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Category: Retro computing

8″ floppy drive adventures

8″ floppy drive adventures

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I recently acquired not one, but 2, 8″ floppy drives. Behold a Data System’s Design DSD 440:

To get this all working in my experiments, I used the following guides

Parts and equipment

IBM 5140 PC Convertible

IBM 5140 PC Convertible

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Cathode Ray Dude did a great rundown on the IBM 5140 Convertible. It was the first PC computer my dad got after the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III and the first one that had a floppy drive. We even had the serial/parallel port and the thermal printer.

But probably the most amazing thing is that this 8088 XT, floppy based computer actually had a method to sleep and wake right where you left off. As far as we know, it was the very first instance of the technology.

Still playing old games? Most other people are too

Still playing old games? Most other people are too

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Valve’s Year In Review for Steam revealed interesting statistics about its player base.

Only 15 percent of Steam players spent their time on games released in 2024. 47 percent of players devoted their time to games from the past 1-7 years (called “recent favorites”), and 37 percent played titles from eight or more years ago (“classics”).

While that seems low, it’s actually in line with historical trends. In fact, 2023 was particularly bad with players only spending 9% of time on games released in 2023. In 2022, players spent time on 17% of games released in 2022.

The ratio for ‘recent favorites’ for 2022 and 2023 were 19 percent and 52 percent, respectively, and ‘classics’ for each year were 62 percent and 38 percent.

YearTime spent on games released that yearRecent Favorites (1-7 years old)Classics (8+ years old)
202415%47%37%
20239%52%38%
202217%19%62%

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Saving the largest commercial CRT ever made

Saving the largest commercial CRT ever made

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The Sony Trinitron KX-45ED1, aka the PVM-4300, is thought to be the largest CRT TV ever sold to consumers. It has a 43-inch visible diagonal on its 45-inch tube and weighs in at almost 440 lbs. The stand alone is over 170lbs. At the time, it cost $40,000 USD in 1989 (or about $100K today, adjusted for inflation)

Long since thought gone, Shank Mods managed to save an extremely rare 43-inch Sony Trinitron KX-45ED1 from an untimely ending. It was being kept on the second floor of an Osaka noodle shop called Chikuma Soba – a building due for demolition in just a few weeks.

It was moved from the soba shop, crated up, and shipped to the US. While it worked well – it did need servicing. The alignment was off, had some tube cataracts, and the dynamic convergence amplifier circuit had failed. They worked on them all and have a very nice display.

The video describes the incredible journey and is definitely worth a watch

Articles:

Demoscene is not dead

Demoscene is not dead

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Andreas from Insomniac Games made a Amiga 500 demo in 2019 as part of this work with The Black Lotus demo group. He presented not only the Eon Amiga 500 demo, but tons of great technical information about the 4 years it took to develop it.

Old demo scene programmers hold amazing amounts of wisdom. When solving the core pieces of logic, I found this is true (but when doing larger, complete system development, these don’t work)

Work backwards from desired outcome to discover your constraints. Don’t just brute force. Instead, ask, what must be in place for us to get the peak performance from the key component we’re dependent on (render, disk load, etc). Then work from that constraint.

Do everything you can at compile time, not run time. Pre-compute tons of things – even the build-up of the data structures in memory. Just run it and then save and reload that blob automatically.

Over-generalizing early is a trap many devs fall into. Solve the problem in front of you. Trust that you can delete the code and do something else if it sucks. It’s cheaper and faster than trying to anticipate things ahead of time. Do the simplest thing that will work and if it sucks come back and delete it.

If you end up with a small runtime table/code that doesn’t require runtime checks because you can prove it can’t go wrong, you’re doing something right.

When developing, the actual Amiga is super slow and limited. They took an Amiga emulator and hacked it up so they could debug on it instead. Using calltraps to trigger the emulator, they added memory protection, fast forward, trigger debug, loading symbols, cycle accurate profiling, single step, high-resolution timers, etc. Also allows perfect input playback.

Modern threading and consumer/producer components (disk loading, data transfer, decompressors, etc) often just throw things in buffers and YOLO. There’s no clear backpressure to show you where you’re wasting time/space. Running on this kind of hardware/simulator shows you how much time the design is wasting by poorly and inefficiently designed algorithms/constraints.

Presented at Handmade Cities event in Seattle at: https://handmadecities.com/

The gritty world of retro game analysis

The gritty world of retro game analysis

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The world has gotten very familiar to retro hardware re-creations, game emulation, re-releases, speed runs, creating new games for old platforms, as well as new exploits, tools, and discoveries. The nitty gritty work of doing all of this, however, is a labor of love. For those that dig into the binary, there’s tricky copyright concerns that need to be managed, only scraps of information about old hardware and software, highly optimized/tricky code that is tough to read, and almost no financial gain – except for commercial re-releases.

Made Up of Wires walks us through a live bit of decompiling of the PS1 classic: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to give you a taste of the work involved in this kind of work. Not really that different than any other reverse engineering but surprisingly accessible as these old games were relatively small and simple.

Sound cards for a retro PC build

Sound cards for a retro PC build

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I was recently making my own retro 486 DX 66 PC build and needed to add an ISA sound card that supported both DOS and Windows games. A genuine Sound Blaster card would definitely work, but buying an genuine Sound Blaster Pro will run you well over $150+ (over $200 with it’s box)

In googling around, I found this great thread on Vogons where someone asked the same question: Is there a cheaper alternative than finding a Sound Blaster/Sound Blaster Pro? It turns out there is – the really excellent ESS AudioDrive ES1868.

I had not heard of the ESS AudioDrive ES1868 ISA sound card before, but it is considered one of the best Sound Blaster clone cards. It has tons of features such as Sound Blaster Pro 2 compatibility (something even the Sound Blaster 16 doesn’t have!). It is extremely easy to set up for DOS and Windows, has mixer inputs for line-in, microphone, CD input, wavetable, and is a really quiet card (as opposed to Sound Blaster 16’s that suffered from chronic hum and pop issues to the point it was often called the ‘NoiseBlaster’). The drivers are easy to set up and even support non-PnP configuration. It makes the card work with 99% of DOS games. Even better, the cards are readily available for around $25-$30.

I bought a card for $25 off eBay and installed it without issue. The ESS drivers are available on Phil’s Computer Lab link (below). I download the drivers, ran the installer, and set the parameters during install to the same as a default Sound Blaster card: A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6
Address: 220h
IRQ: 7
DMA: 1
Port: 330h
Type: 6

I then popped up my copy of Wolfenstein 3D, chose the Sound Blaster output option with default parameters and got all the awesome audio of yesteryear.

Learning everything there is to know about the different Sound Blaster and clone sound cards:

DOS Days has really excellent write-ups on all the various Sound Blaster cards with pros and cons of each. I’m really glad I read up on the different models before buying a generic Sound Blaster 16. There’s a tremendous wealth of information about issues unique to each card. Definitely a site worth reading before buying a card from eBay.

They also have an exhaustive list of all kinds of other sound cards which includes info on the ESS Audiodrive cards. There’s a ton of great information about the different models and where they fit in the sound card landscape. A definite must read.

Links:

Snark Barker – open source SoundBlaster 1.0

Snark Barker – open source SoundBlaster 1.0

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My first video card was the original 8-bit Sound Blaster card. Besides upgrading to VGA graphics, nothing changed my gaming experience back in the day more than this one upgrade.

Enter the Snark Barker. It’s an open source project that gives you a complete bill of materials, circuit diagram, board fab files, and tons of other information you need to make your own. Yes, MAKE your own Soundblaster clone. It looks like a very doable project for those a little handy with a soldering iron.

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Recreation ISA Sound boards

Recreation ISA Sound boards

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David Larsson makes a bunch of clone ISA audio boards such as the Gravis Ultrasound, 8-bit ISA Soundblaster, MCA Sound Blaster, Disney Sound Source. He sells them on Tindie for pretty reasonable prices considering the ebay prices for the original boards.

Here’s a good review of his 8-bit Soundblaster card:

These aren’t the only sound card clones. Turns out there are lots of others too:

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