SuperPope: ex Cathedra

Hiatus Update

A lot has happened since my last update.  My sister and her family moved to Black Forest, Colorado.  We flew there to visit them for a few days over the 4^th of July weekend and had a great time.  Then one day after getting home, my wife had her thyroid removed at Mercy Hospital in Edmond, OK.  She’s doing fine.

In less important news, we got a new computer at the house.  An AMD Athlon 64 system from CyberPower Systems.  I can’t recommend them highly enough.  I have never paid so little money for so much computer.  It even has an nVidia Geforce 7800 GTX, the fastest gaming card available right now.  It runs Halflife 2 with maximum settings in all areas and at 1920 x 1440 resolution at well over 60 frames per second.  Seriously.  The thing doesn’t even break a sweat.

I’ve finished several games and need to get reviews up (is it narcissism to think anybody cares?), so I’ll do that soon.  If you’re still reading this, thanks for stopping by.

Toriyama designed car

Akira Toriyama (The artist behind Dragon Ball Z, Crono Trigger, and the Dragon Warrior series, in case you stumbled across this site by accident) has designed this goofy little electric car that is being sold in Japan. It is available in several different colors. Toriyama has always been known for his detailed drawings of invented vehicles, so it’s only natural for him to do something like this. The only thing that would make it more authentic is if it hovered along with no obvious means of locomotion. :)

Stories from Computing History Ch. 4

Chapter 4: Modems and Bulletin Boards

Before about 1994, the general public didn’t know anything about “The Internet” or “World Wide Web”. The most techno-savvy among us had a 28.8k modem and made physical phone calls to computer systems known as Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes for short). These were isolated computers in homes and businesses around the world that were made available for the purpose of conversing, sharing files, and playing turn-based games. These systems were not graphic-based. You navigated via a command line interface, browsed directories, and downloaded files to your computer. Any graphics you saw were generated with primitive ANSI code.

When modems first came around in the early 80s they consisted of two little rubber cuffs that you slipped your phone’s handset onto. Your phone sent and received organized noise (modulated/demodulated = modem) to communicate.

I had a 300 baud modem on my Commodore 64. It was so slow that you had to wait for text to appear on the screen. From there, the modem speeds increased as technology improved like this: 1200, 2400, 9600, 14.4k, 28k, 56k. The signal limitations of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines prohibited advancements further than this for standard modem communication.

You could buy magazines (basically BBS yellow pages) that were full of different BBSes you could call. Most numbers didn’t work, and when you did get a bite you could look forward to waiting 10 minutes to download a low resolution graphic of the USS Enterprise to show off to all your friends.

BBSes were virtually unmonitored and operated outside the law, unlike the Internet. For example, I knew of one BBS in Florida that would allow you to download freshly pirated games for a month in exchange for a $20 bill mailed inside a blank greeting card. Not that I ever did such a thing…

The first massively multiplayer online RPG I ever played was not Ultima Online or Everquest. It was called “Club Caribe”: A LucasArts game for the Commodore 64. Built on a modified “Maniac Mansion” engine, you walked around this virtual world and interacted with other players. It was extremely expensive to play in a small town like Ada, Oklahoma, since you had to dial a long distance phone number in addition to paying the game’s monthly fee. My friend James had it, but we didn’t get to play it much. The concept, however, really blew me away. This wasn’t a leveling treadmill or an endless dungeon crawl. You talked to people and maybe played an occasional game of checkers. The simple novelty of interaction via computer was enough to keep people fixated.

Stories from Computing History Ch. 2

Computing Magazines

Computer magazines of the Apple II and Commodore 64 era were very different from those we see today. The focus was heavily geared toward programming. In fact, quite a few magazines had a large section in the middle that was nothing more than actual BASIC code. Primitive games and application could be yours provided you were willing to spend the time to type them in and could keep from making typeos. I typed in quite a few myself.

What reviews you did find in magazines rarely had screenshots (too hard to create), and didn’t use much of a rating system. This made deciding what games were worth your money very difficult. More on that next time.

Stories from Computing History Ch. 1

Classic Copy Protection

Back in the early days of computing, games were sold on floppy disks. Generally one game spanned several disks, since each one could only hold between 360 kilobytes and 1.44 megabytes of data. I can remember some games that were contained on as many as nineteen disks before the era of the CD thankfully arrived.

After spending an hour swapping disks out to install the game, you were then faced with whatever form of copy protection the developers had decided to employ. Aside from the obvious physical copy protection (disks that misreported their size in some way so that they either didn’t work when copied or convinced copy programs that they were damaged and shouldn’t be copied) there were several more unique methods of copy protection that forced you to prove that you had legitimately purchased the program.

On the Commodore 64 and some early Amiga games, a “decoder wheel” was often used. These wheels usually consisted of three paper circles attached with a grommet in the center. By turning the disks to line up the three keywords provided when you start the game you learned the password that allowed you to play. Some games went so far as to write the decoder into the game’s story. In “Legacy of the Ancients” (one of my favorite C64 games), your character had to use their “Obsidian Disk” to gain access to the “Galactic Museum”. Without access to this building you could barely progress in the game at all.

Some games used an instruction manual word search as copy protection. Either when you first started playing or at certain key points in the game you would be asked a question such as “What is word 3 of line 2 in paragraph 5 on page 56 of your manual?” This could be tricky to do correctly at times and was very annoying.

The last method (which was rarely utilized) was a picture on the back of the manual. On-screen you were provided with a line drawing of the picture from the manual. One section was highlighted and you were asked to identify the color. Future Wars and a few other games for the Amiga used this form.

The interesting thing about these old forms of copy protection is that they would be totally ineffective in today’s world. Manuals, disk decoders, and color pictures could be easily made available on the Internet by any schmuck with basic programming knowledge or a $50 scanner. Now days, of course, software companies use serial numbers and on-line software activation technology to protect their property. In the 1980s and early 90s, however, programmers relied on a relatively non-existent community of users and the lack of easy digital communication to keep their programs safe from pirates.

Stories from Computing History

Today I’m starting a sort of “weekly segment” (don’t hold me to the weekly part) on my blog about historical aspects of computers and video gaming that a lot of you whipper-snappers probably aren’t aware of. Just like the rantings of most old-timers I don’t expect many people to actually listen to what I have to say, but I’m going to say it anyway.

PC-EZ-Bake Oven

I've gotta give my friend Momotaro props for sharing this with me. It's not a joke (well, it may be a joke, but it is a real thing and it actually works). Buy yours over at ThinkGeek.com.

Paper DVD

Sony has invented a DVD that not only holds 25 Gigs of data, but can be crumpled up and thrown in the trash.

Read about it here.

PC Upgrades 2004

Last Wednesday night I added several components to my computer at home. Here's the rundown:

NEC 22" Flat SuperBright CRT monitor: $549
It's big. It has a cool black case. It's really bright. It can display 1920 x 1440 at 75Hz. Need I say more?

BFG Asylum 128MB DDR2 GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 3D Video Card: $219
Before this I had a GeForce3 500Ti. I ran FutureMark's 3DMark 2003 on it before I uninstalled it and it scored 1017 3Dmarks. Then I ran it again after installing the new card. Shockingly, it only scored 552 3Dmarks. I knew something was wrong, so I rebooted. When windows started back up, my video card informed me that it wasn't receiving enough power, and had switched itself over to minimal operating capacity.

"Did you remember to connect the supplementary power supply to the video card?"

Oops. I had just assumed that this video card worked just the same as every other one I've installed. I opened the case, connected the power, and booted again. 3461 3Dmarks. All is right with the world.

Sony 8x DVD All-format Recorder: $150
Now I don't have to worry about losing my data, and I can finally transfer all those home videos of Sid over to DVD. It's nice to be able to record in all of the available formats, too.

X-Arcade MAME joystick

I recently purchased the X-Arcade Two Player joystick for my PC. It's made from arcade quality (better, actually) materials, and is designed for use with the MAME emulator for playing arcade games on your PC. However, you can also use it with your PlayStation, Xbox, Gamecube or Dreamcast just by purchasing a different adapter for it.

It isn't a PC joystick in a strict sense of the word. You actually plug it into your keyboard port and then plug your keyboard into it. When you use it to play games, it intercepts certain keypresses. To use it with MAME all you have to do is set MAME to use the X-Arcade control set.

The X-Arcade has eight buttons per controller, 1 and 2 player start buttons, and two pinball style buttons on the sides. Usually the pinball buttons are used to "insert coins" in MAME. MAME is a lot more fun with this thing. If you buy the two player version you can play two stick games like Robotron and Smash TV perfectly.

I imagine it would work great with other games, but I've not tried it yet. It's just really cool to have a nice, heavy arcade-style joystick to use.