retrocomputing – The Roohr Way

The Cybergypsies (Indra Sinha, 1999)

If you were to list the great popular historical books of the computer world, you’d probably hear The Cuckoo’s Egg, Soul of a New Machine, and then a smattering of books by Wired Magazine regulars, like Cyberpunks and Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Fire In The Valley maybe, though I imagine Cromemco gets less relevant every day. What I rarely see recommended, however, and what I think belongs on the podium along with Kidder and Stoll, is Indra Sinha’s The Cybergypsies.

The gibsonian flair of the first few chapters creates the impression of a novel, and I think this confused some readers. I had to check out several facts and, low and behold, they turned out true. Eventually I realized “Bear,” the narrator, was Indra, and it’s a memoir. Shades was a real place; you can see a YouTube video playing back a recorded (and very chaotic) session. What else confused people? The terminology is probably period, but it’s a period that was over when the book was published-it’s a story of the modem world and what we would now call BBSs running MUDs.

The characters are drawn with attention to their humanity. It would be easy to turn this story into a people zoo, but Bear never does, instead opting for empathy even when he’s relating outrageous behavior and hilarious drama. In a different era, with a different pen, it might have been delivered as a very long forum post. Nowdays, perhaps as the sort of YouTube essay Folding Ideas produces. Because it really gets to the heart of what it means to be terminally online. Sinha was terminally online before that was even a thing.

You also need to realize that Bear’s got a truly fantastical imagination, and this may have rubbed literal-minded hackers the wrong way. He describes playing online MUDs with a richness that helps justify the outrageous price tag of being online in those days. There’s one scene where you suddenly realize he’s playing Colossal Cave Adventure and you almost don’t recognize it because his vivid description doesn’t betray the spartan description actually given in the game. Indeed, it’s a really interesting appraisal of text adventure games in general and the power of imagination.

So why don’t we hear about it now? Well, for one thing, it’s got a slur in the title. That makes it a bit awkward to bring up. In 1999 the dot-com crazy world wasn’t interested in a book about BBSing; compare similar books and they’re associated with favored technologies like Unix and TCP/IP. It wasn’t associated with any big exciting well known company either. Also, the original dust jacket (NSFW) features a pixelated, suggestively posed woman. It is a mature adult story but not lurid; the cover probably didn’t do it any favors in getting a more serious audience. Oh, and it’s not entirely optimistic, indeed showing the dangers of being terminally online, but again it’s not sensationalized. A lot of reviews at the time latched on to this, selling it as a bit of a horror or anti-tech story. But I really don’t think it earned that appraisal, I just don’t think we had the words we now have to describe what he was writing about.

(Bonus: interview with the author https://in.rediff.com/news/2007/aug/22inter.htm)

The Modem World

When I was younger, I occasioned to write an essay about the history of the internet. I don’t have a copy in front of me, but I do recall that it ended up being practically a book report on the classic Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner and Lyon. It gave a strong account of the technical and social factors that took us from ARPANET to TCP/IP. But apart from an excellent digression into Email, it’s sparse on the question of what factors outside of the specific technology BBN was building lead to the internet we knew in the aughts. It was a fine enough essay, I’m sure I received a passing grade for it, but I think my teacher actually had the right idea that I should have instead focused on the movie War Games.

But now, a student in a similar situation wouldn’t have to settle for inferring people’s understanding of computer networks from a movie; now they could pick up The Modem World and get a serious historical account and analysis of the proto-internet, the internet shaped thing that existed before TCP/IP became the dominant communication protocol.

While the notion of BBSs isn’t new to me (I watched the BBS Documentary, read a bunch of Textfiles.com, and frequent SDF which is BBS adjacent) The Modem World was fresh in two important ways: insight and rigor.

Most accounts of the BBS world tend to be primarily sources; people telling their own stories. You’ll find them in the pages of 2600 and the like. The Modem World goes many steps further in teasing out the statistics, explaining how affordances shaped culture, and related the history to present concerns. In this regard it’s a standout book, comfortably sitting alongside a good Platform Studies volume, or Exploding The Phone.

As far as Rigor goes, look no further than the absolutely lavish end notes for a bibliography of BBSing. Never satisfied to rest on a hand wave, the author is relentless in finding actual contemporary sources for so many assertions. I thought that it was going to rely much more heavily on the BBS Documentary than it ultimately did, because the Author dug up so much contemporary material! I appreciate the serious treatment as opposed to what frequently is the type of rose-tinted retro tech light journalism you see out of outfits that shall remain nameless.

Name Collisions in EV Nova

EV Nova was a formative game for me. One thing I noticed about it, and wanted to document, was that there are a lot of what I’ll call name collisions: names that are almost the same but refer to different things. Did I miss any? Leave a comment, I’ll add it.

Temmin Shard / Shard (faction)

LPAD station, where Temmin Shard takes you

Temmin Shard is a character in a side quest. However, “Shard” is also used to describe a faction formed when you win the Fed campaign and everyone else comes after you.

Krane / Kane (incl. Port Kane, Kania, and the Kane band)

Earth, with Kane band, but also a place where you might encounter Krane

Omata Kane invented galaxy-spanning hypergates and a bunch of things are named Kane in her honor, including earth’s artificial ring, the Kane Band. There’s also a Port Kane in the Kania system. Krane is the sociopath leader of the secret fed faction that you work for in some campaigns. Very different people.

Glimmer / Gli-Tech / Gli-Tech-Nia

*Home of the GLi-Tech corporation (formerly known as GLiMMER until the discovery of the Glimmer system)*…

Both are companies that make missiles. Huh? Gli Tech also owns an entire planet, called Gli-Tech-Nia. But wait, Glimmer is also the name of a star system. Surely this piece of fluff for Gli-Tech-Nia clears it up:

Associated Guild Of Free Traders / Free Traders

Two opposing pirate factions that fly the same ships. One is hostile by default, the other isn’t. No idea which one though; and feds don’t care which one you blow up either. According to Word Of Atmos this is intentional.

Polaris / Polaron Cannon / Polaron Torpedo

Polaris are one of the game’s major factions. Polaron refers to a Federation weapon. But the weapon is pink… the color of Polaris technology. And the Polaris have a Polaron Torpedo which is pink but apparently unrelated. Maybe Polaron refers to some specific scifi gubbin, but then that’s still colliding with the Polaris.

Vella / Vell-os

Vell-os are a race of psychic transhumans and mostly extinct, Vella are a neighboring Arouran subfaction.

Wraiths / Wraith Cannon / Wrathii

Wrathii fired from a Wraith cannon (no relation)

Wraiths are a race of sentient space-monsters, Wrathii are pink projectiles that the Polaris fire out of a Wraith Cannon. Also the Wraiths are right next to the Polaris.

TOWCB / TCTLIDS

The Ones Who Came Before are your standard ancient race of aliens trope, TCTLIDS are The Creature That Lives In Deep Space harvested for drugs, an abandoned plot hook that somehow remained in the timeline preamble.

iMac resto

The iMac G3 is, to my nostalgic eyes, the most beautiful computer ever designed. So when I saw one lying there at the dump I had to take it, to see if it would boot. It did. It hadn’t been used since ’06 and was slightly beat up. I took pictures while restoring it, but much of this post is from memory.

When I found the machine it was booting OSX, and absolutely dog slow. It’s crazy how much faster SSDs have made computing; we used to wait. I posted on /r/vintageapple and got tons of help picking a hard drive replacement. Of course I found out that you pretty much need a working disc drive to boot one of these things, so I picked one of those up on ebay.

Replacement hard drive: adapter in an adapter

Old hard drive above. Adapter-adapter needed a bracket.

In order to get the thing apart you need to first remove the plastic on the bottom, then remove the EMI shield which is a metallic mesh under the plastic. It requires some finicky movements and faith that it’s not all going to fall apart on you. Also screws will try to get lost, so be careful about that. I was able to recover all of the screws once I removed the drive cage; I even had some extra!

The easiest way to disassemble it was face-down. The disk drive is easy enough to take out, but to take out the hard drive the entire cage (metal, at the bottom) needs to be replaced.

Once the thing was put back together with a new hard drive and disc drive, I installed OS9Lives’s version of OS9 from a burned CD. I was then able to load games on via a USB key!

Return of the Flash Games

The Emularity and Ruffle teams have finally done it – Flash is running natively in the browser. No more flash plugin. You can play flash games and watch flash animations on archive.org. Flash defined internet content in the mid 00s. It has been effectively dead since the introduction of the iPhone, and to really enjoy it you need something with a mouse, or a very large tablet I suppose. Actually playing flash has gotten progressively harder, until now.

During the aughts, these where some of the games I played the most. Call it casual if you want, but these where the games you could play on school computers, that you didn’t need to buy. You could discover new ones every day. By timing alone, at least, they’ve ended up meaningful to me.

Heli Attack 2 – Chris Rhodes & Chris Hildenbrand

This is a great example of how the mouse was used for what you might call a sidescroller/shooter. Rather than negotiate a level with pitfalls, the task of your Mario-like character is to dodge incoming bullets, sort of like a bullet hell shooter. It’s also got an array of different creative weapons, each accompanied by a cool robotic voice announcing it when you pick it up. It never leaves this basic loop, spawning helis as fast as you can kill them. Once you get good at it, you can keep playing it for quite a long time. You can play it here.

Fancy Pants Adventure – Brad Borne

The game shows off its non-flat terrain very early

https://archive.org/details/fancypantsadventure_202011
This game made a huge splash when it was released. The norm for sidescrollers since eras where denoted by the number of bits systems has was for side scrollers to be very similar to Mario and have the following characteristics:

Maps made out of a tile grid
Maps defined by axis-aligned bounding boxes
Movement defined by walking and jumping.

Fancy Pants adventure subverts these expectations while still sticking to the intuitive sensibilities of a platformer:

The levels are defined by smooth shapes much larger than what you’d expect in a tile map.
The maps use curved surfaces rather than straight lines or uniform curve sections.
In addition to walking and jumping, you can build up momentum and slide

But oh man, the style. This game dripped style. The lush animation, everything about it. I don’t think I ever made it past the first level. I didn’t care. When this came out it felt like it injected new life into the platformer formula. I think Flash’s vector nature really played a role here – it could do things you just couldn’t do on an NES. You can play it here.

Defend your castle – XGen Studios

The flash era was defined by a callous disregard for the lives of stick figures

This is a game that really only works with a mouse, and also illustrates the obsession with violence against stick figures. The figures attempt to knock down your castle and your defense against them is to click and drag them violently into the air so that they splatter down on the ground into a puddle of blood. Eventually you get enough points and abilities to take stick figures into your castle and turn the game a little bit more into a tower defense setup. You might be able to get this working on a very large tablet, but really the interaction is tailored for the mouse. The graphics are basic and make heavy use of gradients and stick figures – both flash tropes. Yet here I am in 2020, actually getting sucked into it. It’s a very well crafted dopamine loop. Launching the little bastards with your mouse is satisfying, mastering doing it quickly before they get to your gates is rewarding, and the relief of having your job automated by a bunch of archers is even more rewarding. You can play it here.

FlashTrek: Broken Mirror – Vex Xiang

https://archive.org/details/flashtrek-broken-mirror

As a big fan of the Escape Velocity series, Broken Mirror kept me playing for many hours. It’s a space trader game set in the star trek universe. Well, the Trek’s mirror universe-the one where everyone is the baddies. It’s the rare fan game but it fills the exact kind of niche that you’d love to see for that setting. It’s also absolutely dripping with humor, especially inside fandom jokes. As a fan work it is monumental. I’d daresay that until Star Trek Online was a thing, it was the definitive star trek video game experience. The open world of the space trader genera fits perfectly with the open feel of Star Trek. And really, having a big open world RPG on a platform that was mostly used for single-screen arcade games is quite an accomplishment. It plays at breakneck speed on modern systems, but you can play it here.

Playing a 90s web game in the 20s

The first videogames I recall playing where applets on the early web. I’ve decided to explore what I can find of these games on the Internet Archive. I’ll leave notes on how to run them yourself and where to find them so you can follow along.

The Pantheon of game sites was, more or less Alfy.com, Ezone.com, and MoFunZone.com. When the flash era hit, we got Newgrounds, Addictinggames, and ArcadeTown.

This is the earliest capture of alfy.com, from 1999. It’s not the screen I’m most familiar with, but I’m curious to see which games are present already. It appears to be constructed entirely of image maps, so we need to inspect it to find any of the links.

Tail Gunner, Javanoid, Missile Commando, Urbanoids and Asteroids I definitely remember, and we’ll certainly get to them later. This landing page from May 2000 is closer to what I remember:

I’m sure the layout is somehow janked up by my up-to-date browser, but that is the gist of it. Some websites used to be like this. The different clickable sections are sharply rasterized images. There are probably a bunch of things on here which I’ll explore later, but most of my time was spent in the arcade tab.

At just the right resolution, the utterly noisy but correct layout is evident (this is the space games section. I recommend checking these pages out; static screenshots don’t do it justice. Everything is animated. I already recognize a ton of classics just from the little portal views.

Let’s try some games. You’ll need to install the JDK so that you have appletviewer available as a command. To do that in Ubuntu, use

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk

In order to make these games run in appletviewer, you need an HTML file that calls them. When I run appletviewer, I get

java.security.AccessControlException: access denied ("java.lang.RuntimePermission" "accessClassInPackage.sun.audio")

Good to know that this was discussed on Usenet in 2001.

Ok, so let’s install virtualbox, download windows 98, and give it a shot!

I needed to enable virtualization in my BIOS to make virtualbox work. Also I set up the good display driver because when I tried it initially the colors weren’t right.

But the display driver wouldn’t work! The radio button sets it to the driver, but it still thinks it’s disabled. Bummer. I also tried installing ie6 with winetricks, but it was too unstable to use

Let’s try windows XP! We’ll apparently need the JVM. In order to get that on there, I burned a virtual cd which seems to be the easiest way to get files into your virtualbox PC. And it works! At least for some of the games. Check out this one on the author’s site: http://www.javaonthebrain.com/java/warp15/

This had the best graphics and probably made the strongest impression on me. The green/purple stuck with me enough that it’s the base color scheme for my 40k army now.

I probably haven’t played this game in twenty odd years. Does it hold up?

Well, the graphics are amazing. The author used POV Ray to make vibrant raytraced sprites that look great even in 2020. But the gameplay… Well, it’s impossibly hard. The controls don’t work quite right, you can only have two shots on screen at a time, collisions are wonky, and it’s very easy to accidentally slam into a wall and die.

Maybe I’ll return to get some other games working, maybe I won’t. I suspect that the problem with other games is that the assets aren’t in the archive, and if a more current source could be found they’d work just fine. Also some may require newer versions of Java. I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. May I recommend SuperKid.

Atomic PI emulation setup notes

I mostly game on PC, but at one point I set up a retropi for emulated console multiplayer. Mario Kart ran pretty well (sprites and all!) but BattleTanx wasn’t performing. That’s the N64 game that I probably played the most of, and it’s cracking good multiplayer, even at the 9FPS that the Pi could manage. That was sort of the experience I was after though, so I went looking for something a bit more powerful.

Enter Digital Loggers. There was a kickstarter for a board called the Atomic Pi. It’s about the size of two Raspberry Pis and has an Intel Atom processor rather than the Pi’s ARM core. It’s still smaller than any one of the various consoles I plan to emulate on it, which is a nice bonus.

For this setup I got the Atomic PI with the small breakout board that provides a (more or less) standard adapter plug. I’m using this power brick and this multi USB hub (because there is only one USB port on the board.) It comes with a soldered-in EPROM you can boot from and write an OS to, but OSs on the eprom are painfully slow so I would recommend installing your OS to a MicroSD card like you would with a RasPi. I’m using Lubuntu, and it’s performing pretty well considering the big screen it’s on, I’m sure your favorite lightweight distro will also do well. You’ll want something that ships with a desktop for emulation though

Back to Battletanx: To get it running in Mupen64Plus (which you can install with apt along with a barebones GUI for opening ROMs and managing settings) with Rice video you need only change the config in one way:

ScreenUpdateSetting = 7

There are some glitches (the button that makes the flame tank fire sideways and makes the FLP-E tank flip get stuck) but it’s mostly playable. And Mario Kart still runs great.

OS9 on Ubuntu

The first thing to know about emulating macs from The Before Time is that if you where using Classic Mac OS at the turn of the millennium, you probably used an iMac G3. This machine was ubiquitous-at least at schools in my area. This machine used a PowerPC chip rather than a 68k, so the emulator you want to use is SheepShaver. If you want to use a 68k there’s Basilisk II, which has a very similar setup, and just needs to be installed via apt.

In order to run SheepShaver you’ll need to download some additional stuff, so you might as well do it up front. Redundant Robot has become the de-facto distributor of these files (email me if this ever goes down, I’ll host’em.) Specifically you’ll want the New World ROM and A pre-made bootable OS9 install.

Next you’ll want to compile a copy of SheepShaver. This is thankfully very easy thanks to StackOverflow:

Install dependencies:

sudo apt install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev x11proto-xf86dga-dev libesd0-dev libxxf86dga-dev libxxf86dga1 libsdl1.2-dev osspd git

clone the macemu repo from github:
git clone https://github.com/cebix/macemu.git

Build SheepShaver:

cd macemu/SheepShaver make links cd src/Unix/ ./autogen.sh make -j3

Install the binary into your path

sudo cp SheepShaver /usr/bin

Run Sheepshaver with

sudo padsp SheepShaver

This will get you to the setup menu. In the Memory/Misc tab, add the new world ROM file. Then, back in the Volumes tab, add the .img file you downloaded, and create a new (big) empty volume to store your apps. Next add a valid directory that you do not care about because it will be consumed by sudo-enabled fire as “unix root.” Now you should be able to boot into the machine by hitting “start.”

In order to get apps working, you’ll generally want to first get them out of your unix folder and only then unpack them (most vintage mac files are in Stuffit format, so you’ll want a copy of Stuffit Expander to be your first install.)

Unfortunately, the Redundant Robot image is too small to fit many apps. What you’ll want to do is make your own image. Make a blank disc with SheepShaver’s interface download this disc (you’ll need an account.) In order to boot from a file, it needs to be read-only (in fact it will render any writable file that it tries to boot from unbootable.) But you need to run SheepShaver as root. So to render the file unwritable to root, you need to make it immutable with

chattr +i ~/Downloads/Mac_OS_9.0.4.toast

Then add it to the boot list and it’ll boot to the installer.

SYLP is dead, long live SYLP

emf.sdf.org, or “The Shipyard Liberation Project” hasn’t been updated in years. This is mostly because I haven’t had anything to add to it-I think I got every last graphic I could, contacted everyone who’s email address still worked, etc. I’d also all but run out of space for my SDF account (I even had to host the 3d models from Ares on my own site.) Somewhere along the line, I lost access to my SDF account, but by then I was using Unix every day so I didn’t really miss it.

Fast-forward to now, I’ve realized that the fine folks at the Internet Archive have a sweet upload utility that allows you to upload whatever files you want, and (critically) add metadata to them so that some sort of context can be preserved. So I’ve uploaded those files to the archive, you can enjoy them here. That puts out the “what if SDF deletes my account” fire, but some stuff remains:

Files with appropriate licenses ended up on OpenGameArt rather than on SDF because I figured more people would see/use it. They ought to be mirrored on the archive.
Someone from the Ambrosia forums kindly ripped the graphics from a TC called “The Novel One.” I’ve got the graphics somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find the thread.
The “Open Source TC” had some assets at some point, and the notion was that anyone could take it and run with it. I’ve never run across a copy of it (it was hosted on DropBox of all places)
The list of missing shipyards on the SDF site still stands – if anyone out there has any of those graphics, I’d love to see them!

Estes and Escape Velocity’s Rocket Design

I first noticed while thumbing through old Estes ephemera on this site when I saw it staring me in the face:

Snippet from the 1990 estes catalog — 1990 Estes Catalog

Estes is a company that has, for a great many years, built and sold flying model rockets-as in, you build them, stick a solid fuel engine in the back, and launch it into the sky. It’s a good hobby for someone who’s a fan of spaceships. The same camp where I learned the art of model rocketry was where I found out about Escape Velocity, which brings us back to the point. If you’re an Escape Velocity or EV Nova fan, you probably recognize that as fictional space pirate “escort Frigate” the Atinoda Kestrel.

A diagram of the Kestrel, with labels for flavor — The Kestrel

Probably the most iconic ship from that game, it made its way into EV Nova as a post-game bonus option and NAEV as its poster-ship. Matt Burch, author of Escape Velocity, had this to say in an Ambrosia Times interview:

Ambrosia Times: […] Is it true that some of the graphics in EV are the result of a model rocketry hobby?

Matt Burch: Well, I used to build model rockets when I was little, and a couple of the ship designs in EV are loosely based on my memories of some of my favorite Estes kits.

That confirms my suspicions. So, which other ships are based on Estes rockets?

From the 1990 catalog, we’ve got these two:

Cropped catalog page of an oddly configured two-finned rocket — Estes Star Seeker

EV graphic from Evula.com — EV’s Executive Transport

Clipping from Estes catalog — Estes Strike Fighter

EV graphic of the lightning — EV’s Lightning Fighter

I’d seen the Rebel Cruiser described as having “babylon 5 roots” but I think its lineage is very clear from this:

Screen from a 90s Estes catalog — Estes Starseeker

I’m less sure about the Clipper (which I think is the astro blaster.) The configuration is the same (two back-swept wings with giant winglets and canards in the front.)

Astro Blaster from the 92 catalogue — Estes Astro Blaster

Screen from Escape Velocity — Clipper from Escape Velocity

There are two possibilities for the Manta, and I’m not sure which one it really is, despite it sharing the name with one of the rockets. Maybe a combination of both:

Manta from 1994 Estes Catalog — Estes Manta (’94)

So, several of the ships in EV share more than a passing resemblance to Estes rockets. There may be others that I’ve missed, or other sources of inspiration. I’d love to hear about them!

Edit Sept 1 2024:

Somehow I missed that the Scorpius is the Courier.

(Couldn’t find a good image of the courier alone, here’s one from a defunct fan site, second from the right, top row)

(source: https://web.archive.org/web/20131222112652/http://me_al.tripod.com/games/ev.html)