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Elite: Dangerous is going to get made!
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More improvements to the Commodore Amiga emulator, Janus
As I had mentioned earlier there is this great HTML5/Javascript Amiga emulator Janus.
And now, it supports loading a bunch of games & demos from the page! Â Making this the easiest way to enjoy the best of the early 1990’s on Chrome.
Project-X
The available games are:
- Agony – Psygnosis 1992
- Alien Breed -Team 17 1991
- Alien Breed Tower Assault – Team 17 1994
- Another World - Delphine – U.S. Gold 1991
- Blood Money - DMA Design 1989
- Body Blows Galactic  - Team 17 1993
- Dyna Blaster  - Ubi Soft 1992
- Lotus Turbo Challenge 2Â -Â Gremlin 1991
- Pinball Dreams - DICE 1992
- Prince of Persia  - Domark 1991
- Project-X – Special Edition 93 Â -Â Team 17 1993
- Rick Dangerous  –  Firebird 1989
- Shadow of the Beast II Â -Â Â Reflections 1990
- Superfrog  -  Team 17 1993
- Turrican II – The Final Fight   - Rainbow Arts 1991
- Wings of Death  – Thalion 1990
And you can enjoy it here.
Yuhong Bao’s post on the OS/2 2.0 fiasco
You can check it out on his blog, here.
A Commodore 64 vs the exciting world of tapes…
Ah, yes who doesn’t love the old world of the mid 1980’s that was dominated by the Commodore 64?  Naturally I had one, and like many people in North America, I had the incredibly “fast” and reliable 1541 floppy disk drive. Unfortunately, in Europe it seems that the floppy drive addon was actually quite rare.  Many of the systems opted to go with the substantially cheaper, and slower 1530 tape drive.
My only real exposure to the Commodore tape drives was with old PET computers in my grade school library where I’d write meaningless BASIC programs, and save them to tape. Â But at home I had a floppy drive, so moving programs around never was possible. Â Not that it really matters.
So while on vacation in Europe, Lorenzo managed to find this awesome score, a Commodore 64 with a tape drive, joysticks and BOXES, yes boxes of tapes!  All for €20!
20€ of Amazement!
So we get the Commodore home, fire it up and.. none of the tapes work.  Well completely many have these turbo boot loaders that load up, but from then on the screen flashes, the tape runs out and nothing happens.  Now granted all of this equipment has been stored in a garage for a decade (or two?) so it does look like the entire lot has bit rotted.  Going through some major effort we did find out that there were a few programs written to let you visualize the tape data to adjust the read/write heads, or even just determine if the tapes were just plain bad.
Then looking around some more online we pretty much come to the conclusion that we will need some kind of special cable to connect to the Commodore 64, and a Pentium 150-200Mhz class machine (no faster, no slower) to emulate a tape drive and feed the programs to the computer.
With everything looking down, we suddenly have a breakthrough by finding a Windows program that can convert a tap file, to an audio WAV(e).  Luckily Lorenzo has a working tape deck, new tapes, and a CD Player, so we burn the WAV to a CD-ROM, then record the CD Audio to a Tape, and amazingly, it worked!
Donkey Kong!
So was it worth it? Â For 20 Euros it was cool, it is kind of neat being able to play it on the old ‘iron’ again. Â And a joystick was kind if a fun throwback vs the modern era of gamepads, I guess since we wound up using tap images converted, emulation would just be plain easier. Â And it is worth noting that the majority of the joysticks that we got didn’t work properly. Â Old things eventually die out.
But just as there is companies out there still making floppy drives, I’m sure someone is out there making a digital USB Joystick..
Happy New Years!!!
From Italy!
Virtual Floppy Drive – Part III – Fun with HxC
(note this is a guest post from Tenox)
As promised in a post about Floppy Disk Emulators, here is a review of HxC Floppy Disk Emulator. I ordered it from Lotharek via eBay. Initially stuck in Polish post made it just before the weekend! This made my Christmas gift as I had a lot of fun playing with it. The unit comes with two front panel stickers, one grey and one black to match your equipment type. Quite nice touch. I choose grey as most of my units are of this color. I have to say the LCD screen makes a modern touch to an old 286 machine!
286 machine with HxC installed in 3.5″ floppy bay.
Initially I have stumbled upon a lot of issues. Floppy disks are not easy as it seems. No wonder I had so much trouble with the real ones. I spent a lot of time experimenting with ID jumpers and correct BIOS settings. The unit only worked on ID3A but I can probably attribute it to a weird machine. Then I had problems converting my raw images to HFE format. The main project developer helped me a lot on their forums.
HxC Software used to load and convert disk images. The latest beta version includes a Track Analyzer!
Once I got a grip how to do it semi correctly I was able to torture the machine with bunch of operating systems it has never seen before. Â Let’s go directly to the screenshots!
QNX 2 worked just fine!
Minix 2.0 also loaded without problems.
So did SCO Xenix 2.3
SCO Xenix 2.3 boot complete.
Microsoft Xenix also briefly saw daylight.
MS Xenix switched to CGA mode and died.
Guess which operating system is this?
Coherent 3.10 boots correctly as well.
PC/IX booted to Stand Alone Shell.
ELKS
VenturCom VENIX/86
I guess 640 KB is NOT enough for everybody.
This pretty much concludes operating systems for 286. If you have more let me know! I will try 386/486 operating systems in a separate post.
So how does HxC works for an end user? You store floppy disk images in a special format called HFE as files on an SD card. HFE files can be made by a virtual floppy disk emulator + rawrite, reading and imaging in an existing floppy, or converting existing floppy images. The list of supported disk images is quite impressive. The conversion however sometimes fails. It detects a wrong format and you have to change file extension or it completely screws things up making 64 “sides” to a floppy disk. Most if not all these have been fixed in the latest beta version of software, but you need to know about it.
When you insert the SD card to the emulator it will read the file list and allow you to switch between different floppy drives on the fly. Interestingly you can mix and match different floppy disk types on the same SD card. So you can have bunch of 3.5″ or 5.25″ disk in different files. Each HFE file contains specific settings for the emulator including the floppy interface type. The operating systems I’ve tried above ranged from 360k, 720k, 1.2MB and 1.44MB images stored on the same SD card. However changing floppy disk type in the BIOS was necessary for the images of different format to load correctly.
One extremely interesting feature is a host control software, that let’s you manage the floppy disks from inside the machine where HxC is attached. Sort of like VMware tools. The software is available for Atari, Amiga and Amstrad CPC. Unfortunately not for PC so I could not test at this time.
Because of the pain with formats, errors in conversions and confusion about some settings I can only give it 8 out of 10 for ease of use. So let’s conclude:
- Packaging: excellent
- Quality of hardware: excellent, LCD panel with menu is invaluable!
- Software: OK with improving tendency in the beta version
- User manual: OK but could be better
- Compatibility: excellent! (see above)
- Ease of use: excellent once you get grip on things
- Value for money: excellent!
- Total: very very good!
If you have a large collection of floppy disk images or you maintain a bunch of old machines that rely on floppy disks to work – get HxC quickly. It may save your life.
Updates: Venix/86 and ELKS, Tried OS/2 V1.0 and 640 KB RAM was not enough to boot.
Still missing: Microport SYSV/AT
Merry Christmas!
And all that jazz …
I came across the “Super 8 bit Fireplace” on flipboard… Kind of funny but with all the environmental laws going nuts about fires, I guess a fireplace is now.. retro hardwood(hardware) in action!
Best wishes all!
Like to save old crap (Errr, I mean vital data?)
Well as the end of the year approaches, and in the USofA everyone looks for taxible donations, or just the holiday spirit of giving, here is a humble suggestion:
archive.org
Yep, the guys who run the wayback machine, and all kinds of other nifty stuff (like the usenet archive) are running a fundraiser to get four petabytes of storage. Â So far they are one down, three to go.
If you can, donate here.
FWIW I sent them $20 USD.
AmiDevCpp
Antoni sent me a link to this project, AmiDevCpp. It is a nice little wrapped up IDE for cross compiling applications for the following platforms:
- AmigaOS (m68k)
- AmigaOS4 (PPC)
- MorphOS(PPC)
- AROS (i386, ppc and x86_64).
Naturally it doesn’t work correctly on Wine.. .Oh well, but for you Windows users out there that haven’t installed Cygwin this is an easy way to cross build stuff for the ancient Amiga platform.
Apparently he was able to rebulid the infamous aclock using this cross compiler…
I got mentioned on Toasty Tech!
Right here! Â Toasty Tech for those who don’t know has been collecting various screen shots of GUIs like since forever!
So it is kind of cool that I got mentioned over there, and for OS/2 of all things..!
Anyways, I thought it was worth mentioning.
Other than that, it is the prophesied end of some ancient calendar. If only it had any significance other than ‘happy cycle’.. I guess it is appropriate this being the ‘holiday’ season… Which for many may feel like the end of the world, but as they say, life goes on.