Back again

Well, for those of you who were wondering, yes I have been away for a couple days. My grandfather was recently taken very ill with a failing gall bladder and pneumonia at the same time. Needless to say, most things have been put on hold the past couple of days because there is fear that he could die because of it.

However, I have made some little progress again with my retrocomputing hobby. I needed a new null modem cable that has correct handshaking, so I went to my local Radio Shack in hopes of buying one and saving some time. If you are laughing at me it's probably because you've been to a Radio Shack recently. Anyway, I went in and was greeted by the young man who worked there, who had a full red beard and several nose studs. (yeah, odd combo...) He politely asked if he could help me find anything, and I said I needed a null modem cable. To my utter shock and amazement the man knew what a null modem cable was! And then he said, "If you need to connect a couple computers together there has to be a better way, like with ethernet or something." Well, the computer's older than that, I said. They didn't have any null modem cables, as I feared. So now I need to build myself a new cable.

And in the programming department, my inspiration phase is done. It consisted mostly of playing Taipan for about 8 hours, and making a simulated 800 million bucks (not adjusted for inflation) and sailing around in a boat with a 2900 ton capacity. And blowing a fleet of 256 pirates out of the water singlehandedly. In the 1800's. In China. Yeah right, but it was fun!

And in other news I might finally get myself another real (not emulated) Apple II class system. I know a guy who wants to sell me his Apple IIc; now to haggle the price down a bit...

The reto systems I have

A buddy of mine asked the other day "How many old computer things do you have anyway?"
Well, I guess I forgot to mention that here, so I'll post what I told him.

I currently have, in no particular order:

• Tandy 102 laptop
• Atari 2600
• Colecovision
• NES, restored to mint condition, with boxes etc.
• Several Pentium 1, 486, and 386 systems, in various states of repair
• A Tandy 1100HD laptop, used to work but now in the process of being fixed
• and though it's not a computer, I have a very nice Okidata 182 Turbo, recently refurbished, which I use for all my retro printing needs
  

I also have access to a Tandy PC-2 pocket computer and complete working plotter/cassette interface with all manuals and leather carry case. It belongs to by Dad, who has been loaning it to me indefinitely.

Currently on my retro wish-list is an Apple IIe, with color monitor, double disk drives and an 80 column card (the same system I had in 3rd grade) and also a VT100 or similar vintage DEC data terminal. And although it's not retro equipment I would like to get a universal device server like a Lantronix UDS10 in order to hook my retro machines to the internet.

Personal Retro Challenge slowdown

Well, I figure since the Retro Challenge for Summer '08 is now announced to be in July I'll slow things down a little bit. Savor the awesomeness, and of course I can then have time to prepare for the challenge.

In other news, I am wanting to learn C programming, for the purpose of making a game in SDL, not to mention that I just like programming. As a bit of background I have been programming and using computers since 3rd grade, but for some reason I have never learned C. The reason is probably because it wasn't until many years later did I even have a computer I could program C on. I cut my teeth on Tandy Basic with my Dad's Tandy PC2 in third grade, and then got into Applesoft Basic and Apple Integer Basic when I got an Apple IIe, which was my first desktop computer. I went through several Apple IIe's, a IIc, and a IIgs. The IIe's got fried from constant use, and the power supplies just gave up. The Apples were already pretty old when I got them, and my school also happened to use Apple IIs still as well, and they only had about 50 extra units, plus spare parts, because they had phased the IIe's out for IIgs units, which again were considered ancient even at the time. (this was 1998, when I was in 6th or 7th grade)

My computer teacher was a big inspiration for me. She was a big Apple fanatic, and especially loved Macs. She wanted me to get into Macs too. I, on the other hand, really didn't care for Macs at all, I liked the old stuff. I don't know quite why it appealed to me, although looking back I think it was because I could work with the low level, and all my code banged directly on the hardware, so to speak. Later in 1998 we got a PC. I think it was the games that got me hooked on PC's from there. I played Quake for how many years then? Probably all the way through highschool. I have never looked back, and sorry to say for all you Mac lovers out there, I have never used or even liked Macs.

Well, now I'm in Linux, because it's free, like all my previous computer stuff, and appeals to my geek side that wants to have closer workings with the hardware. I used to write games for Apple II, sadly with the demise of my Apple hardware my games also went. Now I want to try some game code again, but Basic doesn't really have the power on Linux as it did on an Apple. See, on the Apple II, Basic was THE language to code in. Sure, you could do machine code, but the only reason for doing that was because it would mostly hide your source from people or do really complex things with the inner quirks of the machine. The Basic was pretty much just as efficient as the Assembler, because the Basic was integrated with the hardware.

Nowadays Basic is not really respected, and doing games is quite resource hungry with only Basic. I need SDL, so therefore I need C.

EDIT: Nix that last line: FreeBASIC is now my next exploration. MS QBasic compatibility (I already know QBasic) and C library integration, including SDL, with only %25 percent less performance than regular GCC. Since my game's won't be 3d I don't need to worry. And it's cross platform, perfect.