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Which *NIX is best for you?

Which *NIX is best for you?

  • REDHAT or Fedora GNU/Linux

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Debian GNU/Linux

    Votes: 4 33.3%

  • Gentoo GNU/Linux

    Votes: 2 16.7%

  • Slackware GNU/Linux

    Votes: 1 8.3%

  • BSD (Free, Open or Net)

    Votes: 2 16.7%

  • Commercial UNIX

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • GNU/HURD

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • A.N.Other *NIX

    Votes: 3 25.0%
  • Total voters
    12
"TIML" wrote:

> CP/M User Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 1:17 pm

>> Computers don't retain their value, unless you can think of a way
>> to sell an Ol' machine to a few pennies.

> I think they DO retain their value, just not necessarily their price!

To a genuine enthusiest, yes an old computer can still retain it's value. But to one of these young bucks - it's all about graphics, sound, presentation overall. Give some kid a copy of Space Invaders after they have played the latest biz & they'd more likely throw it in the bin.

> That laptop earlier, is it made by a company thats gone all out for
> Linux now?

> Linux early adopters: Try the new ones like Xandros, Lindows, or
> even Fedora Core (1or2), they now support SO much more
> hardware and are SO much easier to install (Debian and Gentoo
> not included in the easy bit).

Having so many diferent Linux varients (and I'm guessing there's even more now than when this was posted) - could mean they all need to share compatability to at least have support for a piece of software. If it didn't imagine all the variations you'd get. But then you'd have to get down to which version of that Unix variant to have software run perfectly & smoothly.

"Unknown_K" wrote:

> The problem with older computers is that they realy only run the OS
> and software of their vintage well. While you can get newer software
> to run on older equipment the results are not exactly what you want
> to have.

> If you want to run CP/M, DOS, Amiga, Atari, or early Windows
> programs you will find the older machines are a much better value
> then trying to run an emulater on more current and much more
> expensive hardware (and varying results).

The older software doesn't even expect much from a computer, which is why you get these unusable programs on your ultra fast computers - even my ol' Pentium packs a punch for them & games are generally unplayable - which require a slowdown program.

> While Linux is constantly changing with each new release (more
> bloat , easier installs, and looking more like Windows in each
> release) you have to ask why you want to run Linux to begin with.
> With the exception of office clones the software categories have
> not expanded much from the redhat 5 days, people buy an OS
> to support their software of choice not the other way around. There
> are no killer Linux apps out period (outside of webservers) for the
> average PC user.

True, on the other hand Windows is no better & plus you continuning your support for Microsoft software. There maybe many varations to the Unix OS, but Windows isn't much better. The Internet seems to be the killer for my machine because all the time new software is downloaded onto my computer, OSes change & because Microsoft had to have this automatic update stuff, it's just no good. While it's nice to have access to it, it does come with many flaws in design. It's getting to a point where I need to update my computer, though I'll bet Microsoft will change their OS soon.

CP/M User.
 
If an old game was really good 20 years ago it will still be good now (most of the early 80's arcade games are still popular). Its when the game is all about graphics and not gameplay that it falls out of favor fast because graphics keep getting better but sucky gameplay does not.
 
"Unknown_K" wrote:

> If an old game was really good 20 years ago it will still be good
> now (most of the early 80's arcade games are still popular). Its
> when the game is all about graphics and not gameplay that it falls
> out of favor fast because graphics keep getting better but sucky
> gameplay does not.

Yes, however the only reason they are still going is because they are being updated for the modern times & they are being accepted. Space Invaders has been done countless times over, just like Tetris has been, but if I showed up with the 1987 Mirrorsoft version of Tetris, or the 1977 Taito Arcade of Space Invaders what do you think the latest generation would do with it. Sure these games are pretty safe from a historical point-of-view, but they do change to meet with the times because Society is changing.

Remember, a vintage computer is of more value to an enthusiest (than to some kid), which is what the topic of discussion was about with the good ol' games, rather than a clone of some ol' games revamped for some Windows, Linux, (Insert System here) jobbie.

CP/M User.
 
MAME is used by alot of young people to play those simple arcade games. PACMAN never did get a decent upgrade over the original arcade version.
 
In true retrocomputing form, I like my classics on the real hardware. Besides the old computers, I have the following in my basement:

- Williams Defender
- Williams Joust
- Atari BattleZone
- Atari Asteroids


Emulators seem to do well on games like PacMan, but these particular games never seem to come out right. Besides emulating the main CPUs of the machines and the code in the ROMs, you have to emulate the custom hardware and the timing exactly, which makes many games hard to accurately emulate.

To keep things on topic, Linux has not been ported to these machines.
:D
 
mbbrutman said:
In true retrocomputing form, I like my classics on the real hardware. Besides the old computers, I have the following in my basement:

- Williams Defender
- Williams Joust
- Atari BattleZone
- Atari Asteroids


Emulators seem to do well on games like PacMan, but these particular games never seem to come out right. Besides emulating the main CPUs of the machines and the code in the ROMs, you have to emulate the custom hardware and the timing exactly, which makes many games hard to accurately emulate.

To keep things on topic, Linux has not been ported to these machines.
:D
Click to expand...

Those games can be emulated easily except for the multiple controls and in the case of battlezone the viewfinder you look into on the real arcade machine. Centapede without a good trackball also sucks.
 
Yah, BZ used a pair of levers to steer your tank, and a fire button. I wasn't playing it at the time the lightning struck it, my brother was, and the flash of bright-white light blinded him temporarily.

--T
 
These games *dont* emulate well. .. I've tried many emulators, and it's very obvious.

Defender is a two CPU machine. One CPU handles the game play, video buffer, etc. The other CPU is dedicated for sound. A good emulator has to handle the timing between them exactly. If there are buffers in the wiring that change the timing by a few clocks, you'd need to emulate that too.

Joust is even more of a nightmare. The hardware is very similar to Defender, except now you have four CPUs to deal with.

BattleZone and Asteroids seem to emulate better, but they are still not up to snuff. The hardest thing about BattleZone and Asteroids is the display - they are true vector units, so a normal raster display just doesn't look right.

The controls on these games are very simple .. just momentary contact buttons. BattleZone has the giant levers, but when it gets down to the wiring it's just contacts hitting other contacts. Not like on PC joysticks, where you can measure the resistance to find where the joystick is.
 
Just to throw in my two cents, the multi CPU setup is only one part of the problem. You're trying to write an emulator which has to deal with all the timing issues that are normally present, then you have to "fake" stuff like the acceelaration profile for the old controllers, (like the big, massive trackball centipede uses), and here's the truly horrible part, you're trying to this on something like Windows, or linux, where you really don't have much control over the amount of time your task gets, and how often it's pre-empted.

For non-Windows folks, NT and above schedule execution threads in a quanta known as "timeslice". You don't get to pick the length of it, when your timeslice espires, your thread gets yanked, another thread get's it's turn. And so on. You can request that you run at a particular priority, but it's not a guarantee. This is one of the reasons NT has not taken over the embedded RTOS world; a lot of RTOS systems are actually non-GUI linux variants. For a lot of real-time stuff, you need to be able to completely control when something happens, and game consoles definately fit in this category.

The other thing that makes writing an emulator difficult is the lack of a good timing reference in Windows.
The classic timer tick, used for multimedia, in Win3.1 was 10ms.
Win95 blew this, since it used a pre-emptive scheduler, as long as the thread wasn't in the 16-bit user or gui kernals, and now you've got around 25ms with a lot of jitter.
There's some tricks to deal with this, and actually be able to pull off a reasonabley stable 10ms tick, and a workable( within MIDI jitter) 1ms tick, if any one wants more info, pm me.

So here you are, trying to pin down the timings, when you've got the big wildcard of not being able to control when your thread executes. This is one of the reasons game consoles use dedicated processors and OS.

I think an emulator that you load in lieau of you OS would probably work best.

Heck, I just read the subject of this thread. Wasn't there a release of DOOM, or something, for Linux ? Anyone remember what it was ?

patscc
--grok
 
"mbbrutman" wrote:

> These games *dont* emulate well. .. I've tried many emulators,
> and it's very obvious.

> Defender is a two CPU machine. One CPU handles the game play,
> video buffer, etc. The other CPU is dedicated for sound. A good
> emulator has to handle the timing between them exactly. If there
> are buffers in the wiring that change the timing by a few clocks,
> you'd need to emulate that too.

> Joust is even more of a nightmare. The hardware is very similar
> to Defender, except now you have four CPUs to deal with.

> BattleZone and Asteroids seem to emulate better, but they are still
> not up to snuff. The hardest thing about BattleZone and Asteroids is
> the display - they are true vector units, so a normal raster display
> just doesn't look right.

> The controls on these games are very simple .. just momentary
> contact buttons. BattleZone has the giant levers, but when it gets
> down to the wiring it's just contacts hitting other contacts. Not like
> on PC joysticks, where you can measure the resistance to find where
> the joystick is.

I was thinking of doing a review of my Atari 7800, but now I'm not so sure! :-(

Well Arcades always seem to have the technological advantage, cause they can do that, but it's nice to play it in the privacy of your home & for nothing! ;-)

Funnily enough, I was going to get Joust for it! ;-) I think it's quite addictive - but then I've never played the arcade to know what it's like.

But yeah, that's the message I was kinda sending with all this varation of stuff. Some isn't emulated though, just some game based on an old one with all the tweaks to make it huge & flashy!

Cheers,
CP/M User.
 
I used to sell 6809 based cards for the Apple II running Microware's OS/9. It came with an assembler and lots of guys here in Sydney bought them. I sold hundreds of them.

OS/9 was robust, I never knew it to 'blow up' like Windoze so frequently does.

Xenix was sold on the Tandy Model 16 which was a nice business computer but the applications software was expensive. I used to fix the M16 and the 8" hard disks, all of 30 Mb.... !!

Unix was always fun to use, but none of them were compatible except at the command level of course.
 
I'll tell you which version of 'Nix is most flavorful to me. It's IRIX, cuz I want it so bad I can taste it! It's so bloody hard to find. I got 10 SGI boxes sitting up here that are just holding up the wall! Anyone got a set of cd's for sale?
 
Reply

Reply

Slackware 10.2 is the best.
2 CD's that have all you need for desktop or server.
Not very easy to install.
 
Fedora

Fedora

I use Fedora Core 4 on x64 because all of the other 64-bit distros seemed a bit twitchy. Ubuntu is nice, but they need to work on it some more. An I don't like how Ubuntu automatically gives you Gnome. I prefer KDE. At least Fedora Core and SUSE ask which one you want during installation.

-Vlad
 
Although definitely not vintage related, I must add that I've spent at least four hours trying to start the Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) installation program on my PC. The CD was burned without errors, but upon booting, random errors seem to happen. Maybe my computer is not running well. In any case, no matter which options I give to the boot prompt, it loads Linux from CD and at the end exits in a virtual TTY login. I can use it from there, but no obvious way to start/continue the installation program.

Argh.. this sounds more like a rant. The online documentation leaves a bit to be desired too, and yet they brag with being the most simple distribution to install. One CD-R is cheap, but next time I'll try something else, maybe renew my currently broken Debian installation with a fresh one. At least that one installed the last time I tried it.

So, from the results tonight, I think I know which distro is one of the least good for me, since it doesn't even boot properly. Gnnmgh.
 
I used Mandrake for a couple of years, but when they declared bankrupcy (late 2002, early 2003?) I got scared and finally made the jump to Debian. I ran with Debian testing on my desktop for a couple of years or so, and then decided I liked Ubuntu better, so I switched. I think Ubuntu has more polish than vanilla Debian, and you don't have to worry about having a broken package take down your system (happened to me using both testing and unstable in Debian).

My server runs Debian stable. Nothing else will ever go on there. I know the packages are a bit stale, but it is rock-stable, and their security updates are spot-on.

I do get the urge to go back to Slackware every now and again. I still like Slack, it makes a great, stable desktop or server, but I've just got hooked on the Debian (and Ubuntu) archives.
 
Joust

Joust

CP/M User said:
Funnily enough, I was going to get Joust for it! ;-) I think it's quite addictive - but then I've never played the arcade to know what it's like.
Click to expand...

At a place where a good friend of mine worked had the stand-up version of Joust in their lunch room..

Cheers,

80sFreak
 
I only sampled about 3 or 4 MAME games, Joust not being one of them (one groovy classic), and I would imagine there's really no difference between it and the real thing. Of course using a keyboard to play diminishes the experience somewhat (I guess my version of MAME is old - it won't support my USB joystick either :( ).
 
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