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.

Riding the Rail

The stairlift has proved useful. I wasn't sure it would, but two  round trips on it downstairs & back for meals me left feeling me less drained than I have been lately.  

In other words, it was not a really expensive mistake!

The top to bottom trip takes 105 seconds, I timed it when remotely parking it to charge in the front hall for the night. 

That space in the front hall will normally be more out the way than the landing park/charge space (even after they move it), but if we have actually have people using the front door that will change *real* quick.  

(It also can park/charge just outside my office, but that's only good if Katherine doesn't need the stairs. That works tomorrow morning, when she's gone to Aikido for five hours.)

MIssed it by that much!

The Stairlift is installed, inspected, customer ridden … and wrong.  

Per the diagram, when charging the chair on the landing it is supposed be almost in the corner, inline with the bottom half of the stairwell (effectively under the window in the photograph below). 

The charging station is actually almost in the exact middle of the landing, directly across from the center railing/pony wall.  In other words, it's a choke point. (It failed the laundry basket test.)  

I can't sign off on it (and thus will be locked out of it) until we have this resolved (or have a binding promise of same).

UPDATE: We paid ~86% of the total and I signed off on it.  They will be back next week to move the charger.

Stairlift as Designed With Offset Charge Station on Landing

Stairlift as Installed with Centered Charge Station on Landing

It's Here! It's Here!

The stairlift is being installed as I type. It's uglier than I expected. Mostly, it's heavier construction than I  anticipated (which is a good thing) and is effectively freestanding; it gets screwed to the stairs not to support it, but to simply keep it from shifting.

(When The Bomb gets dropped, you can add the stair lift along with Cockroaches & Keith Richards to the list that will be still be around afterwards.) 

Almost … almost

The dumb waiter (AKA the stair lift) should arrive at the vendor (Mobility Concepts Inc.) today; they called this morning and scheduled the install for next Friday, the 13th. They start at 8 AM; it should be all installed and inspected by the state at ~ 1 PM.

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*