The Professor's notorious list of games
Tue 27 Mar 07 05:12 | Tags: Games, Retro
This is one of the most awesome pictures on the internet. (image source)
A professor from Stanford University, Henry Lowood, recently released his own "canon" of ten historical video games. Lowood believes video games should be a form of entertainment preserved by the Library of Congress, just as TV shows, music, movies and, of course, books have been. His list, devised with the help of a panel of gaming industry pundits, included the first ten games he believes should receive special consideration for historical preservation. Let's take a look at the list, shall we?
- Spacewar! (1962). Arguably one of the first video games that could be called such, Spacewar! was a two-player-only game that featured two ships on a screen with a star in the middle. The ships could fly around the screen and shoot little dots; the goal of the game was to blow up the other ship with your fire without getting blown up yourself or becoming drawn into the gravity field of the star. For one of the world's first video games, the game is remarkably complex; ships had a finite limit of fuel and firepower and could "hyperspace" in case of emergency (think Asteroids, and the vector graphics wouldn't be matched by arcade games for at least another decade and a half -- indeed, the concept of an "arcade game" did not yet exist. This game was implemented on the PDP-1, one of the old "fills a whole room" computers, and was arguably one of the most popular applications for it -- so much so that system installers would play the game after installing the machine in order to test it. You can play it online via a Java applet.
- Star Raiders (1979). Capitalizing on the "space boom" of the late '70s inspired by Star Wars and Star Trek, Star Raiders, written by Atari for their 8-bit computer line, put you in the cockpit of a space fighter and had you blast everything that moved. The game was an early (but not quite the first) example of three-dimensional gameplay from a first-person perspective and was quite a hit, prompting Atari to port it to their other systems of the early '80s. I personally used to own the Atari 2600 version, which apparently suffered due to the relatively weak graphical and processing capabilities compared to the computer version; nonetheless, I remember it being a rather fast-paced and complicated game.
- Zork (1980). Zork is undoubtedly the most popular example of the text-based adventure game genre, popular in the 8-bit computer days. Players would read the details of their situation instead of see it; then they'd type their actions in English sentences for the computer to parse and react to. It's kind of tough to describe if you've never played one, so why not give Zork a try?
- Tetris (1985). Surely you've played this puzzle game before; it was the first of the hypnotizing "falling shapes in a well" puzzle games, and one of the most popular games of all time; not bad for a humble little game created behind the Iron Curtain in the waning years of the Cold War. This is a game which has had college dissertations written about it, and it still sells well to this day.
- SimCity (1989). SimCity was an early and highly-inspirational game in the "god game" genre, a popular genre to this day on home computers. Given a plot of land, your objective was to build the largest, best city you could, balancing the needs of your citizens and keeping them happy while recovering from the effects of occasional disasters. My uncle had the Windows version and I was a huge fan of it when I was a kid; I eventually got the Commodore 64 version, which was also fun but very much simplified and buggy. I would later put hundreds of hours into its first sequel, SimCity 2000, on my Mac.
- Super Mario Bros. 3 (1989). The second sequel to the grand-daddy of platform games, Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES added some nice new touches to the familiar Mario gameplay by allowing the player to fly and store items in an inventory system. The game had a huge number of levels, and though it was not necessary to complete them all to beat the game, completing the game in one sitting involved either several hours of continuous gameplay or the use of the notorious Warp Whistles to skip ahead quickly to the final levels.
- Civilization (1991) and Civilization II (1996). A PC "god game" in the vein of SimCity, these games have you building an entire nation instead of a single city. In addition, instead of being alone, you share the gameplay field with other nations and must deal with them, through diplomacy or force.
- Doom (1993). This game was far from the first first-person shooter game, or even the first such game in which the player is a mere human wandering through levels using (somewhat) realistic weapons; however, it was the game that kick-started the particular genre. It's hard to tell whether this violent game inspired more clones or more controversy.
- The Warcraft series (1994 to present). If Doom defined the first-person shooter genre, then Warcraft for the PC defined the real-time strategy game. What if chess didn't have "turns," but instead, each player could constantly move their pieces as fast as their hands and minds will allow?
- Sensible Soccer, AKA Sensible World of Soccer (1992). Originally for the Amiga, this capable soccer simulation saw limited success outside of Europe.
Gamers can and certainly have debated the qualities of this list online and elsewhere. It certainly displays some quirks; with the exception of Super Mario Bros. 3 and the mainframe-powered Spacewar!, all of the games are or were originally home computer games. Console and arcade games are not well-represented in the list. And speaking of Mario 3, why is that game listed instead of the original Super Mario Bros., which defined the platform game genre? Why do god games get so much representation (Civilization and SimCity), but there's no racing games to be seen? Or fighting games? Or flight sims? How come the entire Warcraft series makes the list, but Civilization III and Civilization IV are gama non grata? Why does the list suddenly end at the mid-'90s, not allowing for later influential games such as Tomb Raider (1996) or Metal Gear Solid (1998) or Dance Dance Revolution (1998) or Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001)? Should Zork really be included when the genre it kick-started is pretty much dead for commercial games nowadays? (Never mind that one of the writers of Zork was on the panel that created the list…) Where the heck is Pac-Man or Donkey Kong or Insert My Favorite Classic Game Here? And, really… Sensible Soccer? Really?
In the end, I don't think it really matters much. Despite all the press attention this list is receiving in both the gaming and the mainstream press, it really is little more than just a list that a bunch of guys made. Gamers always like to see the medium being taken seriously by academia and such; if I got together four friends over pizza and we made our own list and released it tomorrow, surely it would be nowhere near as hotly debated. But despite all disagreements, I'm sure all gamers wish him luck on his campaign to see video games be recognized by the Library of Congress as a legitimate form of entertainment in Americana. I'm sure it has to happen eventually.
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The cheapest PC of all time: The Timex Sinclair 1000
Wed 21 Mar 07 20:34 | Tags: Hardware, Retro
Behold the Timex Sinclair 1000.
I can't entirely recall how and when I came into acquisition of this little guy; I suppose I "collected" it during a point in my life when I had more money than sense, and unlike the TRS-80 Model 100 I wrote about earlier, I doubt I had a practical use for it when I got it. But I still have this one, and after coming across it in my closet earlier today, I decided to go ahead and hook it up for the first time and see what it can do.
The unit next to a marker for size reference. (It's small.)
The specs
First, a little background info on this machine. It's actually a rebranded US version of a computer released by the British company Sinclair Research Ltd, which made several computers during the early '80s which were popular in the United Kingdom and few places else. Sinclair's original version of the machine, released in 1981, was called the Sinclair ZX81, and was the follow-up to a machine released in 1980 aptly called the Sinclair ZX80. It featured a 3.25MHz Zilog Z80 processor (though it performs much slower in reality; more on that later) and a single kilobyte of RAM. Yes, one single kilobyte; 1024 bytes of memory. For comparison, the text of this article takes up over 12KB. I'm well aware that the resource needs of the standard computer user have risen over time, but still, I can't imagine how a personal computer with 1KB of RAM could be at all useful to anyone; with that little memory, how could you write a letter to your mother (including the overhead for a word processing app) and print it out? An optional first-party add-on module increased the RAM to a much more usable 16KB, though, since much of the commercial software released for the ZX81 required the RAM module to run, perhaps "optional" is the wrong word. The module was quite large and connected to an external connector on the back of the unit. Timex's version, released stateside a year later, doubled the ram to 2KB, but you still needed the module to do anything serious.
As you can see in the picture above, the unit is quite small. One of the reasons for that is that many of the features which were common for personal computers at the time were not present on this machine; there's no sound hardware and no dedicated video hardware. The port for the memory module served as the device's sole expansion or serial port; expansion devices had a pass-through connection on the end of their cable which allowed the device and the memory module to be used at the same time. This bare-bones design helped push the cost of the machine down to US$100 when it was released, making it the most affordable new personal computer of all time (though I suppose that could depend on how exactly you define the term "personal computer").
This machine did not support a floppy drive, but instead had "speaker" and "mic" ports which you connected with audio cables to the corresponding ports on a cassette recorder to store and retrieve data from an audiocassette. It also has a "game-style" video output. And… that's it.
Living in Sinclair
Okay, enough with the stats; let's open the box. What I had in there was different than what originally came in the box when the system was new. The 16KB memory module was included; it looks like the previous owner knew what they were doing. There was also a cassette with financial programs on it, and a power adapter. The video switch and cassette recorder cables were not included.
Ah, memories of the days when you had to do a contortion act behind your TV set before you could play Ms Pac-Man.
The first thing I needed to do to hook this baby up was to find a game switch. Remember these guys from the old Atari 2600 days? Of course you do. Fortunately, I still had a newer version of one of these which has a 75-ohm coaxial output as well as the 300-ohm forked antenna connector output; the earlier versions of these only had the latter, and I no longer own or have access to a TV I'd be able to connect that to. Okay, so I connected the power adapter and video switch to the wall, then plugged in the adapter and connected the video. I did not connect the memory module, since I wanted to see what it would be like to compute with such little RAM. I looked over the device for a moment to try to find where the power switch was; it turns out there isn't one. Unplugging the device is the only way to turn it off. Yet another example of skimpy design…
So I set the TV to the proper channel, and was presented with a blank white screen with a prompt at the bottom. Cool, it works. I was also greeted by an annoying buzzing sound; as I said, the ZX81 has no sound hardware, but instead of just outputting no sound, it outputs a buzz. Apparently some clever coders found a way to modulate the buzzing noise in such a way to output very basic music from the machine, but it couldn't have been pretty to hear. Mute!
I began to enter some BASIC commands into the machine. As you can see, the device has a membrane keyboard that, in a word, stinks; I pity anyone who had to do serious typing with this thing. I found it easier to type by holding the unit between my hands and using my thumbs to press the keys, thumbboard-style. Unsurprisingly, "real" keyboards and keyboard adapters were among the most popular third-party accessories for the system. One of the biggest frustrations is that "Delete" is not its own key; the top row of the keyboard stops at 0 (zero), and to delete, you have to press Shift-0. Many frustrating times I would try to delete and find I was entering a series of zeroes instead. Also, the keyboard is surprisingly missing any way to enter an exclamation mark or apostrophe; these characters were apparently not present in the ZX81's character set. The charset also did not feature lower-case letters, though it did feature inverted video letters. More reasons I can't imagine anyone being able to write a decent letter to Mom on this thing.
HI MOM. HOW ARE YOU? GUESS WHAT? MARIA AND I ARE EXPECTING A BABY. YOU ARE GOING TO BE A GRANDMA. IS NOT THAT EXCITING?
Fortunately, entering in BASIC commands with this keyboard is eased a bit by the keywording functions of the system; it's smart enough to expect when you'd want to enter a BASIC function name or other keyword, so you can just press one button to enter it. These are the words shown in white text on the keyboard. So you could type "GOTO" just by pressing the G key; very handy.
My Sinclair 1000 did not come with a manual, but fortunately I found a scanned version of it online. (Yes, it's probably copyright infringement, but somehow I can't see Timex caring much nowadays; they've gone back to making watches.) I used it as a reference to write up the BASIC program below. The intent was to create a string which became longer and longer until it maxed out the machine's meager RAM. The system's BASIC interpreter is surprisingly capable for such an otherwise pathetic machine.
10 LET X=0
20 LET X$=""
30 LET X$=X$+STR$ X
40 CLS
50 PRINT X$
60 LET X=X+1
70 IF X=10 THEN LET X=0
80 GOTO 30
If you ever dipped your toe into BASIC, you can probably figure out what this does. If not, here's the gist; it stores "0" into memory, prints it out, and clears the screen, then stores "01" to memory, prints it out, and clears the screen, stores "012", prints, clears, stores "0123", prints, clears, ad infinitum. Okay, so let's run it. (QuickTime, 3.5MB -- sorry for the low quality here; I had to use my digital camera and do a screen cap, since I don't have any hardware which can capture video from coax.)
The 16K memory module (note the size) and a data cassette.
Hmm. It's pretty slow, isn't it? Well, remember above where I said that the machine had a Z80 processor? That's actually a decently powerful little chip; Nintendo used a 4.2MHz Z80 in the original Game Boy, and Texas Instruments still uses them today in most of their graphing calculators. So why can't it perform as well here? Well, remember when I also said that the system has no dedicated video hardware? That means that the Z80 also has to handle the system's monochrome video output. It manages this by synching itself with the television's CRT scanning mechanism; when it's moving from its starting position to its ending position, the processor tells the TV what it needs the picture to look like. Only in the brief moment when the TV is not actively drawing pixels as it moves its electron gun from the end position to the start again does the processor actually execute the program. This continual "distraction" of the processor causes it to run dog slow. Sinclair mitigates this somewhat by including a "fast mode" feature which basically stops the processor from processing video and allows it to focus entirely on the program, at the cost of causing the picture to flicker as the TV is no longer receiving instructions on what to draw from the system. When the program issues a pause command, needs input from the user or terminates, the machine goes back into "slow mode" to show the user what's happening. Since my program isn't using fast mode, it's going to execute dog slow. With this system, you can have fast processing or you can have smooth video, but you can't have both at the same time. ("Fast" and "smooth" of course being very relative terms here.)
I left my little program running while I took the pictures you see in this article. When I came back to it, it was still chugging along. (6.6MB) I finally gave up and issued the Break command to the program. I guess 2K of RAM is actually plenty when it takes the program this long to fill it up!
Back in the box
The box.
Finally, I decided I had enough fun. I disconnected the system, packed it back into its foam tray, slid the tray back into the tattered box and chucked the box back into my closet. I don't exactly know what I'm supposed to do with this thing; they're going for a pittance in eBay auctions, even for more-complete sets, so I'd rather not deal with that. I suppose I'll just wait until the next free electronics recycling day in my town, then pitch it in.
The ZX81 managed to be a big hit for Sinclair, and likewise the Sinclair 1000 put Timex on the personal computing map -- undoubtedly aided more by the low price tag than any technological capability of the machine. Sinclair repeated their success in 1982 with the release of the ZX Spectrum, which offered more memory, an improved keybaord, and very elementary color graphics support. Timex released the Spectrum in the US as Sinclair 2068, but it failed to catch on in the American market, and by 1984, Timex was no longer releasing personal computers in the US. Personally, I don't think the personal computer market in the US is that much poorer for the fact.
References
- Wikipedia:
- The Obsolete Technology Website:
- TS1000.US (Check your speakers!)
- ZX81 advertisement. This image is a bit puzzling as it gives prices in dollars and references the ZX80 to ZX81 upgrade kit, but as far as I can tell, neither the 80 nor 81 were sold in the US by Sinclair; only the Timex versions, and only starting with the Timex Sinclair 1000 (the Sinclair ZX81). Also, the price, $149.95, is higher than what Timex charged. Hmm. Perhaps it's Australian?
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How much would you pay for a 286 today?
Tue 20 Mar 07 21:13 | Tags: Hardware, Retro
I was recently linked to by John of a blog titled Finding The Money, who I recently linked to, and possibly rudely asked for a link back because I thanked him for linking to me in the comments even though he hadn't linked to me; I had mixed him up with someone who had linked to me, but now he's linked to me and I kind of feel like a jerk… but anyway, one of the other blogs he linked to was titled Stranger in Suwon, written by a Canadian woman in Korea. It's a nicely-done blog, with lots of pictures (especially of food!), and got me remembering once more to the time when I did the same thing in Nagoya, Japan. Sadly, most of the photos of that time I took with my digital camera have been wiped out as the result of hard drive failures and poor back-up habits, but I still have some from my cell phone. Perhaps I'll share more of them sometime, but for now I'll stay on topic with the photo you see here.
I'm not sure exactly when I took this photo, but it was some time around the summer of 2005. Yes, this is a self-contained PC with a 286 processor for sale, new (as far as I could tell), in a major electronics chain store. I don't know if Epson was/is actually still making this or if it's just cruft from fifteen years ago they were never able to sell… If you look closely at the sign, you'll see that it has a whopping 640KB of memory (but that should be enough for anybody), and that the word なし (nashi, without) appears quite often: Hard drive, なし, software, なし. The price, 5000 yen, comes out to about US$45.
I passed on it.
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The laptop of tomorrow, yesterday!
Tue 13 Mar 07 22:59 | Tags: Hardware, Retro
UPDATE: Holy cow. For over twenty-four hours, this article has been up with a gross misspelling in the title: "The laptop of tommorrow, yesterday!" Ugh, I'm a moron.
Wouldn't it be great to have a laptop that had a battery life upward of eighteen hours? That took standard AA batteries so that, if recharging wasn't an option, new batteries could be purchased off-the-shelf for not too much money? That used flash-based storage so that the system started up instantly? That had a keyboard with keys the same size and "feel" as a regular, non-portable keyboard? I had one once. Sort of.
Back in my college days (the early 2000s), I was browsing a thrift store when I came across what appeared to be a suitcase for a pretty low price; I can't recall exactly how much, but it was less than five dollars. I cracked it open to see if anything was inside. Instead of being just a hollow case, it was lined with foam, with holes in it for various items; most of the holes were empty, but the largest held a boxy pleatherette slip case. When I opened that case, I found the miraculous computer described above.
I'm not sure if the thrift store realized the computer was in there when it priced the case, but I took advantage of the low price and picked it up without even knowing what the computer was or what it was capable of. It turned out to be a TRS-80 Model 100. As you've probably guessed by now, it indeed had the miraculous traits listed above, but it also had a few limitations.
I so totally ripped this image off from this site.
The Model 100 was an American version of a computer originally made for the Japanese market and released by Tandy, a mark of Radio Shack, in 1983. Though it struggled in the Japanese market, it was quite successful stateside; it was probably the first widely popular laptop computer in North America. It was about the size of a substantial hardcover novel, and instead of having a hinge as laptops do today, it was entirely flat; what is sometimes called a "slab" computer. With batteries, it weighted about three pounds; over two pounds less than Apple's smallest MacBook! Inside that box was an eight-bit Intel processor running at a blazing 2.4 megahertz; over twice the clock speed of the Commodore 64, released a year earlier. The operating system and applications were stored in 32KB of ROM, and the system could use 8KB to 32KB of non-volatile RAM for storing user data; if you needed more space, you could attach a floppy disk drive capable of storing 90KB. The built-in modem could stream data at 300 bits per second -- hey, it's still faster than you can type!
The display was a monochrome LCD panel which could display eight lines by forty characters of text. Let me help you visualize that:
+----------------------------------------+
|The Model 100 was an American version of|
| a computer originally made for the Japa|
|nese market market and released by Tandy|
|, a mark of Radio Shack, in 1983. It was|
| probably the first widely popular lapto|
|p computer. It was about the size of a s|
|ubstantial hardcover novel, and instead |
|of having a hinge as laptops do today, i|
+----------------------------------------+
The Model 100 had five built-in programs, all stored in ROM; a text editor, a scheduler, an address book, a terminal emulator, and a quite capable BASIC interpreter. What more could you ever need?
Of course, all this sounds quite tame today, but if you look at in context, these capabilities were not much worse, and in come cases even a little bit better, than non-portable home computers that were on the market at the time. In fact, once I found out the full capabilities of the machine, I was quite surprised; it was certainly more powerful than I was expecting it to be.
I was hoping to use the machine to type notes during my classes. In fact, this machine was quite popular with journalists, who could type up their stories on the road and then use the modem to send them back to their publisher instantly, and it remained in use for this function quite past its natural lifetime. (It also would have been great to be able to poke away at BASIC programs during my more boring classes, of which I had many.) Unfortunately, I was never able to get the system to power on, either with batteries or with the AC adapter; it just didn't work. Disappointed, I eventually resold the system and peripherals on eBay (with full disclosure that it didn't work) to a collector for about ten times what I paid for it.
…And recently, we've been hearing a lot of rumors in the Mac scene that Apple will introduce ultra-portable Mac laptops based on non-volatile flash memory. This, plus the exclusion of an optical drive, should drive up battery life significantly (though I doubt it'd go up to eighteen hours). It's interesting how sometimes the computer industry seems to come full circle.
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