The journey towards Cyber Legends 2.0

[mrbombermillzy]

Ok, so I thought I would detail some of the planning, testing and general decisions being made with my exhibits for Cyber Legends 2.

The general plan is to:

1. Finish the event flyer.
2. Test out the prize donation.
3. Setup and test the machines/equipment I will be bringing.

(Not particularly in that order)

Standby for further updates throughout the next few months...

[mrbombermillzy]

First 'struggle' off the mark; I need to find a suitable laptop for the mid 1990s VR equipment I will be exhibiting.

I have several 386/486 laptops in the loft, but the chances of any of the HDDs in them actually being able to power up (or to last the distance if they do) is probably very slim. Thats ignoring the higher probability of driver/irq/setup and PSU/connector as well as general age failure headaches with the more vintage gear.

So, as a rule, I don't really want to touch them if I can help it.

Fortunately, I had already earmarked a suitable Fujitsu Siemens laptop with an Athlon XP64 CPU and a Radeon 9700 mobile GPU.

However, when I actually got to dig the thing out, I discovered it was pretty far from appropriate for the task.

So the problem is, the VR gear needs DOS/W9x and a Serial port.

The laptop was designed to run XP and doesn't have a serial port.

I did have a quick stab at rectifying the issue, as I can get away with USB instead of serial (the original HMD head tracking device is serial, but I do have an alternative USB head tracking device I can use).

But the other problem is trying to setup my own custom driver set for the individual drivers on the laptop. As there are only XP> drivers available, I would have had to mix and match the available W9x drivers for the individual 'off the shelf' internal components. However, if the manufacturer has strayed from the component manufacturers reference design in any way, then it's probably going to fail...and that's without the optimised/fixed specific chipset north/southbridge drivers not being present.

I guess it's like building a new house on a bed of jelly. So back to the drawing board.

[mrbombermillzy]

Next candidate is an old Toshiba Tecra 750.

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This thing has a Pentium 233MMX, W9x OS and a S3 Virge DX in it, as well as the important serial port. It should handle the job in hand, provided it works.

Only problem is, I can't find a 15v 60w PSU to power the thing.

Right, order one of those then and jump to another task while that makes its way here.

[mrbombermillzy]

Alright then, next up, (probably in the next few days now) I'm going to dig out all my C64 PSUs and see if any are fit for purpose, along with trying out my newly acquired modern C64 PSU with the very clean boxed C64C.

So with the C64 PSUs, is it sufficient enough to test that they are putting out ~10VAC and ~5VDC then test the DC under load with e.g. 3.3ohm resistance for a while?

What would be acceptable voltage under load? 4.2-5v DC?

[alexh]

44-pin DOMs are very cheap on eBay. 4GB ones (or lower) avoid BIOS issues.

I don't have this one but it looks cheap.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/302339369595

[mrbombermillzy]

That's really handy to know @alexh Thanks

Now that gets me thinking about how many proprietary HDD interfaces will be missing from some of the old laptops in the loft?

[alexh]

My oldest laptop is (or rather was because I've chucked it) a 1992 Compaq Contura 4/25 and that had a 44-pin IDE interface. I put the Amiga 600's old drive in it when I went to CF card. Which is always an alternative to a DOM.

[mrbombermillzy]

So, (in the wrong order as is usual around these parts) the PSU arrived and I spent some time trying to get a good solid OS install onto the Tecra.

To be fair, i was quite Impressed that a machine circa 1997 was actually fully working; the CD-ROM drive was good, the screen had a good brightness level and the little 5.1Gb drive seemed to be working. Dammit, even the battery held a bit of charge when unplugged (I didn't really test how long it lasted, but still, I'm very impressed).

After wasting some time on a pre-existing W98 install, I decided the most versatile and best fit option was really to do a clean install of W98SE.

This machine has a Pentium 233MMX and 96Mb RAM, so that should be ample for the OS.

Here we go:

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After much churning and whirring of drives, some settings being clicked and timezones being set, we finally arrived here:

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Now the last real hurdle was to have a look at the device manager and see how many yellow exclamations there were. The screen was small, so I guessed we were still on the basic VGA 640x480x16 colour compatibility driver.

Speaking of which, the hunt for drivers had come up empty. I didn't want to download who knows what from who knows where type driver download sites and the Toshiba support pages (now handled by Dynabook) seemed to have recently removed most of the drivers for this machine.

Even trying Toshiba.co.uk on the wayback machine didn't really help. Their old site was, well, weird and unhelpful to say the least.

Time to rip the bandaid off then:

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Heh! Well that doesn't look too shabby at all! I guess being a very expensive late W95 era machine made sure most of the drivers ended up being included with the later windows version (98/Se) as standard.

The only thing missing from that list is the video capture drivers, which I can live without. I can probably cope with basic drivers for the rest. Great!

Next up, I get to dig out the VR hardware, or perhaps test a C64? Who knows?

[mrbombermillzy]

Did I say dig up the VR hardware?

Oh, nooo. That would be to easy; too large a step between one thing and another.

Before I even think about that, I have to try and find some suitable VR patched games.

Now from about 1999 or so, you could just get a stereoscopic forked (official, I might add) driver for your Nvidia/AMD card and use a USB head tracker device (like TrakIR or something) and they would work on most Direct3D games. Job done.

However, in the VR 'dark ages' around 1994-7, you generally had to have native support in the game, or the developers would issue a patch for their game which enabled either stereoscopic 3d or head tracking, or if you were lucky both for a single or several of the various VR devices that were jostling for market share at the time.

So although the Virtual IO i-glasses were perhaps towards the more prominent end of the market, I am having a fair bit of difficulty finding the full number of game patches that were available at the time.

With the help of the wayback machine, Ive managed to find a site with the required patches/instructions for these games:

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However, I now have to find the actual games to use the patches above on. I dug into my DOS/W95 games box and found perhaps one or two that might work:

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I'm thinking Commanche Gold *might have the support in it (Commanche 3 did). As for the rest in the picture, sorry, while I was looking, I dug out some cool games that I actually wanted to play which were non VR too. Along with a UR-Gear headtracker W98 driver CD.

There's another box of games which I know I have Quake and possibly Descent. I also may have Dark Forces too (which brings me onto a point that bugs me). I believe that there was a patch for several other games, including Dark Forces and more which Ive forgotten about.

Unfortunately, they were on the i-glasses CD which was included in the retail version, along with a cool 3d demo VHS tape. I wish I could get hold of these things today. Never mind.

On a positive note, the i-glasses were sold for the Amiga (IIRC Gateway era) for about a year, which resulted in a total of three (that Im aware of) i-glasses 3d stereoscopic games being produced:

Space Spuds, Nemac IV (Directors cut CD version) and Gloom Deluxe.

Well, as it happens I have this:

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Oh, and look at the blurb:

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Cool then. The irony here is that I have a Gotek in my Amiga so I will have to find an image of Gloom Deluxe to test with.

Failing that, Ive got an A500 floppy somewhere. I might have to chuck that in at some point.

********************************************

Other than the VR stuff, the problem with the laptop is that there are no native USB drivers on W98, so I will have to dig out some CDRs and burn a load of drivers utils and VR software onto one and hopefully install a working generic USB stick driver onto it, so if I forget something, I can just quickly USB it over instead of burning CDRs just for one off transfers. (Though its not the end of the world, as I have quite a few kicking around).

Anyway, that's it for now. Stay tuned for I don't know what next.

[PhilC]

@mrbombermillzy progress is progress. Can you get networking working on the laptop? Might be quicker than cdrs