The Old Computer Challenge :: Luddite's Miserable Blog

:: Luddite's Miserable Blog ::

Here we go again... another retrocomputing marathon; another journey back to the days of saving to tape and 300 baud modems; another voyage into the blackest depths of the human psyche. Just in case you're not the type of person who avidly follows these events (and I sincerely hope that's the case), this event was [ill] conceived as a "warm-up" for next summer's big "RetroChallenge". It's not a contest, in any real sense, just a rag-tag group of old computer buffs doing odd things with obsolete technology. If you find that sort of thing titillating, I invite you, gentle reader, to join me in this bold exploration of terminal geekery. ~Luddite

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Dec 21, 2006

Warming-up for the Warm-up Challenge.

At the end of last Summer's RetroChallenge I boldly announced that I would be doing it again in January, with or without official sanction... and guess what? That's right, now I'm having to make good on my promise.

This little exercise in futility came about in large part due to the ongoing discussion over at the 68K Mac Liberation Army concerning the proposed rules for the 2007 RetroChallenge... it seemed like a good idea (at the time) to launch an informal challenge, thus transforming discussion into action. We'll see if anything comes of it.

With ten days to go before The Old Computer Challenge officially starts, there's already a handful of participants (I was expecting 2 or 3, at most, so we're already off to an auspicious beginning). You can wander over to the Official Web Page for a little more on who's in and who's doing what.

For my part, I'm essentially going to be doing what I did last year: making some music; irritating the other participants; and attempting to do all my personal computing with an Apple IIe and IIc. I might get round to doing some other comical tricks and stunts, but the music will be main focus again. Anyone who's interested in how [badly] last year's RetroChallenge turned out can check out my blog here [WARNING: may not be suitable for children... or adults for that matter].

Anyway, I probably won't do much over Xmas, but check back closer to the New Year for the launch of this gruelling challenge...

January 1, 2007

Off to a whimpering start...

Having gone completely overboard with liqueurs and chocolate truffles, I was in no shape to do anything even remotely challenging today.

January 2, 2007 R U Ready 2 Rock? Okay, today was much more productive... after putting in a reasonable facsimilie of a hard day's toil, I spent several hours recording samples with my Apple ][+. The ][+ is sporting a DX-1 sampler, which I'm hoping to make a good deal of use of during my noise-making experiments. The DX-1 is a very *primitive* sampler, as far as these things go, being 8-bit and having virtually no ability to manipulate the sound other than pitch and direction. Although the DX-1 can be used with external keyboards, I'll be using the Apple's built-in keyboard to "type" music... it will be horrible, I promise! I've decided on a more traditional rock'n'roll approach to music-making this time round, as opposed to the mathematical abstraction of last summer's output. I've even figured out how to use an Apple IIe as a guitar fuzz-box (it's really, really nasty). Given that I'll be utilizing more software and hardware this time, I might shoot for an EP rather than a full album... only time will tell. January 3, 2007 Not yet ready... Not a lot of excitement today... after an arduous shift in the gulag I came home all fired up to rock, but sadly things went amiss. I found that, being a complete bonehead, I had forgotten to save most of my DX-1 sample recordings, so I spent a good couple of hours retreading old turf. This time I double-checked all the files and even got in a little practice, for whatever good that will do... Something that struck me whilst futzing around with the DX-1 is how modern audio editing software has made me quite reliant on visual representations of sound rather than trusting my [tin] ear. While recording, the DX-1 does nothingvisual to indicate that anything is happening... there are no level meters; no waveform graphics; not even a red LED... it just records when it senses sound and stops when it runs out of memory. Anyway, I did manage to record some reasonable bass and guitar samples which should suit my nefarious purposes to a tee (although for some odd reason most of them sound better played backwards). Barring any unforseen catastrophe, I should be ready to start recording this weekend. Also swung by the Retro BBS for a bit... looks like it might be another month-long conversation with Dale (aka wgoodf). Hopefully things will pick up as the month progresses and the masses get all whipped into a frenzy over all the retro-excitement... I guess we'll see. On another BBS-related subject, some clever fellow has got a multi-line chat BBS running on an Apple IIe here. It's running 7 300 baud modems and boots off an Apple iPod of all things... sadly, it's on a non-standard port so I'm not able to connect under the constraints of my challenge gear. January 4, 2007 In at the Deep End I had intended to start composing some rhythm tracks with TIMELORD this evening, but quickly became frustrated by its *shitty* sequence editor. In a fit of what can only be described as mindless optimism, I decided to write not one, but two new ones (one for drums and one for basslines)... astonishingly, I was able to conjure up the little buggers in slightly less than 5 hours (about half that time spent looking for a missing colon in the middle of a single line of code). Well, it's not going to get me a job with Microsoft -- or McDonalds for that matter -- but I'm rather proud of my efforts and I do believe it will make the creative challenge a little less challenging. January 5, 2007 Q: Just how do you make music with an Apple II? A: With great difficulty... Since I did nothing more "retro" than watch movies with my daughter tonight, I thought I'd better do pennance by rattling on a bit about the hardware and software I'm going to be using for the Creative Challenge... My primary noise-maker is a Bell & Howell Apple II+. Bell & Howell sold rebadged Apples to schools in the late '70s and early '80s. Mine has the optional A/V "backpack" which provides audio inputs and outputs which come in rather handy for this sort of thing. I normally have an alphaSyntauri synth connected, but the keyboard controller is out on loan at the moment, so it won't come into play this time round. I do have a Decillionix DX-1 sampler installed, which I'll be using for "real-time" playing. I also use the B&H for playing back "TimeLord" bass and drum sequences, mainly because it has a much phatter sound than any of my other A2s. TimeLord is a program of my own devising, which is unfortunately so bugg-ridden and counter-intuitive that I'm probably the only person alive who actually uses it. C'est la vie... I'm also going to make some use of Michael Mahon's RT.Synth, which is a remarkable wavetable synth program that's probably the last word in Apple II soft synths. RT.Synth runs on IIe and newer models only, due to differences in the keyboard, so I'll be using that with an early model (unenhanced) IIe. Although I'm planning to coerce my pregnant wife into doing a lot of the vocals (and may even warble a bit myself), I'll probably include some speech synthesis courtesy of S.A.M. (the hardware version). Other software will include my own OMNIVOX "synth" which basically just goes "bleep" in new and interesting ways, and SQUAREWAVER, which I wrote during last summer's RetroChallenge. I also have a short ML routine that turns the Apple II into a 1-bit DAC (read: maximum distortion), I'll be using that for guitar and vocal effects. In keeping with the spirit of the challenge, I'm going to keep my studio set-up quite minimal. I'll be using a Fostex FD-8 digital 8-track for recording and mixing along with a handful of analog effects pedals. My aim is to record all the effects in "real-time" rather than add them during mixdown, but it remains to be seen how well that will work... As far as the style of music/noise goes, at the moment I'm tossing around ideas drawn from genres as diverse as industrial; black metal; punk; dub; rockabilly and so forth; so it's a safe bet that it will manage to alienate just about every potential listener. God help us. January 6, 2007 Bring Tha Noize! Finished recording my first song today... about 10 hours to put together less than 3 minutes of music -- I'm definitely thinking an EP will be the limit for this month, unless I can somehow contrive an excuse to skip work for a week or so... Anyway, I'm fairly happy with the results... sort of an odd mix of three chord punk and hard techno, though I still have to put vocals on it, so it could easily morph again before it's done. January 7, 2007 Getting really Old School Had to meet with a client to discuss doing a web site... in the spirit of the proceedings, I elected to leave my iBook at home and take pen and paper instead. I don't think he really saw the situational irony, but who cares... next time I'll take along a slate and and abacus. January 8, 2007 Deep Freeze Dire warnings from the weather bureau today... apparently the Worst Storm Of The Century is headed this way in the next few days. Normally adverse weather is something we Canadians take in our mighty stride, but when the TV news is constantly issuing Xtreme weather advisories, it starts to sound like a reasonable excuse to skip work for a day or two. Actually, I'm really hoping for something catastrophic, so I can stay home and get a jump on some of my retro projects... January 9, 2007 Ready for Global Warming... I'm really starting to worry that I won't get anything finished by the end of the month... normally January is slow as molasses for me, but this year it seems to be all about work. Damn this boom economy! Doing a quick check-up on the other Challengers doesn't offer up much hope: Dale seems to be sufferign from some hideous lurgy; Torbar doesn't seem to have started anything as of yet; Byron's project hasn't been updated since Jan 1; and Cory seems to have been sidetracked by cartooning. Haven't heard/read/seen much from the others, though I think Bill Garber's A2 hardware project is already a done deal. Well, tomorrow's supposed to be the big storm day, so I'm not planning on going in to work... maybe I'll get something accomplished. January 10, 2007 Monkey Smell His Own Poo... As predicted the Storm Of The Century arrived today. Although I'm no big fan of winter weather, I really didn't think it was all that bad -- pretty much just you're run-of-the-mill blizzard with a whole lot of media hype piled on top. Still, it was an excuse to shirk responsibility, so I'm not complaining... What I am going to complain about is my retrocomputing progress... Having a full day to piddle around, you'd think I'd be ahead by leaps and bounds, but sadly such is not the case. After spending most of the day recording, I realised that while I've pretty much nailed the sound I'm after, the actual music I've bee n coming up with is utter crap. Not that being crap has ever stopped me in the past, but this isn't even crap I like -- and that hurts! Now here's where it gets even worse: the main reason my music is crap is because the software I'm using is crap. Specifically TimeLord which I've already talked about (I wrote it, so I think I'm allowed to be critical). The main problem being that it's so damned cumbersome to use that it really inhibits the creative process... it makes me shudder to think how many people might have wasted valuable hours of their lives trying in vain to do something with it. Well, the bottom line is I can no longer live with it, so I'm going to fix it. My Challenge is taking a new direction!!! I'm hoping I can make all the improvements I have planned and still have a bit of time to make music before the end of the month, but I'm definitely putting programming ahead of noise-making at this point. For anyone who's keeping tabs, this won't be the second generation TimeLord I've been working on for the last year or so, but rather a complete overhaul of the original. Wish me luck... January 11, 2007 I'm tempted to quit my job... I'm finding that there's a whole lot of things I'd rather be doing with my life other than work. Case in point: today the Uther (Apple II Ethernet) card that I ordered from A2RetroSystems arrived in the mail. Did I get a chance to play with it yet? No. I did manage to spend a few hours fiddling with TimeLord... I think I've got a pretty reasonable sequence editor cooked up at this point, though I imagine there's lots of bugs yet to be discovered. At least it's now possible to compose music in a f airly intuitive manner -- there is hope! January 12, 2007 Contiki... Uther Has a few moments to play with the Uther card today... pretty easy to install (just jam it in an empty slot). Had some stupid user issues with the Contiki config, but once I realised I had it mapped to the wrong slot all was well. Contiki found the router, got an IP address and there I was surfing the net with an Apple II. The next question is: now what? I have TCP/IP capability on a machine that's really too damned slow to make any use of it. For the most part the Contiki apps are functionally minimal... for instance the Telnet application has no terminal emulation and the screen is about 20 characters wide, so there's really no real-world use for it. Similarly the web browser is *very* bare bones -- it makes Lynx feel like Firefox by comparison ;-) On the other hand, it does have an ftp client and an http download app, which could be very handy for grabbing files off the net. I mention these matters not to detract from the efforts of the various developers involved, but merely to outline my own predicament: how does this remarkable, if not entirely useful, technology fit in to my remarkable, if not entirely useful, life? While I could install the Uther card in a IIgs and run a web server with Silver Platter, that would mean delving into GS/OS, which is an aspect of the Apple II world I'm not particularly fond of... OTO, I like the idea behind Contiki but I just feel there aren't enough sites out there that are specifically compatible with it. Perhaps providing Contiki-friendly web content is something that might be a little more satisfying... January 13, 2007 Happy Again Okay, today was pretty good in terms of RetroComputing... Mucked about with Contiki a bit more. My initial lack of enthusiasm has been completely erased, I'm happy to say... I've been finding it quite useful for grabbing files off the internet at lightning fast speeds. Well, less than a minute to download Dale's slideshow disk image, which I'd say is pretty good for a 1 MHz machine. Today was also a good day for programming... well, so long as you consider it fun disassembling machine language routines for which the source code is long gone... I wanted to add a synch pulse to TimeLord in hopes of having the ability to trigger other hardware/software. It's sort of getting a bit beyond my comfort level, but if I can get it to work it will be rather cool indeed. I guess today was really all about networking, as I also spent a good bit of time fiddling about with NadaNet, Michael Mahon's minimalist take on Apple II networking. You can find more information at Michael's site. I bought a pair of NadaNet adaptors just before Xmas, but hadn't got round to trying them out until today... of course I didn't get much further than running the self-test, but I'm hoping to get into it a bit deeper after this month is over. Well... that's all for now. It's well past the Ovaltine hour! January 14, 2007 Odds and Sods Sort of a fragmented day, but fairly satisfying... got a bit more work done on TimeLord, though I haven't got the synch feature working yet. Might have to get someone to look at my code with fresh eyes since I'm sure it's just some stupid mistake t hat's keeping it from functioning properly. Spent quite a bit of time playing with teh Contiki web browser... trying to figure out which HTML tags it recognizes and how it responds to them. It seems like most of the page load time is spent parsing unused markup, so I'm in the process of working out a subset of HTML optimized for Contiki. I'm fairly certain I'll end up with a list of a dozen or less... probably wouldn't be too hard to put together a simplified WYSIWYG HTML editor in Applesoft for all the webmasters out there who are worried about Co ntiki compatibility ;-) Late Breaking News After giving matters some thought (specifically regarding the stupid mistake thing), I managed to figure out where I'd gone wrong with TimeLord... I won't bore you to death with the details, but suffice it to say that multiple Apple II's run ning TimeLord can now be started simultaneously, which is pretty darned cool even if I have to say it myself :) January 15, 2007 Nada With it being Monday and all, it was a pretty dull and uneventful day (aside from the soul-crushing misery of work). Tomorrow may be better, or it may not... January 16, 2007 and again... Another day that may as well not have happened... work, work, work, come home, empty cat litter. A few updates on the Old Computer Challenge: Bill Garber has completed his Apple ][+ Dual Rom Board project. You can find a bit of info at Garberstreet Electronics Torbar has been forced to abandon his recording project due to equipment failure, which kinda sucks... but he's still hoping to pick up the pieces at a later date, which kinda rules. Cory has completely switched gears and is now pursuing a cooperative novel-writing venture using an old Toshiba laptop running both Windows 3.1 _and_ OS/2 Warp. He's also rescheduled his challenge for February... is nothing sacred? January 17, 2006 The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away... Whilst our pal Torbar was cruelly taken out of action by shoddy kit, we are somewhat consoled by the entry of Dustin (AKA bigD) into the challenge. You can check out his blog here... unlike _some_ of the challenged, his writing is quite coherent and provides a wealth of information and insight... the only thing that bothers me is that I understand his particular challenge involves piloting a small aircraft whilst simultaneously benchmarking a fleet of vintage Macs. In other news, it would appear that RetroChallenge veteran Dale (AKA wgoodf) has his virtual nose out of joint over my failure to mention the completion of his Apple II multimedia project in my last entry... the simple fact is that I thought that if his remarkable music video were brought to light at this stage, all the other Challengers might just throw up their arms in despair and the whole proceeding grind to a shuddering halt with much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth... Well, I managed to get a look at said video today (yes, it involved using a modern PC, but I did it on work time, so it doesn't count ;-) and I'm happy to report that it's rather enjoyable... imagine a weird hybrid of The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari and Frogger with a soundtrack that vaguely resembles a funeral parlour organist playing a touch tone phone... well work checking out at www.haddockdot.co.uk January 18, 2007 Going in circles... Okay, obviously I have a problem finishing things... I'm about 75% finished my revamp of TimeLord (which you'll recall is crucial to my musical efforts) and now I've been completely side-tracked by the idea of writing an audio file editor for the Apple II. I've been doing quite a bit of reading on how various sound effects are achieved in the digital realm, and also given far too much thought as to how this could be accomplished within the constraints of the Apple II. Of course I'm talking here about manipulating sounds in the 2 seconds and under range... Some of your more popular effects, such as flanging and ring modulation, are remarkably simple in theory, as are most of your utility effects (normalization, compression, expansion etc). I'm not so sure about equalization... that might be too much for my limited abilities. The main reason for pursuing this idea is that mastering Apple II audio on more capable systems is a bit of a crap shoot. Most of the sample sets I made up for TimeLord ended up sounding very different by the time I got them transferred. Being able to monkey with the sounds in their native environment would take most of the guess work out of it. Of course the important thing at this stage is to write everything down and then forget about it until I actually have time to work on it ;-) In other retrocomputing news, Lorance (our erstwhile BBS SysOp), has made some off the cuff comments about doing some retro digital photography as a possible challenge entry. I haven't seen any of his work, since it doesn't translate well to the 80 column text screen, but I have it on good authority that it's worth seeing. I thik this would be a good time for all those lurkers at the BBS to speak out in support of this project. January 19, 2007 A dirty weekend... Okay, so I've packed the wife and child off to the mother-in-law's for the weekend, so I have a clear run at some recording. If I can't get anything accomplished in the next 48 hours the there's simply no hope. On a slightly sad note, I was hoping to use my *beloved* Morley Emerald Echo pedal to great effect with the Apple II sounds, but it seems to have given up the ghost, so now I'm stuck using a very inferior Radio Shack electronic reverb box. Whether anyone will be able to tell the difference, I have no idea... January 20, 2007 The Grind. Well today turned out to be a bit more gruelling than I'd hoped for... got up bright and early (okay... before noon), and thought I'd take a few moments to chase down some minor bugs in the new Timelord drumbeat editor. A few moments turned into 7 hours after all the tomfoolery that generally ensues when I start pretending I can program a computer. Not once, but twice, I managed to do a reverse backup (where the newest version is accidentally replaced by an older version). Fortunately deleted files can generally be recovered in the Apple II world, but I still kicked myself repeatedly... Fortunately I was able to make some progress on the music front... I had to substitute a less retro digital delay for the analog echo, but everything else went as planned... sort of. Well, I ended up with one entire finished piece of music. It's more-or-less a standard dub instrumental, which isn't exactly what I was aiming for at the start of the month, but I found the dub style really suits the Apple II sound for some reason. For this number (titled "Serial Dub") I used four tracks of Timelord for drums and bass, over which I played a couple tracks of live noodling. For the live tracks I used RT.Synth's "trumpet" voice and the "Dr.Death" setting in Omnivox. Surprisingly it turned out a lot like music. January 21, 2007 New Depths... Another productive studio day; another 4 minutes of dub... though I'm not sure about my decision to incorporate the modem sounds into the piece. Seems like something that a million smart-arses have probably already tried on... At this rate I might close out the month with an EP's worth of tracks (not that it'll ever see vinyl, mind you). At this stage in the game I'll be happy with that. January 22, 2007 Sleep Too psychically broken from work to accomplish anything this evening... the pillow awaits! January 24, 2007 Dying... Spent the last couple of days in the grip of deathly illness, writhing and sweating in feverish delerium at my mother-in-law's house. So obviously nothing exciting has happened. I did, however, fall off the bandwagon and revert to my not-so-retro iBook for my computing needs during this time. The result being that I uploaded a couple of my musical efforts to sendspace. The fatally curious can (temporarily) check it out here. At this point I'm starting to worry that time is running out... although I've fared better than some of the would-be challengers, I'm still far short of my own expectations and with only a week to go! Time to knuckle-down, I guess... January 26, 2007 Skiving Still sick, but at least I'm in that glorious phase of recuperation where I'm still too wobbly to return to work, but functional enough to play around a bit. Clouds... silver linings... you know. I'm happy to report that we have a completed entry from latecomer mmphosis, who's well written Apple II program turned out to be a little gem that draws the Hacker Emblem on the 40x48 pixel lo-res graphic screen... I've already incorporated it as my Apple IIe's startup screen (yes, I'm a sad geek loser...) And speaking of sad geek losers, I finished another piece of music today... egged-on by Lorance and Dale, I went through with my thoroughly lame plan to use a dot matrix printer as a musical instrument. Well, it turned out okay all things considered, but it's probably right up there with the modem song in terms of weak conceptuality... but I'm guessing that anyone who's reading this is starved for entertainment anyway, so whatever. January 27, 2007 On the mend... Spent a pleasant, if unproductive, day hanging out with my daughter... after watching several hundred episodes of Scooby Doo, we headed out into the barren sub-Arctic tundra for a few windswept hours of winter gallavanting. High points of the day included dodging speeding Ski-doos on the golf course and watching young Astrid going down the toboggan hill without benefit of a sled and completely destroying her new ski pants in the process. Mother will be furious! As close as I got to doing anything retro was starting work on my exhaustive guide to optimizing HTML for the Contiki browser. I'm sure anyone tough enough to be messing with Contiki is quite capable of adapting their pages to its limitation, but it seemed like a good "fill-in" project that a) no one else has bothered with and b) won't take a whole lot of brain work... famous last words! January 28, 2007 Mission Accomplished! It may not be destined to be a club hit in Eastern Europe, but the great Apple II dub EP is a done deal... 4 tracks, 18+ minutes and simply reeking of 8-bit geekery. I still have to master it, which will be a decidely non-retro event, and the artwork is little more than a glint in the postman's eye, but the hard slogging is done and the weary adventurer can rest upon his staff for a few fleeting moments. Aside from that, I spent a few hours fiddling Contiki and working on what is surely going to be the definitive guide to HTML for the Web 2.0 generation... uh, well you know how it is. Back to work in the morning... I can't say I'm delighted by the prospect ;-( January 29, 2007 Wrapping up... Well there's not much left to do now but think about my closing address... but I'm not feeling too energetic this evening, so it will have to wait till tomorrow. January 30, 2007 Sermon on the Mount It's been a day of portents... bitten by a chihuahua in the AM and caught in a blizzard in the PM. Still, I'm tough and I managed to clamber over the wreckage and bodies in order to put an end to this month of madness... And what exactly have I accomplished? you may well ask... and I'll tell you. First and foremost, I managed to get half a dozen misguided souls to follow me down this path of insanity... which is about double the turnout I was expecting. Score one for the home team! Spent a pleasant month chatting with Dale & Lorance over at the RetroChallenge BBS... thankfully this time round Lorance got in on the conversation a bit more than in the Summer, so things didn't quite devolve into Knight Rider pr0n as was p reviously the case. Had a few lurkers drop by, but nobody else really got in on the fun... well, you can't really blame them. MUSIC! Well, it turned out *completely* different from what I'd planned at the start of the month, but I think it ended up a success (I speak in relative terms, you understand...). I had some equipment issues which had me using newer effects than I had ho ped, but I don't think it really shows... I also took a slightly different approach compared to last summer's effort, not just in terms of style, but also insofar as this CD could actually be called "produced". The focus on Geometry For Lovers was on being arbitrary and keeping the raw sound of the Apple II at all costs... this time round I treated it more like any other recording project; using basic effects like noise gates and reverb to enhance the sound, though without altering it's basic nature... check out the results here. ACADEMIA! Okay, that's a stretch... being smitten with the Contiki OS, I penned a brief guide to Optimizing HTML for the Contiki Web Browser. Yes, I am a pretentious git sometimes... anyway, I'm neither an Contiki expert n or a comptetent web designer, so it's hardly an authoratative work, but until someone with a bigger head comes along and puts me in my place, it's probably the only resource of its kind available. HACKING! Well actually sub-standard BASIC programming, but I'd rather be called a hacker than simply a hack... spent quite a bit of time revising the TimeLord program. Still not 100% happy with it, but it's a whole lot better than it was. I'll be releasing it into the wild in the next week or so, pending a few minor bugfixes. That's all! Having spent all evening in OS X doing mastering and graphics for the CD, I can definitely say I'm firmly back in the 21st Century... but, as I think this last month has proven, I can easily lose a decade or two at the drop of a hat. Pe rhaps, I'll make it as far as the RetroChallenge (if there is one)... but maybe not. ;-) Until next time, thanks for stopping by, and especially thanks to everyone who took up the challenge! Simon Williams (Luddite) January 30, 2007 Daysland AB Canada.