Yeo Kheng Meng decides to try something silly – can he get DOS 6.22 running natively on his 2020 Thinkpad?
He writes all about the headaches and hurdles he ran into while trying this retro feat – including networking and thunderbolt.
PRGE is a great convention that meets each year in Portland, OR. They get a lot of surprisingly big names in retro gaming: people from Atari, Sierra, Nintendo, etc. Over the years, they’ve had some pretty big folks show up.
They used to sell DVD’s of the sessions, but now you can catch videos of the talks on their Youtube channel.
Nathan Baggs wanted to play a retro version of Jurassic Park, but found it was busted due to DRM. He then proceeds to walk through how to hack it with a debugger and binary/disassembly tools such as Ghidra, x64dbg, CFF Explorer, and PE Bear.
It’s a great video on how people go about hacking old programs.
Demozoo.org is a website that is a library of not only old school ’90’s era demo competition submission – but even all the recent ones as well. They have lists of current competitions and news too. An extra feature is many demos have youtube videos of the runs so you don’t have to download the binaries and run them locally.
8086 emulator is a fun Intel 8086 emulator / vm on github. It can run most of the 8086 instruction set and provides an interactive interpreter and debugger that allows you to run programs line by line. [hackaday]
The Video Game History Foundation (VHGF)’s digital archive of video game research has launched its first round of online early access to it’s library. It’s free to access anywhere in the world and intended for “anyone who wants to study video game history.”
What do they have?
There are some caveats: There are no playable games in the archive due to copyright restrictions and VGHF said it “cannot give express permission” for users to reproduce materials in the library unless explicitly stated otherwise though researchers may be exempt under fair use cases.
We’ve all seen old standup arcade games that used guns – like one of the iterations of House of the Dead or VirtuaCop. At home, who didn’t play Duck Hunt on the NES?
Unfortunately, if you try those games today – they don’t work. The mechanisms they relied on only worked on old tube-type CRTs. People have tried to make alternative mechanisms – but they relied on having to attach messy sensor or light bars around the screen. Using mechanisms like sensor bars also means you must stay in the exact same spot or re-calibrate – something that is very annoying during a long gaming session. What to do?
Andrew Sinden decided to tackle the project and came up with a brilliantly simple solution. Simply render/detect the square around the border of the game being played determine your location from that rectangle. That input is converted to mouse input/direction and voila. It works on any size display, doesn’t need recalibration, and allows for multiple players. Andrew Sinden shows off how he developed it here:
He started an IndieGoGo project, and ended up raising a whopping $4.6 million of the desired $300,000 goal.
His startup project is now a full-fledged product and he sells them over at SindenShop. They make 2 guns: with and without recoil. They run about $170/$115 respectively and come in blue, red, black, and grey if you want different guns for different numbers of players. They also now make arcade-style foot pedals for games that use those.
Acerola has a bunch of great graphics videos. In this one, he talks about why PS1 graphics looked the way it did.
I learned that PS1 actually had realtime camera distance tessellation – something that wasn’t available to desktop GPUs until the introduction of tessellation shaders.
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
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.