late model 486 motherboards but starting with socket 4 is when it began to be considered standard on motherboards.

Socket 4 supported only two chips. The first generation Pentium 60mhz and the 66mhz. Looking back they were a little underwhelming, expensive and always ran hot at 5 volts but they were the cutting edge in 1993 and they offered significantly better FPU (or floating point math) then the 486 chips which the new crop of 3D games would take advantage of. To compare, the original 66mhz Pentium was about equivalent to a 100mhz dx4 486 chip.

In this article I’m going to take a look at what would be a typical high end socket 4 build from about 1994, so pre-windows 95. Building a 94 period correct machine rather then a 93 one opens up many more possibilities since PCI really didn’t come into its own until 94. In 93 there weren’t a lot of PCI cards available and in all likelihood someone that splurged in 93 on a socket 4 board may of been stuck with a ISA video card for few months.

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This would be a case very typical of the era. By this point the desktop form factor really seemed to be fading away as far as home computers go and a majority of new PC’s in homes were of the taller but usually less internally cramped tower design. Of course an IDE hard drive like the one I have installed was standard by now as well as the 1.44MB 3.5 inch floppy drive. A lot of machines from the era still had a legacy 5 1/4 inch 1.2mb floppy drive as well to support older software or games you were likely to still have from a previous 486 or 386. The CD-ROM drive was also starting to become standard fare now as more titles were being released in the format and popularity of the CD was bolstered from the hit game Myst that was released the year before in 1993 on CD-ROM.

The motherboard I’m using in this machine is a socket 4 Intel PM-900 with what I believe is the Mercury chipset. It still has many features that were more common with a 486 motherboard such as on board l2 cache and an AT style keyboard. It does feature three of the then cutting edge PCI expansion sockets and four older 16 bit ISA slots. To be honest I was initially surprised by the lack of features on this board. Even if it was a low end socket 4 board you would expect manufactures to want to go all out for something that at the time was an expensive state of the art board. a PS/2 mouse port or connector for a header would of been nice as well as on board IDE or floppy connection. Many of these things were even starting to show up on 486 boards of the time.

There are also some interesting peculiarities on this board such as the inclusion of a connector for a turbo led but no turbo switch. Instead of a jumper to select if your using the 60 or 66mhz CPU this board requires you to swap out the oscillator not unlike many 386 era boards. Also the board features jumpers for the PCI slots and these assigned IRQ’s. I have never noticed this on any board before.

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Taking a closer look

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1) CPU – The real star of the motherboard was the cutting edge Pentium processor. You had only two options with socket 4 and those were the two early P5 Pentiums that came in either 60mhz or 66mhz. Mine is the faster 66mhz. both these CPU’s ran at 5.0 volts when as all Pentiums after ran at 3.3 volts. You did have one option though for upgrade and those were the socket 4 Pentium overdrive chips. these chips would boost a P60 system to 120mhz and a 66mhz system up to 133mhz which is pretty significant. Unfortunately these overdrive chips are pretty uncommon and when found expensive. These upgrade chips also weren’t released until later in 95 or 96. The Pentium 66mhz is roughly comparable to a 100mhz dx 486 though with a superior FPU performance as I said earlier. These chips did noticeably outperform the gaming standard of the day which was the 486 66mhz DX2 but later 486’s like the 133mhz 5×86 from AMD with a Pentium rating of 75 easily beats the 66mhz Pentium in everything except Pentium optimized games or games that utilize FPU operations such as Quake. It has also been found that 83mhz Pentium overdrives used to upgrade 486 boards will also outperform a true Pentium 66mhz. to change the CPU from 60mhz to 66mhz or vise vera there is no jumper. you need to change the oscillator. The oscillator is obscured in the image above by the wires but its located above the CPU and to the right of the large chip under that bundle of wires.

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2) L2 cache – the on board L2-cache, all of the Pentiums up to the Pentium II lacked on chip L2 cache so as before L2 cache was accessed from the motherboard. The PM-900 supports up to 256k of L2 cache which is pretty standard for the time and the amount I have installed.

3) RAM – this board supports up to 192MB of 72 pin DRAM via six slots. As far as I can tell it does not support EDO RAM. Its a bit of an unusual number but 192MB would of been an outrageous amount of RAM for the time. I have a more conservative 32MB’s installed which would be more common for the time on very high end pimped out builds like this one. At the time though many machines still happily ran 8mb or 16MB’s so even this is overkill.

4) AT power connector

5) AT keyboard port

6) CMOS battery – this board uses the infamous Dallas real time clock. these clocks were basically lithium batteries in a hard plastic shell. Though they don’t have the same level of leaking risk as the old barrel batteries they are sometimes pretty annoying to replace. they can be hacked to allow for cheap and common lithium battery replacements.

Now I’m going to go over some expansion cards that would be pretty common for a machine of this type. I’m not going to talk about modems cards cause they bore the hell out of me but a PC of this era would usually have some sort of ISA or maybe PCI networking card or modem.

Multi I/O – since there is no IDE or floppy controller built into this particular board I needed a I/O controller. This is the one that came with my board. Its a Winbond chip based card and nothing special but it gets the job done for floppy and IDE support as well as giving me a serial and parallel port.

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Video – The choice of early PCI video cards seems to come down to two brands, ATI and S3. You also need to ask whats more important to your specific built. DOS performance or Windows (3.1) performance. Some cards are better in DOS and some Windows. The ATI mach64 supposedly was released in 94 but all the cards I found had a BIOS date of 1995. This left me with a PCI ATI Mach32 and an S3 Vision 864. after some benchmarks the 2MB Vision 864 did come out ahead in DOS but I never tested in Windows. The Vision 864 like the trio that would come later was a great card for the time offering excellent compatibility with games and other software. Other options are the venerable et4000 which should of had an early PCI version available.

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Sound – There are a multitude of option for sound such as the PAS16, Adlib gold or Gravis Ultrasound that were out in 94 but all of said cards are rare and expensive. The sound Blaster 16 line on the other hand was widely available and almost all games supported it. My board came with Acer Magic S30 which is just a SB16 that used a early version of the Vibra chip. This card has a real OPL FM chip, some various CD drive headers as well as a wavetable connector for a daughter board. Its not as fancy as the other cards but its a hell of a lot cheaper and just about everything supports it. This card does suffer from the “hanging midi” bug though. I should point out on this build I actually am using the on card controller of this sound card to run my CD-ROM drive.

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So, is a socket 4 machine worth it to collect now and was it worth it back then. To address the second question first, No. The Pentium 60 and 66mhz were insanely expensive when they were first introduced. Throw in the fact they ran hot and were fairly unreliable and they just weren’t smart buys, even with the power boost. Consumers were far better off waiting for a 100mhz DX4 or better yet a AMD 133mhz 5×86. Many early software wasn’t yet optimized for the Pentium or took advantage of its superior FPU abilities that only later 3D games like Quake would heavily use. Now are they worth having presently as part of a retro PC collection, maybe. The price of these CPU’s and motherboards keeps creeping up as they become more and more rare. For practical use though in an actual running retro game PC there more of a novelty and best avoided. A retro gamer is far far better off with building a socket 5 or 7 machine as those Pentiums are more powerful, cheaper, and far more reliable then the socket 4 types.

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benchmarks Pentium 66mhz, 256kb l2 cache write-through, 32mb fpm RAM, s3 Vision 868 2MB

3DBENCH – 56.4 FPS

PCPBENCH – 17.6 FPS

DOOM – 37.78 FPS

Quake – 14.1 FPS

same setup with a ATI Mach32 1MB

3DBENCH – 49.0 FPS

PCPBENCH – 16.7 FPS

DOOM – 36.03 FPS

Quake – 13.6 FPS

Pentium 66mhz, 256kb l2 cache write-back, 32mb fpm RAM, ET6000 4mb

3DBENCH – N/A

PCPBENCH – 18.3 FPS

DOOM – 40.6 FPS

Quake – 14.8 FPS

TRS-80 Model II

This won’t be a full on review and more of a briefer overview as I actually never did manage to restore my model II to working order before letting it go to someone that hopefully can but it is an interesting machine.

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As you can tell by the above advertisement the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II is a pure business machine, even more so then the earlier Model I. The Model II was released in 1979 and was squarely focused on the business world. The model II had either 32 or 64kb of RAM, a Z-80A CPU at 4mhz and used a different OS then the Model I (TRSDOS II) as well as CP/M, not that the original Model I was a hardcore gaming machine but the model II although more advanced was even less game friendly. I’m not going to go much farther into specifications since that can all be easily Googled so lets just go over the machine.

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The computer itself is pretty heavy. This can mostly be attributed to the built in black and white CRT screen. The case itself is made of grey plastic. Its a fairly durable case overall but it does kind of feel cheap and you can cause cracks in it if your not careful. The power and reset switches are to the right of the monitor. The switches on my machines kind of felt a little loose and flimsy but I’m not sure if that’s a model II thing or was just my machine. They way the keyboard attaches is also rather odd-ball. instead of the cable coming off the keyboard its actually attached to the computer so its sort of backwards.

The other immediately noticed feature of the model II is the massive 8 inch floppy drive mounted next to the built in monitor. I’m sure there were other computers that used 8 inch drives but the model II is the only machine I’ve ever come across that uses one and may be the most common one to of used one. The floppies themselves held about 500kb of data which isn’t bad at all for 1979.

Here’s the monster of a drive.

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And here is a floppy disk size comparison.

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My machine gave a “boot error DC” that I never solved. I think it had to do with the floppy drive just not being set up or connected correctly but to be honest I never put to much effort into trying to solve this. apperently there are ways to add a 5 1/4 or even 3 1/2 drive but that begs the question of where/how would you mount them?

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On the back of the machine we have ports to connect the optional disk expansion box which would give you the ability to add more Floppy drives or hard drive options. There’s a printer port and two serial ports as well as the AC power connector and a fuse.

speaking of the expansion box.

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This is the very heavy expansion box. This one came with a second 8 inch floppy drive. This expansion box would be used to add more drives or hard drives. It has its own power supply built in and its own power switch.

Now will take a quick look inside the machine.

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Most of the internal space is eaten up by the CRT tube as well as the 8 inch drive. The center board with what look like ISA slots (they are not) is how the various components interface with the TRS-80. The connected boards are separate floppy controllers and the CPU board which makes this machine interesting since its not made up of one integrated motherboard. I would of liked to pull each board and photograph it but I was a little pressed for time and the bar that hold these boards was pretty firmly screwed in and I just didn’t feel like dealing with it and possibly messing something up.

I did though take a short video of this machine powering up which sounds like a 747 powering up for lift off.

So that’s about all for the model II. Its a very interesting machine but squarely focused at the 1979 business market if you want to get into the TRS-80’s I’d suggest a model I or perhaps a model III/IV if you can find one.

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Adventure Game Time : Hugo II & III

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Why am I clumping Hugo II and II together when Hugo I got its own article? Because I want to.

SPOILER ALERT!

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Hugo II: Whodunit or Hugo’s Mystery Adventure Is the second entry into the Hugo adventure game trilogy released in 1991. I’ll be playing the enhanced Windows version with a added mouse interface and midi music. Well Hugo II is the second game ive played in my Adventure Game Time series and I almost gave up at one point but luckly I endured and I did complete this one. First off on a technical level this game is very much like the first game in the series with no noticeable game play improvements. The art style is basically the same. One thing I will say is that this game is a little bit harder then the first game, though not for the right reasons, and it is longer with several more screens then the first game had.

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One of the first things to notice is that after playing a brief opening as Hugo your placed into the character of Penelope, Hugo’s girlfriend for the bulk of the rest of the game though they game would be no different if you played as Hugo himself except for maybe the groundskeeper wouldn’t hit on you. The plot is that after the events of the first game Hugo and Penelope are in England visiting uncle Horus when Hugo goes missing and Penelope witnesses uncle Horcus death and sets off to find Hugo and solve the murder mystery. The problem for me is the setting just feels a little pedestrian and boring compared to the haunted house theme of the original and I never really felt drawn in. The game takes place on the estate and the lavish grounds area complete with annoying hedge maze and underground caverns.

hugoii6I think this looks like a digitized image converted to EGA

The game started off easy enough and I found no real difficulties. Like the first game the logic and inventory puzzles are for the most part logical and with a little thought most can be easily overcome. The hedge maze isn’t all that difficult either and I found all the items needed within with just wondering and no real map making. I did quickly come across some sections that nearly ruined the game and something I tend to find infuriating in an adventure game and that is sections that require almost pixel perfect navigation to get through. Even worse is that it almost seems like the results of your navigating these sections is random and that following the same path will at times get you through and at other times end in your death and a restore. The collision detection is just terrible in these spots. The first section is a lawn filled with killer venus fly traps (it was a coincidence the day before I bought 2 fly traps for the apt.). Anyways you need to navigate them to retrieve a magnifying glass item but till almost the end of the game I thought you needed an item to get through since I failed to be able to navigate around the plants multipal times. I only finally made progress by complete luck and getting through these parts requires a lot of saving and restoring as you go. The second section like this is when your attempting to cross a bridge and if you touch the edge you drop your matches into the river and soak them, thus destroying a vital item. I’ll get to the third instance in a moment.

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There are some interesting parts such as running into that old man from the first game that asked all the trivia questions before you could proceed. I cringed when I encountered him but lucky a lesson was learned from the first game and Penelope simply bashes him over the head and knocks him out. Another section sees you entering a phone booth and transporting to another planet where you have to figure out how to kill a Dalek or “robot” as the game describes it. The Dr. then grants you a “Sonar Scewdriver” as a reward. The problem here is its easy enough to figure out how to kill the Dalek but if your not familiar with the Dr. Who series you have no idea when to use the screwdriver. As a nerd I had a general idea of Dr. Who but never watched the series so I was at a loss. I had to text my friend who was a fan (since my rules forbid googling) and asked what the screwdriver does on the show. Apparently  it does many things but chiefly among those things seems to be it opens doors which is what this one is used for later in the game.

hugoii11My first encounter didn’t turn out well

There’s also a path you must follow with a poisonous snake on it. You cant avoid the snake and you will get bitten. After this you have a limited amount of time to figure out how to treat the bite. I kept dying at first because I lacked the item needed but after going back I found it and its not hard to figure out. Again, that’s a good point about this game is the puzzles are mostly logical. Getting back to the third instance of bad pixel perfect movement. The part that almost led me to give up on this game is I had come to a point that I could not seem to proceed. I knew there was a door I had to get past and I knew I needed the Genie to help me. I knew he needed a moldy banana and I knew that the banana was on the other side of a chasm. The problem was I had no idea how to cross it.

hugoii16me crossing said chasm

Now after attempting to use every item in various ways I noticed an obscured lower section and I’ve seen this trick of the hidden way before so I attempted to cross, fell, and died. Tried again with the same effect. I also tried auto navigating by licking on the banana but Penelope just walked in a bee line to her death. I really rattled my brains here until again by accident I discovered there was a way where I suspected to cross. Why she didn’t make it the other times I first attempted this I have no idea but it almost cost me the completion. After this you make your way back into the house, solve a few more puzzles that lead to recovering evidence and then the police show up. I did enjoy that when all the suspects are gathered the snake from earlier as well as Dr. Who are there. in the end you find out that no one actually murdered uncle Horus and what you really witnessed was the practicing of a play. “What a Twist!” as Mr. Shyamalan might say.

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And that’s basically it. There’s a brief section at the end before the big reveal where you have to figure out how to escape a laundry room that Hugo had accidentally trapped himself in the whole time that was fun. The whole game is also filled with Red Herring jokes that can invoke a smile. So did I enjoy this adventure? not really. This game was a challenge at points but it was a challenge for the wrong reasons. The sections requiring the pixel perfect movement were infuriating. The game is longer then the first game but not by much and I completed it in a few hours. It would of been probably an hour less then that if it wasn’t for the stupid chasm section. Even though the first game was much shorter and less of a challenge I enjoyed it more and also the theme and atmosphere of the first game appealed to me more.

on scales from 1-5

difficulty – 2 (for the wrong reasons)

Plot – 2

Playability –  3

Characters – 2

Graphics – 2

Sound – 1 (2 for the windows version)

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And now for the final Hugo III or Hugo’s Amazon Adventure.

hugoiii1Someone needs to tell Mr. Gray either that there are no elephants in South America or that the there is no Amazon in Africa.

Hugo III takes place after the events of Hugo II with Hugo and Penelope flying home when their airplane crashes in the Amazon. Soon after the crash Penelope is bitten by a rare spider and your tasked with finding and retrieving water from the magical spring, the only the thing that can cure the spider venom. First off the scenery and mostly outdoors areas is a welcome change of pace and the jungel setting is rendered fairly well. Its mostly on the same level as the other two games but at least Hugo is wearing a nice safari outfit now instead of his bizarrely colored wardrobe from his other games.

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If you experienced Hugo I and II then the third game is mostly the same experience. I don’t have very much to say about this game since despite the setting its very similar to the previous games. This game though is very very short and would take an average person and hour or perhaps two to get through. Its roughly the same length as the first game but it actually felt a little shorter to me but then the old mans riddles section made the first game feel longer to me then it actually was. Also as the previous games the puzzles are all pretty logical and relatively easy to figure out. The only section that stumped me for awhile (meaning roughly 30 minutes was figuring out that there was a witch doctors hut in town. Once I figured this out by going east once in the native village I was captured by the witch doctor and stuck in a cage. figuring out how to escape I think was probably the most challenge puzzle in Hugo III and I could see how someone may not figure it out. It involves making a voodoo doll of the doctor out of molding clay that you had in your plane. I spend a good 20 minutes trying to figure something out when I decided on a strange impulse to say “make mask of doctor with clay” which triggered Hugo making an effigy of the doctor instead. From this I figured out the rest and soon after he was incapacitated.

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Other then the witch doctor section it was all rather simple deducing. Thankfully the mistakes of the past two games were not repeated and Hugo III lacked both trivia questions and sections that force you to make pixel perfect navigation. There were no hidden passages behind rocks either for once. The old man does make an appearance though at the very end but really he only serves as a means to make sure you have the magic water before you can return to Penelope.

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 Even though I preferred the theme and setting of the first Hugo I would say that technically this is the best game of the trilogy. The puzzles for the most part make since and it lacks the annoyances of the previous games such as the trivia questions, hidden passages and difficult navigation sections. The game is though awfully short which is a shame as it would of been nice to see this on be a little longer. One thing to note is there is actually a little side quest involving obtaining the old mans crystal ball that was dropped behind a boulder. You don’t need to do it but if you want the maximum points you need to.

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on scales from 1-5

difficulty – 2

Plot – 2

Playability –  3

Characters – 2

Graphics – 2

Sound – 1 (2 for the windows version)

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Epson Equity 1e

The Epson Equity 1e is an interesting computer and defiantly worth talking about. It’s interesting for several reasons. First off it’s a clone of an IBM PS/2 machine (specifically the IBM PS/2 model 30) that beats IBM at its own game making a clone PC that is superior in almost all ways to its source. Second, it is one of the only known PCs in existence other than the IBM PS/2 line that uses MCGA video. The Epson PSE-30 is also known to use MCGA though I’m unsure at this point if the PSE-30 is simply a rebadged 1e or not. This isn’t necessarily a positive point but it is a point of interest. It also happens to be a very late model using the at this point aging 8086 CPU and I suspect one of the last commercial PCs to use said processor. It does use the CPU to the best of its abilities and can be made into a very fast and capable PC. I do not know the exact date of commercial release but the manual for the 1e is copyrighted 1988 but this definitely feels like a later early 90’s machine.

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The 1e came in a few configurations. Mine is the single 720kb floppy and hard drive version though there were dual floppy versions. The hard drive installed when I received this machine was not stock. I believe the stock version was a 20MB half-height MFM hard drive. The machine itself is fairly compact and of good quality. The downside is the lack of expansion bays. Also, both bays are of the 3 1/2 inch variety so no 5 1/4 floppy drives. While we’re talking about floppy drives, the 1e has a built-in floppy controller that can not be disabled so you’re stuck as far as floppy drives go with 720kb drives though this is usually more than enough for the era of games this machine is meant to play.

There’s a single LED power light to the far left. About mid case, we have two recessed buttons. The first is a reset button and next to it is a “Speed” button. The speed button acts like a turbo button on later PCs though here the labeling actually makes sense. I never could understand the “Turbo” moniker on 386/486 machines as by default the machines ran at their full speed but on pressing the “turbo” button the machines was slowed down, very backward. Here the labeling makes much more sense with the machine running at a default 8mhz and the speed button giving a modest bump up to 10mhz. This is accompanied by a change in the LED color from orange to green. Finally, we have the rather large rectangle power button to the far upper right of the case.

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Here’s the back view. Ignore anything in those expansion bays as they would not be present stock. The only card that would be installed stock would be a hard drive controller card IF your configuration included a hard drive. To the left, we have the power switch and the fan vent for the PSU. The first port we have from left to right is the built-in video port. As I mentioned before the Epson Equity 1e is the ONLY non-IBM PC to use MCGA video. I wrote a Quick Guide to Computer Graphics article a while back if you want to check that out but in a nutshell, MCGA is a cost saving cut down version of VGA. It uses the same connector and any modern VGA monitor should work fine. MCGA can do 320×200 in 256 colors like VGA but not some of the higher resolution VGA modes. It can also display CGA but it leaves out the ability to be backward compatible with the EGA standard making it a rather poor choice for this machine since I think the 1e is ideal for EGA games of the late 80s and early 90s.

Next to the video port, we have two standard PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse which is really nice on an XT class machine. It’s not too often that you can so easily use a modern optical mouse on an XT class machine. Lastly, we have a parallel port and a serial port though it is the larger version of the serial port so if for some reason you wanted to use a serial mouse you would need a cheap and easy to find adapter.

So let’s take a look on the inside. The case is opened by removing seven screws, two on each side and three in the rear.

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The inside of my machine was exceptionally clean when I received it. I think it was originally used in an office as the side had a property of Washington county Virginia marked. This machine as you can see uses a nice sized PC speaker and not a beeper. I find it to be pretty good as it’s not too loud or so soft. Overall the motherboard is pretty compact especially for an XT class machine, showing off the refinements due to the late production date of this machine. Taking a closer look.

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1) CPU – The heart of the 1e is an 8086 processor. In this case an AMD version. The 8086 was the true 16-bit brother of the far more common 8088 found in the original IBM PC and many, many clones. The 8086 is 100% compatible as far as I know with software for the 8088. Where the 8088 was 16-bit internal but only 8-bit external the 8086 was 16-bit both internal and internal giving it in some cases a 50% speed improvement over the 8088 running at the same MHz speed. Some motherboards featuring the 8086 still had an 8-bit logic board but the motherboard in the 1e has a fully 16-bit data bus and 0 wait states taking advantage of the power of the 8086. The speed of the CPU is one of the reasons I find this machine more tailored to EGA games rather than CGA as many CGA games, especially early ones tended to be very dependent on the 4.77mhz speed of the standard 8088 and an 8mhz 8086 or especially a 10mhz 8086 can cause these games to run far too fast. Even a number of early VGA games can be made to run acceptably on the 1e.

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2) Co-Processor socket – This is a socket for an optional 8087 math co-processor. Because of the 10mhz speed, you would ideally want a 8087-1 co-pro that is rated for 10mhz. an 8087 won’t find much practical use in this machine unless you love running CAD stuff but there are a few games like Sim City that will benefit from it.

3) RAM – This is the built-in 640kb of system RAM. This should be more than enough for running all the games this machine is tailored for. For additional RAM you would need to find an add on RAM expansion card though almost no games of the period will require or take advantage of this.

4) CMOS battery – This machine uses a battery type I’ve not seen in any of my other machines. This is a barrel style Lithium battery. Most PC’s of the time used a Nic-Cad barrel battery. later machines used a coin style Lithium battery. Thus far the battery has worked perfectly and shows no signs of leakage. not bad for two plus decades.

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5) Floppy connector – The built-in floppy connector. It even has the plastic guide siding that wasn’t even common until the socket 7 era and wasn’t even common on high end 486 motherboards. The big downside of the built in floppy connector is that it cannot be disabled so there’s no chance of upgrading the floppy drive to a high-density 1.44MB drive.

6) Riser slot – the riser card for this machine supports four 8-bit ISA cards which is one more than the IBM this machine is cloned off of.

The build quality of the Epson Equity 1e is impressive and is a pinnacle of XT class technology. The MCGA is a major drawback as the machine stock is a little too slow for later VGA stuff. a true VGA or EGA card is really needed to unlock the potential of the 1e. It’s a unique PC and one I’ve enjoyed using. with a VGA card, I’ve found it fills a small niche for EGA games that won’t run on my CGA 8088 machine but run a tad too fast on my 10/20mhz 286 PC such as Ultima: the First Age of Darkness and Ultima II with the EGA patch applied. The manual and spec sheets for the Equity 1e can still be found here.

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SUGGESTED UPGRADES

To really unlock the potential of this machine I performed a few upgrades. I even considered using this machine as a template for an “Anatomy of a 8086” article but have decided against it (though expect an “Anatomy of a 8088 PC” in the future). A VOGON’s user Anonymous Coward did build a very nice and far more capable 8086 based machine similar to this one you can read about here. For the 1e though I have made the following upgrades.

CPU – My first upgrade was to the CPU and this was to replace the 8086 with a pin-compatible NEC V30. the V30 is very much like the 8088 upgrade V20 chip. the V30 is almost 100% compatible with 8086 software and is a simple drop in replacement. You can expect an immediate 10 – 15% speed boost, more in some cases. The V30 should bring the CPU power of the 1e very close to that of a 286 machine. Running at 8mhz Landmark speed test ver. 6.00 reported I was running equivalent to a 9mhz 286 CPU but this can be taken with a grain of salt. Another benefit of the V30 is that is contains some 186 code allowing some software meant for a 286 to run. Next to a true VGA card, I think the V30 upgrade is essential for smoothly playing EGA and VGA games on the 1e though keep in mind compatibility due mostly to increased speed will decrease for older games, especially CGA ones.

I also did some benchmarking using CheckIt 3.0 and ran this machine at the 10mhz turbo setting up against my IBM model 30 286 sporting a true 10mhz 286 with these results

IBM Model 30 286 w/ 10mhz AMD 286 = 1889 Dhrystones

Epson E1 w/ 10mhz NEC V30 = 1280 Dhrystones

So the results confirm the V30 is still behind a true 10mhz 286 but its definitely in the ballpark and I would wager about equal to an 8mhz 286

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The V30 I got here is rated for a whopping 16mhz. The 1e will only run it at 8 to 10mhz but my thinking is with the higher tolerance it should run a little cooler (though overheating is not really a concern at these speeds).

Co-Processor – I hate empty sockets on a motherboard so I purchased an Intel 8087-1 math co-processor for this machine. It probably won’t get much practical use for games but it makes me warm inside knowing it’s there.

Video card – Some would suggest using the built-in MCGA for the uniqueness of it but I would suggest you install a VGA card to really enjoy the 1e fully or at least an EGA card if you have the correct monitor. This machine really excels at EGA-era games and even stock at 8mhz  is too fast for many CGA titles. The trick is finding an 8-bit VGA card as the 1e only supports four 8-bit ISA slots. I found the easiest solution was to find a 16-bit VGA card that runs in 8-bit slots. Surprisingly there are a number of them to choose from. The Vintage Computer Forums have a post on which 16-bit cards work in 8-bit slots here. I found that I had a Trident 8900D based card in my box of unused cards and it is the card I’m currently using. The card is a full VGA card and has 1MB of video RAM, more than the PC. The card was configurable to 8-bit mode by configuring a few jumpers. Trident is usually known for low end video cards and I usually do not recommend them but the 8900D chip actually does very well in benchmarks I read and is possibly the best of their cards for the task. The 8900C based cards supposedly auto detect if you’re using 8 or 16-bit slots but are much slower cards. Though at XT class speeds the extra RAM and speed probably does not matter much.

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Hard Drive – My 1e actually came with a fairly rare XT IDE hard drive controller from Silicon Valley, the ADP50L and is primarily the reason I bought this machine. It’s a pretty capable controller that allows more modern IDE drives to be used in PCs with only 8-bit slots much like the IDE-XT hobbyist cards today. The stock hard drive as I mentioned before was a 20mb half height MFM drive but mine came with a 52MB IDE drive along with the controller card. I ended up replacing this rather small and oddly sized drive with a 420MB IDE drive I had sitting around. It didn’t have the fancy front plate with the activity LED so I ended up having to fashion a new front plate from a discarded bezel plate of another PC.

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Sound Card – For sound I went with a Sound Blaster 1.5 w/ added CMS chips that I recently acquired from a trade. This card is sound blaster compatible as well as mostly CMS sound compatible thanks to the add on chips.

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All these upgrades together greatly increase the power of the Equity 1e and open up many possibilities for smoothly running EGA and some VGA games. A possibly better VGA card (though honestly the 8900D is surprisingly a fast card), larger or faster hard drive and maybe the inclusion of an EMS memory card for that empty fourth expansion slot could make this PC even more capable I found that it now occupies a nice place for me playing EGA games that are to fast for my 8088 but run to fast for my high end 286.

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Dell Dimension XPS D and R series

I was doing my usual rounds at my usual thrift when a PC caught my eye. I knew from the stickers it was a mid 90’s machine and sported a Pentium II. Unfortunately I’m already up to my eyeballs in mid 90’s P1 and II machines and I had no reason whatsoever to buy this machine. Whats more it was priced at $24.99 which is a deal more then I normally would be willing to pay for a machine like this. Despite this it called to me. that case, the normal off white color of the era yet also sporting aggressive frontal styling and slimness. I knew of the Dell Dimension series, a mid-high end line from Dell and despite not owning one in their hey-day I have a sort of soft spot for the series and regularly preferred using them previously for Win 9x machines. After attempting to open the case and gaze on the goodies inside, and failing, I gave up and left. I know I didn’t need this machine yet I felt regret for not picking it up. A few days later I returned to the thrift and to my mild surprise the Dell was still there and the case was open. I took a peek inside and saw it sported an AWE64 which I could defiantly use in other machines as well as an Nvidia RIVA 128, A card I never really played around with. There was no hard drive and it was still overpriced at $24.99 but I gave in and despite my better judgment I bought it. At the very least it would make good material for a blog article I thought. That said, without further adue, the Dell Dimension XPS D300.

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The Dell Dimension line was the name Dell gave to their line of PC’s for homes and small offices and they were usually of decent quality. The XPS line was at least at first reserved for there high end cutting edge machines with XPS standing for Xtreme Performance System, because as we know everything in the 90’s was EXTREME! sometimes even omitting the E for extra XTREMNESS!. The XPS D300 here came out in late 1997 from what I can figure and indeed uses very high end parts for the time. This machine would be one of the last and faster machines “designed for windows 95” before win 98 came out the following year. The D300 here was one of the highest spec PC’s of the D series of XPS computers. I’m not 100% sure whats stock on this machine but I’m pretty sure the second CD drive with the blue highlighting was added by the previous owner but it does match the upper blue case label and goes well with everything. I’m also not 100% sure about that Zip 100 drive below it either but from the pictures I’ve seen online of the D300 most have one installed in the same place so I’m betting the Zip drive is stock. The power button is easily accessible mid case and the smaller reset button a little below it. I don’t know what it is about these machines but I’ve always loved the case styling of the Dell XPS and Dimensions series. The case itself is also thinner then an average PC case.

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We can see here that the case is tool-less to get into and only requires unscrewing one screw that can be done by hand. Under the PSU we have a really nice and large case fan to assist with cooling. Built in ports are a little sparse with two ps/2 ports (that are interestingly none color coded for the time). Two USB ports most likely 1.1, as well as a printer and serial port. Absent is the built in video and to a lesser extent built in audio. This is actually a mark of quality though as usually built in video/audio is of the low quality sort and is easily blown away by most add on video/audio cards. As I don’t think its likely at all that Dell sold their machines without any video or audio cards I can only assume the cards I found installed in mine were stock from the factory. This would make sense as the cards are period correct for 1997 and of higher quality which would also go along with the rest of the D300. Usually I go into the cards near the end but It feels right to go over them now since were on the subject. Keep in mind I don’t know for sure if these are stock cards.

First we will talk about the video card.

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This is the video card I found inside. An AGP Nvidia RIVA 128 from 1997. Since in depth spec information on this model seems to be scarce I can only assume this is the card that came stock with the D300. It does make sense this being a high end machine as the date of the card matches the computer and the RIVA 128 would of been a higher end card to use in 1997 when it was pretty hot stuff competing with the 3DFX Voodoo. It was one of the earlier cards to use the then new AGP bus slot and was one of the earlier cards to integrate 2d and 3d into one card. The Riva 128 makes a decent card for DOS as well as early Windows 3d stuff. Its a great all around card and I’d suggest keeping it installed if you want to keep the machine 1997 stock correct. If not, toss in something more powerful, perhaps from the next generation Nvidia TNT or TNT2 line.

for audio we have…

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A AWE64 CT4500. This would make it the AWE64 Value with only 512kb of RAM. Overall its still a decent card and as I suspected with the video card I also suspect this was the card that came stock with this machine though I was hoping it was a non value edition. Its doesn’t have true OPL FM or a waveblaster daughter board header but its not a half bad card. In DOS it will mostly act like a AWE32 with clearer output and If you hook up an external midi module the AWE64 is free of the “hanging midi note” bug found on just about all Sound Blaster cards from the SB16 to the AWE32. Its a good all around card for DOS compatibility and Windows 9x. Stick with this card or upgrade to the AWE64 gold if you want to stay period correct or plan on using the D300 for DOS heavy gaming. If not, A PCI sound blaster live! or something using the Vortex chip from Aureal. You’ll lose some ease of use and compatibility in DOS as is the case with all PCI sound cards but they will make better overall Windows sound cards in my opinion. (I actually replaced the AWE64 in my machine with a PCI Monster MX300 with a Aureal chip)

Now for the motherboard itself.

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One of the first things to catch the eye is the CPU and the massive copper heatsink. The motherboard itself is a slot 1 motherboard and features the Intel 440LX chipset and the at the time new AGP slot for video cards as well as PCI and ISA slots giving a lot of nice expansion options for building a DOS or Windows machine. The PC speaker is a “beeper” type so it doesn’t produce as great a sound as a true PC speaker. You can also notice in the image above the vertical bay to the left where normally a PC speaker or case fan would go. That bay is for a hard drive but on my system I simply mounted my drive in a more traditional manner In a bay under the Zip drive. I don’t know the type or size of the hard drive that came with this model as it was removed when I received it but my guess is that it was a 2GB+ model hard drive. I installed a simple 1GB model IDE drive to replace the missing drive.

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There is no L2 cache on the motherboard  since slot 1 CPU’s have L2 cache on the CPU package itself.

1) CPU – The CPU in the D300 as the name may suggest is a 300mhz “Klamath” Pentium II. This CPU was pretty hot stuff in late 1997 and would of been a good choice for a higher end PC. The heatsink on this CPU is huge.

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As you can see there is no fan directly on the CPU and my guess is the design here called for the oversized heatsink to be cooled by the case fan behind it.

2) – CMOS battery

3) RAM – 3 sockets for up to 384MB of PC66 SDRAM as I have here.

4) two IDE connectors and above them a floppy drive connector

5) this cable connects the reset/power buttons on the front of the machine to the motherboard.

Even with the praise I’ve given it the machine does have its faults. First of which is the case. Just let me say again I love the case. I love the look and the ease of taking the side panel off with one hand screw BUT I still have not figured out how to take the other side panel off. This prevents me from removing any dead drives and the ones currently installed are screwed in on both sides. I know it sounds silly and there’s probably a manual online…wait, let me Google that real fast…..no, nothing I could find in 5 minutes anyways. just dead ends. its unacceptable when you have to hunt down a manual to take a case apart or maybe I’m just missing something here.

Second issue I had is the password which is set to be there by default. Usually the user sets a password and then if the CMOS battery dies the password dies with it but in the case of the D300 and I suspect most Dells of the time the opposite is true. I received this PC with an obvious dead CMOS battery so after POST I was presented with a road block in the form of a password. What you have to do is find this jumper on the motherboard.

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Jumper pins 2-3 to set the machine to “config mode”. reboot and then go into BIOS and set things to no password. make sure you have also replaced the CMOS battery with a working one or else you will need to do this again after you power down. Power down and replace the jumper to pin 1-2 for “normal mode” Its not a huge deal but it was kinda annoying.

Lastly we have the proprietary Dell power connector.

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This is the bane of most all Dell PC’s from 1996 until about 2000 and you can actually fry your system if you decide to try and use a standard ATX power connector. Basically if your PSU dies its not as easy as grabbing a spare ATX PSU you may have lying around or can find at goodwill for $5 the same day. There are a few adapters I found on eBay that let you hook up a regular ATX power supply for about $6 so that may be an option though I cant comment on there reliability.

The machine performs adequately and truth be told makes a pretty cool Windows 9x machine or even a good DOS PC  depending on what video/audio cards you decide to go with though even the stock cards are well up to either task. The biggest real downside is the Dell PSU but that’s only really an issue if it decides to die on you. As far as OEM machines I would recommend it though I currently definitely prefer using generic cases and building your own machines from scratch this would of been a pretty nice PC for 1997.

Benchmarks for DOS

300mhz Pentium II MMX, 384MB SDRAM, Nvidia RIVA 128

3DBENCH – 179.2

PCPBENCH – 78.5

DOOM – 70.07

Quake – 58.3

20150518_200805This is the Dell Dimension XPS R450 which is at the highest end of the Dimension Pentium II line. Its uses the exact same motherboard as the D300 with the only difference being the CPU is a 450mhz Pentium II. It even still has the oversized heatsink with no fan. Obviously the front of the case is redesigned but offers the same number of expansion options though the lowest slot now needs to be a floppy drive or ZIP drive. I think this machine was altered by the former owner but the Video card was an Nvidia TNT card

HP Pavilion 3100

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When I think of Pavilions I think of those wooden roofed buildings found at the park. It hardly evokes images of high speed computing or technology. Apparently one definition is also “lower surface of a brilliant-cut gem” so maybe that’s what they were going for with the HP Pavilion line. Anyways this is the HP Pavilion 3100. I received this machine as part of a lot of three PC’s I picked up. Its actually the second time I’ve had this models as strangely enough that last one was also from a lot of three machines I grabbed although that one didn’t work and when I tried booting it up it sparked and caught fire. This machine though worked fine. As you can see there is one 5 1/4 bay for a CD drive as well as a spot for a 3 1/2 floppy underneath. there’s a power button to the left and LED’s for power and HDD activity but no reset button. This is a no frills machine.

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Mine still had the sticker attached with what were the factory specs, 166mhz MMX Pentium, 16MB SDRAM, 2GB HDD, 16x CD drive, 1MB video RAM, etc… The machine I acquired was upgraded by the previous owner and I’ll get to that.

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On the rear of the computer we have a assortment of the usual suspect ports. Serial and printer ports with an interestingly placed gameport above them for a joystick or gamepad. Next to that we have two PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse, two audio jacks for microphone and speakers, two USB port and finally the VGA port. Its not a bad assortment of ports for such a small machine and all your basics are covered. The expansion card options are very limited with only two slots available. One slot here being taken by an Ethernet card  (its removable). This computer is very compact and light which is a nice plus.

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The case top slides off after removing three rear screws. Still has what I believe is the original WD Caviar 22000 2GB hard drive. It uses a riser card for the two expansion slots with 1 PCI and two ISA so you can have either one of each type or two ISA cards. The most logical setup if you don’t care about networking and are going for pure gaming would be a PCI video card and an ISA sound card for DOS compatibility.

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I guess the lack of expansion slots is the tradeoff for the extremely slim case but it is very limiting.

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First off there is no l2 cache on this motherboard.

1) CMOS battery

2) Two IDE connectors and one floppy connector

3) S3 Trio64V+ with 1MB of video RAM. A classic stand by for DOS. The nice thing about this chip for on board video is you may not need to bother with adding a video card if your primary concern is DOS since the Trio is pretty much the standard and compatible with just about everything.

4) The on board audio chip from Crystal. there’s no true OPL chip on this machine. It does adequate job but if your serious about sound I would recommend adding an ISA sound blaster or clone.

5) gameport connector

6) Piezo speaker, despite not being a true cone speaker the piezo does a pretty decent job and mine was fairly loud.

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On the other side of the riser card you have your AT power connector as well as

7) CPU – the 3100 came stock with a 166mhz Pentium MMX chip but mine has been upgraded to a 200Mhz chip. I *think* this may be the top CPU upgrade for this machine as the jumpers only allow for 3x at 66mhz fsb. I did try installing a 233mhz P1 but it was only detected and running at 200mhz. *EDIT* I have been informed that you indeed can get the machine to post to 233mhz with the correct jumper configuration which should be jumper JBF0 and JBF1 set to 1-2.

8) RAM – This machine came stock with 16MB of SDRAM but mine has been upgraded to the full 64MB

So my thoughts on this machine. On the plus side its a very compact and light machine. If you lack a lot of space or want an old desktop for DOS or early Windows LAN parties or something this one should work. It has all the basics and could be made into a serviceable DOS/Windows machine. adding a voodoo I/II to compliment the S3 trio would help or just placing an all-in-one solution card like a voodoo 3 or a Nvidia or Matrox card would also help. I would say adding an ISA sound blaster 16 or AWE would also be a must for gaming. That said there seems to be better options out there and the expansion possibilities with this machine are just to limited. Windows 95/98 run fine on the machine but later games would seriously choke on it from the CPU bottleneck. no L2 cache always sucks and hinders overall speed. if you want something compact a Compaq EN is a much better option, especially with its speedier CPU options and ability in BIOS to disable all cache to seriously cut speeds and help with old game compatibility. The 3100’s BIOS options are like the rest of this machine, very limited. It does a good job cramming as much as it does into such a light and slim case and as I said DOES play DOS games and early Windows stuff OK but its hard to take seriously as a gaming machine.

Benchmarks for DOS were decent

200mhz Pentium MMX, 64MB SDRAM, NO L2 Cache, S3 Trio64V+

3DBENCH – 152.9

PCPBENCH – 41.9

DOOM – 72.44

Quake – 38.9

It actually barely beat my main Pentium DOS PC under 3dbench by .7 FPS but then that could be a fluke since that machine beat it by several FPS in all the other tests. Or 3dBench may rely more on the video card and I’m starting to suspect the 2d core of the Trio may be ever so slightly more efficient then in the Virge even though there supposedly are exactly the same.

Adventure Game Time : Hugo’s House of Horrors

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Well I’m killing two birds with one stone with this article. First off this is the inaugural article in my new series “Adventure Game Time” and its also happens to be my obligatory Halloween article. Last year I started the tradition with my article on Night Slashers.

If anyone knows me they know I love the RPG genre, I even have a separate blog detailing my quest to complete as many as those types of games as possible, but I also have another love and that’s Adventure games, primarily old school PC adventure games (are there really any other type?). Despite that affinity for the genre I’ve actually played very few of adventure games and have actually completed even fewer so I wanted to start this series to encourage me to play some more gems, and not so much gems, of the genre and then share my experience and thoughts.I wanted to set a few ground rules though.

1) As with all my gaming I will make every attempt to play the game on actual period hardware (I have all these old PC’s may as well make use of them)

2) I will make every attempt to complete the game but I don’t necessarily have to.

3) I will not use walkthroughs, the internet or printed guides as that just makes it to easy. I will allow myself to ask other people. for instance if I have someone over and I’m stuck in a game and there bored enough to sit with me and watch what I’m playing and make suggestions that’s okay. I suppose a bit of allowing that is nostalgia as I used to sit and watch my friend play Kings Quest games on his old Tandy and help him solve situations. Generally I will only use the means of  what would be available at the time to solve any in game puzzles without using anything direct like hint books or hint lines (not that those exist anymore). I think this makes the games an actual challenge and I’m very curious to see how far an average human can figure through some of these games.

These articles generally contain spoilers so be warned!!!!

So for the first game I’ll be playing in this series I’m going to ease myself into things with a very short, simple and Halloween themed game from 1990. Hugo’s House of Horrors AKA Hugo 1 AKA Hugo’s Horrific Adventure.

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I learned about the game from this old Canadian shareware CD. Hugo 1 is a 1990 title and mainly the one man job of David Gray. Its shows in the short length and dated graphics of the game (even for the time). I’m not insinuating that a bad thing but just a stated fact. Right off the bat I need to say I violated my first rule with this game, sort of. Somehow forgetting I had the shareware version of this game I loaded it up on my early Pentium DOS machine and played the DOS version through to the room right before the last room when I learned I could not progress because I needed to register. feeling annoyed and pressed for time with the Oct. deadline I hung my head in shame and went to GOG.com and bought the whole trilogy for $5.99 that will play via included emulator in Windows 7. Truth be told I like GOG. The prices are generally good and from what I know you can take the Digital download files and transfer them easily to disks or CD’s or whatever and play them on real hardware. seeing as I already played through 97% or so of the game in a real machine I just used the emulator so the screen shots you’ll be getting are from that. The GOG versions of the game though are from the later Windows release and features an “improved” mouse interface, midi music and 10 more points to score. So it did give me a chance to compare versions. In truth I think I prefer the old DOS version. The Windows version feels really cheap with the generic interface and mouse control adds almost nothing to the game. The one thing that I did like though is the music. the original DOS release had almost no tunes that played except on rare occasions and they were short PC speaker diddies. The Windows version has a minimalist midi soundtrack appropriate to the game. Its doesn’t add a ton to the experience seeing how short that experience is but it doesn’t detract either.

 hhh1xBOO! Haunted House. The fact the Pumpkin is yellow annoys me.

100_8172How he walks almost reminds me of Lester the Unlikely for the SNES

Hugo 1 as I’ll just call it for simplicity seems a lot like Maniac Mansion and I suppose that’s the most common and obvious comparison. The plot is your girlfriend who intended to babysit has disappeared into a haunted house and its your job to brave the dangers of the homes crazy inhabitants and save her. Both homes even have a mad scientist but creator David Gray claims he never played Maniac Mansion and the actual inspiration for Hugo was the original Leisure Suit Larry game.

You move by way of the keyboard arrow keys or in the Windows version you can also use the mouse, though I prefer the keyboard. The interface is text input but you get some point and click functions with the Windows version. The parser is fairly limited compared to other games but I never found it giving me to many issues with performing tasks. The largest problem I can recall was figuring out the correct phrase for opening a bolted trapdoor.

100_8175I couldn’t resist trying the dog whistle.

The entirety of the game can be completed in less then an hour if your good. I completed it in under two hours total of play time and I never played this game before. Thankfully there weren’t any “dead man walking” situations I encountered where the game was uncompletable due to missing an item but The short nature lends to avoiding that. Even if a situation like that was to occur its not a huge deal to simply restart the game. Death can occur as there are a few monsters but its usually obvious things that will kill you and there aren’t any “cheap deaths”. There’s a mummy and a killer dog that can end you and the Butler will chop your head off if your not prepared. None of the deaths though have the charm or humor of Sierra games.

The first part of the game is roaming around the house proper, which isn’t very big. There are seven rooms in the house plus a backyard. The underground portion consists of five rooms and if you count the screen outside of the house there are a grand total of 14 screens comprising this game. There isn’t much interaction with the residents of the haunted house though the brief interactions are fun such as participating in the mad scientists experiment or wondering into a dinner party for classic monsters. even with its limited nature a few parts do have their charms. I have to say big green shirtless Igor made me a little uncomfortable.

hhh4ah, all the classics, we have a smartly dressed Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula….a zombie woman?, the Grim Reaper? that furry monster from the loony tune cartoons? and….the Joker?

One particularly bad section that I only found quickly by luck is the entrance to the caves found in the basement. Once you discover the basement your at what appears to be a dead end. The actual entrance to the caves in found by walking between two rocks and is completely obscured. It doesn’t even look like you can walk between the rocks making things even worse.

hhh6

The few rooms of the cave all contain obstacles for you to overcome usually by using the items you recovered in the house. None of the inventory puzzles are particularity difficult and all require very basic logic. There is a section with a killer Mummy that requires a bit of figuring out and dexterity. In a part of particularly annoying game design you eventually come across and old man who you cant pass unless you answer a series of trivia questions. Me, being a nerd was able to answer most of them in one try and one is multiple choice. Questions like Where does Azlian live (and not in a wardrobe) are fairly easy for the nerdy or film inclined but the second to last question is “what is the name of Roy Rogers dog?” This was an issue as I know next to nothing about westerns. I knew who Roy Rogers was but that was my extent of Roy knowledge. Now according to my rules I was very limited in options. I couldn’t simply take less then a minute to Google the name, that was against the rules and I was already bending one by running an emulator. I could hunt down a library and then hopefully a book on Roy. My other obvious option was to ask people but had to be sure they didn’t just Google it and tell me making it a risky task. In the end I had to have a call made and the answer was swiftly given by a Western buff. Crises averted. This is also the point when playing the original DOS version that I was unable to proceed as the last question is “did you register this game”. As I didn’t I was barred from proceeding (lying won’t help, the old man knows!). In the Windows version the last question is something like “do you want to save Penelope” (your GF).

The final room is another simple inventory puzzle and then that’s it. you rescue Penelope and thus ends your adventure. Well now I see the Leisure Suit Larry influence. Kissy kissy!

hhh9

So what did I think? well its not a bad game at all. It has its charms and you can forgive the poor music and visuals being a shareware project by one guy. There’s not much to the game overall and it’s a short experience that doesn’t overstay its welcome. I would place it in the very easy category and I assume most anyone could complete this game even if your terrible at inventory and logic based puzzles prevalent in adventure games. With the exceptions of the annoying hidden entrance and those unnecessary trivia questions there are no quieting in frustration moments. Hugo makes a great game for someone looking for a quick Adventure fix or someone just getting into the genre and intimidated by longer more difficult games that may contain unintuitive and ridicules logic puzzles.

on scales from 1-5

difficulty – 1

Plot – 2

Playability –  3

Characters – 2

Graphics – 2

Sound – 1 (2 for the windows version)

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Luggables: Kaypro 10 & Toshiba T3100

Before we had Ipads and notebooks and even laptop computers we had “luggables”. Luggables were an early type of portable computer. Closer in many respects to a desktop then to what we know as a laptop this was the best early designers could do to make a PC portable and in many cases had to implement bulky technology of the time like large 5 1/4 disk drives and CRT monitor screens. The name comes from the fact that often they were more like luggage that needed to be lugged around then like a laptop that was easily portable and light. In many cases a luggables exceeded 15+ pounds. Another general trait is the need for a power cord and a wall outlet and no battery power severely restricting use while “on the go”. We will be going over two such luggable machines from two ends of the spectrum. The Kaypro 10 a more traditional luggable from earlier days and a later Toshiba T3100 that uses technology like a early gas-plasma screen to reduce weight and size and almost enter the era of the laptop.

Kaypro 10

First up is the Kaypro 10 from 1983.

kprot1

First off I have to say I had two of these systems and both had the same issues of not being able to detect the hard drive as well as freezing up after a few minutes after booting from a floppy. That said I don’t have a lot of experience in using these machines. Also I sold off my two units and forgot to take that many images so :(. The kaypro 10 was part of the successful Kaypro line. From what I’ve read it was one of the first computers  to come with a hard drive. In this case a 10 MB MFM drive. The K10 came with a 5 1/4  double sided double density 390k floppy drive, a 4mhz Z80 CPU, 64kb of RAM and ran CP/M. As you can see the K10 came with a 9′ green screen CRT monitor built in. In the rear there is a printer, serial and modem port as well as the reset and power switch. The keyboard latches on and covers the screen and there is a handle on the back of the machine so you can lug it around like a bulky 15+ pound briefcase. I really wished I could get either of mine working but even if I did these are CP/M machines and CP/M is not known for its gaming.

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The metal box to the far right is the floppy drive and directly to its left is the hard drive enclosure. Under that motherboard is the CRT tube.

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Here is the motherboard. not to much to say. That chip directly above the cable labeled MOBO J9 is the Z80 CPU and I think those little chips under the cable are the RAM chips.

kprot4

This is the controller board. It is located on the right side of the machine screwed onto the side of the floppy drive enclosure. This board controls the HDD and FDD. Other then that I don’t have a whole lot to say about the Kaypro 10. I didn’t get to use it much due to the fact both my machines had issues and also I’m not very experienced with the CP/M OS which is primarily a business OS. It is though, a very good example of an early portable PC. The large built in CRT was typical and in the K10s favor the screen is actually big enough to be usable and having a actual hard drive is a huge plus. The thing is not easy to carry around. You don’t need to be the hulk to carry it but its certainly not without effort. I would hate to be the businessman that had to lug this thing to the office and up a flight a stairs on a hot day while in a business suit. Two Kaypro 10’s were apparently used by the medical team in the 1984 Paris-Dakar race and powered by the car battery which I guess at the time was very hi-tech.

Now lets look at the other end of the spectrum at a machine that acts as sort of a missing link between luggables and laptop the

Toshiba T3100

t31002

This machine came out in 1986 and in many ways is far more closely related to the laptop. The main difference is that the T3100 still relies solely on wall outlets for power and has no battery ability like a laptop does. This machine is also in general heavier and more bulky then many early laptops. I found this machine at a local thrift chain and as you can see the screen is a little messed up with vertical lines through it and barely readable. Other then a broken screen the machine boots up with no issues and luckily there is a way around the screen issues I’ll get to in a bit.

The T3100 uses a amber gas-plasma display greatly reducing size and weight from the large CRT in systems such as the Kaypro 10. This machine is powered by a Intel 7.16mhz 286 and sports 640kb of RAM upgradable to 2.6MB. Unlike the K10 this machine is a DOS machine opening up many possibilities. Mine came with DOS  3.2 on its 10MB hard drive. The manual states the CPU can be down clocked to a compatibility mode of 4.77mhz to help run older software but to do this the manual states ” [this] can be done by depressing some keys of the keyboard”. What those keys actually are though is anyone’s guess.

t31001

My T3100 has a standard configuration of a hard drive and a 3 1/3 inch 720kb floppy drive, another technological leap from the K10.

t31005

There is also a port on the rear to add and external 5 1/4 drive and a switch on the left side of the machine to configure A: and B: drives. Now will take a look at the rear of the machine.

t31003

Other then the Power switch and starting from the left we have an expansion port that has a proprietary connector for adding things like a modem or I think memory expansion cards as well. There was also an external base that housed up to five ISA cards that could be used to expand the T3100 abilities. This though would obviously come at the price of the portability. Next to that we have a serial port and then a printer port that also acts as a port for an optional external 5 1/4 drive. Next to that are some DIP switches to set things such as memory and display. I’ll post a chart on that here.

t3100dipAnd lastly we have a very convenient RGB port for hooking the T3100 up to an external CGA monitor.

t31004

This is very nice for situations such as my own where the built in gas-plasma screen is damaged. The CGA chip is fully CGA compatible and has a hi-res 640×400 mode which is very much like the mode in the AT&T 6300 PC which is well, unusual, but in a good way. Lastly I’ll include a layout of the internal motherboard.

t3100mb

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I’m not really a laptop or portable PC guy and prefer the expansion and sturdiness of desktop systems but the T3100 is a decent DOS game machine for what it is, if you can get past the amber monochrome screen. You could add an expansion bay and a CGA monitor but when you do that you defeat the purpose of portability and may as well use a desktop. I think the Kaypro 10 and the T3100 make a good  and interesting example of how luggable PC’s evolved in just a short period of time.

The Best Version of: Super Nintendo

Usually when a gaming console comes out it goes through several revisions in its life. Sometimes these revisions are all internal but many times they are also external. Sometimes the early version of a console is most desirable because of extra features or abilities that were later cut to save costs and sometimes later revisions with more refined internals and bug corrections are the models to get. In this series I’m going to pick a console and examine the different versions released and try to decide on the best one overall. For the first console I’m going to look at in this series I’ve picked one of my all-time favorites, the Super Nintendo.

bsnes1

I’ll be covering the North American systems here since there’s really no significant difference except for form factor and the NA SNES seems to be the best “universal” system. So first we should go over the SNES consoles available before we compare. The most common is the model pictured above. This was the model sold in NA from 1991-1997 and the one most retro gamers are familiar with. It’s fairly easy to find and can be had for about $50 or under depending. Many of us may even still have one laying around from the ’90s. This model is pretty capable, it supports a wide variety of A/V outputs via the rear multi A/V  and RF port from RF to RGB. It has a nice little red LED power light and is pretty durable. The original model SNES is also fairly easy to modify. The inner tabs can easily be removed to allow the use of JP game carts as demonstrated here. Its also fairly easy to find someone online to perform a lockout switch disabling mod and a 50/60mhz switch mod to allow one to play European PAL games on a North American SNES. The one negative thing I can think of off the bat is its kind of ugly. I’m full of nostalgia for the thing so to me the site fills me with fond memories but to be realistic it’s not the sleekest looking machine especially when you compare it with the look of its Japanese and European counterpart.

Super-Famicom-Console-Set

Japanese Super Famicom taken from Wikipedia Commons under fair use

Another not very well documented issue with the SNES is the “middle light bar” or “vertical line issue”. Its a little hard to capture and explain but basically its a sort of distortion that sometimes can be seen running down the center of the screen. This is especially prevalent in dark scenes. I first noticed it when playing the game Robotrek. In the workshop sections of that game a large portion of the screen is black and you can notice a sort of “band” running down the center of the screen that I found a little distracting. I’ve read that early Japanese models do not have this issue and later production NA models have it to a lesser degree. If you want to see an example of this there’s an image at RetroRGB here.

The original model did go through several small internal changes through its life cycle and these changes did have a small effect on the machine. These changes were mostly just small refinements of the internal motherboard design. As these changes happened A/V quality, especially if your using RGB improved. The last version of the original SNES’s are known as 1chip motherboard SNES’s. The 1chip design consolidated several of the chips and is the same layout used in the SNES Mini. This redesign improved picture sharpness but introduced some other issues such as minor graphical glitches to some games. There’s no sure way to tell what motherboard revision your SNES has unless you open it up and look inside. 1chip SNES’s tend to have serial numbers starting with UN3. The serial number can be found on the underside of the unit.

bsnes2

Here is my machine opened up. As you can see my serial number starts with UN1 and inside my motherboard is labeled SHVC-CPU-1. this is NOT a 1chip motherboard. 1chip boards should actually have “1chip” printed on the board.

and here is another non 1-chip board from my other version 1 SNES

snes1mb

A second cost reduced version of the SNES came out in 1997 and was known as the SNES Mini, SNES Jr. or SNES 2.

snes3

Unfortunately the yellowing of the plastic shell is a problem all SNES consoles suffer from due to the nature of the plastic used. The SNES mini is not quite as well known and I still encounter many casual gamers around my age that have never heard of it. As far as I know works with most add-ons for the original model. This model may also  be harder to mod with a lockout disable switch and a 50/60htz switch for PAL games due to smaller chips but I have not confirmed this yet. It’s a much smaller and sleeker machine much more in the style of the Japanese and PAL models then the NA version. Removing the tabs as in the original model to allow JP games to be played is achieved largely the same way. Unfortunately despite its new look and less shelf space needed this is a cost reduced machine and many capabilities were omitted. First it lacks an eject button of the original model requiring slightly more force to remove games. The SNES mini has the best A/V quality output of any former SNES, even the 1chip motherboard models *unconfirmed*. Unfortunately this is almost completely negated by the fact this model has had support for S-video and RGB disabled. This model also lacks a power LED light when the machine is on. A minor thing next to the reduced A/V options but still a minus. The mini is also slightly more expensive due to its relative scarcity and usually goes for $60+. On the positive side S-video and RGB output can be restored via an internal modification and a power LED can be easily added. there are notches next to the power switch to indicate on/off position which makes excellent drill holes for a small discreet power LED.

compared to the model 1 SNES the SNES mini AKA Jr. has a sharper image, especially after an RGB mod. Also the RGB mod tends to reduce the vertical line issue present with the SNES. Unfortunately recent information indicates that this model has several incompatibilities and graphical issues.

1) the white levels are overly bright compared to the original

2) “ghosting” of images may occur with certain backgrounds on certain monitors that have poor filtering

3) a number of games appear to have minor graphical glitches on the SNES mini though none of these seem to make any game unplayable but usually consist of random white dots appearing, upper screen visual glitches, missing shadows or warped text boxes. These games include but are not limited to

  •  Air Strike Patrol
  • Treasure of the Rudras
  • Aladdin
  • Final Fantasy Mystic Quest
  • Demon’s Crest
  • Soul Blazer
  • Magical Pop’N
  • Super Ghouls N’ Ghosts

.

Here’s an example I captured from Air Strike Patrol of the shadowing issue. Both SNES’s had the images captured via S-video.

aspmin2

SNES MINI

aspn1

SNES “standard”

Notice you can barely make out the shadow of the fighter on the SNES Mini but it is very noticeable when played on a standard SNES

more.

aspmin3

SNES Mini

aspn2

SNES “standard”

Or if you would like to view the two versions in motion I captured some video.

4) games that use add-on chips like the Super FX chip (Star Fox) seem to run slightly slower (unconfirmed ATM). I’ve captured the intro and some game play from both Starfox and Stunt Racer FX and played them side by side.

The SNES mini has been S-video/RGB modded but has a diagonal line issue in S-video not present in RGB. I tried to sync the games best I could in the video but its still a little inconclusive. Star fox does appear to run slightly slower, Stunt Racer FX is inconclusive.

5) the first version of Game Genie will not run on SNES mini

more information on these issues can be found here

to compare models.

bsnes4

bsnes5

In the picture below you can see the SNES mini (on left) has had the RF port and channel select removed requiring an external RF selector if using RF.

bsnes6

so which is the better model, well that depends.

BEST MODEL STOCK (out of the box, no modifications)

original SNES with non-1chip motherboard

bsnes7

  • Eject button
  • Power LED
  • ability to output RF, composite, s-video and RGB easily
  • cheaper
  • full game catalog compatibility and compatibility with all peripherals
  • correct white levels

BEST OVERALL MODEL

SNES mini (with A/V and LED modifications) I’ve changed my mind after learning about the issues with the mini and 1chip units.

bsnes8

  • small sleek look
  • LED easily installed
  • with s-video/RGB restoring mod has the absolute best A/V output quality of any SNES model

Almost all the major shortcomings of the mini can be overcome with modifications. Full A/V can be restored and an LED added. I think I paid under $50 to have someone perform the needed mods for me. Yes the mini lacks an eject button but is that really such a loss for getting the best awesome A/V output in return. The price is also a little higher but its sometimes only a matter of $10-$20 dollars. If you want the best SNES I defiantly advise tracking down a mini and at least getting the A/V restore mod done. Its worth it for the S-video alone and if you have an RGB monitor the difference in quality is very noticeable.

after the new information I think overall even compared to a modded SNES mini that the original non-1chip SNES is the overall best version. With the right monitor or TV the “ghosting” isn’t much of an issue with the mini and even though a lot of people seem to find the overly bright whites to be a major negative it never bothered me too much but the graphical glitches and possible speed issues with games that use add-on chips is just a deal breaker for me. Even with the sharper image and lessened vertical lines if it can’t play the games correctly that’s a huge downside. The best possible solution would be to have an original as well as a modded mini for games that have no graphical issues but if you could have only one go with the compatibility of the original and besides RGB on a non 1chip is still pretty good, especially on a quality TV or monitor.

I got a lot of information from this very awesome site. I recommend you check it out as he has quite a few comparison images of the RGB quality of the various models. RetroRGB.com

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