Using machines as they were vs. with modern "upgrades"

[Eudimorphodon]

This thread reminded me of a Model A Ford replica made in the 1980's that was functionally a new car under the skin. Modern 4 cyl engine, suspension, seat belts, power steering, and brakes. I even had an automatic transmission. I can see it's utility as a reliable daily driver. From a collector's point of view, it wouldn't have the same charm when the hood was opened. After all, it's an 80's car under the hood, not a 1930's car.

FWIW, I would argue that the Shay Model A replicas were kind of the car equivalent of the Mini Pet or an RC2014 as compared to an original Commodore PET or late-70's homebrew CP/M computer; they're built using "modern" components and techniques, but they at least broadly duplicate the functioning of the original computer. I mean, yeah, there's 40 years of technological advancement between an original Model A and a Ford Pinto (which is what the Shay Model A was based on), but are at least both powered by 4 cylinder gasoline motors. The Shay version is going to have much better brakes than the original (Fords were deathtraps through most of the 1930's because Henry Ford had a "thing" against hydraulic brakes), and if you've ever driven a manual transmission without synchromesh you're not going to complain about *any* of the transmission options the Shay was offered with (standard was, again, the same 4 speed as a Pinto), but ultimately at least the end result is broadly evocative of the original and the improvements make it more accessible. Sure, it's not actually a "30's car" just like a Mini Pet isn't strictly a "70's computer", but there are actually a fair number of antique car owners that are fine with incorporating quality-of-life improvements into their cars if they drive them on a regular basis; my grandfather had a Model T with the original band transmission, but it was quite common for people who drove theirs regularly to convert it to a conventional manual. And it's also *extremely* common for owners of 30's Fords to upgrade to syncro transmissions and install a hydraulic brake conversion kit. With these upgrades (which, to be clear, you could have actually had in the 1930's if you'd spent enough money) an original Model A becomes a lot more like a Shay Replica, and unless you're specifically needing a mint example to put on a plinth in a museum I'd say it's fine.

On the flip side, though, if your "retro" computer isn't even trying to be a technical "work-alike", it's just a Raspberry Pi wearing a suit, well, sure, whatever, if you're a casual enough user and the emulator is good enough who cares? But in this universe it's not like popping the hood of your Model A replica and seeing a Pinto 2.3 liter, it's looking inside and finding an antimatter reactor straight out of Star Trek. Likewise, I guess, if your "upgrade" to an original computer involves ripping the original brain completely out and replacing it with one many of magnitudes more powerful to enable it to do things the original technology could never do, well... I guess I'd say maybe you crossed a line there somewhere.

 

[Moondog]

Likewise, I guess, if your "upgrade" to an original computer involves ripping the original brain completely out and replacing it with one many of magnitudes more powerful to enable it to do things the original technology could never do, well... I guess I'd say maybe you crossed a line there somewhere.

The PiStorm is such a mod. It uses a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 in place of the cpu. Imagine your 68040 cpu running up to 3Ghz?

 

[Unknown_K]

The PiStorm is such a mod. It uses a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 in place of the cpu. Imagine your 68040 cpu running up to 3Ghz?

Yea I'm sure vintage Amiga scrollers would love to run on a fake 68040/4Ghz instead of the 68000 they were made for.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

The PiStorm is such a mod. It uses a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 in place of the cpu. Imagine your 68040 cpu running up to 3Ghz?

That's exactly what I was alluding to. (I mentioned the PiStorm only a few posts ago.) It's a Raspberry Pi running an emulator wearing your Amiga like a skin suit. And I guess if that sounds great to you, well, go for it, but like I said earlier, it seems like you could just sell the old Amiga on eBay and get a better experience running the emulator without all the overhead that comes along with trying to use the peripherals it's interfaced to via a very awkward bus.

And FWIW, the PiStorm Amiga emulation "only" runs around as fast as a 68040 at around 25mhz or so for *most things*; granted that's a huge boost compared to the original 7mhz CPU, but it's not a "68040 at 3ghz". Apparently there are some ridiculous speed claims being tossed around for it based on a Lightwave 3D benchmark that's entirely relying on floating point performance that show the PiStorm achieving Ghz-range-040 speeds, much faster than even the Apollo FPGA accelerators... But here's the gigantic lump of salt you have to take with that: the JIT emulator core the PiStorm uses doesn't "emulate" floating point operations, it passes them through to the *actual* floating point hardware of the CPU you're running it on, meaning that the floating point results are just completely out of line with any CPU that would exist in the real world. The same method is used by the Mac emulators BasiliskII and Sheepshaver and, yeah, same thing; you might "only" get a "few times" faster than a 68040 for normal instructions, but you'll be sitting in front of God's Quadra when it comes to bashing out Mandelbrot sets. Unless you really *want* to spend all day playing with Lightwave 3D this is performance that you can't really use (and in fact might break some programs), and you'd get even *better* performance if you just ran the same emulator on your gaming PC instead of the PiStorm. (According to this spreadsheet WinUAE running on an Intel i5 from 2010 is over half again faster than the PiStorm with a Raspberry Pi 4, on an i7 from 2015 it's four times times faster.) So really all this benchmark is proving is that even a toy ARM board that you can buy for less than a decent pizza party has a crushingly faster FPU than even the talented folks making the Vampire CPU upgrades can even dream about fitting into an FPGA.

Anyway, I dunno. I guess it just seems sort of pointless to me because when you shove one of those things into your Amiga any pretense that you're gaining the advantages of running on real hardware (IE, cycle accuracy, etc) just goes right out the window, and in exchange you're spending a lot of CPU cycles that could otherwise go into the emulation to support cramming it through the crufty old hardware that someone might want to actually use as is.

 

[Moondog]

Yea I'm sure vintage Amiga scrollers would love to run on a fake 68040/4Ghz instead of the 68000 they were made for.

Not sure a vintage enthusiast would go that route, however there are hardware enthusiasts which like to push technology to it's limits. I saw an article on modern C-64 replacement boards, and a C-64 board that accepts 2 SID chips exists. Another one sports the Korg "nu-tube" for audio amplification. In both cases, that goes beyond reliability upgrades and caters to a niche market of hardware enthusiasts

 

[oktology]

Considering that by the late 1980s, much of the entire publishing industry was run off systems in the 286/386 or 68k range, which are regarded as worthless junk by almost everyone (except us, of course) today, and that these same machines continue to be capable of that same kind of work, they are very capable systems.
[...]
It is remarkable what can be gained by adding modern components, but it is worth remembering that these old systems managed a great deal of highly demanding and sophisticated uses in their time.

Very well said.

I still like to use original media, particularly floppy and Zip drives, because the entire draw of vintage computer hardware for me is the different, slower, more involved user experience. Goteks and the like break that experience, and if I just wanted to play old games as fast as possible, I'd use an emulator.

I think this is sometimes a generational difference; I'm 38, and I remember magnetic media as a regular thing, but never had to use it professionally (graduated college in 2007), so I don't likely have the same built-up frustrations with how slow much of it is, or the hassle of maintaining the media and drives in a context of using them hundreds of times a day. I've got the fond memories of the hedonic value of, for example, sticking a floppy in a drive and hearing it whirr, without the memories of having to fuss with them all day every day.

Reliability upgrades and functional upgrades that preserve the classic user experience I'm always here for, though. The REX# in my Tandy M102 is a game changer, without fundamentally changing the way I use the machine, and there is nothing special or fun about limping old switch-mode power supplies along.

 

[Abmvk]

Very well said.

I still like to use original media, particularly floppy and Zip drives, because the entire draw of vintage computer hardware for me is the different, slower, more involved user experience. Goteks and the like break that experience, and if I just wanted to play old games as fast as possible, I'd use an emulator.

I think this is sometimes a generational difference; I'm 38, and I remember magnetic media as a regular thing, but never had to use it professionally (graduated college in 2007), so I don't likely have the same built-up frustrations with how slow much of it is, or the hassle of maintaining the media and drives in a context of using them hundreds of times a day. I've got the fond memories of the hedonic value of, for example, sticking a floppy in a drive and hearing it whirr, without the memories of having to fuss with them all day every day.

Reliability upgrades and functional upgrades that preserve the classic user experience I'm always here for, though. The REX# in my Tandy M102 is a game changer, without fundamentally changing the way I use the machine, and there is nothing special or fun about limping old switch-mode power supplies along.

Well, I am 53, and I remember the frustration very well. But still I want my TRS-80 to run on a real floppy. With age the frustration leaves the memory and the fondness remains, I found

 

[icono]

I only have a small area to dedicate to my Vintage Computers so each computer in the collection has to fill a specific niche. My rough guideline is that each system gets a roughly 5 year span where operating systems and upgrades that fit the original motherboard are allowed. I also use modern hardware for when period correct hardware would be to unstable or expensive(many of my systems use XT IDE instead of an MFM hdd). I also put a VGA card in my XT because I didn't have a CGA monitor I could use. I also put network adapters in almost every machine as a ease of use modification.

 

[Moondog]

Since I've got back into retro computing, I've found several of my old 3.5" floppies have gone bad. That may be the result of stuffy closets or humidity issues. I'm considering going the Gotek route. Odd thing is I have even older 360k 5.25" floppies that are still healthy. As soon as i get mTCP and Fastlynx running on my retro systems, a Gotek may have less relevance.

 

[Mike1978]

I like to explore and use mods from around the time but also why not use modern upgrades. I make use of an Xtide and ad-lib clone in my 5155 and I intend to have an Intel Inboard and Intel Above Board and Cyrix cx486drx2 clock doubled Cyrix in my 5160. To say people weren’t using mods to get that little extra from their machines is a dis-service to the innovators such as the PC Sprint, use of NEC V20 for 8088 and NEC V30 for 8086, there were many accelerators made for the 8088 and if there were options to owners or XT and AT owners and they worked then why not. It’s great to have period correct but keeping some of these machines alive and in use is also fun. I also have modded my 5155 to have 1mb ram on board and this isn’t a new mod at all. It’s good to see a machine from before the internet join the modern age online with a modified driver for a network interface a serial mouse, mtcp, packet drivers and microweb. Business machines at the time suddenly got games there were people copying basic from books and copying cassettes from my days starting with a ZX81, and 48k spectrum and I recall 3rd party memory paks Velcro fastened to the rear of the machine. There will always be the interest for some to push technology beyond what it was ever designed to be. Why not, it keeps some of these systems from ending up unused and unloved and landfill. We are merely custodians of what are fast becoming museum pieces and I enjoy showing my kids something that shouldn’t be possible on a machine that is less powerful than a pocket calculator. So yep I’m of the camp do as you will and use what you feel is right for you, I have no issues either with those that like period correct but we are at a pivotal point where some components are failing and in some cases failing fast and if I can keep some of my machines going for a few more years yet, I will. Live and let live enjoy what you have and in the way you wish to. I pass no judgement on how others choose to enjoy this retro hobby we are all part of. It’s great to see some rare machines being enjoyed however the custodian chooses.