Jolt Country

One of things I've been thinking of is - why was the PCjr so magical for us? Besides the PCjr being a 16-color computer that showed up on Christmas Day and everything.

This is Frogger II: Three Deep on the Commodore 64. A legitimately good-looking game.



This is what I personally saw in my time, leading up to it:



As our friend that had the Commodore 64 had it connected to a black and white television.

Our cousins had a Vic 20 and Gorf. Here's what that looked like. I don't know enough about the VIC-20 to know if they just threw a border around the game, or if that is some artifact of a VIC-20 screen shot.



At school we had Apple // computers. We played Snooper Troops on it:



The 2600 was in the house and the Intellivision was as well. The Intellivision was the closest thing to nice graphics that we saw at this point. So of course the PCjr looked like a godsend. Nobody knew the Amiga was around the corner and without a color television, C64 games are, through no fault of their own, muted.

I bought a modern day board that will let me boot off a PCjr today. I do not have a physical PCjr.

Yet.

The two boards I bought were these:

The jr-IDE. Link.



This is the project page for the board - https://www.retrotronics.org/home-page/jride/

It offers:

40-pin Parallel ATA IDE interface
1MB of static RAM
512KB of flash ROM
A real-time clock
A Power On Self Test (POST) display
Bus activity indicator LED

I was under the impression that it also offered a way to use a CF card to boot from... let me see where I got that idea. I think the jr-IDE solves the issue of needing sidecars for memory expansion.

I also bought this board, which is supposed to be like an Ad-Lib board for the Junior. We never had anything like this originally.

https://texelec.com/product/resound-jr-opl3-adlib-pcjr/

That's cool. My first soundcard was a SoundBlaster 8-bit, but it seemed to me that Ad-Lib cards could do music without sound samples just fine. And obviously it sounded MUCH better than the PC Speaker. That's actually the main reason my mom prompted my dad to buy us the Sound Blaster for 99.99$ back in 1991. The sound of games blaring over the PC speaker was driving her nuts. I want to say at the time an Ad-Lib sound card ran about 70$, so paying a bit more to also get sound effects not to play thru the PC speaker was worth it.

I still wish I had a Roland MT-32. I recall drooling over those back in the day to run high-quality MIDI music. You could use it and a SB at the same time to do the SFX.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 12:52 pm Our cousins had a Vic 20 and Gorf. Here's what that looked like. I don't know enough about the VIC-20 to know if they just threw a border around the game, or if that is some artifact of a VIC-20 screen shot.

The VIC-20 had a resolution of 176x184, whereas the C64 was 320x200. Both systems has a large border around the outside of the screen which could be changed to a solid color. Most games simply changed it to black, which visually kind of made it disappear. Just for comparison, here's Frogger II as it plays in WinVice, uncropped.



There are some programming tricks that will allow you to move graphics into the border areas (I forget which is which, but one is easier than the other), but by and large most games have that border. A lot of demos have graphics in the border area as a way of showing off.

Jizaboz wrote: Sun Sep 18, 2022 12:45 am That's cool. My first soundcard was a SoundBlaster 8-bit, but it seemed to me that Ad-Lib cards could do music without sound samples just fine. And obviously it sounded MUCH better than the PC Speaker. That's actually the main reason my mom prompted my dad to buy us the Sound Blaster for 99.99$ back in 1991. The sound of games blaring over the PC speaker was driving her nuts. I want to say at the time an Ad-Lib sound card ran about 70$, so paying a bit more to also get sound effects not to play thru the PC speaker was worth it.

Our first sound card for a PC was an Adlib card. Someone told me at the time that the Adlib had 7 voices while the Soundblaster had 11, and it was those 4 additional voices that allowed for digitized speech. I don't think that's technically correct, but the explanation was good enough for me at the time.

Jizaboz wrote: Sun Sep 18, 2022 12:45 am I still wish I had a Roland MT-32. I recall drooling over those back in the day to run high-quality MIDI music. You could use it and a SB at the same time to do the SFX.

If you have a spare Raspberry Pi lying around, you can reconfigure it to act as a MT-32 with the MT-32-pi software. These are very popular in the MiSTer community.

Link: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspb ... midi-synth

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 12:52 pm I bought a modern day board that will let me boot off a PCjr today. I do not have a physical PCjr. Yet.

I think the PCjr, along with a TRS-80 Model III, are the only two vintage machines left I could consider buying. Vintage TRS-80 emulation isn't great for some reason (I can't get the MiSTer core to do much of anything tbh) and the PCjr was such a unique beast that I feel like some enjoyment would be obtained from owning a physical one (again). As you noted, it certainly isn't a poor (or cheap) man's game. That IDE card is a technical bit of wizardry; allowing for IDE hard drives would be a must. And the Adlib card, even more than adding additional audio voices, adds a speaker out jack.

Flack wrote: Sun Sep 18, 2022 8:18 am If you have a spare Raspberry Pi lying around, you can reconfigure it to act as a MT-32 with the MT-32-pi software. These are very popular in the MiSTer community.

Link: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspb ... midi-synth

Ah thanks! I was wondering if such a thing existed yet.

There is a Junior on the way. I got a joystick breakout board that will let me use a PS/2 keyboard with it, along with some quality of life improvements for the two joysticks I'll eventually get.

Anyone looking to buy a 4-player X-Men arcade game so I can finance this and park this winter in my garage, hit me up.

This is a win for you. It's a win for all of us. Let us all celebrate this win as if it were our own.

Flack wrote: Mon Sep 19, 2022 11:55 am This is a win for you. It's a win for all of us. Let us all celebrate this win as if it were our own.

It's time we came together as a community for this one.

I will hope to have a working PCjr soon with good peripherals and we can share in this success.

My father was a good man for getting our family one.

When I think about how much those early computers cost, especially when compared to our family's income, I think... yeah, my dad wasn't just buying some box that played video games. He was investing in the future. He was investing in my future.

And those fathers that bought VIC-20s were giving their kids valuable experience in black box testing HEE HEEE HEEEEEEEE

Because there was a black box around the game.

FedEx is saying the Junior will be here tomorrow. I'm going to spew kittens if that is the case. I think I've got floppy disks from the 80s in my office that should work, like Zork.

It's marked out for delivery. Which doesn't mean anything because the one industry that the change to online-everything couldn't kill, but only enhance, is shipping companies, so of course how could they be expected to have any accuracy. But it's close to being here, which is great.

It arrived.

You owe FedEx an apology.

FedEx, I apologize. And HOLY NUTBALLS did the seller pack this thing well. I think there was enough bubble wrap to encircle my house. I've never seen such good wrapping.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Wed Sep 21, 2022 12:13 pm I think there was enough bubble wrap to encircle my house. I've never seen such good wrapping.

That's the only way you can pack anything with any shipper these days or it will be destroyed. It could also quite possibly be destroyed even if you do!

Will there be an unboxing video? Or a Hello World video when you load up your very first program?