Kim Kimberley, Zork & CP/M

November 8, 2010November 10, 2010Retrocosm Leave a comment

I had a spare hour or so today and decided to hunt around for some games for my PX-8. Given the limitations of the display and my own fondness for interactive fiction I decided to see what text adventure games I could find for CP/M.

A quick search for CP/M games took me immediately to the Retroarchive where I’m pleased to say the first three games of Infocom’s excellent Zork series were to be found along with a number of other games.

Pleased with this result I wondered if there were any CP/M versions of Level 9’s adventure games out there and I quickly found Snowball and Lords Of Time here.

Annoyingly my plans for a bridge machine with both USB and network support remain exactly that, plans, for some reason Filink will not run on the Pentium III under DOS and I have therefore been forced to resort to my Fujitsu in order to transfer files to the PX-8. The downside of this is I have to burn a CD every time that I want to transfer files downloaded with my Mac on the Fujitsu for transfer to the Epson.

Nevertheless I was soon transferring the games I had downloaded with Filink from the Fujitsu directly on 5.25 floppies via the PX-8 (picture below.)

All of the Infocom and Level 9 games appear to be working fine. Some of the location descriptions are too long for the PX-8 to display without some of the text scrolling out of view and if I’m honest the LCD on the Epson is not one of the best I’ve seen, in fact the PX-4 has a much better screen with clearer better contrast.

However the keyboard is a joy to use, it has that lovely clackety clack that you don’t seem to get with modern day equivalents so I shall get stuck in again to the world of Zork and see what I can remember.

I’ve copied Zork 1 to the ram disk and will store my save games on cassette for the shear hell of it.

I am indeed standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. Maximum verbosity.

That reminds me, I’m sure there was a another version on the Vic 20 called The Colonel’s House? Oh, and I’ve also discovered that you can play Zork in your browser at ifiction.org.

Epson PF-10 Disk Drive Working Again

October 19, 2010Retrocosm Leave a comment

I recently stripped down my two PF-10’s and managed to reassemble one working drive from the components. The drive is working quite well, the only real problem is the battery is only lasting about 30-40 minutes before needing a lengthy recharge. However this at least gives me enough time to perform a few tasks.

Today I formatted some disks using Copydisk, I found some old 1.0 MB double sided double density disks which seem to work well, the high density ones that I tried did not work. I then daisy chained the TF-20 and the PF-10 to the PX-8 by running the cable from the TF-20 into the back of the PF-10. This required opening up the PF-10 battery compartment in order to flick a dip switch to ensure there were no drive letter conflicts.

This set up gives you the PF-10 as drive F and the TF-20 dual drives as D and E. The PF-10 came with some old disks and I took the opportunity to copy their contents using PIP onto some 5.25″ disks just in case the PF-10 dies again. This included some original copies of Microsoft Basic and Compiler. That proved to be enough work for the main battery and the back-up battery light began to flash. It’s a shame the unit won’t run off of the AC adapter however I’m just thrilled it’s now working at all.

I shall use Filink to further back up the files I transferred today onto my bridge machine and I shall see if there’s any chance of building another working PF-10 from the left over components.

Building A Bridge Computer

October 18, 2010October 19, 2010Retrocosm 1 Comment

I’ve learnt that an important requirement for Retro Computing is to have one or more ‘bridge’ machines. It’s all very well having the latest Windows 7 PC or iMac but they ain’t gonna talk to your retro machines, certainly not politely, smug gits.

In my case most of the retro machines I’m using hark from the early to mid 80’s and were therefore designed to talk to DOS and usually via either the parallel or serial ports.

Realistically then I needed a PC running Windows 98 or earlier as Windows 98 was the last iteration that would allow you to drop into DOS when required. If like me you tend to hoard things you’ve probably got a pile of old PC’s somewhere, however if also like me you tend to butcher them for parts the chances of having a complete working system may be less likely.

Originally I managed to dig out an old Fujitsu Pentium machine running Windows 95 that much to my surprise booted up successfully. However it has been a tad unreliable, understandably, and the system fan really is on its last legs plus I really wanted a machine with USB support.

In fact I decided the specifications for my perfect ‘Bridge’ machine would be as follows:-

Ability to run Windows 95/98
Parallel and Serial Ports
3.5″ and 5.25″ Floppy Disk Drives
Network Card
CD Drive
USB Support
Reasonably Quiet/Reliable
PCI & ISA Slots

I therefore decided to return to another box, namely a Dell Dimension XPS D300 which with its combination of PCI slots, ISA slots, parallel and serial ports, plus 2 USB ports seemed the perfect bridge machine. With no hard disk, floppy drive or memory things didn’t look promising. However I found a suitable 32 MB stick of memory, an IBM 80GB IDE hard disk and pulled out the floppy drive from the Fujitsu.

Once assembled and powered up the machine requested a BIOS password? Mmm, I thought, I’d certainly never set one and could only guess that this had been triggered by a flat CMOS battery. I had a search online and found this following Dell XPS support information.

Changing the jumper allowed me to get into maintenance mode which in turn allowed me remove the password and confirm that the CMOS was definitely flat. I had hoped the disk drive might have had either Windows 95 or 98 on it, but no such luck.

This of course led to the next problem, did I still have any suitable installation disks? Amazingly I was able to dig out two OEM Windows 95 CD’s and a retail Upgrade version of Windows 98, both with product keys. Cue next problem, the machine would not boot from the Windows 98 installation CD despite claiming such ability in the BIOS. Another quick root around and I found a working Windows boot disk I’d created in 1998. Soon the Windows 98 installation was underway, things were looking very promising.

Then for some reason that I’ve been unable to fathom the machine died and no amount of fiddling has bought it back to life. Some of this process is quite enjoyable but when you’re time limited failures such as this can be very irritating. Moving on, next in line a home built Pentium III 700 built around an Abit motherboard and case. This machine fulfills my requirements save for a lack of network card. I swapped all the parts over from the Dell and successfully installed Windows 98.

Fingers crossed this machine will now do reliable service as my ideal bridge computer once I’ve found a suitable network card to install.