ancientelectronics

Beginner’s guide to choosing a hard drive for vintage PC’s and installing and optimizing MS-DOS 6.22

December 11, 2013 – 22:28
Posted in miscellaneous
Tagged compact flash, conventional memory, DOS, DOS 6.22, DOS memory optimization, hard drives, IDE, installing MS-DOS, MFM, MS-DOS, SCSI
Comments (9)

I’ve said it before but for those that did not grow up using a command line interface operating system MS-DOS can come off as being quite intimidating. For me I grew up on the Amiga and C64 and my first PC was running Win95 so when I first became interested in DOS I was quite intimidated. Sure I played on PC’s that friends had prior that ran DOS but it almost seemed like computer sorcery as a kid to remember all those commands and navigate the maze of text commands and directories. The reality of the fact though is DOS is very easy to learn and game on once you get the basics. The scope of this article though is taking those first steps, as in installing and doing your initial optimization of the memory since that seems to be the aspect that trouble many new users of the OS. I’m not going to get to into drivers or hardware to much, with the exception of hard drives since they form an important aspect of installing the OS. This guide is also specifically for MS-DOS 6.22 since that is the OS that a majority of DOS users are going to be running on an older machine. There are also a number of DOS alternatives like PC-DOS and FreeDOS that I know about and have varying degrees of compatibility. I’m completely aware of these alternatives and am also aware that some of them work very well and have some advantages. If your interested in them do a Google search but this article will focus on installing and optimizing MS-DOS for a highly compatible DOS experience. I’m also not going to go into any super exotic hardware options I’m just going to keep it simple with the hardware I feel a large majority of people referring to this guide will and or should be using.

First off for DOS 6.22 I would defiantly recommend a 386 based PC or above. A 386 to a Pentium 1 233mhz would be the ideal range of computers to run it on but it can be installed without issues on faster computers though games and applications may have speed issues with the CPU and hardware issues may arise depending. For anything slower then a 386 like a 286 or 8088 I would recommend dos 3 for those CPU’s as from what Ive read DOS 6 will run on a 286 and lower but I believe it uses some aspects of 386 and above CPU’s so you won’t be getting its full potential and there may be some conflicts that occur (just speculation on my part but I’m assuming its possible).

So first off were going to take a look at our hard drive and connection options since this is where were going to be installing the OS. Also I’m going to assume you have a 1.44mb floppy drive installed since this is the only format I’ve ever seen DOS 6.22 come on. I’m pretty sure there’s 1.2mb floppy and 720k floppy versions out there but I’m going to assume that the vast majority here will be installing from a 1.44mb floppy. From what I know there was never a CD release of the OS but I have heard of a way some people have found of burning and setting it up on a CD in a manner that it can boot and install from it. I’ve never gotten this method to work nor have actually seen it work.

If you have the most common 1.44mb floppy version you should have 3 disks minimum to install. There may be a forth disk with optional extras and tools. If there is I’ve never utilized it.

So now that we have our OS and disks ready we need to choose and setup our hard drive. There are a variety of hard drive types to choose from so I’m going to cover the most common.

MFM drive

If your hard drive your planning to use is kinda big and has the same connector as your 5 1/4 floppy drive (if you’ve ever used one) its a MFM drive. These are old and generally very small in data capacity size, 10 to a few hundred megabytes. These are how very early PC’s interfaced with hard drives. They are comparatively slow, small in space available and unreliable. Unless its the only thing you have around I would not recommend using one. You will almost defiantly need a 8 or 16 bit ISA controller card that can specifically handle these types of drives. If the computer your using has one of these pre installed its probably vintage enough that your probability better off installing DOS 3 anyways.

SATA drive

SATA is the newest type of hard drive connection that really starting appearing in mass in the mid 2000’s. Successor to IDE it is fast and the cables are nice and small. Unfortunately what I can find on the subject is a little unclear. If your using a new motherboard with SATA ports or have a older (say socket 7) motherboard with PCI slots you can get a PCI SATA card but from what I can find DOS may or may not detect and install. Those that have gotten it to work report that like SCSI that I’ll talk about in a moment it does overcome the BIOS hard drive size limitation. I found that certain CD-ROM drivers will work in DOS to detect and use SATA CD based drives but information on the hard drive aspect seems pretty sketchy. On these grounds I would just avoid using SATA. Its extra work, IDE or SCSI drives are far cheaper and although it probably can be made to work DOS isn’t going to be able to utilize that 500GB drive space anyways. This also obviously not an option if your working with most 486 era motherboards and earlier since they lack PCI slots.

Compact Flash

The next option would be to use a compact flash card and a CFtoIDE device. CF is basically IDE so It won’t give you to many issues. You can find the adapters for a few dollars on eBay and a 512mb CF card for a few more. The upsides of these cards is they are completely silent, run cooler, use very little power and are very fast since there are no moving parts. Its basically a small solid state hard drive. One issue that you may run into is that not all IDE connectors on motherboards or IDE controller cards and CF cards get along. I had an older 486 that would not detect or boot from a CF card and I had to buy a separate IDE controller that ate one of my ISA slots to get it to work. Some cards require being initialized as hard drive mode as well. I do know people that use them in their every day heavy use vintage machines under DOS and have recorded very little to no issues but they do have a finite read/write ability. Personally I stick to more tried and true conventional drives in my systems but I will use CF drives in lesser used or special purpose systems. There are also “Micro drives” which are CF sized conventional hard drives. This Wikipedia article directly compares them to CF drives here.

IDE AND SCSI

now will go over the two most likely drives you’ll be using and there pros and cons. First is IDE or “Integrated Drive Electronics” or “Intelligent Drive Electronics”. This is by far the most common way hard drives were interfaced with household PC’s throughout the 90’s and into the 2000’s. Most motherboards starting in the Pentium era of the 90’s had two IDE controllers integrated into the board and a large number of 486 and even some 386 boards features one IDE interface. SCSI or “Small Computer System Interface” rarely had interfaces on the motherboard of PC’s and usually required a controller card. SCSI was largely favored by Macintosh and Amiga computers.

so for the pros and cons

IDE

Pros

easily and cheaply available
most motherboards already have interfaces built in saving you a expansion card slot
less hassle setting up

Cons

considered slower and less reliable then SCSI
limited to two IDE devices per cable, one device acts as a slave and the other a master
usually a Bios imposed partition size limit of 504MB under DOS without extra modifications or adjustments
older drives/interface cards may require a older style IDE cable (connector is exactly the same but older style cable has larger ribbons in it)

SCSI

Pros

considered to be faster, has own controller thus taking burden off CPU and freeing CPU power.
generally considered more reliable then IDE (usually the choice for 24/7 running server machines)
7 to 15 devices depending on a single controller
not hampered by BIOS size limits in older machines. easier to have up to 2GB drive partitions in DOS

Cons

generally harder to come by and more expensive then IDE
can be harder to set up and be booted from (last drive or connector on chain requires a terminator)
in general drives may be louder then IDE drives
several revisions and version of the SCSI interface that may be confusing
will most likely require an SCSI controller add-on card taking up an expansion slot

–

So in short SCSI is usually the way to go if you have a little more money and time to spend and the patience to set things up properly where IDE is good for a cheap drive that usually “just works” with minimum surprises. Not that SCSI is generally hard to get up and running but depending on the machine, controller card and drive you may have to spend a little more time setting it up. Also keep in mind that although SCSI is considered in general a little faster and more reliable then IDE a good quality IDE drive is going to be faster and more reliable then a low quality SCSI drive.

IDE to SCSI adaptor

I wanted to briefly go over one other option that for a price gets you the best of both worlds, this is the IDE to SCSI adapter. Basically what these little adapters do is allow IDE devices to be used by an SCSI controller. so with one of these you could get a cheap easy to find IDE hard drive and connect it to your SCSI controller and benefit from the SCSI controller handling things and not the CPU. One popular option is to pair a IDE to SCSI adapter with a compact flash card and adapter creating an extremely fast solid state drive option. Unfortunately unlike the IDE to CF adapters the IDE to SCSI cards are rather expensive. A few years ago I picked one up for about $45 and that seemed to be the average price but recently (2013) they seem to be going for well over $100 on average.

Above are three drives. They all look very similar but they are two SCSI drives of the 50 pin and 68 pin variety and a IDE drive. Ironically the IDE drive is the Apple branded drive. Its ironic because Apple tended to use SCSI drives in most of its computers.

Here are those same drives with Interfaces up so we can see the difference. They all use the same type of 4 pin molex power connector. The IDE drive on the bottom has a jumper to select “slave”, “master” or “cable select”. I never use cable select. Generally you want to have your hard drive set as master and your CD-rom drive set as slave. You can see the drive above that is the 50 pin SCSI. The 50 Pin standard is the older style connector for SCSI you will find on the older drives as well as most SCSI CD drives. Its slightly larger then the IDE connector. Also notice no jumper next it since slave/master settings are not necessary on SCSI. Finally we have the 68 pin SCSI which is a newer and faster standard. The connector is very different looking from IDE or 50 pin and much more compact. 68 pin drives can be connected to a 50 pin controller card and cable via a 68 pin to 50 pin adapter but this will cut its speed.

If you go with an IDE hard drive there’s a almost guaranteed chance that you already have two interfaces on your motherboard if its socket 7 or later and a fair chance you have at least one if its a 486 board. It should look like this though on mostly older boards if it is present it may not have the plastic guide around it and just be pins.

If your board does not have a built in connector or if your using SCSI your going to need to add a controller card. The faster the slot the better with PCI being the best followed by EISA and VLB and finally ISA. Here are two typical examples of 16 bit ISA controller cards.

You generally do not need to do anything but insert them in the slot and hook up the drives. You may need to set or adjust some jumpers but other then that they should load their own BIOS’s on boot up. If your running SCSI remember that that last device on the chain needs to have its jumper set to terminate (check your drives manual, most can still be found online), if there is no device on the final connection on your SCSI cable you may need a terminator. The terminator pictured below is actually for an external SCSI chain but the internal ones are similar.

Also if you’ve gone the IDE route and are having trouble getting the IDE drive detected try switching the Slave/Master setting if you have a second drive or CD drive present as some drives and setups are just oddly picky about that. Also try swapping between the two styles of IDE cables if you have them. Especially if its an older motherboard.

The newer style cable is on the left. As you can see there are much more ribbons then the older style cable on the right. Keep in mind that you need to be using the newer style 80 pin ribbon (on left) if you want to take advantage of higher speeds if you are using a ATA-33 through ATA-133 drive and controller otherwise it will still work but you will be limited in speed.

You may also come across some oddball types or full height drives. As far as I know these drives are basically functionally identical but different sized.

The IDE “Bigfoot” drives were popular with Compaq in the earlier Pentium days. There very large but thin and are in general slow. you would probably have a hard time fitting these in a standard tower setup and I’ve only come across them in OEM cases. The SCSI is a full height drive which is an older style and is taller then a more common 3.5″ drive.

Newer SCSI drives may use a combined connector that combines the power and data cable. These are usually pretty fast drives (15,000 RPM’s) that come from servers and are pretty overkill for a vintage system. If you do want to use one though you’ll need a adapter that changes the single connector to a 68pin SCSI and molex connector.

Okay now hopefully BIOS is detecting your hard drive on boot so we can get to the business of installing DOS. If your CMOS battery is dead or you also just installed a 1.44mb floppy drive you may need to enter the BIOS and setup the drive. Its also useful to know how to access the BIOS to set boot order in case you want to use a 3rd party CD disk partitioner. Generally you can access the BIOS during boot my pressing Delete or F2. Usually your boot screen will tell you this information in the lower section of the screen. BIOS screens and options vary wildly between systems so mine may not be representative of yours but most of them are similar in key respects.

Here is my initial BIOS screen. Selecting BIOS features setup lets me change boot order in case I want to boot from a CD drive before the hard drive. Under Standard CMOS settings I can set my 1.44mb floppy drive as drive A:.

You can also use a 3rd party disk partitioner at this point if you want to reformat your hard drive and set up separate partitions on a single disc if you want. The MS-DOS floppies will reformat the hard drive for you and will give you that option booting to them but a 3rd party partitioner may offer more options. I use Super Fdisk myself available here.

If formatting from the DOS disks your fine but if your using a third party formatting program make sure you format the drive to FAT 16 since that what DOS can “see”. DOS 7 can use FAT 32 but as were are assuming DOS 6.22 is being installed that’s irrelevant. Keep in Mind most old BIOS’s can only detect up to 504mb of hard drive space for DOS on an IDE drive and 2GB on SCSI. There are ways around the 512mb limit and if you want you can always create several partitions. I know a lot of people opt for 4gb SCSI drives and then create two 2gb partition as dive C and D. you may need to set some jumpers on your SCSI card though to enable large hard drive sizes. Here’s a link if you want to learn more about hard drive size barriers.

So if the hard drive was detected and the installer feels it needs formatted you’ll get this option.

Excellent. your hard drive is being detected and you’ve formatted so that’s one thing out of the way. After formatting the PC should restart and then your ready to install DOS.

C: is going to be your boot drive and C:\DOS is the directory that DOS is going to be installed to. It is default and do not change it. I suppose you could but I’m not sure why you would need to or what issues may arise from it. Just hit Enter here.

If there are no errors on the hard drive or disks DOS should install with little difficulty. The three disks should install fairly quickly but stay in the room since you’ll be prompted to swap disks. Once installation is complete remove all floppies from the disk drive and restart. If everything went smooth you should now be booting from your hard drive into DOS.

Okay now that your in a clean install of DOS we need to focus on everyone’s favorite MS-DOS activity, memory management. This is the aspect of DOS that tends to get new users. This activity can get very technical and in-depth. basically in DOS there are several types of memory working and the “conventional memory” or your first 640kb of memory is really what matters most. It doesn’t matter if you have 8mb of ram or 256mb DOS is going to be the same as far as that first 640 and how you can mess with it. basically the amount of free conventional memory or that first 640kb of memory is what matters, its where DOS is and where all the programs or TSR’s (Terminate and Stay Resident programs) that make your mouse and CD drive run goes. unfortunately DOS games also need a certain amount of it available, it varies by games but the more the better and you really want at least around 580-600 for most games to be able to play (though some require even more). So what about the rest of your RAM? well it ends up being seen as XMS which we don’t need to worry about. You can also convert some of that XMS memory to EMS memory which some games need to run BUT converting some of that memory to EMS uses precious conventional memory. The challenge is configuring it in such a way as to have the most free memory since all the other stuff goes there as well. It can be a game of moving around what programs load first and finding the smallest drivers to run your mouse and drives. See there’s also a place called “upper memory” where using a memory managing program we can shift some of those programs from conventional memory to upper memory. Confused yet? Don’t worry, just know that the 640kb called conventional memory needs to be as free as possible.

When your into DOS and at the command prompt which should be C:\ there are two commands you can use that are very helpful in seeing the amount of memory you have available. the first is MEM which displays the amount of conventional memory you have free as well as XMS and EMS. The other command is MEM /C /P which will also display what programs are currently residing in conventional memory. So at the prompt after a clean install type “mem” hit enter and you should get this.

As you can see we have no EMS memory and of the 640kb of conventional memory we are already using 47kb leaving us with 593 which is enough to play a large amount of games. Typing in “mem /c /p” gives us.

This screen breaks down whats eating up that conventional memory as well as what we have moved into upper memory using a memory manager. As you can see here nothing is in upper memory since we have yet to run a memory manager. The first few things “MSDOS, HIMEM, COMMAND” cannot be moved into upper memory (for the most part, I’ll touch on that later). SETVER is mostly useless and can be deleted but it takes so little memory why bother? A few very old games may require it though if that’s a consideration. SMARTDRV is a caching program. A lot of people will tell you that you don’t need SMARTDRV and they are correct. I personally always try to keep it since a few games will install very slowly if it is not running and it is helpful to increase loading times. It MAY cause stuttering on a few games on older CD drives though from the information I’ve found. I would advise keeping it running and rest of the article assumes you do but disabling it will free up the 28kb of memory.

Now if you want any kind of functionality were going to need to load drivers or “TSR’s” to run various things like our CD drives and mouse. There are various drivers for DOS that can be found. You want to find the ones that are most compatible and smallest in size. For reasons of demonstration were just going to assume you want a basic setup with mouse and CD support. which will be what most starting DOS gamers will be mostly concerned about. I’ll also assume a Sound Blaster 16 is being used since it is the most common sound card used in these setups. It fortunately does not require a driver running in memory so we don’t need to worry about that although I have ran a few clone sound cards in the past that did use a small TSR.

CD-ROM – A lot of DOS user’s tend to use the OAKCDROM driver for DOS but I find it to large. I use the GSCDROM driver available for free here. I’ve never had an issue with it detecting a CD drive or reading a CD.

MOUSE – for a mouse the only real option is the CUTEMOUSE driver available for download here. This driver works with all mice I ever tested either serial or ps/2 and the size is a tiny 3kb of memory

If your having trouble figuring out how to install the drivers I can suggest this site. Its focused on creating a DOS PC for the sole purpose of playing the old Space Quest games but it has a pretty good guide on installing drivers and setting them up. He does use different but self installing (and larger) mouse drivers though.

Also keep in mind if your using a SCSI CD drive your going to need different drivers specifically for SCSI. If your using the common Adaptec controller card most of the drivers are still available on their site but you may have to do some digging for specific models.

So assuming were running a basic setup with an IDE drive and basic drivers (mouse, CD-rom) and running a sound blaster 16 for sound. We get all the drivers loaded restart, run MEM command and….

Ouch! and were not even assuming you want to install a network card, have a zip drive always available or run some sort of VESA video utility like UNIVBE. 530kb is a very low amount of memory available if you want to play DOS games and at this point many will not run and give a “not enough conventional memory” error. Investigating further with the MEM /C /P command.

As we can see the added drivers are eating up a lot of available conventional memory. Ctmouse the mouse driver is only eating a measly 3kb of mem but the CD driver (GSCDROM) and MSCDEX the program DOS uses to interface with the CD driver are eating a combined 57kb of memory. At this point I will point out that like the mouse driver there are smaller alternatives. As for compatibility though you may start to have issues. FreeDOS has a much smaller MSCDEX replacement called SHSUCDX though as I mentioned it is not 100% compatible and several games will not work with it, Fade to Black and the CD version of Gunship 2000 being two examples I have found through researching.

Its at this point a lot of questions come up about how to free up memory for games and at the same time still load all the drivers you need to. The simplest solution at this point is to run DOS’s built in memory manager program EMM386 aka memmaker. This the official memory manager and the only one I’ll be covering here. Its compatible with most games with a few exceptions like Ultima VII which no memory manager will work with. There are alternatives such as JEMM and QEMM and so forth that from what I’ve read can free even more memory at the sake of slight compatibility. As the scope of this article is freeing the most memory using official tools it is beyond our scope but if officiality isn’t a concern and you feel you want to try them out, do so.

At the command prompt simply type in memmaker, hit ENTER and the program should start. The first thing it will ask you is if you plan on playing games that use EMS memory. If you choose yes the program will create EMS memory from XMS memory making EMS requiring games available but this will cost us more conventional memory. If you choose no you’ll likely get over 600kb of conventional memory but for our purposes of having the most options will assume “yes” is chosen for the article.

The setup will also ask if you want the “Express” or “Advanced” option. Choose advanced and you should get this screen.

I usually select yes for “scan the upper memory aggressively” and also choose yes for “use monochrome region”. Microsoft actually recommends this to free up memory. It frees up a block that is reserved for a monochrome (black & white) displays. So unless your planning on hooking your machine up to a monochrome display which is pretty unlikely, enable this option.

After you choose the options and go through the process memmaker should restart and ask you if everything seemed to load up fine. Hopefully it did (I personally have never had it not) and you should now have a good number of those pesky TSR’s transferred to upper memory. One more quick thing you can try and not have to be a command line wiz is adjust the “LASTDRV” line in your CONFIG.SYS file to something more reasonable. at the command prompt type EDIT and hit enter and you’ll go to something like this.

select “file” from up top and select “open”. Search for “.sys” and select “config.sys”. your CONFIG file should look something like this (if you’ve already run memmaker).

See where it says LASTDRIVE=Z? just change Z to something like H and it should free an additional 2-3kb of memory. Unless you plan on having more then 8 drives but you can set it to whatever letter you want but the closer to Z the less mem it frees up. Assuming everything went well and you ran memmaker with the settings suggested and changed your LASTDRIVE value your mem should now look something like this.

So short of 1kb we are back where we initially were. This would be considered an acceptable amount of conventional memory and most games should run fine. Some games like Elder Scrolls: Arena that require 603kb of conventional memory can be an issue but you can always disable EMS by running memmaker again or type REM before the SMARTDRV command line using EDIT in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file to disable that.

we can see here via the mem /c /p command that much space was freed because the whole CD-ROM driver system (MSCDEX and GSCDROM) were placed in upper memory. At this point we have a highly functional system of 592kb of conventional memory using all highly compatible programs. We have EMS enabled for those games that want it. A sound card for sound, SMARTDRV for fast loading and highly compatible mouse and CD-ROM drivers. This should be sufficient for light DOS users or those just getting into DOS gaming.

Of course much more can be done to free up more memory. The mem /f command is useful for looking at available upper memory space and there are a vast amounts of DOS memory optimization sites available. One of the best is MDGx Max Speed which is an awesome site but slightly disorganized as well as confusing and can be overwhelming for users new to the DOS environment.

Slightly more advanced DOS memory optimization

I do have a 133mhz Pentium DOS machine that I have toyed with a little to try to get the most conventional memory available and still using official MS DOS drivers and no memory management other then EMM386 and I’ll share what I did a little here.

With this setup I was able to achieve 624kb of free memory with EMS enabled along with UNIVBE, SMARTDRV ,CD-ROM drivers and mouse drivers. I achieved this using a much smaller CD-ROM driver, UIDE (5kb) and a program called DOSMAX which moves a few parts of DOS into upper memory that usually wouldn’t go there. As far as I can tell DOSMAX shouldn’t cause any issues with compatibility but its always possible. UIDE works okay for the most part but I’ve had other DOS machines that it just will not load on and I’ve had a few games that had issues running with it though that may be attributed to other things. All in all the system runs very acceptably.

Here you can see it all running as well as the parts of DOS that got placed in upper memory. See apparently upper memory is like an elite clubhouse that only TSR’s can go to and DOS and any of its parts just isn’t allowed.

DOSMAX is like a shady lawyer that sees an opportunity for a discrimination suite but is only half successful in letting some of MS-DOS’s parts inside.

Was that analogy really necessary? Not at all but I wanted to make hasty and badly edited pictures.

Here is my AUTOEXEC and CONFIG files for anyone interested. You can probably use them to help set up a system in a similar fashion and get similar results or base your own memory management off of.

Odds & Ends: TRS-80 Model 100, Iomega Zip drives, Gravis gamepads

November 13, 2013 – 10:12
Posted in Odds & Ends
Tagged Gravis, gravis gamepads, iomega zip, PC gamepads, Tandy, trs-80, trs-80 model 100, zip drive, zip drives
Comments (2)

In this Odds & Ends I’m going to go over the venerable TRS-80 Model 100 a small portable computer. Also the much more successful relation of the LS-120 super drive the Iomega Zip drive and finally a number of gamepads from the king of PC gamepads in the 90’s, Gravis.

TRS-80 Model 100

Considered the worlds first laptop computer I came across my model 100 at a Goodwill and purchased it for a couple of dollars, about $3 I believe and to my surprise on hitting the power button the thing turned right on.

As you can see the model 100 is sort of like a giant calculator. These machines began to be sold back in 1983 and have anywhere from 8kb to 32kb of RAM. I believe mine had 24KB installed. Apparently these machines were very popular with news journalists and other “on the move” individuals. As I am primarily a gamer and this machine is pretty obviously not a gaming machine I don’t have to much to say about it but I did think it was kind of a neat little find. It has no internal mass storage capabilities so for saving anything permanently you would need to use an external cassette player of disk drive. The screen is a non backlit LCD and despite the age it displayed quite clear for me. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that its probably only capable of text display. It is also powered by 4 AA batteries but also has a port for an external 9v dc power supply. I’ve read that it is very easy on batteries and can go for 16+ hours on batteries.

Here we have the back of the computer with most of our ports. We have a small reset button as well as a RS-232 serial port and printer port. The north American version like this one has a built in 300 baud modem which I believe that phone port may be for. Lastly a cassette port for a cassette player for storage.

Other then that I don’t have much to say about it. Its a neat little machine but doesn’t have much practical use I can find today at least not for myself. Apparently this machine has quite a following though http://www.club100.org/

Iomega Zip drives

Ah, the Zip drive. The much more popular “floppy” storage alternative to the LS-120. The Zip drive’s initial version could store up to 100mb of data on a disk and eventually a 250mb and 750mb version was released. Unlike the LS-120, Zip drives cannot read or write to standard 1.44mb floppy disks but they do have a higher transfer rate to their disks then a floppy has to its own. I’ll admit the Zip drive has become indispensable to me lately as everything from DOS to windows 7 supports it. Although smaller in storage capability They are more convenient then burning CD’s. Its nice to be able to download a patch or file from your internet connected Windows 7 PC that may be a little to big or to many files for a standard 1.44mb floppy. Transfer it on a Zip disk and then easily transfer that file to you ancient 286, 386, 486 or whatever PC. With a cheap and advisable NEC V20 CPU upgrade the Zip DOS driver even works on 8088 based PC’s like the original IBM 5150 via a parallel port. I even believe Zip disks are Macintosh compatible (may require mac formatting or only certain models). I personally tend to stick with the 100MB models as the larger capacity models seem to be rarer and more prone to failure as well as not being fully backward compatible. Also 100mb tends to be more then enough storage capacity for my pre USB capable systems.I believe zip drive drivers are included with Windows XP and 7. At least I had no trouble connecting my external USB drive to my Win 7 machine. There are separate drivers for Windows 98 and DOS. I don’t generally link to drivers here but I can tell you they aren’t hard to find with a web search. you can try the Vogons driver database here and check under uncategorized or utilities for the relevant drivers. The DOS drivers should fit on a 1.44MB floppy and all you need to run is Guest.exe and it will assign a letter for your zip drive. You can set it to do this on boot though your .BAT file but I generally just have it in a file named “ZIP” on my hard drive and only use it when I want to use the Zip drive since the TSR does eat some DOS memory when active.

I’ll start off with the internal drive. The internal drives came in two flavors, IDE and SCSI though the SCSI version seems to be far more uncommon.

Here we actually have a 250mb model which is identical except for storage capacity and logo to the 100MB model. I’m using this particular drive since all my other internal drive are install in systems at the moment. The internal drives are the same 3 1/2 inch size as a standard 1.44MB drive so you can install them anywhere you would one of those. Like most this is an IDE version and connects to an IDE controller just like your standard hard drive or CD-ROM drive. Being IDE it also has a jumper for Master, Slave or Cable Select. Many BIOS’s from the mid 90’s up directly support Zip drives. The thing that I find slightly annoying is the use of a larger molex power connector used for larger devices such as hard drives as opposed to the smaller floppy power connector. Usually that means I have to dig out or buy a Molex splitter because I’ve already used up all my connectors on hard drive and CD drives.

Here we have the uncommon SCSI version of the internal zip drive. These were most likely intended mostly for Macintosh users. The front bezel is a little different and as you can see on the back it uses the smaller floppy drive style power connector as the 50 SCSI connector is larger then IDE. You also have jumpers to set device ID number and SCSI termination.

Now I’ll move on to the more common and cheaper external drives which happen to come in many flavors from USB and Firewire to SCSI and parallel and possibly others. These drives require and external power supply but other then that are identical in function. I tend to see these external drives fairly commonly at Goodwill’s and thrifts at a decent price. About $9.99 but sometimes under $5.

This is my USB external zip drive that I use with my Windows 7 machine. The see through blue plastic shell is kind of cheap looking and it kinda clashes with my black PC but it works like a charm and was as simple as plugging in the power and USB cable and then it just works.

Here is an assortment of older external parallel port and SCSI drives. On the far left is a Epson branded 100MB parallel port zip drive. The parallel port drives are very versatile and will pretty much work with any IBM PC or clone with a parallel port all the way back to the 8088 based models provided there CPU is upgrade with a NEC v20 chip. I believe this is because the V20 does contain some later coding that the 8088 lacks but which the Zip drive needs to function. As far as I know these are identical in function to the Iomega drives except for the branding and the color. I prefer the off white color of the Epson models as it looks much better with the off white case coloring of 1990’s and earlier PC’s that I generally use it with. The middle drive is a Iomega branded SCSI Zip drive. Finally on the far right is a 250mb model which uses a parallel port.

Here are the parallel port and SCSI port drives from the rear. The parallel port drive is pretty simple with a input and then a pass through for a printer or potentially any other parallel port device. The SCSI drive has a few switches though. One is to set termination either on or off. On a SCSI chain of devises you want a “terminator” device on the last connection in the chain or have the last device on the chain set as a terminator. It also has a switch to set the device number ID for the SCSI chain. The SCSI Zip device can only be configured as ID 5 or 6. Also take not that the Zip SCSI drive uses the same 25 pin SCSI connector found on many Macintosh’s. Your going to want a 68 pin adapter like this one if you want to use it on most later PC SCSI controller cards.

All in all I’m a fan of Zip drives and they’ve been a major convenience for me in transferring files. If your making a retro rig I do strongly suggest at least keeping a external model handy.

Gravis Gamepads

Back in the 1990’s Gravis was known for their Gravis Ultrasound sound cards for PC’s. Sound cards largely seen as superior in sound quality to the Creative Sound Blaster line but they also made a line of very successful PC game pads. Although their sound cards never became the de facto sound standard there game pads for the most part did. I have a few Id like to go over here. Keep in mind this is a evolving article so as I acquire more I’ll be sure to add them.

This I believe is the first model introduced labeled just the Gravis PC gamepad. I do believe there were a few minor variations. It has a standard D pad as well as a little joystick part that you can actually unscrew. This pad is very common and I see them at thrifts all the time though usually the joystick part is either missing or broken off. These make really nice DOS gamepads for games that support joysticks/gamepads. I like to use them for first persons shooters like Doom or Duke3d or platformers like Bio Menace. No drivers needed just plug it into your gameport either built in or on your sound card. As long as your game can be configured to use a gamepad it should work.

This is the Gravis Gamepad Pro which is also a fairly common gamepad. This pad is a little more modeled on console controllers and bears a resemblance to the playstation controller. The gameport connector on this model is a pass through so you can connect a second gamepad for two player gaming. Other then that its basically the same as the standard gamepad though it does sport a start and select button as well as four more buttons on the shoulders. I generally prefer this controller and this is what I generally use for games like Doom or Duke3d.

Here we have the Gravis Destroyer. In most ways this is kind of a step down from the Pro controller. I think its a little more comfortable to hold but it has less options. Less buttons including the lack of the start and select buttons, no joystick knob and the port connector is not a pass through so forget two player. It does sport a turbo button and LED that lights up green when activated which seems like a handy feature for shoot em ups. This controller does seem slightly less common “in the wild” and as the others is a breeze to use in DOS.

The Gravis Xterminator. To be honest I don’t know much about it since this is a digital gamepad and as far as I can tell does not work in DOS. Maybe it will with drivers but from my initial search I could not find drivers for DOS or its intended OS Windows 9x. This controller does sport a lot of buttons as well as a analog joystick. It also has a pass through connection to allow other gamepads to be connected which is nice. I’ll keep looking for drivers this controller and update this article once I find them.

Lastly I have a USB Gravis Gamepad Pro which is basically just a straight USB version of the standard gameport gamepad pro so in all areas besides the interface it is identical. This is a basic but excellent gamepad and since it uses standard windows joystick drivers it should be just plug n play for windows 95 and up. I frequently use this controller on my Windows 7 machine for arcade emulation and it makes a great and simple gamepad that you simply plug in and it works.

Gravis was a defining force in 90’s PC gamepads and I highly recommend at least the gamepad or preferably the gamepad pro for all your DOS game padding needs.

Night Slashers (Arcade)

October 10, 2013 – 13:45
Posted in games
Tagged arcade, arcade games, beat-em-up, data east, gaming, horror, night slashers, night slashers x
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I came across Night Slashers as a young man at a local amusement parks arcade. I was immediately captivated by the amazing horror atmosphere and game play. Night Slashers is a 1993 Arcade release from Date East which has as far as I can tell no ports to any other system. The game is your basic beat-em-up where you scroll from left to right beating the hell out of everything in your path. What sets Night Slashers apart from other games is its excellently executed horror theme featuring various monsters such as zombies, werewolves and vampires. The game also has a pretty high gore level for the time as well as a pretty excellent sound track. There are two versions of this game, one released in Japan and then an oversees version with the various censoring that I’ll get into.

The plot of the game is pretty sparse as to be expected from a arcade game and especially a beat-em-up. The world has been overrun by the undead. Zombies, mutants and monsters of all sorts have overrun the earths armies and mankind is being slowly eradicated with only a few remaining outposts.

First lets take A look at our three intrepid hero’s which are all selectable playable characters. The “Night Slashers”, yea, sounds more like a trio of serial killers then monster slaying hero’s.

Christopher is a Billy Ray Cyrus look alike vampire hunter, hes the most balanced character.

Jake is a reject from a failed 80’s hair band that happened to have giant cyborg arms. hes the slow powerful one of the three.

Hong-Hua is the fast and agile female character that every beat-em-up of the era required.

The version I’ll be reviewing here is the Japanese version since I feel it is the superior of the two as far as atmosphere goes. Mostly they are identical games besides some superficial censoring. The oversees version had the gore turned down and most of the blood was colored from red to green. It doesn’t really effect much as far as game play goes but the over the top horror atmosphere takes a hit from it. other changes include missing between level cut screens and the censoring of the character Christopher’s move. In the Japanese version when he ends his attack he flashes a cross but in the oversees version the cross is changed to a blue gem. A lot of Japanese companies were concerned with offending anyone in America back then so this kind of censorship was very common.

Another change involves when the game prompts you to continue moving to the right to progress through the stage. In the oversees version its just a “GO” arrow but in the Japanese version the arrow flips over and reveals “TO HELL”, pretty clever.

The game itself has a good variety of creatures pulled from the stock of usual suspects. Zombies, werewolves, vampires giant executioners, mad scientists, golems, elementals. Everything is nicely animated with werewolves starting out as normal looking young guys standing around in jackets before transforming into leaping werewolves and vampires looking appropriately vampireish. The highlight though is the horde of zombies. we have regular guy zombies, fat man zombies, armless zombies and my favorite the decomposing skeletal zombies that heavily remind me of “Tar Man” from Return of the Living Dead.

Blood is everywhere, intestines hanging out, bones poking through its just very nicely done overall.

Theres also these guys that I guess are psycho’s with knives and hockey masks. They move around swiftly and do these sliding kick moves. I guess their undead though since if you look when they move their arms you can see ribs showing.

Dispatching any of these creatures results in lots of gore and bloody piles of body parts. Here is just a sampling of the death animations.

Bucking the trend of many games of this genre at the time there is an almost complete lack of any weaponry laying around to be used which is a shame because the nature of the game could of really benefited from it. From time to time you get knives, swords, fireball globes and brief cases to throw but its mostly a one time use weapon and is never very interesting overall.

So the game starts out with a brief summery about how the world has been overrun by monsters and the undead. At least in the English version. Since I’m playing the Japanese version I can just assume the text is basically saying the same things.

Japanese for “BRAINS!”?

The game starts out with your group assaulting an undead overrun hospital that apparently has been taken over by a mad scientist as a base for his inhuman experiments. This stage is possibly my favorite and really sets the tone for the game. The stage starts with you driving a kick ass 80’s style van straight through the front gate, over a horde of zombies and into the side wall. The hospital itself is nicely done and full of nice disturbing backgrounds like a caged area with humans crowded in and trapped presumably awaiting to be experimented on by the mad scientist. You have elevators that bring more zombies down and body bags that roll off the morgue shelves releasing even more undead.

I should also add that the stages to this game are in general pretty short but most do involve a sub boss fight sometimes right before the main boss battle. After a brief tour through the hospital you come across the very mad scientist. He always looked like Egon to me from Ghostbusters. I guess he took the breach of the containment unit pretty hard this time.

He first shows up riding in on a gurney slashing a zombie to bits with a knife/scalpel before a brief exchange of words and then a battle. Most boss and sub boss battles end with a particularly gory finish for the defeated monster and I’ve attempted to get screen shots of boss and said death together. You should be able to click on any of the images for an enlarged image. Directly following the death of the doctor you are greeted by the stage boss, a somewhat appropriate Frankenstein’s monster. The monster is well done and busts from his gurney in order to kill you. His death animation is particularly well done with a melting off the flesh to a skeleton that collapses to a pile.

The second stage is a creepy fog filled forest. This stage keeps up the atmosphere of dread as your assaulted by continuous hordes of foes.

After battling your way through the forest you come across a stage coach and a vampire who you suspect may be behind the recent apocalypse. Before taking off in his ghostly carriage though he tells his weird ass hunch back and Satan possessed Pinocchio puppet to murder you. The way the hunch back skips across the screen as well as the puppet is just genuinely creepy. You know when you see a doll and your thinking “that’s one creepy ass doll”. That’s this doll.

This fight is followed by a chase where your running to catch up to the carriage while werewolves are attempting to stop you. Apparently its common for monster hunters to be able to run at the same speed as a horse. Very handy indeed. Finally after NOT catching up to the carriage you come to a graveyard. The graveyard is pretty small and just has a handful of oversize generic R.I.P gravestones that fade away and turn into zombies if you touch them. It just feels like a wasted opportunity here as a great place for more atmosphere. The boss of this level is a golem. Hes actually pretty plain and boring.

I do have to say though that with his one eye kind of bulging out like it does he always reminded me of a rock golem version of Popeye.

Two things I need to point out at this point. One is the two mini games that you get as the game goes on in between stages. The first involves stepping on zombie heads as they emerge from the ground and the second is a zombie toss / zombie bowling where you try and toss a zombie into other zombies lined up like pins at a bowling alley. The highlight of these games is the zombie crowd watching in the background. Theres even a lady who has torn her head off. Their all in various states of decay. Along with the zombies there’s also bizarre adds plastered up like one for “Doctor Rippers hospital” who is the mad scientist of the hospital you just razed.

Next are the well done cut screen between stages that attempt to move the plot forward.

I love his vaguely disinterested pose and smug look here. I attempt to duplicate this look every time I drink a glass of red wine.

Anyways stage three is the head vampires castle and is filled with elevators, guillotine traps, hooded giant executioners and of course more zombies.

The mini boss is a ghostly knight and that smirking sword in a room with a few destructible Greek busts followed immediately by a battle with the head vampire. When you kill him he turns to stone and then to a pile of goo before the sun rises.

So with the vampire lord dead the world is saved and all is well……or not. You learn that the main menace is far more powerful so its off to South America. This stage is extremely short and takes place amid some Aztec themed ruins. There is no mini boss just a short stroll to the stage boss which is actually a pair of predators dressed as Mexican wrestlers? I dunno, its probably supposed to be demon Aztec shamans or something.

Stage 5 takes place aboard a large transport aircraft. You have discovered the source of the worlds evil and attempt to reach it but on the way your plane is assaulted by undead, or perhaps you stowed away on a plane of undead going to the island since your plane is stocked to the brim with monsters?

The fighting eventually leads to the roof of the plane where regardless of massive wind sheer and low oxygen you battle it out with a palette swapped undead knight just like the one you faced at the vampires castle as well as another aircraft that drops off mutants before you board it.

On board the second aircraft you meet the stage boss. A mummy. It was inevitable, you cant have werewolves, vampires and Frankenstein’s monster and not have a mummy. Though two things always came to mind with this boss. One is that he moves and fights like some professional MMA champion fighter with his fists up and his sidestep moments. Second is he always felt so misplaced to me here on a plane. It just feels like despite the cliche of it he would of been better faced in a tomb or a destroyed museum level or something and that’s were I find one minor fault with this game. It seems after the first few stages it just kinda drops the ball on the overall horror atmosphere. Don’t get me wrong its still really good but I always wanted more and felt they could of pulled off so much more in that specific department.

The next and final stage takes place on a secret military base on a remote island. This is where whatever is causing this is based. Military experiment gone wrong is also cliche but in this case I like it.

When you crash land on the island base your faced with a sort of initial mini boss in the form of a Vietnam era ghost helicopter. Its somewhat transparent and you can see the dead and rotting corpses of the pilot through the cockpit and another dead soldier in the cabin. It fires at you with a nose cannon while creatures continuously attack from the sides. How to kill a ghost helicopter? punch it of course, that technique seems to work for a lot of things…..ghost helicopters, evil arch mages. When I was a kid playing this game this boss always stood out to me. I loved it and I don’t know why its not the most amazing boss in the game but it defiantly helped me remember this game as a kid.

After this fight we enter the base proper and are faced with a sort of boss rush, or a part of a game where you have to face previous bosses one after another. Now if we follow the code of classic horror video games we can easily reach a logical conclusion of whose next. We’ve faces zombies, mad scientists, werewolves, vampires, golems, Frankenstein’s monster, the mummy…whose left? Medusa…well that’s a good guess but no. DEATH of course.

Death tells Christopher to “talk to the hand”

Also following the nature of horror video games (I’m looking at you Castlvania) we realize that Death himself is NOT behind the undead hordes and he is just playing second fiddle to a even more powerful entity…..the cyber devil! I don’t think that’s the main villains name, its actually King Zarutz. So after Death in the form of the Grim Reaper (what other form would he take) reveals his place in the scheme of things you release him from his shame by…punching and kicking him to….DEATH. He likes to hold his scythe out and spin around like a bozo. Its a little silly but hard to avoid.

Shortly after this fight we finally meet the dreaded cyber devil, err King Zarutz. Well technically he is a cyber devil I really don’t know since its not clearly explained. I always just assumed he was a military experiment of some sort..sort of like DOOM where hell was accidentally accessed…I don’t know

He’s not really all that impressive or gory. To be honest he was kind of a anti climatic moment. He does employ this shield that surrounds him and hurts you a lot which is really really annoying but then I’m sure he was designed to eat quarters.

Once you defeat him the base begins to self destruct and as you run to escape the flaming ruins the remains of king Z float at you. At least there’s no timer here forcing you to escape or defeat him in a specified time, I usually hate those.

That’s pretty much It. You escape the base, It explodes and you go home. All the undead go back to being dead and everyone is happy.

Each character has their own ending showing what they end up doing after saving the world but none of it is anything spectacular.

So overall what do I think of this game? Does it hold up from my childhood memories? well, yes. The game is just good. Even with my trivial gripes the atmosphere is pretty unique and done well. The characters all play well and have a variety of moves. I personally would of liked to see more. I wanted more levels like the first one depicting a ruined civilization overrun by monsters. I wanted usable weapons and monster placement that made more sense and just a longer overall experience would be nice as this game can be finished quite quickly. Despite that its still a great early 90’s beat-em-up and if your a fan of that kind of genre you need to check this game out.

Now normally things would end here but it seems someone was standing over my shoulder as a youngster reading my thoughts as I played this game because some years ago someone created a homebrew mod of this game that other then being unpolished and unfinished made Night Slashers everything it could of and should of been. That game is Night Slashers X

Night Slashers X is a homebrew remake of the original Night Slashers by BonusJZ for openBOR. openBOR is an open source game engine. Its free to download and its kind of like a program that people can write games for and then play them with the program. There’s versions of it for many consoles and computer types. I actually had somewhat of a hard time finding a version and then the files for NSX itself that worked and even then I think my version may be a Beta since it crashes/ends on stage 3’s ending. I don’t know if this game was ever finished but I can say that what has been done turns Night Slashers into everything I ever wanted the game to be. There are now usable weapons, more enemy’s, a combo system, level rearrangement to make more sense, branching levels and all the stages have been touched up giving an even greater horror feel. Also bodies of enemies you kill do not flicker and fade away so at times you end up with piles of dead around you. The game does “barrow” spites from other games but for the most part its done well and only clashes with the art style of the main game rarely.

The first change you will likely notice is a bit of fan service as the conservatively dressed Hong-Hua has been replaced by the busty blond Jasmine. If your wondering her sprite is taken from the Japanese game Kurokishi from Guardians: Denjin Makai II.

Asia’s most revered martial artist huh? I can probably think of two more reasons shes revered in Asia…….the fact shes the youngest graduating student of Tokyo University and her great contributions to preventing the spread of the Asian bird flu in China.

No, its her boobs.

Another funny thing is that in all the between stage cut screens we still see Hong-Hua.

The touched up levels are really well done and add a lot from the original. More blood has been added. The numbers on the elevator in the hospital level light up as the elevator changes floors. Crows peck at the flesh of lying corpses and In certain areas you get lighting effects such as In the fight with Frankenstein’s monster.

Images from original on left and remake on right.

There’s also a great variety of weapons added that can be found in random barrels. Grenades, chainsaws, shotguns, assault rifles and battle axes. Its really adds a layer of fun that was missing in the original. Another great aspect is branching levels such as In the hospital stage (now stage 2) where you can enter the elevator to reach the mad scientists secret laboratory complete with giant computer terminal and a new battle where he uses a potion to transform into a monster. One highlight is the return of that kick ass 80’s van and a drive through a ruined city. If this game was finished and polished and the sprites taken from other games done with original art this game would be beyond a doubt the definitive version of Night Slashers. Here’s some images of the game showcasing some new levels, monsters and weapons.

(The above monster really clashes with the games art style and that’s one problem you encounter time to time with this homebrew. The creature is a boss from Kishin Douji Zenki FX: Vajra Fight on the PC-FX)

Retro Gamer Magazine

September 26, 2013 – 10:13
Posted in miscellaneous
Tagged game magazine, retro gamer magazine, retro scene
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for reasons of copyright some of these images have had sections blurred*

Nintendo Power magazine stirs a lot of gaming nostalgia in most of us including myself. Getting and reading an issue of this magazine as a kid was a magical experience and I spent hours pouring over its many pages, looking and memorizing the game maps and reading about future releases. I had a similar relationship with a lot of other game magazines such as Electronic Gaming Monthly and PC Gamer. Unfortunately though it seems these days the magic is lost. Thumbing through an old issues of Nintendo Powers does give a pleasant sense of nostalgia but the magic, the warm fuzzy feeling is gone. Maybe the idea of the internet and all the information of the world at a keystroke has killed it for me or maybe its the limited scope of a magazine that only covers Nintendo when I am now aware of a much much bigger world of gaming or maybe its just the reality of growing older and inevitably losing the magic in doing something we once very much enjoyed but the fact is….the magic was gone. That is until I discovered a UK published magazine, a magazine that reignited that warm fuzzy feeling upon opening a new issue. A magazine that demands I read it cover to cover while I love every second of it. That magazine is Retro Gamer.

As I mentioned before Retro Gamer is a UK publication so It is a bit Euro centric focusing many pages on the British retro scene and featuring many articles on games and systems that never quite made it state wise but this in no way hinders the enjoyment of reading it and in fact opens up a new realm of retro gaming information. This also in no way limits its scope as it also cover many games and systems from Japan as well as the US. These magazines cover well known as well as obscure games and systems like the NES, Genesis, PC Engine and SNES as well as retro PC’s such as the C64, Atari ST and Amiga. There are interviews with game designers and retrospectives on game series from Might and Magic on the PC, to Metal Slug from the arcade to Legend of Zelda.

You can get a subscription in the US but if that’s not your thing you can find them at your local Barnes and Nobles book store in the magazine section. I cant stress how great this publication is and every issue continues to be a delight to read cover to cover. At times They do tend to go over the same material but its always approached differently and usually new information is presented or expanded on.

you can check out the magazines website here at retrogamer.net

If your into classic gaming, regardless of where you may live as long as you read English this is the magazine for you.

Packard Bell Legend 115

September 4, 2013 – 16:06
Posted in classic computers
Tagged dos machine, packard bell, packard bell computers
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A Packard Bell 486 PC. probably with an almost identical layout to other PB machines of the same era but with a different name. This particular machine was picked up by a friend of mine for $8. You may also be seeing it in a later review significantly reconfigured for a particular purpose but as of now were going to be looking at its (mostly) stock configuration.

Stock this PC is actually rather light and small making it a decent 486 for a non power user that just may want a compact 486 for dos gaming and doesn’t care about having a massive dos monster machine. The downside is the lack of expansion bays. As for external bays we just have one 3 1/2 inch and one 5 1/4 inch bays. Mine came with a standard 1.44mb floppy drive but the upper bay can be used for a CD-Rom drive or a 5 1/4 floppy drive. I like how the cover for the upper bay kind of looks like a disk drive. Besides the power button on the right of the floppy drive we have two lights labeled HDD for hard drive activity and a turbo light but no turbo button. Like the earlier PB 500 I reviewed the Legend 115 actives the turbo by the keyboard and pressing [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[ – ] to slow the PC down and [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[ + ] to restore normal speed. The light should change color to indicate if turbo is activated or not but if it is you should defiantly notice. Like many 486 machines of the time “turbo” buttons now slow the PC down as opposed to speed it up. This is to help with compatibility with older games that require slower CPU speeds. With my turbo activated my machine acted more like a 286 class PC.

As opposed to having screws in the rear to secure the case cover There are two hidden latches in the front that cover the screw placement. I kind of like this. its convenient and looks nice.

Turning the PC around we see.

Slots for three expansion cards, again a bit limiting but not horrible. From the right we have a I/O serial port and then a printer port. This followed by a game port for a controller or joystick which is kind of nice to have built into an old system. Next to that is a VGA port and then two PS/2 ports for your mouse and keyboard, again nice to not have to deal with an AT keyboard keyboard and serial mouse.

Opening up the system is a simple as taking out the two front screws and sliding the top case off. You can see the hard drive in the upper part of the image. It mounts on a slide in a side position. For a better view of the board you have to remove the middle cross bar. Its easy just two screws and then remove the ISA riser. This model is limited to three 16 bit ISA cards which is going to limit what you can add especially if you wanted to go for a fast VLB video card. It gets even more cramped if you want to add modem or network cards though I believe there are models very similar to this with built in modems. The covered port and connectors are on this model on the other side of the riser.

This machine uses the 410/42/420t m motherboard. Specs can be found here

1) These are the connectors for the single IDE channel and behind it in the picture is the connector for the floppy drive cable. There just pins with no plastic guide guard around them so you need to be a little careful. I also should say the BIOS for the IDE is VERY picky about what hard drives will boot and work. Mine came with a completely dead 140mb Conner IDE drive. Unfortunately the BIOS has no auto IDE detect and even if you know your drives parameters I could not get it to work correctly with any newer IDE drives I owned. The only drive I got to work was on old 420mb Conner IDE drive that had the drive parameters printed out on the side of it.

2) The CPU that came with this machine that you see here is an Intel 486 25mhz SX. Its a slightly unusual part. The SX designated that there is NO math co-processor on board. Luckily this motherboard supports a wide array of CPU’s selectable via jumpers on the board. there should be a label on the underside of the removed case cover with a jumper guide. The 486-25SX is pretty slow as far as 486 CPU’s go but its reliable and does not require any kind of heat sink or fan. Apparently a lot of these chips were actually 33mhz parts down clocked with the math co disabled. You have to love Intel. This being said there usually pretty overclockable but in these days its just easier to actually buy a higher clocked chip.

If the blue socket didn’t tip you off you can take the chip out of the socket and can see this is actually a Intel overdrive socket and so compatible with a Pentium overdrive CPU which would in theory bring this machine up to early Pentium CPU speeds of 63 to 83mhz.

3) Here we have the soldered on 4mb of RAM and a 72 pin RAM socket. This machine did not come with the RAM slot populated, I had added the RAM stick. As I said the machine does come with 4mb of RAM on the motherboard which is nice. The motherboard can take a 32MB stick for a total of 36MB of RAM.

4) The onboard Video is run by a Headland Technology video chip with 512kb of video RAM. I cant seem to find much information on this company or the quality of there video chips but from the information, or rather lack of information I don’t imagine they were a major player or well known for high quality. The chip is apparently running on an integrated VLB bus though and benched slightly higher then a et4000ax and diamond speedster pro I had installed via the ISA slot in tests. upgrading to 1MB of video RAM looks possible via a proprietary looking socket.

*I was recently informed that the Headland chip in the Packard Bell does have a timing error that causes graphical errors such as dot trails and graphics corruption in some games, Sim City 2000 being one of them and Ultima VII being another as yet I have not confirmed this in Sim City but Ultima VII definitely has graphical issues with the on board video.

5) These are the sockets for the L2 cache. Cache is basically very fast RAM that the CPU accesses first before going to the comparatively slower system RAM. The L1 cache ram is generally located on the CPU itself in small amounts but in the 486 era the L2 cache RAM was added and placed on the motherboard usually close to the CPU socket. L2 cache is slower then l1 cache but much faster then the standard RAM, also it was pretty damn expensive. sometimes less reputable PC motherboards either came with completely fake L2 chips, empty and none functioning sockets or lucky in this case simply empty sockets. Even though this PC comes with no L2 cache if you can find the chips 32, 128 or 512k of L2 cache RAM can be added for a nice performance boost. 512k is kind of a lot so I’m a tad impressed with that.

On the left is a cache chip of the size if you want 64 or 128kb of L2 cache. The chip on the right is the larger size that you will need if you want 512kb of cache. these larger chips seem harder to find and even when I did find a number of them when I tried them they failed to work.

For a lowly Packard Bell this PC isn’t to bad. I do have some issues with the video, the small number of drive bays and lack of anything other then 3 ISA slots is limiting and the BIOS is very picky about hard drives. That said the CPU upgradability is decent the 72 pin RAM is pretty expandable and the option to add a good amount of L2 cache is a boon. All in all I think it makes a decent 486 for the casual user that’s not concerned with having the most powerful 486 and has little space to spare. I myself am planning a future article using this machine in a configuration for a special purpose.

Benchmarks (Intel SX 25mhz 486, 128kb L2 Cache, 20MB FPM RAM, Built in Headland 512kb video)

3DBENCH – 19.9

PCPBENCH – 3.9

DOOM -10.71

Quake – N/A

SPEEDSYS – 9.20

Socket 7 / Super Socket 7 Motherboards and pushing their limits

August 13, 2013 – 23:04
Posted in miscellaneous
Tagged AMD k6-III+, computer, cpu overclock, socket 7, socket 7 motherboard, super socket 7
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If your into retro computers probably one of the more common boards you’ve come across uses the socket 7 or super socket 7 for the CPU. socket 7 spanned almost the entire 1990’s and you can use a socket 7 motherboard to build everything from a capable DOS platform to a PC that can run windows XP. The CPU’s that can be used in a socket 7 board range from the 75mhz Pentium to the 550mhz K6-2 and K6-3. Intel abandoned the socket 7 after the 233mhz MMX Pentium 1 but other companies like Cryix and to a greater extent AMD pushed socket 7 into the super socket 7 which is a backwards compatible extension of socket 7 for their k6 CPU’s. This extension created a cheap upgrade path for many people and extended the life of this CPU socket. That long life means that a retro gamer enthusiast can use a cheap and common socket 7 motherboard to make a very capable and well rounded 166mhz Intel based DOS PC or a capable k6-2 or 3 Windows 98 machine or with adequate RAM a k6 powered windows 2k or XP machine for “light” gaming and computing. I used a k6-2 500mhz machine for Windows 98 and then windows XP for a large part of my college life. I also use a socket 7 board with a 200mhz MMX Intel chip for my official “fast DOS” machine for classic gaming.

Here is a typical later model super socket 7 board. It has a variety of PC extension slots from ISA to AGP and PCI allowing you to use a huge variety of video and sound cards for DOS or Windows. You could slap a 166mhz Pentium a Virge video card and a Sound blaster 16 on here and have a computer that would play most DOS games fine or a 450mhz K6-3 a voodoo 3 and a sound blaster live! and have a great Windows 98 machine. These motherboards came in both ATX and older AT designs which featured AT keyboard ports as well as AT power connectors.

The socket itself is very simple. Just raise the handle and the socket is ready for a CPU to be inserted.

Lower the handle after the CPU is inserted slap on some thermal paste as you see in the image and then slap on a heatsink/fan and your good to go.

Despite the relatively high speeds of later socket 7 CPU’s they are still running on what was at the time older and limited boards. a 450mhz k6-3 is really only maybe equal to a 266 or 300mhz or so Pentium II CPU in a Slot 1 motherboard. The Intel Pentium II and especially Pentium III had much better floating point math abilities and using a socket 7 board in the late 90’s was really seen as more of a budget friendly course for PC upgrading rather then a power platform for gaming.

Slot 1 is the format that Intel moved onto with its Pentium II and early Pentium III CPU’s. The later Pentium III’s went back to a socket format that resembled socket 7 but its not compatible.

PUSHING THE LIMITS

I’ve used plenty of socket 7 boards for DOS. my main “fast DOS” PC used a 200mhz MMX CPU and my all purpose DOS PC uses a 133mhz CPU but I wanted to see how far the Super Socket 7 design could be pushed. I only used what spare parts I had around with the exception of the CPU that I acquired online.

The case I used is a pretty standard ATX case. I have a DVD as well as CD-ROM drive installed. I have two Hard drives installed. One is a 6GB drive where I have Windows 98SE installed and a secondary 40GB drive for files and games. I also have a 1.44MB floppy drive installed.

For video and sound I wanted to stay strictly period correct. For sound I originally went with a PCI Monster Sound MX300 from 1998 but it tended to give me some stability and reliability issues with this motherboard (common on VIA chipsets I’m told) so I dumped it for a simple ISA sound blaster 16. A outdated and mediocre card for something of the late 90’s era but supported by just about everything and able to give great DOS compatibility since its ISA. For sound you could also go with a AWE64 or a later Sound Blaster Live!. For video I used originally installed a Nvidia TNT2 Ultra AGP card. The TNT2 Ultra is a high end card for 1999. Its fairly backward compatible so you get good DOS compatibility and its also a very good card for OpenGL and D3D games. other choices would be The Diamond Stealth III S540 which is supposedly slightly more DOS compatible but a rather mediocre Windows 98 performer.

Perhaps the best choice for a pre 2000 socket 7 would be a Voodoo 3 seen directly above. The Voodoo 3 performs better with Glide games and can be a faster card in certain games as well as giving a very nice picture but it has half the video RAM of the TNT2 ultra and is limited to 16 bit color where the TNT2 can do 32 bit color. The Voodoo 3 supposedly “scales better” with an AMD K6 since it specifically supports the AMD 3DNOW! The version I’m using is the standard AGP version with VGA and S-video out. There is a PCI version as well as a high end faster AGP version the v3 3500 but it uses a proprietary DVI connector that requires a breakout box dongle.

The motherboard I’m using is one I had on hand and is a EPOX EP-MVP3G2 which is a good performing Super Socket 7 board that offers easy overclocking with jumpers in the lower right corner of the board. I’m running 512MB of SDRAM. This particular motherboard supports everything from the Pentium 166MMX to the AMD K6-III.

The most important part of stretching socket 7 to the limit is the CPU. The fastest available socket 7 CPU would be the AMD K6-III+. These CPU’s go for about $15 to $20 but be sure you get a + chip since a standard K6-III does not overclock well. You will notice the AMD K6-2 comes in higher clock rates, up to 550mhz and although its very doable to run something like XP on a 500mhz K6-2 the K6-III is the newer chip and the better overall performer. Originally the K6-III only was sold up to 450mhz and was a very poor overclocker but fortunately AMD made the almost identical K6-III+ for the mobile pc market. Thankfully the K6-III+ uses the same socket 7 form but requires less voltage making it an excellent overclock candidate chip that also offers rock solid stability at higher then rated speeds. Some motherboards may need a BIOS update to accept the K6-III+, mine did not.

If your going to overclock try to make sure you have adequate cooling for your CPU. I replaced the standard heatsink and fan with a larger heatsink designed for a later K7 chip.

using the standard settings for the K6-III of a 100 fsb and a multiplier of 4.5 we get the rated 450mhz.

Now simply changing the fsb to 112 and the multiplier to 5 we get a CPU speed of 560mhz which if were being generous puts this CPU on par with a Pentium II-350 for some games or applications. The system is also extremely stable at this speed with no issues or crashes running Windows 98 for long periods. Games like Half-Life ran beautifully on this setup and I would think this particular machine would meet almost all of your late 90’s gaming needs. I did attempt to bump the multiplier up to 5.5 giving the CPU a speed of 616mhz but apparently this did not jive with something and Windows crashed after boot on all occasions I tried this. I have read that several people have gotten the k6-III+ to run stable at 600 and 616mhz so I’m pretty sure it is possible with some tweaking and possibly a different Super Socket 7 board.

All and all it was a fairly cheap and fun project and goes to show how far the old and reliable socket 7 could be pushed. The K6-III+ is a great chip and overclocks super easily and stays very stable. Just remember not to set your expectations to high, the K6-III+ was sold as a budget CPU rather then a performance CPU so even though it’s a nice performance kick in the butt to the then outdated socket 7 it will still start to struggle in many post 2000 games and at higher resolutions.

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Prehistoric Isle in 1930 (Arcade)

July 30, 2013 – 02:22
Posted in games
Tagged arcade game, arcade shooter, biplane shooter, dinosaur shooter, gaming, horizontal shmup, horizontal shooter, prehistoric isle, prehistoric isle in 1930, shmup, video games
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Prehistoric Isle in 1930 is along with Time Pilot one of my favorite and earliest game memories. The game is from 1989 and features a biplane from the 1930’s being sent to investigate an island in the Bermuda triangle where shipping has been vanishing. Being a kid at the arcade this game always grabbed my attention with its colorful graphics and interesting theme. It kind of reminded me of one of my favorite movies growing up which was about a world war I German U-boat that gets stranded on a dinosaur and cave man infested island. The game play is fairly standard for a horizontal shooter but features the interesting mechanic of “pods” that act as power ups. You have your standard shot but when you get a pod power up the pod makes your standard shot more powerful. Also you have the ability to rotate the pod around your biplane changing its power depending on its position. For instance if in front of you it powers up your standard shot, angled diagonally in front of you it arcs bombs, directly above or below and it fires a sort of energy blanket and if placed directly to the rear of your plane it lays mines. Other then the theme it was always the variety of dinosaurs and monsters that grabbed my attention from giant bugs and cavemen to skeleton pterodactyls. There were also nice details for the time such as the cavemen grabbing onto your wings and weighing you down or flying under waterfalls and feeling the pressure of the water forcing your plane down.

before each level your shown a little map of the island and where you will be on said island. The game isn’t overly long and can be completed in something like 30 to 40 minutes or less but the levels are interesting and varied from jungles to underwater to the open skies.

The first level takes place in the jungle where you face various dino’s as well as cavemen that emerge from huts and leap up to latch onto your plane and drag it down. This stage like many feature a mid level boss as well as a level boss.

The first two bosses you encounter are a Brachiosaurus that lunges out at you with its long neck and an Allosaurus. before each boss encounter your greeted with a large “CAUTION!” on screen as well as the bosses species and length and weight stats. Its ultimately pointless but its a nice little touch for introducing the boss.

The second level mixes it up a bit sending you high up above the island where you battle various flying enemies such as pterodactyls and cavemen latched onto giant bats.

This level features no mid level boss but does have a huge pterodactyl as the level boss. Besides his standard fireballs that he fires at you he also creates mini tornadoes with his wings that grab your plane and fling it around the screen possibly right into a fireball or the giant flying terror.

The next stage takes you back down to the island. This stage is a little bland and seems to take place in rocky canyons over small lakes and in caves.

The bosses of this level are a little strange. The first one is even introduced as “unknown dinosaur” and looks like a some kind of flying green whale covered in giant pustules. The main boss is a giant insect that splits into smaller and smaller versions of itself as you weaken it.

The next level is my favorite of the game and sees your biplane transform into a submarine and go underwater off the islands coast fighting various undersea prehistoric monstrosities.

The mid level boss is a giant prehistoric turtle that fires baby giant turtles at you.

This level features some neat details such as the wreckage of all the ships that have gone missing in recent years. In one section of the stage as you begin to descend deeper into the depths a wrecked ship from above floats down and two heads and necks of the Brachiosaurus boss you faced earlier bust out of the wrecked ship and attempt to grab you. The effect used to create the dinosaurs neck is admittedly sort of cool for the time and its nice to see it used again.

The boss of this stage is a giant nautilus type monster that uses the same effect that the necks used for its to grasping tentacles. If you to happen to get grasped by one of the tentacles you are dragged to the mouth where you are chewed apart and pieces of wreckage are spewed out.

The final stage takes place in what appears to be a volcano but overall is not very interesting.

Your mid level boss is an angry Stegosaurus that jumps around and knocks stalactites on you. The “veggie” eating dino’s out for your blood and kind of the whole vibe I get from this game does kind of make me think of the island from King Kong, well at least the original version.

The final boss is actually kind of silly. Its a Tyrannosaurus but all you get to fight is his head as he comically bobs back and forth across the screen. I understand the fight is supposed to give you an impression of his massive scale and the bobbing is to awkwardly simulate his walking but it all just kind of comes off as comical. He breaths fire and gives off a Godzilla roar as well.

Defeating this final boss grants you an ending cinema and a job well done…and a horrible death. yep, that’s right, after defeating the fearsome and awkward Tyrannosaurus you dock with your mother aircraft which is then promptly attacked by a flock of pterodactyls and destroyed, your dead, the end…oh sorry. SPOILER!

I really enjoy this game. For the time it was released the sprites are nice and the levels and enemies are varied. I really enjoyed the theme and it made me feel like I was playing an interactive version of some of my favorite movies as a kid such as The Land That Time Forgot/The People That Time Forgot or exploring the dinosaur island from King Kong. As far as I know this game was never ported to other systems outside of the arcade. I think there was some kind of digital download version for the PSP but that’s really no different from just running the game on an arcade emulator. There was in fact a sequel created in 2000 by the title Prehistoric Isle 2 but in my opinion the game is horrible. The premise is okay and involves you flying either a Soviet Hind or American Apache helicopter against invading dinosaurs and rescuing civilians but the game turned out bland and lacking any charm the original had. Most of the enemies aren’t even recognizable dinosaurs but just generic monsters, most of the levels are pretty boring. The game is done in a sort of 3d style that has not aged well and that I find generally unpleasant.

Macintosh Classic II

July 9, 2013 – 15:08
Posted in classic computers
Tagged compact Mac, compact macs, Mac Classic II, macintosh, Motorola 68030
Comments (1)

The Macintosh Classic II is in many way similar to its less powerful sibling the Macintosh Classic. It was the last of the iconic black and white compact Macs and perhaps the most powerful next to the excellent Macintosh SE/30. The case looks very similar besides the label on the front and back indicating if the machine is a Classic I or II. Keep in mind there were two cases for the Classic II both looking alike except that the later cases have holes on the side for the speaker to allow better sound. My case is of the older type. There’s not a lot I can say about it that I didn’t say about the Classic as far as form goes. This machine was found off Craigslist and suffered from the common “stripped display” issue that plagues many of these macs. The issue is commonly caused by leaking caps on the motherboard. after cleaning the board in distilled water and allowing it to dry It operated flawlessly when reinstalled into the Mac. This is a temporary solution though and if your board suffers from this problem it requires the motherboard to be “recapped” or the capacitors replaced. this is neither to difficult or expensive and you can typically find someone on the internet who offers the service for around $40 or so plus parts.

The machine came with the same black and white 9 inch display as the Classic, sported the standard 1.44MB floppy dive and had the same Monaural four-voice sound with 8-bit digital/analog conversion using 22-kHz sampling rate for sound as the Classic did.

The rear of this unit is also very similar to the Classic except for the inclusion of a port for a microphone on the far left. Next to the microphone port we have the standard ADB port for keyboard/mouse, port for an external floppy, db-25 SCSI port, two ports for a printer and then modem and finally a headphone port.

On opening the Classic II up it also looks very similar to the Mac Classic. These machines typically came with a 40 or 80MB hard drive. Mine came with a 40mb drive. Like all the compact macs it is very cramped in there and you have to take a lot of caution not to be electrocuted by the capacitors for the CRT tube. The drive on top is going to be your floppy drive while the hard drive is attached below that.

The motherboard though looks very different from the Classic.

1) This slot looks like the RAM expansion slot from the Classic but actually it is a slot to add a FPU or math co-processor or additional ROM. A few third parties did make FPU add ons for this slot but they are not very common.

2) This is the CPU. The Classic II really bumped things up in terms of power from the Classic I. This CPU is a 16mhz 68030. The Classic I used a 8mhz 68000.

3) Floppy drive connector.

4) SCSI connector for the hard drive.

5) 3.6 V lithium PRAM battery to save settings.

6) RAM slots for up to 10MB of RAM. this is a good deal more then the 4MB limit on most other classic compact Macs.

7) Power connector

My Classic II is running System 7.1.0 which is a fairly typical OS for this machine. you can run the sleek System 6 if you wanted but lose some features or upgrade to System 7.6.1 which I think this machine can handle pretty easily.

There wasn’t a whole lot to say about the Classic II that I didn’t say already about the Classic I. I do think this is a much more capable machine with a better CPU and the capability or more RAM, 10MB as opposed to 4MB limit of the Classic I. I would also say that this may be the most capable of the black and white compact Macs next to the SE/30. The Classic II shares the same CPU as the SE/30 but unlike it the Classic II uses a 16 bit data bus as opposed to 32 bit meaning that the RAM is limited to 10MB and is overall a slower system despite the same CPU. If you want that iconic compact mac look but still want good functionality, don’t mind the B/W screen and don’t have a ton of money to splurge on the SE/30 I would recommended the Classic II if you can find a working one for under $40.

Time Pilot (Arcade)

June 10, 2013 – 21:03
Posted in games
Tagged arcade, games, Konami, Time pilot
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This 1982 Konami game from the golden era of arcade games is possibly one of my favorite games of all time for just some quick game play and nostalgia. Playing this game is also one of my earliest memories. There are several versions of this game from a Colecovision port to an Xbox live digital download with enhanced graphics but otherwise identical game play. For this article though I’m only going to refer to the original arcade version as this is the version I am most personally attached to. One of my early memories is going to a diner? bar? pool hall? I don’t exactly remember but back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s almost every place had an Arcade machine. even grocery stores and pizza parlors. anyways I remember going into one of these places with my dad and seeing this machine in all its upright arcade cabinet glory. He gave me a few quarters and I immediately went over to Time Pilot. I didn’t have many quarters and I wasn’t very skilled so I didn’t last long but I simply loved this game. Maybe the aerial time jumping appealed to the military historian inside me or maybe it was the simple but fun lateral and vertical game play but I really liked this game. It was played from a side view yet it allowed you to scroll endlessly in any direction which was kind of novel since many shooters were either vertical or horizontal scrollers. Basically the point of the game is your a modern fighter jet and for whatever reason your jumping through various time periods in aviation history and destroying a number of airplanes of that era until you come to a Boss aircraft, defeat it and you jump to the next more advanced and thus difficult era. There are also parachute guys that you can grab for points, remember when points mattered? The game only has five era’s but they are varied and interesting. Years later on visiting the arcade at a local amusement park me and my best friend spent a lot of time on this game, though its meant for one player at a time we would designate one of us to fire the gun and one controlling movement. Our system kind of worked and I remember having a lot of fun and spending a lot of time on the game.

The first era you begin the game in is 1910 where you face biplanes that occasionally fire bullets at you as well as lob bombs

The boss of this era is a blimp. All the bosses essentially operate the same as they fly across the screen and randomly fire bullets at you, never deviating. The general tactic is to line up behind them and fire away.

The second era is 1940 and here you face two types of standard enemy’s, a typical WWII mono fighter plane that fires bullets and larger bombers that fly across like mini bosses and fire at you. I get the impression these planes are more plentiful, fire more often and are slightly faster then the 1910 era but I have to say those random bomb lobs for the previous era sometimes surprised me.

The boss of this era is a larger bomber. according to Wikipedia its a B-25 Mitchell….so apparently your attacking the Americans or Canadians in this era…..as well as the B-25 being an extremely early version or a prototype since the B-25’s first flight was 1940 and did not enter service until 1941…but i ridiculously and nerdily digress. Time Pilot is not a game based on absolute historical accuracy.

The third era is 1970 where you are confronted by helicopters this time. They fly around firing bullets at you but as a twist they also fire off guided missiles that attempt to follow you but luckily their not very hard to avoid and they can be shot down.

The boss of this era is a large tandem rotor helicopter that can really only be a CH-47 Chinook. Its a big helicopter so it makes as a good boss though in actual use the Ch-47 is a utility helicopter and its usually unarmed…its also another NATO/JDF aircraft. I’m starting to think the time pilot is actually a Soviet tossed about through time as the side effect of a failed 1980’s communist time machine experiment. So hes just randomly dropping in on these eras and blindly attacking the Americans with his future jet. Also he apparently missed the history lesson on WWI and II. Though the players jet on the promotional art looks like an American F-4 Phantom II.

The forth era places you in 1982 OR 1983 if your playing the Centuri distributed USA release. Here you face jets just like your own which are fast and fire bullets and more homing missiles at you.

The big boss of this stage is just a large jet bomber that acts just like the other bosses. Wikipedia claims that this is a B-52 (again an American plane) but really it could be anything. I mean to me it kind of looks like a really big WWII nazi ME-63 Komet rocket fighter.

The final era takes us to the distant future of 2001. What was it with the year 2000 that everyone thought we would either be dead or suddenly horribly technologically advanced. Remember when Gateway was called Gateway 2000 because it sounded futuristic? Those were awesome PC’s though. Anyways this era takes place in deep space with an asteroid field in the background and your facing stereotypical flying saucer UFO’s. They fire two kinds of energy bullets at you but really its just bullets and missiles with a fancy look to them.

The boss of this era is a large mothership UFO that seems to take quite a few shots before exploding. I’m guessing all these flying saucers are piloted by Americans or capitalist aliens.

In typical fashion for the era upon defeating the mothership the game loops you back to the starting era and everything is a little harder and so on and so on. I just really love Time Pilot or as I’m starting to think of it “Time Pilot: Red Scare!”. I always find myself coming back to it through the years. It was a success in its day and I think it holds up as a fun as well as timeless game. There was a sequel of sorts, Time Pilot ’84 but this game is nothing like the original. It sort of has time jumping but I dont even recall if its on earth as all the stages are samey looking future places. Its just overall a mediocre game in my opinion. As I said there have been recent updates to the game and even spiritual successors (Time Ace, Nintendo DS) but I would love to see a true sequel with more eras and detailed enemies.

Odds & Ends: LS-120 drive, Tandy Hungry Monster, Think-A-Tron, Cryix 80mhz 486

May 21, 2013 – 16:27
Posted in miscellaneous, Odds & Ends
Tagged 486, computer game, gaming, ls-120, Tandy portable, think-a-tron
Comments (5)

Well this is the first article I’m writing of a series I’m calling “odds & ends”. basically just putting together a few things I think are kinda neat but don’t really have enough for an entire dedicated article. Its also decent filler till I write something more comprehensive. For this first one I’m going to go over the not so well know LS-120 “super drives”. The early 80’s Tandy portable game Hungry Monsters the 1967 Think-A-Tron…game? and lastly the Cryix 80mhz 486 CPU only because I like its green heat sink…really, only reason why.

LS-120 SUPER DRIVE

The LS-120 and its larger capacity brother the LS-240 was the not so successful competition to the somewhat successful Iomega ZIP drives in mid 1990’s. Until recently finding one in a purchased PC I’ve never heard of these before. Like the ZIP drive these drives use special disks to store large amounts of data. This was before CD burning drives were extremely cheap and available. Unlike the ZIP drives though these things were more reliable, held slightly more data and here is the cool thing, could act as a standard 1.44mb or 720k floppy drive. Why these failed and Zip drives did not I don’t know (well I kinda do). I know it was not widely supported but many of my later socket 7 motherboards do support these drives in BIOS.

As you can see they use IDE just like the ZIP drive but use the mini four pin molex connector unlike the ZIP drives that use the large molex connector usually taken up by your CD and hard drives. Like I mentioned earlier these drives held 20MB more Data then the standard ZIP drives and also could read/write to standard 720k and 1.44mb floppy disks faster then conventional drives. ZIP drives COULD NOT read or write to standard 1.44mb or 720k disks.

And here is an external model I recently came across at the thrift for a few $$. It uses the parallel port like many external peripherals of the day.

The most likely reason these failed was that Iomega had a three year head start with the Zip drive and burnable CD media was on the horizon. Its a shame these weren’t more common.

TANDY HUNGRY MONSTER

In 1983 Tandy, the makers of the trs-80 and Tandy 1000 line of computers, among others released a portable hand held game, “Hungry Monster”. Its basically a Pac Man type clone but none the less its kinda fun.

I picked this unit up at a Goodwill for about $3-$4. Its in good shape and requires 4 AA batteries for operation though it does have a connection for using an external power supply at 6 volt DC, center positive. The unit is light and pretty easy to use. I was slightly impressed by the color from the lights on this game and was expecting something more basic before turning it on.

So yeah, Its really just a Pac Man clone down to the power pellets. But its a good Pac Man clone

THINK-A-TRON

The oldest computer like thing I own. From 1967 Its Hasbro’s Think-A-Tron modeled after the huge mainframes of the time.

Where were going we don’t need zip codes! I say that because there’s no zip code for the address on the box (non mandatory zip codes were introduced nation wide in 1963 but did not start to become mandatory until some time in 1967). Anyways I received this for free from a bulk lot of vintage computer stuff I also received for free as a donation.

Basically the machine uses punch hole cards and you feed it the question cards with the punch holes and it answers via lights on it light array. Kinda neat for the time.

The crank on mine is cracked but other then that its in decent condition.

CRYIX 80MHZ 486 CPU

This was in a computer I picked up. I really don’t have much of anything to say about it. I was never a big Cryix fan but I really really really like that heat sink. Though I guess any 486 over 66mhz is kinda neat-o.

ancientelectronics

Beginner’s guide to choosing a hard drive for vintage PC’s and installing and optimizing MS-DOS 6.22

Odds & Ends: TRS-80 Model 100, Iomega Zip drives, Gravis gamepads

Night Slashers (Arcade)

Retro Gamer Magazine

Packard Bell Legend 115

Socket 7 / Super Socket 7 Motherboards and pushing their limits

Prehistoric Isle in 1930 (Arcade)

Macintosh Classic II

Time Pilot (Arcade)

Odds & Ends: LS-120 drive, Tandy Hungry Monster, Think-A-Tron, Cryix 80mhz 486

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