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Possibly useful if you have old Apple ][ disks laying around:

Many years ago I graduated and lost access to Apple ][ machines at school, but still had a bunch of floppy disks for them.

Then just a few years ago I happened to stumble across a tool called disk2fdi http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi for MS-DOS, that can read Apple disks using IBM hardware. I was able to use the trial version of that (from MS-DOS on an old IBM compatible) to recover images of my disks.

I transferred the images to a newer Linux machine, and was able to use dos33fsprogs https://github.com/deater/dos33fsprogs to extract individual files and confirm that the recovery was successful. I also tested some of the disk images in an Apple ][ emulator.

I also have a couple of old TRS-80 disks (possibly a version of CPM?) that I have not been able to recover, although I haven't really tried very hard either.

Considering that there exist cheap ICs that handle analog video overlays that really only need a serial input...yes, your 8088 could at least render the overlay with less than $100 of extra hardware.
As for the video on CGA...I guess that's possible too.

Been done on a PC/XT too: http://www.oldskool.org/pc/808...

You may want to try reading them back on your PC before getting rid of them, in case you've got two PC floppy drives lying around...

See ADFRead from WinUAE (any recent Windows version) or Disk2FDI (Windows 9x only, but better disk format support).

If you're interested Beyond Castle Wolfenstein has been ported to DOS/Windows and released for free.

As someone who runs a software collector's mailing list and a co-author of a collectible software grading scale, I think I'm qualified to report: It depends. The collectible value of software is pretty much the same as any other collectible:

• Desirability (not the same as rarity)
• Availability
• Condition

The reason rarity != value is because, if nobody knows about it, nobody wants it. I own a fairly nice copy of Wibarm, and I believe I'm the only one left in the USA to own it. But since nobody has heard about it, and it's not part of some Infocom/Sierra/Lucasarts legacy, nobody would offer me more than $20 for it.

Condition is obviously important. Incomplete items are worth nearly nothing, and even if it's complete it should be in decent condition (ie. the box isn't crushed). If it's in mint condition (still shrinkwrapped), you are holding gold.

One exception to this is diskettes: For reasons I don't quite agree with, most collectors feel that the condition of the diskette media is not nearly as important as the other materials, mainly because most of the software has been cracked and available. I disagree, because without working originals, you can never be sure if the cracked versions are complete (and in my experience easily 15% of them are not).

The ebay market for collectible software started to dry up around 2005, but for a very long time it was a hotbed of collectible software buying and selling. You can still find some reasonable bargains (ie. an average of $20-$30 a title) but most of the time it still costs $200 for a Kilrathi Saga, or $1600 for an original Infocom Starcross Saucer.

So, like some of the other posters mentioned, the confusing part is security through obscurity vs. using secrets.

It can be shown that if two people know a secret, they can exchange information over a common channel, and eavesdroppers can't decrypt the message without trying every possible secret. This is somewhat like sending a safe through the mail - anyone intercepting packages at the post office would have to try every possible combination to get it open. Even if they knew the design of the safe. Even if they had helped design the safe.

A real-world example of this is the design of the ATM: The author used public-key encryption so that even if he were trying to break the encryption, he wouldn't be able to. While he made the design, he doesn't know the secret key.

The reason such strong encryption can't be used on DRM is because they have to give you the secret. It's like giving you a safe, giving you the code, and then telling you that you should only open it in certain circumstances.

Here's a little windows app that might help you save a little power. When your machine is idle, it throttles the clock back, which should save a bit of juice (and heat!) http://www.oldskool.org/pc/throttle/

Aside from the chicklet keyboard, it's claim to fame was expansion by stacking cartridges on the side.A little memory here, a printer port there, and you had a few feet sticking off the side.

http://www.oldskool.org/shrines/pcjr_tandy

Sounds like the same thing with a new paint job.

Some beautiful person has done some great work putting Jumpman on the modern PC. I love this man. http://www.oldskool.org/pc/jumpman

cold dead tand-em playing hands.

The best thing to do for home comptuers is probably turn on the power-saving options like turning off the monitor/hard drives after 5 minutes of idle, and having the computer sleep after 15 or so.

...and inbetween, use a load based CPU throttling program like this: winThrottle

why u2 sucks: http://www.oldskool.org/archives/u2sucks

sheesh, I'm replying to my own comments...

FWIW, I've now changed my FAQ about my legal rights to distribute this game, from "YES!" to "HOPEFULLY!" ;) and provided a bit of an explanation as to why I believe it's not a problem.
http://www.oldskool.org/pc/BCW/faq.html

-jeff!

The guy who did this (jeff?) seems to want to remain fairly anonymous for some reason. I couldn't find any info on who he really is on his page. It's the same guy who did the Jumpman conversion a while back.

Oh! And he's looking for another project!!! Who are you so I can send you my shelf-full of old DOS games I can't play anymore??? (Though I'm sure none of the disks work anymore.)

Actually, he has a pretty nice tutorial on how to recreate source from bootable games and how to implement speed fixes. It's a pretty nice read.

Shame on all of you. In those 15 years, we've seen what was considered state-of-the-art, expensive server hardware degrade to 'suitable for wordprocessing', to a mere packet router. Despite of all pretty eye candy, software isn't what it used to be. "My computer is too slow" is an excuse often heard instead of "my software is badly designed". Of course in those days we had to carve the 0's and 1's of our code in stone, after walking barefeet uphill both ways through blizards. For those who always have had the luxury of lightning fast machines, maybe for a bit you should stand still at what computers at that time were already capable of without 3D accelerator board and a mere 33 megahertz processor.

A spy movie? How about any movie involving computers?

So, not only will the Commodore disk drive provide superior preservation for your music files, it can play the music as well

Definitly the demo dvd (mindcandy).

It features PC demos from 1993 to today. For definition of what a demo is check here

I am using my Tandy 1000 RL (circa 1989?) as a monitor stand. Oh! Better yet, I'm using an Apple Power Macintosh 6100/66 as a monitor stand at work. It's from mid 1985.

A little off on the Mac date. The Power Mac 6100/66 was introduced in 1995, not 1985. In 1985, I was running my beloved, brand-new Apple //c, with 128kb of RAM and an internal 5.25" floppy drive, while my uncle (an engineer) was running a brand-new, super-expensive, super-powerful Macintosh -- no adjectives, since the Macintosh came out only the year before. How I wanted one of those!!

I still have my //c and some of the software for it, and it still works. The expensive RGB monitor that I got with it is still pretty nice, although tiny.

BTW, you're right, the Tandy 1000RL was in the late 80s/early 90s.

If you were sane, you'd have archived all those floppies on a cd-rom. It's disquieting how many boxes fit on a single cd :)

BTW, there exist many free PC emalutors:

• Dosbox is by far the best. It's a true emulator, portable, has a built in DOS, and is trivial to setup (no config files, uses the file system instead of disk images). Only major problem is the lack of protected mode support (if you also want to play some more recent games :)
• DOSEMU is also pretty good, and it will run most games, but it's configuration file is a mess, and it requires Linux/i386 (they were working on a CPU emulator, so it might work on other platforms by now).
• Bochs is another true emulator, not targeted specifically to games as Dosbox is. As a result, it is slower and more cumbersome to setup, but it supports protected mode games. Bochs is your only hope if you want to play protected mode games on most non-intel platforms.
• MESS, the console and home computer counterpart of MAME, has an IBM PC and PC/XT emulator. They probably go for hardware emulation accuracy. I've never used it.
• Flopper is a tool that lets you run games that were distributed as bootable floppies. I have no such games, so I've never used it :)

You're right. The computers started out being called Kon-Tiki, but Heyerdahl forced the manufacturers to change the name to Tiki. Norw Wood

You could create so called "demos" which requires a bit of everything, programming, graphics and music. More information can be found here. There is already a lot of them out there from C64, Amiga, texas instument calculator demos and PC demos, most of them can be found here. They are useless but then again fun to make :)

The Tandy 1000SX was an IBM PC compatible, but it had some custom hardware: It had sound which was better than the PC speaker (in that it was polyphonic), and some sort of 16-color graphics which was nevertheless incompatible with EGA... so, most games couldn't do better than CGA, but MechWarrior supported both Tandy Sound and Tandy Graphics!

Don't know if you know this or not, but the Tandy 1000 was not just "IBM PC compatible", it was actually an IBM PCjr. clone. This is where you get the "Tandy Sound and Tandy Graphics" - these are actually enhanced IBM PCjr. graphics modes. The Tandy 1000 was actually more successful than the PCjr., so some game developers referred specifically to the Tandy capabilities rather than to the PCJr.

Code, by Charles Petzold is what I'd give my 12 year old self. At that time 1984, my dad gave me the C Programming Language, the Unix Programming Environmnet, and a new computer loaded with a copy of Microsoft's XENIX operating system.

Not like I needed to tell you that or anything, but it's true. In an era where PCs are a household appliance, video game consoles sell like hotcakes, and everyone's grandma knows what the Internet is, why does Hollywood insist on making incredibly stupid computer-based movies that insult your intelligence?

Interresting about software art, because I tent to look at demos as art. The word is defined here, and it is a mixture between different algorithms, graphics and music. They put it into a program witch renders pictures in real-time.
For more demos you can look at scene.org or pouet.net.

Thank you for posting this. The second side has the exact demo I was looking for:

Amnesia by Renaissance (1992)

And, here, those of you unlucky enough to have never seen this demo on a PC may listen to the nice music that went with the demo. In this case, the tracker used was rewritten by Tran and the music recorded at 44.1kHz and encoded as 128kbit MP3s. The music is only half the treat, though. If you can find a 486 of some sort and a SB Pro, I think you'd really owe it to yourself to check out what they were doing in '92 on 386's.

Since I appreciate the service the site linked above provides, I've mirrored the music on another host: http://www.osuweb.net/~ahaning/stuff/amnesia/

Enjoy!

Ok, I've got to reply on this. Go to the disk2fdi homepage, download the package and see for yourself.

Disk2fdi can read Amiga floppies (among others) on a PC with two floppy drives.

And by the way, the if you buy a Catweasel mk3, you can read even those pesky variable speed 800k Apple disks on a single speed drive. Disk2fdi doesn't require anything else but a plain dos prompt and two floppy drives.

Why does every Amiga thread on Slashdot have to be full of misinformation? Oh well, I guess that goes for all Slashdot threads.. :-)

• Writing a 'burglar-alarm' program that sat there expecting the space bar to be pressed constantly. Then putting the keyboard across the way with a book sitting on the space bar. If anyone walked by and interrupted the beam, the alarm would go off. Fun to do across people's cube entryways. (Yes, I was writing software that was supposed to work on those things...)
  
• Normal TV remotes would interfere with the keyboard signal and cause the PCjr to beep annoyingly and not recognize commands. I have fond memories of taking a remote to computer stores and surreptitiously pointing it from my pocket at the PCjr when the salesman at Sears was demonstrating the wonders of the wireless keyboard to someone. (Yes, I was an Apple II/Mac partisan and actually thought there was some danger the PCjr was going to take over the world... How could I have known that it was going to be one of the most remarkable flops of all time? )
  
  

This site explains it all: the PCjr was an ill-fated attempt at the consumer market by IBM.

Apparently UAE users that only want to read Amiga disks do not need one. This program disk2fdi claims to let you read Amiga disks if you have two floppy drives (by buggering around, swapping between the two drives in the middle of a sequence of commands, from what I understood of their explanation). I have not tried it yet, but I really hope that it works, not because it would be convenient, but because it appears to be such a neat hack.

Well, it won't do C64 disks, but in the past week, I've found this awesome software tool to help me get access to my old Amiga disks on my PC. It's called DISK2FDI, and uses a neat floppy controller trick to read Amiga disks using regular PC floppy drives, all through software. You do need 2 drives for it to work, though, but it works great making .ADF files that UAE can use.

http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/

Actually, they weren't the first makers of the modern soundcard. I think that distinction would go to Adlib not Creative Labs. Creative Labs first showing of a soundcard was the incredibly medicore Game Blaster. We also can't forget the incredible for its time Roland MT32 which still has kick ass Midi today.

But for some reason the computer industry seems to belive that if there has been a lapse for 10 years, the next sucessor is suddelny 'new'.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/sheet/gameId,134/

www.oldskool.org/shrines/captainblood/capblood.htm

http://argnet.fatal-design.com/bluddian.htm

The Gathering isn't meant to be so much a "gamer" party as it is supposed to be for the Demo Scene .

Good examples of what demos are are here if you have a win32 or DOS box around.

More parties like Mekka, Assembly, The Party and others exist.

Too bad. What did it talk about then? Nibbles and Moppyranger?
"PC" and "gaming" didn't get along too well at that time. If you had a clue you got either a console or Amiga.

Oldskool has a utility that lets you play booters from disc images. I can't get through to the site right now, but they have a utilities section. So, if you can pop the drive in long enough to make a few images, you're golden.

Mo'Slo is what you're thinking of, I think.
Mo'Slo

There's also Turbo, (which I have never used).
Turbo

rainbowfyre

But the history of this very cool idea goes all the way back to one of the old kit-computers where you toggled in the entire program using switches and got results from a couple of LEDs. It produced a different frequency whine depending on how hard the processor was working. Somebody got it to play "Mary Had A Little Lamb" at a meeting of an early Homebrew Computer Club. I can't remember which computer or club specifically, though.

...has already been written.

You can check out those old games at MobyGames.

You are correct. Adlib should've been the real winner here--the Sound Blaster was the same Yamaha chipset with a DAC tacked on. If it weren't for the Adlib's popularity beforehand, the Sound Blaster wouldn't have taken off.

Why? Because Creative's original idea of music for a PC was the Creative Music System, also sold under the name "Game Blaster" at Radio Shack. It was essentially four Tandy sound chips in stereo. Anyone who remembers their sound standards can easily tell you that Adlib's 2-operator FM was much better than the TI chip in the Tandy.

Go visit http://www.oldskool.org/pc/sound/ if you want some audio examples.