Author Archives: neozeed

PETSCII Robots released for the ZX Spectrum

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PETSCII Robots title

So yeah on the surface, it’s an 8 bit game on another platform. Not that exciting but this isn’t a 6502, the Spectrum is a Z80! So yes it’s been manually ported by mr287cc with music from Shiru.

faux petscii mode

So this is pretty cool watching the game break out of the 6502 that spawned it. So overall yeah, it’s the same game, but new platform. And the first image is the traditional game, which works fine, but where would be the fun in that? Instead you get a whopping 4 versions of the game, along with a program that plays all the sountracks, a full 184kb worth of fun. I suspect it’s a full tapes worth.

Gripes on strange and foreign platforms…

The biggest and weirdest thing to me is loading the tape files into an emulator. I have to admit I never even heard of a Spectrum until college, and it was largely that it’d been emulated better before anything Commodore, and that it too had an extensive (although 100% tape based) library, which really restricted things like RGP’s and Adventure games, having to run from the incredibly limited 8bit ram.

Anyways to load from tape the command is:

LOAD "".

But the spectrum doesn’t have a Microsoft Basic, rather you type in J for the load command. Yes. J.

Spectrum Keyboard matrix

I had to google around a fair bit to find this, butt here is a keyboard matrix.

The P key

Yes seriously. And because it’s the most pressed key, many of them are impossible to tell from images that they have the double quote. Also it’s a “symbol shift” key so in emulators it maybe a control or alt key, so it’s J CTRL+P CTRL+P, then play on your virtual tape deck and listen to the screeching data (just like a modem). The game loads in a minute or so, and off you go!

The Microbots image

Adding to the keyboard fun, this is the game keyboard layout:

So it’s not too bad.

Colour Micro Robots banner

Is it worth it?

Absolutely! You do get several versions for your $10, and the ZX-Microbots version is the best by far, with music, and of course a high resolution screen letting you see far more of the action!

I’ve tried it in a bunch of emulators, and it works fine, so compatibility seems to be very good, but I don’t have any hardware to run it native. You do get WAV & TAP files in the sizeable download, along with PDF’s of the manuals. I haven’t seen anything about mastering tapes, so I don’t think there will be a physical release.

You can pick it up on David’s site for $10 USD. It’s totally worth it in my opinion.

My disclosure is that I’ve bought it for the Pet/c64 twice (once by accident), ZX and Amiga, 100% on my own money.

68000/Amiga

As a bonus non 6502, there is also an Amiga version, which sounds great, plays fine, but compared to the Spectrum version, it just feels cramped.

Linus DECUS ’94 talks found!

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As I’m sure this will be making the rounds from Facebook (yes how tragic it’s on that thing of all things), and YES you have to login as King Zuck-my-users-are-idiots-erberg demands to know if you are reading this.

This is written by Jon “maddog” Hall

This is the long-promised Christmas present to all those good little girls and
boys who love GNU/Linux.

It was November of 1993 when I received my first CD of what was advertised as "A
complete Unix system with source code for 99 USD".   While I was dubious about
this claim (since the USL vs BSDi lawsuit was in full swing) I said "What the
heck" and sent away my 99 dollars, just to receive a thin booklet and a CD-ROM
in the mail.   Since I did not have an Intel "PC" to run it on, all I could do
was mount the CD on my MIPS/Ultrix workstation and read the man(1)ual pages.

I was interested, but I put it away in my filing cabinet.

About February of 1994 Kurt Reisler, Chair of the UNISIG of DECUS started
sending emails (and copying me for some reason) about wanting to bring this
person I had never heard about from FINLAND (of all places) to talk about a
project that did not even run on Ultrix OR DEC/OSF1 to DECUS in New Orleans in
May of 1994.

After many emails and no luck in raising money for this trip I took mercy on
Kurt and asked my management to fund the trip.   There is much more to this
story, requiring me to also fund a stinking, weak, miserable Intel PC to run
this project on, but that has been described elsewhere.

Now I was at DECUS.  I had found Kurt trying to install this "project" on this
stinking, weak, miserable Intel PC and not having much luck, when this nice
young man with sandy brown hair, wire-rim glasses, wool socks and sandals came
along.  In a lilting European accent, speaking perfect English he said "May I
help you?" and ten minutes later GNU/Linux was running on that stinking, weak,
miserable Intel PC.

I sat down to use it, and was amazed. It was good. It was very, very good.

I found out that later that day Linus (for of course it was Linus Torvalds) was
going to give two talks that day.  One was "An Introduction to Linux" and the
other was "Implementation Issues in Linux".

Linus was very nervous about giving these talks.   This was the first time that
he was giving a talk at a major conference (19,000 people attended that DECUS)
to an English-speaking audience in English.   He kept feeling as if he was going
to vomit.   I told him that he would be fine.

He gave the talks.  Only forty people showed up to each one, but there was great
applause.

The rest of the story about steam driven river boats, strong alcoholic drinks
named "Hurricanes", massive amounts of equipment and funding as well as
engineering resources based only on good will and handshakes have been told
before and in other places.

Unfortunately the talks that Linus gave were lost.

Until now.

As I was cleaning my office I found some audio tapes made of Linus' talk, and
which I purchased with my own money.  Now, to make your present, I had to buy a
good audio tape playback machine and capture the audio in Audacity, then produce
a digital copy of those tapes, which are listed here.  Unfortunately I do not
have a copy of the slides, but I am not sure how many slides Linus had.  I do
not think you will need them.

Here is your Christmas present, from close to three decades ago.   Happy
Linuxing" to all, no matter what your religion or creed.
An Introduction To Linux
Linux Implementation Issues In Linux

I’ve also archived the slides & audio files on archive.org.

Merry Christmas

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I had a bunch of stuff in my head for this year. Really. Some 'new' Commodore 64 game reviews. some random g2a action, and just some all around fun. Then my schedule slacked and log4j happened. On the one hand none of the stuff I ran was immediately impacted as it was inward facing. I had already gutted the 'magical nonsensical scripts' t hat kids these days use to deliberaly complicate running simple services. So adding the right flags to disable this crap in the Java runtime was something I could do quickly. Sadly the rest of the organization didn't fare so well.

Things are bad.

But life finds a way.

So in the words of the late George Carlin, Merry Christmas, and try to do the best you can.

Can you trust a man in a van with your virtual plan?

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Once upon a time this was a legitimate ad. Tad from VM-limted.com. Sadly the domain has all but lapsed and finding any reference to this ad is pretty much impossible to search for. You’d think with the ‘glamp’ of vanlife and living in a van that people would love to take notes from the Microsoft VM-limited 70’s style conference van.

Nissan NV350

Instead I was getting crap like this Nissan NV350 which looks so 1960’s SciFi that it’s just unlivable and unusable. Compare that pod living thing to this incredible 1970’s themed van from VM-limited!

So comfortable!

From leather chairs, rolodexes, tube televisions to the mandatory ashtrays, wood paneling and shag carpet how could this not be a ‘work from the road’ thing today? While looking at other solutions for working on the road they seem to be so boring and unlived in that they feel about as legit as that new starwars hotel that looks like a telephone game of ‘space conflict’.

As far as I can tell it started as a print campaign in 2011 to be launched the same time as the big VMware convention (vmworld?!) back then.

2011 print ad

I do have to admire the very Atari-esque look of it. Apparently it was good enough to get some videos shot in the van:

And along with that was a TADTalk. I mirrored it on my site, and with a bit more searching I found some more and put them on archive.org.

It’s too bad the domain lapsed, and Microsoft didn’t hop onto the van-life trend with their future thinking retro 70’s conference van.

Anyways to help me google/bing it in the future Microsoft man in van selling virtualization.

Anyone else living the nomadic life? I guess with wife + kids it’s hard, but I’m sure someone is doing it.

Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint Library dropdown menu insanity!

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I don’t know what is so exciting about this feature but Microsoft has paged me about 2-300 times this morning about this exciting feature.

Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint Library dropdown menu

As of 10:25 BST/HST it’s still going off. I had to mute the Office 365 Admin application. Talk about either over excited or just plain broken. Over on reddit yeah, it’s everyone else.

Do people even use sharepoint anymore?

nonsensical benchmarks

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So I was messing with quake1 & DJGPP/DOSBox. So yes that means this table is largely nonsense. My larger goal was to see if a strictly softfloat could run Quake1. The answer, is no.

However I got some weird answers from messing around with the flags & fps from a timedemo of demo1

FPS
67.7
113.4
130.1

131.9
101.3

73.0
71.7
31.1

44.6
32.7
CFLAGS
-O0 -m386 -m80387
-O2 -m486 -m80387
-O2 -m486 -m80387 -mhard-float -mno-soft-float -mieee-fp -mfp-ret-in-387
-O2 -m386 -m80387
-O2 -m386 -m80387 -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -fexpensive-optimizations
-O2 -m486
-O2
-O2 -msoft-float -m386 -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -fexpensive-optimizations
-O2 -msoft-float -m386
-O2 -msoft-float -m486

This needs to be a table! it’s unreadable!

So surprisingly -O2 -m386 -m80387 produced the fastest code using GCC 2.7.2.3. On DOSBox so yeah that means literally nothing. Rebuilding DOSBox with no floating support code gave a weird error about the pov being out of range.

Obviously the next thing to do is run this stuff natively.. .which means GCC 2.7.2.3 for NT. Oh this is going to be fun, but utterly pointless. Or maybe not.

I re-ran the tests using VMware. There is no audio drivers involved just plain MS-DOS. The red is DOS-Box while green is VMware for the graph with FPS being the measurement. Interesting how the numbers aren’t as varied like DOSBox, however the -m386 -m80387 proved the be the worst for VMware, while the 386 soft float was so incredibly slow on DOSBox but performs great on VMware. yay?

YouTube Monday video Extravaganza!

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First up, a friend of the blog, NCommander has his 8.5 hour marathon ‘Porting 16-bit Windows 1.0 Applications to 64-Bit Windows 11‘

I was so tired I ended up sleeping through the whole thing. Sometimes it’s hard being on the other side of the planet. But for anyone interested in Windows programming it’ll be super interesting in how much has changed, and yet how much things haven’t changed.

Damn!

As an added bonus, 65scribe has also blessed us with not only another great retrospective on iMacs, but also our favorite museum in Ontario, but left us with a cliff hanger (minor spoiler!).

Blue and Ice

I never knew about the artic blue ice thing before. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but who knows?!

zeeDooM Xenix!

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So a few months ago, gattilorenz had told me he managed to work out how to do direct video under Xenix, and was able to get DooM running! He made the source available, and I meant to do something back then, but I must have gotten distracted.

So I went ahead and added the zeeDooM thing I had been working on a while ago which is a combination of the John Romero released maps, and the FreeDoom assets. So it’s not 100% the released version, it just looks that way.

I’ve gone ahead and created a qemu disk image (if you convert it, it does run on VMware, so probably far more 386 capable emulators than I can imagine), along with an old Qemu exe for some stand alone fun on archive.org.

There is no sound, nor music. I should look closer one day, and see if I can drive some direct music to an Adlib since it’s just IO ports, and maybe grab all the direct sound code from viti95’s FastDoom?

Anyways, it’s zeeDooM!.. on Xenix!

Playing Mel Kaye’s LPG-30 Black Jack

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Oh sure, the tale is as old as time itself, but how does one play the original Royal McBee LPG-30 game?

Something very Fallout’esque about this modern miracle of miniaturization!

Thankfully it’s all covered here: Using the SIMH LGP-30 emulator | Obsolescence Guaranteed

For the impatient the short story is this on a SIMH LGP prompt:

SET CPU LGP30
SET CPU TAPE
LOAD BKJCK.TX
SET CPU MANUAL
G -T 4500
g

Naturally you’ll need the game as well which is currently on FTP at ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de . Obviously thanks to our google overlords FTP is no longer integrated in the browser because the browser is only http, not gopher, telnet, ftp .. who needs to be universal?

You’ll find it in the /pub/cm/lgp30/papertapes/Games directory.

Important things is that your yes/no should be inputted as y’ or n’ The game will stop SIMH so you need to ‘g’ to start again.

FUN!

Although this comes up time and time again, I found this hacker news post, that actually has a picture of Mel, showing that he was in fact a real person.