It was everything I had hoped it to be. I paid extra for a 3d printed mounting bracket and the cute led display.
I had one adf handy to test, Captain Blood, a nice pirated version so the weird encoding wouldn’t be an issue.
It was kind of nice watching it boot up, although as slow as I remember a mechanical drive being. But at the same time nice not using 30 year old media.
I have a few more upgrades on the way to deck out my 600, although I need to do some kind of RGB thing as the composite video has so much noise it’s unreal.
Anyway despite the old flame war on floppy emulation, the Goteks are dirt cheap, and. Hell if it’ll work in an Amiga, it’ll work anywhere.
So I woke up to this incredible news. Jason Scott at the most excellent archive.org had just uploaded the old Infocom source code to github. It’s from the infamous ‘found hard disk’ that has been mentioned going back to the failed game ‘The restaurant at the end of the universe’.
So looking at the repos here, you can see the latest ones are all Infocom. It’s best to get them all via git for reason below:
The reason being of course that if there are multiple versions they are stacked. Now why is this important? Who cares? it’s all in ZILL which there is no compiler for, as the TOPS-20 tools are still lost?
Written by Jesse McGrew in an apparent vacuum, this toolchain can Z3 machine based ZIL source code. Yes that’s right it’s a compiler!
I know Zork will get all the headlines, but back the 80’s I preferred Planetfall. I’m not even going to talk about the insanity that was the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy.
Zilf is really only suited for Z3 compilation, and looking at planetfall there are two commits of note:
The source for the Final version won’t build with ZILF. However the Revision 37 source will!
$ git checkout 281bd3417faada8011397244d4bfaad562cb7bfc
Note: checking out '281bd3417faada8011397244d4bfaad562cb7bfc'.
You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental
changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this
state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout.
If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may
do so (now or later) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example:
git checkout -b
HEAD is now at 281bd34... Revision 37 (Original Source)
Ok, now let’s trash the directory! (you did backup the repo first, right?)
C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall>..\bin\Zilf planetfall.zil
ZILF 0.8 built 3/19/2017 1:34:17 PM
Planetfall
[warning MDL0417] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\MISC.zil:509: ROUTINE: only 3 routine arguments allowed in V3, so last 2 "OPT" arguments will never be passed
in INSERT-FILE called at planetfall.zil:14
in IFILE called at planetfall.zil:25
[warning ZIL0208] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\SYNTAX.zil:143: preaction routine mismatch for 'V?ZAP': using PRE-ZAP as before
[error ZIL0113] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\MISC.zil:150: SETG: argument 1: bare atom argument must be a variable name
[error ZIL0113] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\MISC.zil:315: SETG: argument 1: bare atom argument must be a variable name
[error ZIL0113] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\MISC.zil:317: SETG: argument 1: bare atom argument must be a variable name
[error ZIL0113] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\MISC.zil:319: SETG: argument 1: bare atom argument must be a variable name
[warning ZIL0504] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\PARSER.zil:244: treating SET to 0 as true here
[warning ZIL0502] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\VERBS.zil:156: RETURN value ignored: block is in void context
[warning ZIL0204] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\VERBS.zil:1879: no such global variable 'WHERE', using the local instead
[warning ZIL0505] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\COMPTWO.zil:3035: COND: clauses after else part will never be evaluated
[warning ZIL0308] : too many parts of speech for 'PORT': Object (C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\GLOBALS.zil:78), Adjective (C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\GLOBALS.zil:224), Direction (C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\GLOBALS.zil:11)
[warning ZIL0306] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\GLOBALS.zil:224: discarding the Adjective part of speech for 'PORT'
[warning ZIL0308] : too many parts of speech for 'BRUSH': Object (C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\GLOBALS.zil:548), Adjective (C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\GLOBALS.zil:549), Verb (C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\SYNTAX.zil:283)
[warning ZIL0306] C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall\GLOBALS.zil:549: discarding the Adjective part of speech for 'BRUSH'
10 warnings
4 errors
C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall>dir *zap
Volume in drive C is BOOTCAMP
Volume Serial Number is 903B-72D4
Directory of C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall
04/17/2019 08:32 PM 247,803 planetfall.zap
04/17/2019 08:32 PM 162,476 planetfall_data.zap
04/17/2019 08:32 PM 1,336 planetfall_freq.zap
04/17/2019 08:32 PM 40,495 planetfall_str.zap
4 File(s) 452,110 bytes
0 Dir(s) 238,542,704,640 bytes free
C:\temp\zilf\zilf-0.8\planetfall>..\bin\zapf planetfall.zap
ZAPF 0.8
Reading planetfall.zap
Reading planetfall_freq.zap
Reading planetfall_data.zap
Reading planetfall_str.zap
Measuring..
Assembling
Wrote 121952 bytes to planetfall.z3
Sure it said 4 errors, but it compiled! Using a z3 or higher interpreter we can load up Planetfall
Planetfall!
At first glance it may look the same, but check the serial number. 190417. That’s today!
I’ve had this 2006 MacPro for quite a while. I’ve taken it home as didn’t have a ‘good’ home machine as I have my better stuff in the office. Anyways the machine is far obsolete with 10.7 being the last official release supported, and although you can treat it like a hackintosh and go much further, Apple is making their binaries tuned heavy enough that all the spectre/meltdown patches broke the old Xeons.
So I installed Windows 10, and found I can go all the way to 1809 without any issues. I put in a GT 1030 with DDR5 RAM and it can even game to extent, although the 13 year old 2Ghz processors were certainly holding it down. Upgrade processors have always been available when I had this machine but they were expensive, and I wasn’t sure if they’d work. Well I picked up a pair of Xeon x5365 for $88 RMB each and pulled the plug.
I thought the thing to do was a quick benchmark of before and after. I was getting a whopping 167! That means if Cinebench scales to 100% efficiency I get a core score of 41. While my ‘newer’ machine’s E5-2620 v2 was scoring 52, and the current E5-2667 v2 is scoring 77.
It took two hours, but I finally got these 2 Xeon x5365’s installed giving me a score of 560, or a score of 70 per core. Nice!
If you are expecting to run new and exciting software that requires SSE4/SSE4.1/SSE4.2 and the infamous POPCNT and LZCNT instructions you will be disappointed. Sorry Apex Legends fans. This also means that VMware Player is capped to version 12.
Another thing worth noting is that it’s worth looking at the TDP of the various sSPEC of Xeons. I was lucky and I was able to source the SLAED variation which has half the idle TDP of the SLAC3 variant.
So yeah, this is basically as far as this thing can go CPU wise. Although I have 16GB of RAM, apparently it can go to 32GB, which means buying all new memory modules. I guess I can do a better video card. I’m hoping that I can run more stuff at once, I was hitting a point with all 4 cores were maxed to 100% way too much.
I was going to show off the new CPU’s but apparently the pictures didn’t come out and I wanted to get this upgrade over with, as I had mentioned it did take 2 hours. The plastic retainer in the memory cage, and that stupid cover for the processors was the hardest PITA to remove. I probably spent at least 30 minutes pulling that damned thing off. I never removed the CPU shield before and 13 years, 3 nations, 2 continents worth of dust was unreal. Maybe it’s just as well the pictures didn’t come out, as it was pretty disgusting in there. It’s also no wonder the old CPU’s were running hot.
I wonder if this machine counts as being vintage now? Apple’s sliding scale of support is a weird thing.
What is cool about these versions is that they do have some audio capabilities, although they are so old that they do rely on sampled sounds for:
Alien Syndrome
Altered Beast
Golden Axe
Shadow Dancer
Shinobi
Wrestle War
But it’s from 1999 and that was the state of emulation.
0.82 is basically where the project had left off, and was of course supplanted by MAME. There was preliminary work on AfterBurner 2, although there is from the looks of it a bad/partial ROM dump to blame for the most part. It’s unplayable but it sort of runs the demo.
0.82 does however emulate a strange version of OutRun. Namely that it lacks shifter support all together. So hold down the accelerator and take off!
Notable things is the inclusion of Neill Corlett’s Starscream for 68000 emulation, Neil Bradley’s Mz80, Jarek Burczynski’s YM2151. Which reflects many components of the era that would find their way into MAME.
Which of course speaks to another thing, that tracking down ROMs for these ancient pre-mame emulators is getting impossible with vague names, and no timestamps.
Btw, there is two excellent pages where you can get all the roms supported by this emulator, these pages are : http://www.davesclassics.com by Conjurer and http://www.emuviews.com by JoseQ
Which naturally, are lost to the mists of time.
I’ve been able to run it under DOSBox, Qemu and VMWare. For VMWare, be sure to enable Sound Blaster emulation, and set the BLASTER environment variable to:
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H7 P330 T6
The video mode for the start screen doesn’t render on VMWare or Qemu, so in that case I just start it with the following batch file
I don’t have the FPS stats as it’ll crash when going to the menu to exit, and I didn’t hack up the source that much at the moment (caught another flu…). But Qemu 0.90 feels a LOT more fluid playing outrun than VMWare or DOSBox on my 2006 Mac Pro. Although on my 32 core Xeon monster it plays great on everything. I guess if you have at least 3Ghz and your CPU is less than 8 years old it’ll be fine for running nested emulation along with emulating 2 68000’s a z80, and a ym2151. Or just run a native build of MAME! Or if you really want low lag Outrun, use Cannonball!
And thanks again to Thierry Lescot for letting me redistribute this
First thing, what makes these tracks from sc68 & sndh unique is that it’s not simple music notes, like MIDI, but rather each track actually includes the native 68000 program to play the track, and it interfaces directly to the hardware. This means that sc68 actually has to emulate enough of the Atari ST & Commodore Amiga to play music. I’ve got to say, it’s pretty impressive!
Likewise the SNDH project has downloads on their page http://sndh.atari.org/download.php that currently sits at 75MB, and has 4,925 files!
sc68 plugin doing it’s thing
If you look at the code, you can find that it does in fact emulate a 68000 along with peripheral chips and music chips. Just as the SNDH format is 68000 ASM.
So there we go, an obscure music format that actually involves emulation!
Count on un-elected technocrats trying to ruin awesome resources with their kanagroo court style operations in their little backwater nonsensical nations.
While looking around for simple compilers to see how easy it is to modify their assembly output syntax, I ran across this tiny file, cc68iii3.zip which bills itself as:
This compiler consists of various modules that build up a front end — these modules are common to all versions of this compiler — consisting of parser, analyzer and optimizer, of modules that are specific for the target processor, namely *68k.c (for the 68000) and *386.c (for the i386), and of assembly language output modules that are further dependent on the (syntax of the) target assembler.
Well isn’t that interesting! So instead of doing something 68000 based, I setup the i386-gas compiler, and tried it with MinGW. And amazingly a hello world program worked!
Well that was unexpected, but great! So I thought I’d modify the simple Infocom interpreter to build with this. I came up with this as a block for gnumake to read in a Makefile
The key substitute is $* which is the 'root' of the file being passed in. Although it's lame doing it this way but it works in a nice automatic enough fashion.
The compiler must be K&R only as it doesn't like standard includes, so I built file.c/io.c/term.c using GCC but all the rest were able to be built just fine. And even better it works!
Infocom '87
Although I'd never recommend using something like this in a place that matters. If anything GCC 1.x is probably a better choice, but it's still kind of neat.
The 68000 Microprocessor (5th Edition) Hardcover – Nov 25 2003 by James L. Antonakos (Author)
So I was trapped in the Library for a bit, and spied this book. It’s not every often in 2019 you are going to find books about the 68000, as I’m sure any good library will have removed stuff like this, and have it pulped ages ago. But the amount of current technical books in English here is pretty damned slim to none, so I was all to happy to pickup this book for a week.
The poor thing has been checked out 4 times in the last 15 years. I guess the kids don’t know what they are missing.
Anyways what was interesting in this book is that it has a CD-ROM, and on there is some lesson code from the book, along with an assembler that outputs to S-records of all things, and a small emulator that is meant to be compiled under MS-DOS. It was trivial to isolate the passing of DOS interrupts from Unix/MinGW and get the simulator running on something modern.
In Chapter 11 there is a brief walkthrough on building a board, which sounds like fun although I’m sure in 2019 finding parts will be.. challenging, along with a simple monitor program.
The built in assembler can happily assemble the monitor, but it’s geared for talking to the obsolete hardware as specified in the book. I just made a few small changes to instead have it’s console IO hook to the simulator’s TRAPs and I had the monitor running!
I then took the echo test program, and modified it to run at a higher location in memory, along with exiting via the RTS instruction, so that it will exit when you press Q back to the monitor. Then for the heck of it I further extended the monitor so you can Quit it, and return to the simulator.
Is this useful? I’m pretty sure the answer is absolutely not.
The CD-ROM is tiny, I thought it would be packed with goodies, but it’s 250kb compressed.
