The only institution to last 2000 years wasn’t because of us
“The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine – but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight” – Hilaire Belloc
Snark Barker – open source SoundBlaster 1.0
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.
Links:
Recreation ISA Sound boards
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:
- Covox Speech thing and Disney Sound source clones
- Orpheus ISA sound card clone
- DreamBlaster
- Snark Barker – make your own Soundblaster 1.0
- Keropi & Marmes Retro Computing – Makes recreation Midi, Adlib, and MegaCard multi emulator
Links:
TexElec Quad-Floppy controller
Texelec makes some amazing retro PC equipment. They make clone Adlib and soundblaster cards, EMS ram boards for 8 bit computers,
One of the things they make is an 8-bit ISA floppy controller board that control up to 4 floppy drives.
Utopia Must Fall
PixelJam has done a fantastic job re-inventing the old vector graphics game style in a new and creative way with their upcoming Utopia Must Fall (Steam). Add to that some stellar soundtrack, fun gameplay, and deep progression path; and it’s kind of what retro arcade reboots should be.
Even better, you can play it online for free.
How’d you know his house burned down?
Funny little bit from the DYI crowd.
Attaching a ST-225 hard drive
Here’s a collection of all the tools you’ll need to set up an old MFM style hard drive in a XT/286/386/486 computer.
Hardware you’ll need:
- Cables
- IEC.net has MFM and RLL cables. They can also custom make them for you if you don’t see them on their website.
- MFM Interface board
- List of common MFM and RLL hard drive controllers
- Remember that 8088 or XT based PC’s ran their ISA bus at 4.77mhz, AT ran at 6mhz, and 386 and beyond ran ISA at 8mhz (though many later ISA systems ran them at 10mhz since ISA is very forgiving and the higher clock speed gave better speeds). This means you may find old 8-bit or AT-based ISA cards won’t work in AT or 386/486 systems since the ISA bus runs too fast.
- If your BIOS allows it, you may be able slow down the ISA bus speeds and that might help old cards work.
- Drive
- Seagate ST-225 manual
- ST-225 Geometry and quick reference guide (cyl: 615, heads: 4, Sectors: 17, precomp: 300, Landing: 670)
- AT power supplies
- Software preparation:
- USB 3.5″ floppy drive to write disks
- Greaseweazle with 3.5″ or 5.25″ floppy drive
Software
- DOS disks
- Low-level format tools
- Seagate Ontrack Disk Manager – Seagate OEM tool
- BIOS – many motherboards from the 386/486 era have a low-level format tool in BIOS
- SpeedStor – v6.0.3 , link 6.0.3, 6.5.0
- SpinRite
- debug (with -g=c800:5 command)
- Testing
- Tools
- RawWriteWin to write img files to USB attached floppy drives
Informational links:
- Reference site for a huge number of drive controllers
- Getting an MFM Hard Drive on Pentium II PC
- Old software on WinWorld: OS, apps, tools, games, etc
Anime Studios
Anime has grown in popularity. Just like the US that has many animation houses (ex: Disney, Hanna Barbera, Cartoon Network, Warner Bros, etc), there are many Japanese studios and many are known for their particular styles and genres.
Arikendo’s video is informative because it gives you a great overview of all the major studios. There is information about the founder, leaders, styles they are known for, business models, and other tidbits such as working conditions at these studios. I found some studios and series I wouldn’t have even known about.
Some tidbits: the story of a WIT worker that claimed working 391 hours in one month (over 13 hour days, 7 days a week for a whole month). KyoAni that treats it’s employees really well and has high profits from selectively producing titles from their annual Kyoani awards. Or the sad story of a worker at A-1 Pictures that died after working around 600 hours a month (20 hours a day, 7 days a week).
AI interprets gymnastics
Wow – that’s disturbing. AI has a way to go yet