Space Quest II

2011-11-07T15:12:00.000-05:00

Made it home to find a large box from Amazon with the tiny DB-15-to-VGA connector (also, neither here nor there, but a second package containing a promotional LEGO clownfish.)

So I dove into my long-abandoned desk area to grab the most readily available CRT. And it was a big one. Let me tell you, dear reader: if anyone ever tells you that a 21" Trinitron is not really, really, really heavy then they are an enormous liar. With some pulling and shoving and oh-look-millions-of-stinkbugsing I dragged the monitor to meet what was most likely its final duty.

Gotta move that finding-an-LCD step up, I think!

And so I lovingly attached the power cables, put on the new dongle, hooked the parts together and so forth. Power on the monitor--green, no source, yellow standby. And then I stepped back and considered something for the first time:

I had absolutely no idea how you turn a 1997 Macintosh on.

I had done it once, when I bought it, to listen to the boot up... but not since. Was it the weird nub under the CD drive? No, further feeling around revealed a second one of those on the other side, they were for releasing the front of the case. On the back? Nope, a flashlight and a magnifier revealed no buttons.

So I whipped out my trusty iPhone, Google'd up Apple's support site which happily had a PDF manual for the 7300 right there. I zoomed it into iBooks and found that the on button was... right in front of my face, a tiny recessed button on the bottom left of the front. D'oh.

I turned it on and waited with baited breath. Pause. Startup chime! Pause again... the monitor switches to green, there is a video source! And then I was greeted with this beautiful sight:

Thank Sivar! Now I know it has Mac OS 9.1, which may be problematic. I have a memory that SWC may not work with such a new operating system... in which case I'll have to figure out how you go back to 7 or 8. But I'm sure it can be done!

We'll find out more on Tuesday when the actual input devices arrive. Can't wait!

LOAF Fixes a Macintosh

2011-10-07T15:06:00.001-04:00

I know I have enough Wing Commander projects to last ten lifetimes, but the recent news about Steve Jobs inspired me to finally get to work on something I've been meaning to do for myself for many years: build the ideal old Macintosh for playing Wing Commander. My aim is to go from some old surplus to a kickass machine for Super Wing Commander, Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV, tracking down all the cool extras they support in the process. I thought I'd start a thread so folks who are interested can follow my progress... and we can use it as a reference for anyone else wanting to do this.

First I should say that I have absolutely NO idea how old Macs work. As I mentioned in the other thread, I grew up with an Apple ][... but irony of ironies my father turned the skills he learned on that early Apple into a job for IBM and we never owned a Mac. I have a Macbook as my regular notebook and I use a Mini as my HTPC today... but beyond the occasional encounter in a middle school library, I've never touched anything before OSX. So this will be an adventure! Sort of.

(... and it goes without saying that I could use some helps from folks here who *didn't* skip the Macintosh...)

So, here's where we start. I picked this up five or six years back at a surplus sale for a few bucks. I suspect it belonged to a university:

It's a Power Mac 7300/180, which would have been top of the line a short time after Wing Commander IV came out. I'm not necessarily married to her, but that seems like a reasonable place to start. I also have no idea what the actual condition of the thing is. All I've ever done is listen to see if it boots up, which it does (I hear a startup chime, anyway.) I never picked up a monitor or keyboard/mouse or anything else...

Until yesterday! Amazon has Primed me one of these, which is sitting on my doorstep at home right now: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002J1JAE

That should let me plug a regular monitor in. Like all houses, mine is full of old CRTs so I can use one of those for now. It sounds like you can also get an LCD to work with an old Mac which I will want to do eventually (I don't have much space left, for you see my house is full of old CRTs...)

So, there's our cliffhanger--what will the monitor reveal? Stay tuned to find out.

(I also bought an ADB keyboard/mouse off of eBay, which should show up in a few days.)

If anyone wants to keep track of how much this project costs--and say yell at me when it outgrosses buying an old 3DO--we're at: $20 for the computer, $10 for the DB-15-to-VGA plug and $15 for keyboard/mouse.

Edit: THRILLING UPDATE -- the keyboard and mouse will be here on Tuesday.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

2011-10-06T14:55:00.000-04:00

Hopefully no one out there has Space Quest II on their RSS readers; I'm going to archive all of the "building a PC" articles here so they form something approaching a narrative. We'll start with the Steve Jobs memorial post that kicked everything off. Like anything I've ever written, I'm not altogether happy with it on reflection... but I also think it's best not to go back and edit such things.

I tried to string together a few words to send to the Apple memorial address, so I'll repost that:

Days before I was born, my father--who was an ER nurse at the time--went out and bought an Apple II+. He used it to teach himself about computers, to make a better life for his family. In a few years he was a top database developer. That was Steve's genius: discovering how technology could be used to improve life. In a few days the wags are going to start pointing out that he didn't really invent the PC or the phone or the animated movie... but he figured out how to elevate these things, to give them a meaning and a value that no one else could.

You wanted to imagine a different end to this story. We all knew this was coming but... needed to believe that something magical would happen, that there would be some deserved recompense pointing to a fair universe. I don't think that Apple needs Steve to keep innovating, but you wanted so much to imagine an end to his story where he would have been able to look back at the world he changed ten or twenty years on.

And of course Steve knew what was happening better than any of us, which is why the narrative that now emerges is so compelling. We come to realize that faced with his own death he lived his philosophy in a way that most people can't. He fought to spend his final years working on things that would change how we communicate instead of stepping back at all. That's astonishing to me.

2009-08-23T14:58:00.001-04:00

Check out this completely awesome hypershrimp that I saw at the Invertebrate House a few weekends back:

It's like someone grafted extra giant blue arms onto him and he isn't quite sure what to do with them.

We went to see the baby cuttlefish, which were kind of a disappointment. They were being kept in a small tank suspended in the middle of a large tank in the dark--you could only barely make out that they existed.

Triumph of the Roofcat

2009-08-23T14:50:00.001-04:00

Roofcat II

2009-08-23T14:36:00.001-04:00

From Space Quest II

Picasa, maybe?

Rage of the Roofcat

2009-08-23T14:14:00.001-04:00

Rage of the Roofcat
Originally uploaded by BanditLOAF

Testing iPhone->Flickr->Google connection.

2009-08-19T18:59:00.002-04:00

Resolved, in conversation with John: the Taylor Swift song which begins "we were both young when I first saw you" must necessarily be about a relationship affected by relativistic speeds, otherwise the wording of the introduction would make no sense.

2009-08-19T11:50:00.002-04:00

I fell asleep as soon as I got home yesterday and didn't wake up until 5 A.M. I'm not sure why.

2009-08-18T14:36:00.002-04:00

I had a turkey sandwich from the cafeteria for lunch.

2009-08-18T09:04:00.002-04:00

Sensors indicate that my copy of Wolfenstein 5D rapidly crossed the country. It went from Louisville, Kentucky at 5 A.M. to being Out-for-Delivery in Gaithersburg, Maryland at 7:36. When this happens I like to pretend they had to hire a special airplane for my package.

2008-10-09T13:44:00.000-04:00

The greatest benefit - of many! - to my Tivo being named Spicy Potato is that I get this message whenever I tell it to record anything through the website: It will be added to the To Do List the next time your Spicy Potato connects to the TiVo service.

In that same vein, here is a recent email subject that I really like: Special Stapler Needs to be Returned. This is an animated movie waiting to happen.

Cheat Sheet

2008-10-01T09:15:00.003-04:00

Sabre / Sabrejet / Supersabre

Lightsaber

F-57 Sabre

"Two Confederation Sabre fighters streak across the blackness... Gleaming sabers are arranged in rows... He stops and admires a Saber..."

2008-09-26T13:14:00.000-04:00

Everything CNN's web division does is the most obnoxious thing possible, except this:

Lets Test... Pictures

2008-09-09T20:30:00.004-04:00

Chloe is not happy to see you.

My blog still has a little something for the discerning Wing Commander fan.

Avril is not happy to see you.

Shawn Johnson-flavored coke.

2008-09-05T11:27:00.002-04:00

The air conditioning is broken at work and I've already had to be here extra hour today. The building manager doesn't know when it will be fixed. Five more hours to go. The only work to do today is intricately unravel enormous HTML tables that five preceding generations of people who don't know what tables are have somehow mashed into existence.

I want to go get a grocery store sandwich, but what right to I have to bring a grocery store sandwhich into such a terrible world?

The first fish in space was the mummichog. This keeps me sane.

2008-09-04T12:52:00.001-04:00

1000/1000 in Civilization! I think my next target is the Tomb Raider DLC - I need to clear some shelf space before Rock Band 2 and Force Unleashed later this month. I finished Civ early, giving me a chance to watch the Republican speeches.

One quick observation: did anyone notice the executive name-checks? All Democrats! Governor Lingle quoted LBJ and Governor Palin talked about Harry Truman. That's a strange departure from the ordinary Lincoln/Roosevelt/Reagan talk we usually hear at these things.

IMPORTANT REMINDER

2008-09-02T12:17:00.000-04:00

Note to self, try the downloadable Wii aquarium tonight.

I Can't Believe I Eight the Whole Thing

2008-09-02T12:14:00.002-04:00

My big task this morning was to remember to sign up for Air and Space Museum lecture tickets at 10 AM. All three of the Apollo 8 astronauts will be speaking together in November, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of their mission. Mission accomplished!

Apollo 8 is probably the single most impressive American space mission. It's somewhat forgotten in popular culture, coming just before the moon landing as it did... but I think it's a better story. NASA, worrying about Soviet plans to orbit the moon, planned and executed the mission in a matter of months. It was only the second manned Apollo launch and the first to use the Saturn V rocket. It was a lot riskier than the other flights which were planned years in advance and had their hardware tested in across a step process.

The mission went flawlessly (so no Hollywood movie) and was full of amazing firsts and wonderful moments, from the famous reading of Genesis on Christmas eve to the 'Earthrise' photograph that everyone has seen before. Fancy historians will sell it even better, telling you that it was a high point for makind after a year that was full of high profile assassinations, violent protests around the world and military disasters. I generally don't know how much stock to put into that level of psychohistory, but it's hard to watch the Christmas Eve broadcast without that in mind.

So, I have four tickets! Hurray! (November 13, downtown in the evening.)

A Thick Veneer of Civilization

2008-09-02T09:34:00.002-04:00

I lost a weekend to Civilization Revolutions (as you can see from the handy gamecard to my left). I'm two achievements away from finishing. One is annoying (unlock every Great Person; I've said it before and I'll say it again: up yours, Sophocles) and the other will require some strategerizing (win on King difficulty before 1000 AD).

I still can't believe that they've created a faithful and nearly flawless version of Civ for a console. Now if they could just figure out RTS games... (sorry, C&C3, you sort of suck).

Introduction

2008-09-01T09:55:00.001-04:00

As you will recall in our last chapter, you had just foiled the Sariens fiendish plot to rule the galaxy by using the Star Generator as their weapon of destruction.

You became a hero by saving countless lives and returning the Star Generator technology into safe hands.

Life Was Beautiful

But heroes come and go and people soon forget. Your celebrated herodom slowly fades leaving you, once again, a janitor.

The promotion to head janitor was no consolation. (Especially since you are the ONLY member of the janitorial staff.) Nor was the transfer to Orbital Station 4.

Sweating like a pork-beast in a presure suit while relocating space debris in zero-gravity, just wasn't your idea of a good time.

Life Sucks.....Again

Taco Lucas

2008-08-31T11:42:00.000-04:00

Hello, Internet

2008-08-31T10:45:00.004-04:00

Livejournal has decided that my journal is for advertising Obamas and discrete hookups with women in YOUR AREA, so I'm going to try this. Does Blogspot have advertisements? Lets find out.