RetroChallenge Winter Warm-up 2010

Okay, well there's another one down the crapper... RetroChallenge, I mean.

Before I move on to meatier stuff, I'd like to take this opportunity to 
clear my name with regard to the Hunt tournament... interlag is built into 
the system, people! It's a 33MHz 68040 processor trying to keep up with 
web, gopher, ftp and mail service, not to mention errant user scripts and 
a rather poorly designed user interface... so of course it bogs down from 
time to time. And believe me, it lags just as bad on the console as it 
does when your connected via dial-up... so let's stop using that as an 
excuse for inferior hunstmanship. Interlag is part of the hunt, just like 
dysentery is a force to be reckoned with in real-world warfare.

There -- I feel better!

Now for those who want to practice up and improve their chops, I'm going 
to leave the hunt server running 24/7 so feel free to organize your own 
matches among friends (or enemies)... if you feel confident enough to step 
into the ring for real, there's a game every Saturday from 10-11 pm UTC.

Okay... other stuff:

One of the secret projects I've been involved with is now out in the 
open... 300 Baud Magazine was largely the brainchild of RC big-wig wgoodf, 
who saw fit to encumber me with the production end of things. After a 
predictably rocky start, we've managed to get the first issue "put to bed" 
(do they really say that in publishing, or am I just making it up?). It's 
a bit of an oddity, I suppose, putting out a print-only publication in 
this whiz-bang modern age of flying cars and pdf files, but I suppose 
that's part of the charm -- bloody-mindedness.

It'll be interesting to see where it leads, but the initial response has 
been overwhelmingly enthusiastic (for the most part -- we have managed to 
generate a bit of hatemail, but I suspect that's par for the course).

The other "secret" project I've been working on is a home-kludged 
point-of-sale terminal and inventory control program for my wife's 
clothing shop. I'd actually started on it during last summer's RC, 
intending to write it in AppleSoft BASIC, but having gained some 
rudimentary proficiency in Bourne Shell scripting I decided to take that 
route instead... the nice thing about hacking together something like this 
rather than buying a proper system is that if you need to add or change 
features and functions you just do it. The other advantage is it cost 
nothing but my time (which isn't worth much anyway) and I learned a 
helluva lot in the process. It's funny... while I'm nowhere near close to 
growing a neck-beard, in the last year I've gone from fearing UNIX to 
absolutely loving it. I should have made this leap 20 years ago.

Oh yeah... my not-so-secret project: retrocomputing humiliation.

You know I really thought it would be an easy thing to get a trio of olde 
MS-DOS machines going and do something fun with them, but it turns out I 
was tragically mistaken...

The Epson Equity LT-286 laptop was probably the closest thing to a success 
story -- I managed to get it's hard drive working and was able to make 
boot disks and transfer files with the help of an olde Mac. Is that 
ironic? Maybe a little... I had a pretty good run with Windows 1.0, which 
I found surprisingly decent. Sadly I had mouse issues which precluded me 
from having any fun with GEM. Even managed to play of few of the games 
PrintStar was reviewing on his blog.

Speaking of PrintStar, he was kind enough to mail me boot disks for my 
recently-acquired Rainbow 100 (he is the world's leading authority on this 
particular machine, so I am told). Sadly the disks suffered almost 
immediate corruption due to a [possibly] malfunctioning RX50 floppy drive 
-- damn Digital for using such an obscure disk formatting! This machine is 
parked pending a better solution than having people mail me disks.

It's a beautiful machine and it seems to be in perfect working order... 
unfortunately until I come up with some way to get new software into it, 
it's just a boring office machine capable of doing spreadsheets, memos and 
little else... another one up on blocks for now.

Right back where I started, pretty much... don't get me wrong, I had fun 
failing to do stuff. It's a noble sort of failure... well, sort of...

...I'll be back!

Played Wolfie today... wasn't much of a game with both of us wandering 
around in darkness, but he did manage to kill me a couple of times without 
me even knowing he was there. I am truly terrible at Doom. I give up!

I may as well admit defeat on the DOS front as well... it's worn me down. 
Next RC I'm going back to my usual modus operandi of cobbling together 
some questionable Apple II programming... or maybe I'll finally listen to 
wgoodf and do some art... anything that doesn'ty involve MS-bloody-DOS.

I still have a two days left to make up for my pathetic showing... will a 
decent effort in the hunt get me off the hook? Seems a bit chintzy, but it 
may be all I take away from the current RC... sigh!

Well... I haven't exactly done anything worth mentioning today, so I'm 
instead going to talk a bit about rsayers' RetroChallenge entry.

Rob's gone and whipped up a multi-player version of the classic "Hunt the 
Wumpus" that runs on his gopher server. When you think of gopherspace 
(assuming you ever do), you probably don't think about interactive text 
adventures... but that's essential what this is, albeit in a very 
simplistic way. It certainly opens up a boatload of possibilities -- I'd 
like to think it might prompt others to look at ways to expand the 
limitations of gopher. But then I also like to think there are actually 
others using gopher... 

Go check it out -- it'll be worth it... and for extra kicks, give it a go 
in GopherVR.

So it looks like I'm pretty much hooped with the Rainbow 100, unless I can 
get my hands on PC with a 5.25" floppy drive that's got some sort of 
network capability... I'm sure I could dumpster dive one, but not being a 
PC guy, I have no idea what to look for...

It also seems like this is going to be a necessity if I'm ever to do 
anything with the IBM PC...

So much for that.

I did go walkabout with the Epson laptop today. Oddly enough the battery 
still holds a fair charge, so I was able to sit outside with it long 
enough to get bored and cold. This thing is seriously heavy -- I guess 
more luggable than laptop.

So anyway, it's looking like this RetroChallenge has so far been a bit of 
a bust... maybe I can get my shit together by the summer and really take a 
stab at this PC lark.

Oh, the trials and tribulations of retrocomputing!

The Rainbow 100 boot disks from PrintStar arrived today, which was 
somewhat exciting... actually getting to boot the Rainbow was even more 
exciting... having both disks almost instantly corrupted, not so much.

I can only surmise that the Rainbow's disk is faulty, as the disks were 
initially fine and only became corrupted after (ironically) I attempted to 
make backup copies... and no, I didn't accidentally format the disks or 
try to copy them onto themselves or anything like that -- thanks for the 
vote of confidence!

So now I'm back to square one with the Rainbow...

Feeling a little down, I decided to fire up the IBM for a little retro 
diversion. You can imagine my delight when it basically did nothing -- 
nothing on the screen; no grunting and scratching... no signs of life 
whatsoever except for the floppy drive LED coming on and staying on.

Last time I had the IBM on, I recall formatting a few floppies and 
horrible thought crossed my mind:

"Did I format the hard drive by mistake? Have I wgoodfed* the whole thing?"

No, dummy, you just left a blank diskette in the drive and the PC is 
trying it's damnedest to boot from it... what a n00b!

So I breathe a sigh of relief as I remove the diskette and flip the switch 
again...

CLUNK CLUNK WZRRK

The hard drive shudders to life and I gaze expectantly at the monitor...

Nothing! WTF? OH NOES!!!!1!1!11!1!!!1! ITZ BORKED!

So off I go to the interwebs and spend a good hour googling for possible 
explanations and/or remedies before a flash of inspiration hits:

Hey, isn't there a brightness knob on the front of the monitor?

Yup. What a tit I am.

Today's sermon concerns something I have wildly mixed feeling about: 
GopherVR.

GopherVR is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a gopher client that incorporates 
three-dimensional "virtual reality" navigation. Originally released as a 
semi-functional alpha in 1995 it's now been rediscovered and brought back 
to life by Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap fame.

I've known about GopherVR for some time and even attempted to use the 
Classic Mac version of old, but it wasn't until today that I read about 
the OS X release (still a semi-functional alpha) and got all 
hot-and-bothered again... 

What strikes me as rather odd about this whole concept is that it 
essentially circumvents what gopher is really good at -- presenting 
content without a lot of unecessary junk. On top of that, the virtual lego 
interface makes navigating tedious at best... sure, when you first "drop 
in" to a site it's kind of exciting, but then you're faced with something 
akin to an 8-bit version of Stonehenge whose megaliths are festooned with 
largely indecipherable inscriptions. To be honest, I found myself mostly 
using the text window to navigate and only occasionally glancing at the VR 
window as a distraction.

So what about my mixed feelings? In spite of how utterly pointless, 
perverse and counter-productive I find GopherVR, I just can't help but 
love it... there's something almost heart-rending about these colourful 
little villages of information all alone on a vast featureless plain. If 
you listen carefully, you can almost hear the wind whistling between the 
selectors...

Okay, enough! Got get GopherVR already, and give it a try...

   What a day
   What a day
   What a dull day

I've been feeling guilty about abandoning my MS-DOS machines out of sheer 
contempt, so I put in a few solid hours trying to get some sort of serial 
connection sorted out... turned out to be a boring and unproductive 
effort.

See, the problem is that I have a near-pathological aversion to soldering, 
so I delved into a big box of random cables and adaptors hoping some 
combination would work somewhere. Naturally I have no idea how any of 
these things are wired -- they could be printer cables; modem cables; 
custom cables for obscure equipment... who knows? I also have problems 
telling the difference between a simple gender changer and a null-modem 
adaptor. Because, you know, they look the same...

I know all this would be a lot easier if I had a multimeter or some sort 
of circuit tester thingy, but I'd really rather hoped to rely on dumb 
luck.

*yawn*

So today I spent a fair bit of time fiddling with the chat scripts on 
RetroNET... fixed the cleanup script so it deletes the chat file when 
everyone's left the room *and* found a way to deal with users who don't 
log off properly (I'll go to their house with a baseball bat). I also 
suspect having a script with an infinite loop in it could be a little more 
hazardous than I initially thought... I've got a pretty good idea how to 
deal with that, but at the moment I feel like I've done far too much for 
one day!

On a possibly more useful track, I putzed about with Lorance's Mac-based 
Tandy M10x file transfer utility... not actually having an M100, I let my 
Apple IIgs act as a stand-in. At this point it's able to receive text from 
the Apple and display it in a terminal window (though you can't save or 
edit yet) and upload files from the Mac to the Apple. Pretty cool stuff... 
and one more reason to invest in an M100 one of these days.

Haven't done much today... stayed home with the kids and watched lots of 
old cartoons on TV. Aside from that I TOTALLY THRASHED EVERYONE IN THE 
HUNT MATCH!!!!!11!1!1!!1!1!111!111

Oh, sorry about the caps -- totally unintentional ;-)

I half-heartedly fiddled about with the Epson today, but it was all for 
nought... I'm still down on MS-DOS. Fortunately I received a whole year's 
worth of Juiced.GS Magazine in the mail. Juiced.GS is, as far as I know, 
the only Apple II publication still in print. You can learn more here:

Anyway, suffice it to say I spent most of the day reading and not actually 
accomplishing anything -- but at least is kept me away from the horrors of 
DOS!

I buggered about a bit this morning trying to get some assorted utilities 
transfered to the Epson... turns out most of what I downloaded needs 
32-bit DOS -- who knew? Probably everyone but me. Anyway, I got completely 
fed up with it and turned my attention toward writing a chat program for 
RetroNET in sh... I have to say I really enjoy fiddling about with shell 
scripts (even if I'm not that good at it) -- to me it's a lot like BASIC; 
at least as far as you can spend all day bashing your head against 
something that seems like it should be dead simple.

In my case the problem was how to break out of an infinite loop without 
exiting the shell -- my 'elegant' solution was to slap together separate 
scripts for listening and posting and have them launch each other in the 
same shell and then trapping CTRL-C to break out of the loop...

If it were a BASIC program, every second line would be a GOTO. That's just 
the way I roll...

It's time to refocus... so far the only machine I've been able to get 
software onto is the Epson Equity laptop. PrintStar suggested I may need a 
real serial mouse for GEM to work instead of teh PS/2 thing I'm currently 
not using. This means going back to the Logitech Crampmaster trackball, 
but if that's what it takes...

I also have a couple of chicken/egg problems: I have a disk image for 
VisiOn OS, which looks like a pretty good (and really old) GUI, but the 
image is too big to transfer to the Epson and it's in a format my Mac LC 
475 can't deal with.

The Rainbow 100 is still waiting for the boot disks, which PrintStar has 
mailed -- hopefully they'll get here before the end of the month.

The IBM-PC also needs some way to get software to it... not having access 
to a PC with a 5.25" floppy drive, my options are limited. The PC also 
seems to be lacking any sort of comms program, so I might be S.O.L. on 
that front too...

In other words: no progress today.

I did bugger-all today except try out a few of PrintStar's games... and 
here are the requisite reviews:

SPACEWAR
This would be a really cool game if I had I didn't have the reflexes of a 
salted slug... probably even better on a real monitor as the Epson's mono 
LCD is fairly low-contrast and slow.

SOPWITH
Cult following, eh? I couldn't get the hang of the "reasonable controls" 
despite the game's "shallow learning curve" so I just kept crashing on 
take-off.

HARD HAT MACK
Are you serious? Even with the 286 kicked down to 8 MHz this thing was way 
too fast for me... shame, as it looks to be quite Donkey-Kong-ish.

ZZT
Pfft! Should have called it "Zzzzzz....."

Be warned, however, they're a little more verbose than mine ;-)

No, he's not really... still a dirty, cheating, haggis-faced bastard. But 
he was kind enough to provide me with the key to using GEM sans souris, as 
the Welsh say.

And for posterity, here it is in a nutshell:

Key          Action
===          ======
CTRL         toggle "keyboard mouse" mode
ARROW KEYS   move cursor 16 pixels
SHIFT+ARROW  move cursor 1 pixel
7            left click
9            right click
SHIFT+7      left click and drag

That works for GEM Desktop v1.2 on my Epson, anyway.

Okay, I'll admit here that I'm completely lost in the world of MS-DOS... 
it's taken me all day to install GEM on the Epson 286. After much 
rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, I finally figured out that the 
problem was with the *.BAT files -- many of the lines were missing the 
first character which resulted in DOS having a shit fit... eventually I 
determined that I could edit them in Windows' Notepad program and now have 
GEM running -- except for the bloody mouse!

And at this point I'm at a loss, as there seems to be precious little 
online documentation... anyone know the keyboard equivalent of the mouse 
buttons?

And naturally, if you need to install GEM...

So wgoodf demonstrated exactly what's wrong with the scoring of Hunt over 
at RetroNET... I was having a gay old time pummeling hunt n00b Andy 
Collins when in pops wgoodf for a few cheap kills and then buggers off... 
probably on no more than two minutes and yet he wins the match... why?

Well here's the thing: the Hunt score is more-or-less the number of kills 
you rack up divided by the number of times you get killed... and that just 
doesn't cut it... so from this day forth, Hunt standings will be based 
solely on the number of kills you amass during the game. So no more 
cheating for that haggis-faced bastard.

Okay, on to slightly less aggravating things: Windows 1.0

So I got a half-decent mouse hooked up to the Equity and gave Win1.0 a 
decent go this afternoon and oddly enough I was pleasantly surprised. The 
Equity is a 12MHz 286, so not exactly a speed demon, but I found it quite 
responsive... I was a bit surprised, however, that Windows 1.0 doesn't 
really do, um... windows. Sure it puts directory listings in resizable 
boxes, but you can't do a whole lot with them. It reminds me a fair bit of 
A2DeskTop for the Apple II, which, as it happens, is

Anyway, where was I... oh yes, Windows. While I'm not totally enthralled 
with it, it does seem like a perfectly serviceable OS for the Equity. I 
think I'm going to try a few others, however, and do a report on how they 
compare... or maybe I'll just download a bunch of games and fritter away 
the rest of the month.

Well, today was my first two matches in the Doom tournament and I'm sad to 
say that I did even worse than I feared... I was expecting to get pasted 
by gavo, but wgoodf? This is a sad day indeed...

Hopefully I regain a little of my shattered pride in tomorrow's Hunt 
match.

Just in case anyone else is looking for Windows 1.0...

Success!

Well... sort of.

I've installed Windows 1.0 on the Equity... took a few goes to find the 
right mouse driver, but it's there... working! My first time ever 
installing any sort of Windows on anything. I imagine everyone else out 
there is thinking "what a cone... I've done more Windows installs than 
he's had hot meals!"

Well, be that as it may, I'm pretty darned chuffed with this turn of 
events and if I can find a real mouse instead of the RSI-inducing 
trackball that I've got, I'll be a happy camper... oh so happy!

I haven't got an OS on the Epson 286 yet... I tried FreeGEM, but it won't 
install. Haven't been able to find suitable versions of OS/2 or BeOS and 
the handful of DOS clones available just don't get me hot'n'bothered... 
that leaves me with Windows 1/2-ish (not enough memory for 3.x) which is 
slooooowly dribbling down the torrent pipeline as we speak or Minix, which 
might be good for a larff or two.

What to do?

So who would have thought Epson would still have the setup files for a 
20-year-old laptop? Not me... in fact, I'd already been to their support 
site and got the manuals, but no software was available on the web. Then I 
happened across an old forum post about a similar model which mentioned 
that Epson has a public ftp site with some old stuff on it... well, it was 
there -- HALLELUJAH!

So now I have the Equity booting from its 20MB internal drive... that's 
just about full of stuff that doesn't look very exciting. Not sure what 
the next step is -- apart from deleting all of "Gail's" files -- I guess 
at should take a more serious look at what OSes are available for this 
machine. I'm leaning toward GEM, I think...

In other news, PrintStar feels sorry for me and is going to mail me some 
boot disks for the Rainbow 100.  I thought that was awfully nice of him, 
even though it could be considered a bribe and result in his immediate 
disqualification... I don't make the rules, you know.

Oh, wait...

So it looks like there's no way into the BIOS on the Epson Equity without 
the setup disk that originally came with it... what are the chances?

PrintStar, being the RetroBBS's resident Rainbow expert informs me that my 
model of Rainbow can't boot from the Hard Drive and that there are very 
few options for creating boot floppies, most of which involve hardware I 
don't have access to.

That leaves me with the IBM -- I need a way to get stuff in or out. I'm 
hoping some sort of direct serial connection will do the job... but I bet 
it's not going to be fun or easy.

It just occurred to me that this is the first RetroChallenge event for me that doesn't involve an 
Apple II project... have I lost me faith? Is this the start of a new life in the buttoned-down, 
grey flannel world of the PC? Stay tuned...

So today I spent a ridiculous amount of time making an MS-DOS boot disk 
for the Epson Equity... a process aggravated by the fact that the only 
thing I have to make 3.5" floppies on is a Mac LC475. Anyway, I got the 
job done and had my first encounter *ever* with the MS-DOS CLI. 

It's ugly.

But it's progress!

Sadly, I was unable to figure out how to access the BIOS on this thing, so 
I'm still sans hard drive... so it goes.

I also spent far too much time playing with Print Shop on the PC... I 
designed a completely awesome 2010 calendar but, lacking a printer, I'm 
afraid it's not going to do me much good at the moment.

A little bit of progress with the trio of old boxes currently straining my 
test bench, but what's really of interest today is that I totally cleaned 
up in the Hunt on RetroNET -- it was total carnage, really. I wiped the 
floor with the ragged carcasses of wgoodf, wolfie, urbancamo and lorance. 
In fact, it was such an unholy bloodbath that I'm a little embarrassed to 
speak of it. I only hope that a worthy contender will appear next week...

Please understand that I'm not gloating over my [easy] victory at all -- I 
simply mention it because it's historically significant and future 
generations of RetroChallengers will surely be curious as to how the barre 
was set so high, so early.

Ahem!

I forgot all about doing inventory at the shop today, so needless to say I 
din't get quite as much done as I had hoped... still, I managed to evade 
the boss/wife long enough to set a few things up on the bench and poke 
about in a very cursory way. Good news is things seems to be at least 
mostly functional... here are the details.

First up, the IBM PC 5150 -- I'm happy to say this thing seems to be fully 
functional. Mine has a single 5.25" floppy and an internal HDD with a 
menu-driven program selector and a handful of applications. It sounds like 
a gas-powered lawnmower when it's fully booted (takes a while). One 
problem I can see is that the keyboard layout is completely alien to me -- 
I have to look at the keys a lot more than usual. Another quirk is that 
the phosphor on the green mono monitor is so slow that you often have to 
wait for the screen to become readable -- which, in effect, makes the 
computer quite a bit slower than it really is. Hope that makes sense.

The Rainbow 100 (like pretty much all DEC gear I've ever seen) is yellowed 
like an old smoker's fingertips. Cosmetic issues aside, however, it seems 
to be a goer. Monitor's a little glitchy and the keyboard is filthy, but 
it does boot to a disk selection screen (which I assume is in ROM)... it 
sounds like it's got a HDD in it, but it could just be rodents of some 
sort. I don't have any boot floppies for this unit, and selecting the C or 
D drive doesn't work, so for now it's a bit limited... it does, however, 
have a built-in terminal mode, so there's a good chance I can get it going 
that way... hell, I'd be happy if all I accomplish with this machine is to 
use it as a terminal for my PowerMac ;-)

Now we come to the Epson Equity "laptop"... this thing is seriously huge 
and cumbersome! It's a 286 with 640KB of RAM, internal HDD and a 3.5" 
floppy drive... unfortunately it isn't seeing the HDD and I don't have 
anything to stick in the floppy, so all I've been able to do is not much.
Still, getting something on 3.5" floppy shouldn't be anywhere near as 
challenging, so of all the contenders, I'm glad this is the one that 
decided to be obstinate.

Tomorrow's the first round of Hunt on RetroNET, and I have a title to 
defend... better get some sleep now!

I haven't even got anything set up on the test bench and already I've hit 
a snag -- floppies!

I used to have a small collection of old MS-DOS and Windows floppies that 
I was planning to use this time round, but it looks like I gave it all 
away some years ago (probably thinking I'd never find a use for it). So 
that leaves me in a bit of a bind... of the three machines I wanted to 
focus on, two have only 360K 5.25" floppy drives (the Rainbow 100 and PC) 
and I have no working gear that can write those... the Epson luggable 
*might* be a bit easier to deal with as it has a 3.5" floppy, so I may be 
able to use one of my old Macs to make boot disks.

You know, I really have a lot of learning to do here... I have no idea 
what OSes are available for these things. I *think* GEM might be an option 
for the Rainbow... maybe OS/2 on the Epson... just speculation at this 
point, since I haven't actually got anything set up and powered on yet.

Just a test.

Still a few days before the RetroChallenge officially starts, but I 
thought it may be wise to give the matter a little thought... very little, 
actually.

I've decided to step outside of my comfort zone this year and see about 
some IBM/MS-DOS action. Last summer I picked up a truckload of vintage 
gear that I've yet to do anything with. Among the treasures are an Epson 
286 "laptop", an original IBM PC and a DEC Rainbow 100 -- all of which are 
systems I have virtually no knowledge of. I don't have any real solid 
plans beyond clearing enough bench space to set them up... we'll have to 
see what happens...