A Software Safari in the Land of Intel

I think I seriously Crossed the Streams … and I liked it.

My favorite Tetris game is from the ~1990 MS Best of Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.x. It runs well on Windows 98 SE and even on Windows 7, but forget about it about on Windows 10. (Windows 10 doesn't do 16 bit apps.)

Unfortunately, I haven't had a machine on my desk which will run Windows 98 (real, virtual, or emulated) since I switched away from my Intel-based iMac to the Mac Studio two years ago.

Until now. (And no, I didn't buy an obsolete Intel box on EBay.)

The x86 emulator Bochs is described as the slowest of the popular emulators because it's the most accurate; I'll take that trade off. I installed Bochs on a Raspberry Pi 4B. Suffice to say having the 4B emulating processors popular 26 years ago (~12 iterations of Moore's Law) might be heavy lifting, but the machine is up to it.

So I now have Tetris (and Solitaire and …) on Windows 98 SE on an emulated Pentium MMX host on Bochs on X Windows on Linux on an ARM single board computer. I actually installed most of the games I had in CD images on disk; testing will continue. :-)

Footnote: The 2 GHz 8GB Raspberry Pi 4B with a 512 GB SSD is the size of 5 stacked CD classic jewel boxes.

It's a disk drive, but …

In the early 1980s when I first started working full time, I was in operations. I occasionally reorganized disk packs, which made me very aware that an IBM model 3330-1 drive held 100 MB of data and its double density cousin the 3330-11 held 200 MB.

Much later (in the Wikipedia era), I learned Digital Equipment Corporation had used 3330-1/3330-11 compatible drives on their systems as the RP04/RP06 drives.  

This weekend I went to install an emulated PDP-11/70 image, and discovered that while the legacy IBM and DEC systems may have used similar drives (in fact, the media on the real drives is interchangeable), how they use them isn't the same. If you write full tracks (13030 bytes, a number I can rattle off from memory 40 years later) as IBM users do, you can fit the aforementioned 100/200 MB per volume.  But DEC environments write 512 byte sectors (which imposes more overhead per track), and it reduces the 200 MB capacity to 176 MB.

This confused me no end when I was looking at the RP06 webpage and the "same" drive had different numbers than what I knew.

"It's an IBM model 3330–11 drive, but not as we know it, Captain."

A Pinball Wizard For the New Millennium

I've mentioned before that I've had a series of machines dedicated to arcade games running MAME. The current setup includes a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with:

• Logitech Gamepad F310
• Backup media
• Shared access to my desktop KVM, which in turn connects to my:
• Keyboard
• Trackball
• 27" ASUS monitor
• Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 THX speakers

Of course, 1980's video games don't deserve either the monitor or the speakers, but the Mac Studio doesn't mind sharing.

What I have not done in the years I've had these machines take the proper time learn about my hardware, MAME, or its games. (Or to use them!) But, finally, I've made progress on that in the past week.

First, I reread the GamePad documentation. I discovered it can do either XInput or DirectInput protocols, and I had in it the wrong mode (which disabled a button required to exit games!). I also didn't know the GamePad can swap the function of the left four-button D-Pad and the left analog joystick. (Many games play better with a joystick.)

Hardware problems do exist which don't have an easy fix, like using a Gamepad that has generic A-B-X-Y buttons for games written for specific controls. That means sometimes you "Cross the Streams". For instance, under MAME firing in BattleZone also turns the tank slightly before it fires! (Try aiming while anticipating that!) (BattleZone fixed by twiddling the game specific controls.)

Alas, I've also rediscovered a problem I knew in the 1980's and let fade from memory: I positively stink at video games, especially the ones that rely on twitch reflexes.

In other words: PBKAC

*sigh*

Arcade Emulators, Redux

Back when I owned an iPad 2 (acquired ~13 years ago), I bought Atari's Greatest Hits and also a Atari Arcade stand with a joystick. The stand connected to the iPad 2 with a Doc Connector, which speaks to how old the technology was.

I declared the iPad 2 both obsolete and slow after a few years; I replaced it with a 5th generation iPad, which alas uses a Lightning connector. The newer iPad is now also obsolete, but not so slow (or used enough) to replace it.   

I still have the Atari Arcade stand and its incompatible Doc Connector sitting around gathering dust. However, last week I discovered not only was Atari's Greatest Hits was installed on my current iPad (I didn't think the App was supported), but by using a Doc Connector <--> Lightning Adapter & an extension cable it will run the games with the Atari Arcade stand and its joystick. 

Cool!

Atari Lunar Lander running on my 5th Generation iPad

Sadly, my attempt to make the display bigger with the iPad HDMI adapter simultaneously with the Arcade stand did not work. 

I can now run arcade games on MAME on Linux, on Windows 95 virtual machines, and my iPad. Not that I ever get around to using any of them …

They Live!

TL;DR: New Raspberry Pi toys are alive after a month of torture.

My two new Raspberry Pi 5 units are alive! They are in Argon ONE v3 cases with M.2 NVME SSD drives connected via PCI-e.

Back at Christmas, I asked for a Raspberry Pi 5. My geeky spouse was happy to order it, but warned it was backordered. In March other vendors got it in stock, so she canceled the original order, and I ordered two from other sources.

Then I ordered cases.

The torture came from multiple sources:

• Argon 40 makes nice hardware, but their shipping department is … lacking. It was two weeks after they said it was shipping before the package was in the hands of the shipping company.
• The Argon 40 case would not power up when the NVME base is installed. (I finally jumpered the case to "always on" and poof it worked.)
• A stop gap NVME USB adapter (bought when the Argon 40 NVME cases were delayed) is not reliable.
• As Tom's Hardware describes the Argon 40 NVME SSD installation, it needs "a level [of] dexterity normally reserved for magicians [to] connect the PCIe cable to the PCIe connector on the Argon ONE V3 board."

The flaky NVME USB adapter was most the evil part, because it made both the Raspberry Pi 5 and the NVME SSD drive look suspect. That made me nervous about doing the tricky into-the-case install once the Argon 40 NVME cases arrived. However, the internal case installations are reliable.

The Raspberry Pi 5 with the NVME SSD speed is ~4 times as fast as a Raspberry Pi 4 with M.2 SATA SSD drives connected via USB, and ~ 1/8 the performance of my Mac Studio (which was ten times the cost).

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the various spare hardware I ordered during the adventure ...

Pro tip

When using a Raspberry Pi 5, using good heat sinks matter, as in a ~20º C (~35º C under load) difference.

The World's Most Expensive Arcade Emulator?

At least one of the three heads of xena, the warrior system now has multiple purposes (for a sufficiently loose definition of purpose).

Last year, I put RetroPie (a wrapper for MAME, the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator) on a dedicated Raspberry Pi 3B+, and DOSBox (a game oriented MS-DOS emulator) on a spare Raspberry Pi 4B.  (They could not share the same machine because RetroPie needs an older OS version, but the newer faster Raspberry Pi 4B needs a newer OS.) The MAME host was fine, and the DOSBox host worked reasonably well but was running flat out with newer games. 

I love Raspberry Pi units for their low power consumption, which is why I run a use one for our router and two others to run emulated IBM mainframes on them 24x7.  But none of those units clutter my office desk; the two game emulator hosts sit mostly powered off right under my nose.

xena is also on the KVM at my desk, but while she's physically huge she is completely out of the way under the desk.  When running Ubuntu Linux, she supports both RetroPie and DOSBox, and while she is ten years older than the Raspberry Pi units, she was built for top of the line performance, not cheap efficiency. That means that even today she can handle MAME more easily than any Raspberry Pi.

So yesterday both RetroPie and DOSBox got migrated to xena, freeing the two Raspberry Pi units for other nefarious purposes away from my desk. xena has purpose!

Been There, Broke that

 

Old (torn) Strap Top, Spare Strap Bottom

I've previously noted that I torque my right leg and thus the right foot strap tends to slip off my exercise bike. It happens enough I usually check (and have reset) it every time I use the bike.  Of course, this increases the wear on the pedal strap, and I discovered it was torn this morning.

This is no big deal because I've got spare straps. I grabbed one, verified it was a right (not left) strap, and went to install it.  that's when I looked at it closely, and realized it was not actually a new strap: it was already torn.

Time to check the rest of the inventory, more carefully, and toss any other dead straps.

(And yes, if you look carefully in the photograph, both straps are torn.)

Update: I had three open sets of straps, and all the right pedal straps were torn; I threw them all out. I had one sealed set, used the right pedal strap from that, and ordered two more sets.

Voodoo Hardware, Unearthed

Thermometer Used in My Previous Offices

OK this is truly strange.

This is the thermometer I used for years when I worked in an office to check the building temperature versus my perception. It's a WYSIWYG device; it shows the current temperature and that's it.

I haven't used it since I left Google, and of course the battery was quite dead. Today, I was curious about the temperature in my office closet and had a spare battery; I threw the battery in.

The thermometer displayed a reasonable temperature about a degree low compared to my office thermometers (one is my office thermostat and the other is a weather station with three remote sensors); that's fine, the two thermometers don't always agree with each other exactly.

But then things got weird.

I've flipped it over to see the back of the case, and when I flipped it back and could see the display again, the LCD suddenly had "Mem" in a corner.

(It has no buttons to turn on a memory function or any other display. It just doesn't.)

I power cycled it (by removing & replacing the battery), and it powered up with "Min" & "Max" also showing.

I power cycled it, and it powered up with a clock display (WFH?).

I power cycled it, and it powered up with a blank display.

I power cycled it, and it powered up flashing.

I power cycled it, and it powered up with just the current temperature.

I quit while I was ahead (or least breaking even). I set it aside, putting the thermometer in my (chilly) office closet, which was in fact the planned original destination.