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MS Flight Simulator 3.0 running on Olivetti Quaderno PT-XT-20. Although only XT-compatible, 16-MHz NEC V30 is five times faster than original PC with 4.7-MHz Intel 8088. This means that the game is perfectly playable on this machine. The internal...

MS Flight Simulator 3.0 running on Olivetti Quaderno PT-XT-20. Although only XT-compatible, 16-MHz NEC V30 is five times faster than original PC with 4.7-MHz Intel 8088. This means that the game is perfectly playable on this machine.

The internal 20MB Conner hard-drive is defective and needs to be repaired. However I am able to share a hard drive from another computer over a provided null-modem serial cable thanks to somebody in Olivetti who decided to add interlnk.exe and intersvr.exe to the C: ROM drive.

olivetti pc xt pt-xt-20 ultraportable vintage computer retrocomputing flight simulator

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CP/M running on Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3

Unlike previous ZX Spectrum computers, +3 is equipped with an internal 3-inch floppy drive (compatible with Amstrad computers) and it is fully capable of running CP/M. The system runs snappier and more responsive than Commodore 128 in the CP/M mode but there are two caveats. Multiple keys are missing in the crippled keyboard layout and these are replaced with cumbersome keyboard shortcuts. This can be especially annoying when working with spreadsheets.

Another issue comes from the fact that the video circuit works in a resolution of 256x192 so it cannot handle the standard 80x24 text-mode typical for CP/M machines. The computer normally displays only 32 characters per row which would not be enough for any CP/M program. The +3 version of CP/M therefore uses a reduced font resolution with just 5x8 pixels for each character (including space between characters). Such font allows to display 51x24 characters and that’s the default text mode when +3 is booted in CP/M.

Of course not all programs work correctly with the reduced screen size so there is a program called SET24x80.COM. It provides a virtual 80x24 screen and you can quickly switch between displaying the first 51 columns or last 51 columns of the screen using a keystroke.

sinclair zx spectrum spectrum +3 CP/M retrocomputing vintage computer bytefest

CGA Color Palettes

The infamous default 4-color palette with pink, cyan, black and white is probably the first thing that comes to mind when somebody starts to talk about CGA. I previously wrote a post about 16-color modes available for composite monitors but it’s good to add also something about the palettes for RGBI TTL monitors. These started to be used heavily when people stopped using TVs with their IBM PC compatibles.

The CGA palettes were designed for good viewing on NTSC TVs. That’s the reason behind the strange color combinations. The default one can, however, be modified using a video chip register – it replaces pink with red but also disables color burst on the composite output. Such trick was used in many games, but it did nothing on newer cards (EGA/VGA).

CGA also supports changing the color 0 (usually black) to any other color. Several games used this with the default palette to get blue, cyan, pink and white which allowed for better color transitions. Anyway, the easiest way to get more visually appealing games was to use the second palette – red, green, yellow and black.

cga palette IBM PC vintage computer

XT-class Toshiba laptops started to use “double-scan CGA” displays with a resolution of 640x400 in the late 80s. This allowed for better graphics and much sharper text in comparison with ordinary CGA solutions. However, the LCDs which Toshiba used worked only in 1-bit mode so there were no shades of grey (blue). Lower resolutions in graphics emulated (four) colors using 2x2 patterns. The text mode, on the other side, emulated the intensity bit (bright text) using bolt characters.

Toshiba experimented a lot with hi-res fonts in ROM and I’m not pleased with the results. Standard (thin) font is hard to read and not visually appealing. Fortunately, it is possible at least to swap the bold and standard fonts using a keyboard shortcut. It is strange that the highlighted characters are in fact less readable then but overall experience is still better than with the default setup.

retrocomputing toshiba T1200XE double-scan CGA IBM PC
A few nice things from last weeks I’ve salvaged two SGI O2 workstations in a very good shape. They were used in Military Research Institute Brno (a state-owned enterprise in Czech Republic). Both have 300-MHz MIPS R5000, 128MB RAM and an extremely...

A few nice things from last weeks

I’ve salvaged two SGI O2 workstations in a very good shape. They were used in Military Research Institute Brno (a state-owned enterprise in Czech Republic). Both have 300-MHz MIPS R5000, 128MB RAM and an extremely noisy 9GB hard drive made by IBM. One of them is full of dust and needs cleaning really bad but the other (which held classified information according to stickers) is clean like new. They were for free.

I was also given two packs full of CDs with SGI marketing materials, sets of hi-res photos of SGI computers for printed magazines and technical presentations for SGI customers. Most of it can be shared with public so I’m thinking about uploading it somewhere.

sgi o2 unix workstation vintage computer irix
sgihardware
sgihardware: “ SGI Octane2 Dual Head module SGI Octane2 was introduced in 2000 and contained SGI’s own VPro graphics chipset (sometimes called “OpenGL on a chip”). The graphic chip itself has about the same performance as NVIDIA GeForce 256 (Quadro)...
sgihardware

SGI Octane2 Dual Head module

SGI Octane2 was introduced in 2000 and contained SGI’s own VPro graphics chipset (sometimes called “OpenGL on a chip”). The graphic chip itself has about the same performance as NVIDIA GeForce 256 (Quadro) but offered also multiple advanced features including the 48-bit color precision. The chip, however, could handle only a single screen so SGI started to offer also a dual-head option which was basically two VPro cards glued together on a single XIO module.

Dual Head module manual: http://www.irix7.com/techpubs/007-4493-001.pdf

SGI VPro brief description: http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/SGI_VPro

swarmik

I’ve created another tumblr for the SGI images recovered from old press CDs. I will occasionally reblog posts, but please follow the new channel if you are interested in graphical workstations from the 1990s.

sgi octane dual-head silicon graphics
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