0xDECAFBAD - Tag: oldschool

Reviving my C64 history with a uIEC/SD

2010-04-08T00:08:44+00:00

I've lived a very focused life. From very early on, I've been learning to make computers do things.

And being as introspective as I am, I like spending time considering how I got here. I suppose this is nostalgia, but I like to think of it as recentering and recapitulation. Contemplating the story so far, as a means to consider the story yet to come.

One huge benefit of this habit is that I've become ever more appreciative of today. It's easy to forget, but we're living in the future these days—at least, with respect to who I was in 1983.

No flying cars yet, but for US$55 I was able to buy a tiny gadget called a uIED/SD that gives a Commodore 64 access to modern SD cards for storage. And, of course, I have Jason Scott's review of the more general-use FC5025 5.25? Floppy to USB Adapter to blame in getting me started on this current mini-obsession.

You want to talk about a magical device? Screw the iPad—this is magic.

This is what it looks like:

To put that in context, take a look at this thing alongside the Commodore 1541 drives it emulates:

If my math is right—and it often isn't—plonking a 1GB card into this thing is the equivalent of over 5700 old-school floppies. That's nearly incomprehensible if you try to wrap your head around it in an appreciative context.

I don't think I've ever touched that many floppies, even after getting my hands into huge (to me at the time) boxes of software shipped between friends and strangers across the country and overseas in a filesharing sneakernet that made every month feel like Christmas. (Never underestimate the bandwidth of the postal service.)

Today, all that stuff and more can be found in torrents topping 20GB that offer brain-numbingly huge archives of both commercial abandonware and freely-shared demoscene releases. I'm sure there are things left out, but you'd be hard pressed not to find everything you ever remembered seeing on a Commodore 64. These archives are so large and uncurated that it's easier to do research online first to come up with things to look. Kind of like those huge boxes, but we had no web to search back in the day.

And nearly all of it works on this thing after a quick drag-and-drop into the FAT-formatted filesystem of an SD card. You just need to rediscover and dust off some old expertise with the arcane DOS wedge commands of the Commodore era, sprinkle in some new additions to navigate modern directory structures and disk images, and you're off. Sure, you could just use an emulator for this stuff—but if you don't get at least a little thrill from the original hardware, you probably never grew up with it.

For the floppies I do still possess, the uIEC/SD can write to as well as read from SD cards. So, the real magic is that I've been able to recover all kinds of data from 15-25 years ago: old BASIC and assembly programs; awkward poetry and short stories; embarrassing high school newspaper articles and columns; college application essays; archived message threads of religious debates and miscellaney from BBSes I used to call; even the memory-jogging lists of names and numbers to those BBSes that started so much for me.

In short, further fodder for introspection that I thought was long lost to bitrot and drive failure. Luckily, all my old-school hardware and media seems to be in just enough working order to make one more transfer. I can only hope to be in as decent shape myself someday, should the Rapture of the Nerds ever come.

Anyway, I wanted to get this breathless post off my chest first, but I'm thinking about writing a more in-depth account of using this thing, with links pointing at what to download first and how to use it. You know, written to that recent-past self of mine who'd just opened the package and stared dumbfounded at the "Ready." prompt again with serious intent for the first time in a decade or so.

Let me know if that'd be of interest.

Archived Comments

Jason Clark
2010-04-08T02:37:43

There is, at this very moment, a box full of floppies (including plenty of manually hacked 'flippies' made with a hole punch) a 1541 Disk Drive, and at least one but possibly two functioning C-64s, plus various and sundry joysticks, modems, Fast Load Cartridges &tc., sitting in my garage, just waiting to be called forth again into the light, as soon as I have an excuse and some time. Time's in short supply right now, but a post with lots of details would surely be my excuse.
Metal Fatigue
2010-04-08T03:07:48

I'd definitely like to see a more in-depth post.
Kent Brewster
2010-04-08T04:19:08

First program I ever sold was Typo Invaders, a VIC-20 game that appeared in Compute's Gazette in 1983 or so. I've found it online, but every copy has a syntax error on line 60 that I can't fix in the emulator because of keyboard differences. I would be very, very appreciative of a corrected copy, or even a plaintext listing ... I'm pretty sure I invented the learn-to-type-or-be-blown-to-bits game. :)
l.m.orchard
2010-04-08T04:43:21

@Kent: Is this what you're looking for?

http://decafbad.com/2010/04/typo-invaders/

I managed to convert the .prg to .txt using a petcat utility that comes with the Vice 64 emulator. I think I see your syntax error - line 160 has a : that seems out of place.

The keyboard mapping on my Vice emulator under OS X seems not horrible - so if I figure out what that line should be, I could possibly fix it for you and send you a .d64 image with the corrected .prg
l.m.orchard
2010-04-08T05:00:22

@Kent: Also, I have a torrent of Compute's Gazette downloading now - claims to have all disks as .d64 and issues as .pdf. Maybe I'll run across the issue with the original listing in it.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4623812/
CiaranG
2010-04-09T14:51:43

Interesting. You've sent me off on a similar obsessive search, and I found the following, which I now must have one of:

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/index.html

All my old machines are hooked up to PCs in various ways to allow software transfer, but having them standalone with an SD card looks much more interesting.
Jeri Ellsworth
2010-08-03T20:46:09

Nice!

dialup ghost towns and amazon ec2

2006-09-01T03:37:54+00:00

Most BBS enthusiasts know that the last outpost for BBSes has been, for some time now, through telnet on the Internet. There was a time, however, when when dial-up BBSes over analog phone lines were the rule, not the exception.

Source: VintageComputing.com | Vintage Computing and Gaming » Blog Archive » The Dial-Up BBS Revisited

Reading this article, and having tinkered with Synchronet, an idea occurs to me: I'll use Amazon EC2 to host a running instance of Synchronet available via telnet - but only from like 9:00 PM until 5:00 AM. I'll save hourly hosting charges and not tie up my parents' phone line all day! Hmm, I wonder: Has anyone tried setting up an auto answer modem under VoIP?

Archived Comments

Gregory Williams
2006-09-01T19:25:46

What a great idea! History has turned the frustration of only being able to run by board at night (before I got a dedicated line) into a nice feeling of nostalgia, and being able to re-live that through a crazy combination of VoIP and Amazon virtualized hosting would be awesome.
Jason Cook
2006-09-01T22:48:42

The problem is that VOIP and modems really don't get along well at all.
Ben West
2006-09-04T22:25:43

It's very hard to tunnel a modem through VoIP.

West of House

2005-10-21T03:09:49+00:00

The next documentary I am working on is about Text Adventures, or Interactive Fiction. It is called "Get Lamp".

Source: ASCII by Jason Scott: There is a Shiny Brass Lamp nearby

Sweet merciful crap! Man, aren't I smack-dab in the middle of Jason Scott's target demographic? I snatched up his BBS Documentary with the quickness, but I got my initiation into Zork a very long time before I ever heard the dulcet tones of my first 300 baud modem.

Archived Comments

D'Arcy Norman
2005-10-21T04:47:02

Hehe. I was a Zork addict. Still have a copy on my Powerbook... My /. sig is:

It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
l.m.orchard
2005-10-21T10:56:04

I think I spent some short period as a little kid actually wondering whether or not there were grues in dark rooms. :)
Nick
2005-10-21T15:11:26

I'm going to have to pick that one up.. How is the BBS DVD? I might have to grab it, as I was known to visit a BBS or two in my past..
Jason Scott
2005-10-25T06:55:44

I need more than 1.5 films to have a target demographic, Les!
l.m.orchard
2005-10-25T14:54:22

@Jason: Pssh... Years from now, when you've released your 10th documentary, your master plan will be clear for all to plainly see!
l.m.orchard
2005-10-25T14:55:43

@Nick: Oh, and the BBS Documentary very much rocks. You should definitely pick it up. I've got it, of course, and could lend it should we ever get together for that beer. :)
Robert
2006-07-01T20:02:47

Zork! I grew up on the BBS, learned so much about ignoring my family there! I'll be picking up the BBS Documentary... I just wish I could fire up QModem and hit the boards still...

Synchronet BBS Software, Tidal Pools, and On-Ramps

2004-12-16T15:19:03+00:00

Synchronet Bulletin Board System Software is a free software package that can turn your personal computer into your own custom online service supporting multiple simultaneous users with hierarchical message and file areas, multi-user chat, and the ever-popular BBS door games.

...

In November of 1999, the author found a renewed interest in further developing Synchronet, specifically for the Internet community, embracing and integrating standard Internet protocols such as Telnet, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IRC, NNTP, and HTTP. Synchronet has since been substantially redesigned as an Internet-only BBS package for Win32 and Unix-x86 platforms and is an Open Source project under continuous development.

Source: Synchronet BBS Software

This software deserves so much more attention. It's like an old-school BBS, complete with ASCII/ANSI menu screens and everything, but it's been modernized: It offers a slew of Internet protocols integrated with the message bases and file areas. It's got an HTTP daemon with server-side JavaScript. It works on Win32 and various Unix platforms. Everything above is true. And it's open source.

In the 90's, I would have expected software like this to be at the core of a startup company stuffed with superfluous and overpaid code monkeys. It would have turned into an Enterprise Application Server or Intranet Knowledge Management Solution-- a mini Domino or Lotus Notes. And, in fact, I seem to remember seeing a few old-school BBS packages get mutated and gigantified by the dot-com radiation in this way.

I keep meaning to get a Synchronet BBS up and keep it up, and maybe get a few interested users logging in, if only for the retro-gaming experience for things like Trade Wars, Barrent Realms Elite, Legend of the Red Dragon, Global War, and anything else I can find.

I really miss the tidal-pool effect BBSes had back in the day, when in my area they were the first and best gateways to the Internet. Direct SLIP and PPP access to the net were rare things still and, before the web took off, Usenet and IRC were some of the best things around. But, anyone who wanted to get the the net had to wander through the local BBS first.

It was really neat to see the mish-mash of people all drawn together by geographic areas denoted by telco area codes. The degree of Aspergers affliction and just plain dysfunctional nerdity gradually decreased as sisters and friends-of-sisters were introduced to terminal programs and teleconference. It was sad to see all of this gradually die off as more and more callers came in via SLIP/PPP dialers and headed straight for the information superhighway on-ramps. All the gift shops closed up and no one showed up in the café anymore.

Sigh.

But, at least Finland isn't a long distance call these days.

shortname=synchronet

Archived Comments

knight37
2004-12-16T11:18:24

Back in "the day" I ran a BBS dedicated to RPG gaming and programming, called "The Wyrm's Byte". We had cool ansi-graphic art. We had doors games. Trade Wars, BRE, and some others. We had a download section but not much was on it. And we ran Fidonet (sort of like Usenet but using a different protocol and shared among BBSes), Vnet (RPG-oriented net that used Fido technology), and CandyNet (also RPG-centric net that used Fido tech). This was a great hobby, I had lots of fun. But, it seems like in this day and age, I'd rather just run a web site than try to do a full fledged BBS. What could I really offer using BBS software that I can't do on a website? Other than maybe doors games, but I'd rather play World of Warcraft or Half-Life 2 multi than those.
ArcAiN6
2006-09-05T20:02:16

Synchronet is easy peasy, i'm currently running it, and i love the thing.. :)