modelrail.otenko Trains, computers, vintage, retro, model railways… the lot…

swh@raspi-jpn:~ $ sudo modprobe configs
swh@raspi-jpn:~ $ zcat /proc/config.gz > .config
swh@raspi-jpn:~ $ cat .config | grep ATALK
CONFIG_ATALK=m

swh@raspi-jpn:~ $ sudo apt-get update
Get:1 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm InRelease [151 kB]
Get:2 http://archive.raspberrypi.com/debian bookworm InRelease [55.0 kB]
Get:3 http://deb.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security InRelease [48.0 kB]
Get:4 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates InRelease [55.4 kB]
Get:5 http://archive.raspberrypi.com/debian bookworm/main arm64 Packages [543 kB]
Get:6 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm/main arm64 Packages [8,693 kB]
Get:7 http://archive.raspberrypi.com/debian bookworm/main armhf Packages [544 kB]
Get:8 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm/main armhf Packages [8,508 kB]
Get:9 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm/main Translation-en [6,109 kB]
Get:10 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm/contrib arm64 Packages [45.7 kB]
Get:11 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm/contrib Translation-en [48.4 kB]
Get:12 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm/non-free arm64 Packages [75.8 kB]
Get:13 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm/non-free armhf Packages [55.9 kB]
Get:14 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm/non-free Translation-en [68.1 kB]
Get:15 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm/non-free-firmware arm64 Packages [5,832 B]
Get:16 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm/non-free-firmware Translation-en [20.9 kB]
Get:17 http://deb.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security/main arm64 Packages [264 kB]
Get:18 http://deb.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security/main armhf Packages [250 kB]
Get:19 http://deb.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security/main Translation-en [160 kB]
Get:20 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates/main arm64 Packages [756 B]
Get:21 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates/main armhf Packages [756 B]
Get:22 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates/main Translation-en [664 B]
Fetched 25.7 MB in 12s (2,094 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
N: Repository 'http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm InRelease' changed its 'Version' value from '12.10' to '12.11'
swh@raspi-jpn:~ $

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/raspbian/gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc

# Add the repository to Apt sources:
echo \
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc] https://download.docker.com/linux/raspbian \
  $(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update

apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin

sudo docker run hello-world

docker run --rm --network host \
  --env AFP_LOGLEVEL=debug \
  --privileged=true \
  --security-opt apparmor=unconfined \
  --cap-add=ALL \
  --volume "[ADD_DATA_DIRECTORY_HERE]:/mnt/afpshare" \
  --volume "[ADD_TIME_MACHINE_DIRECTORY_HERE]:/mnt/afpbackup" \
  --volume "/var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus" \
  --env AFP_USER=old_user \
  --env AFP_PASS=password \
  --env AFP_GROUP=afpusers \
  --env TZ=Australia/Melbourne \
  --env ATALKD_INTERFACE=eth0 \
  --env SERVER_NAME=apple-pi \
  --name netatalk netatalk/netatalk:latest

Nostalgia – Complete: 601 FX Martell Advertisement

I'd recently done some archeology to find cover CDs from my childhood. After working out the first challenge and finding the executable/animation on the Walnut Creek CD, I started scouring PC User CDs thinking that I could find the second animation I was after.

Turns out I was barking up the wrong tree... as another tree had made other paper into another magazine known as computer arts interactive. I was hoping to link that title to some kind of article describing their history, but nothing exists! Anyway, I was browsing eBay and saw a mildly familiar CD art design and realised that I must have bought one of the first editions of the magazine back in '95. It wasn't until stumbling upon Vintage Keepsake's site that I realised I knew the CD my animation was on:

That top-left CD was it. The listing had me worried at first, but the price was for the bulk set. They came in quick order from only a few KM away, and only mildly cracked. Fortunately, none of the discs were damaged!

I imaged the CD and slapped it into 86box. From there, I was presented with a very familiar splash screen and muscle-memory allowed me to find the video very quickly!

Ah, it's revolting. 320x240px? But that's what I remember! Actually... the next video is what I remember. I didn't dare slap it into Youtube as it'd hit (at least) 3 copyright flags.

Here's the video from the Youtube video, as-is.

And here's ground-breaking technology showing off Toy Story, which was still to be released.

Now to ISO the rest of the CDs and keep them preserved!

IO-DATA CDBOX

I found this at Beep in Akihabara in the junk pile whilst in Tokyo a few weeks back. It had a label saying "No Power", but I couldn't resist after all the effort I'd spent in the past on 110-pin junk for PC98.

At first glance, it could just be a box containing an CD drive... but flipping around to the back shows some interesting ports! CRT in and out seems to imply there's a window accelerator inside? There's also a C-BUS slot!

The switches underneath definitely indicate that there's a window accelerator. Opening up the unit shows that it's Cirrus Logic-based.

No Power?

The power supply inside smelled fishy, so it was (at least) time to replace some capacitors. I removed and re-inserted a few of the caps, as they didn't seem too bad. I replaced three that I felt were suspect, but the daughter-board only let out a sad squeak/sigh when power was applied.

The wiring between the power supply and the main unit seems to have 12v, 5v and a blue line to power up the relay which is probably something like a power-good signal. The voltages were all non-existent... so I decided to go the sneaky route.

Thanks to PC-standards, we know the pinout of the molex power to the CD unit, so let's just use a splitter and inject +12/+5v there via a Pico ATX supply.

Ok, it works. The LED even lights, meaning the power is flowing into the bus appropriately from this connector!

Installing It

In true IO-DATA style, the drivers are still available on their site. And, of course, in true IO-DATA style, the archives only contain updates to disks you're already meant to own. Fortunately, the archives can be expanded in 7-zip. Inside you'll find all the drivers you need.

The Matsushita version of the CD-ROM Driver was installed (there's a Creative driver there too!) and the Atlas CD was read...

To the point where it even wanted to install...

Using the original power supply

I heard the relay on the board switch when the attached notebook was turned on. It then occurred to me that the "junk" "no power" status was probably a lie. I bet the shopkeepers had just plugged the unit into the wall and not actually tested with a laptop connected. It turns out that the laptop needed to be connected AND powered-on for the relay to throw and the power flow from the internal power supply. Otherwise you'd get nothing. If you do have a totally dead power supply, this is the pin-out:

Note that 5v is on the orange wires and gets two wires. 12v is the red wire and only needs one wire. Finally, the power supply is switched by the blue wire. When the power supply sees the -12v from the Notebook then it'll engage and provide +5 and +12.

Cirrus Logic 98 Graphics Accelerator

This 'just worked'. Doom 2 has drivers for it already, so it was a matter of choosing the right one and booting in.

Excuse the image quality!

Nostalgia: Two Animations From The 90s

I don't know where to start... was it the eBay auction for a cheap DX4/100 in Canberra, perfectly timed to end the weekend that I was in town... or the random discussion of what olive-oil-naming conventions ACTUALLY mean, at work, that lead me to remember a random video on a random cover CD from the 90s that lead me to try and think of the brand that sponsored that 3D animation demo on a CD from the past that I've long lost and long forgotten?

Either way, here are the two vivid memories, of two pieces of animation from the family 486 DX2/66, purchased from Harvey Norman Fyshwick (even though Woden had already opened, replacing Normal Ross, when it was above The Model Shop... damn I miss that shop and thank you for repairing (removing the track nail from the electric motor's brushes) my HO Scale Hornby Maroon Princess Elizabeth which I bought at a basement-bargain price from Mr Odd, father of David who lived off McTaggart Crescent in Kambah back in the 1990s when we went to St Anthony's and... well... he also had Load Runner going on his Apple II which I drooled over.. but he also wanted to sell me a full Candy set Lima XPT in HO which I have also just been recently re-buying) on a 24-month loan from let-us-take-all-your-money-if-you-fail-the-interest-free-period shitty finance company.

Can you believe Gerry Harvey is still going and still offering the same shit? No computer repair corner though... where we took our copy of Free DC which had already been virus-trashed...

I do believe I might have digressed.

The mission today is to find two animations which are most-possibly lost to time...

1. The first is something that ran on Windows 3.1+. It was an EXE and was literally a demo app for windows. An encapsulated animation in an EXE that ran when you executed it, took your whole screen... played the animation and then returned you to where you were prior. This is what I remember:
   • A red parrot is flying on a blue sky background (no clouds) left to right.
   • It is a simple cartoon animation and it has a yellow beak.
   • From the right, a bi-plane zooms in, chews up the bird and just the beak is left.
   • The beak then falls through the bottom of the viewport.
   • The credits scroll and the authors are Huon and Maverick.
2. The second is a sepia-toned 'birds-eye view' of a bird flying into a spanish/greek vineyard/olive-plantation, discussing the qualities of the olive-oil/wine that the company produces. It was a movie file (not an EXE!) sitting in the videos/movies/demos folder on a magazine cover CD. Maybe it was quicktime? But I think it was AVI as I don't recall codec issues when watching it. Either way, the hints are:
   • From a Cover CD from an Australian Magazine in the 90s.
   • Sepia-toned landscape, dry, vineyard/orchard ... somewhere middle-europe.
   • Following right on the tail of a bird (maybe a swallow?)
   • Either an Olive Oil or Wine advertisement.
   • It's actually meant to showcase the video compression technology, fitting on a Cover CD with all of the other bloatware.
   • The brand could be: Martelli, Martell, Mortell

Update: The second animation has been found!

With all of this in mind, I started scouring the web. I quickly landed on the APC Mag Cover CD Stash on Archive.org. Sheesh, I definitely bought a few of those mags and used their CDs... but they didn't have what I was after. A quick goog' of "aus mag cover cd" brought me to Australian PC User (now TechLife) and ... woah.. I think I was a subscriber? This was 30 years ago. Am I meant to care/remember? Either way... One of those cover CDs hit me like a sack of bricks. Maybe I wasn't a subscriber and maybe I might have only bought one of those mags from Wanniassa Newsagency with its cover CDs?!

Why do I have this photo? I bought the same fkn Cover CD from eBay 4 days ago. It's all still circulating... But I actually bought it as I want to archive it all. archive.org has a good selection, but it's not as clean-and-tidy as the APC Mag CDs are.

Anyway! The CDs I could find did not contain the olive-oil/wine (herefore known as OOW) demo.. nor the BIRD demo. At this point I was chatting to my Brother, Rodger, who is awake when I sleep in Amsterdam. I do believe I triggered a dragon when I mentioned I was looking for a bird flying on a blue background in Windows 3.1... He proceeded to go for a stroll down memory lane and list the games he remebered from our childhood, but none matched what I was digging for. I thoroughly enjoyed adding to his memory games like Xenon 2 Megablast, but it didn't get me to where I needed to go. One thing though... during his search of nostalgia-ware... he mentioned that I might be thinking of something from "one of those 100000'in'one shareware compilations....".... oh.

Walnut Creek

This actually hit a nerve. At this point I would've written a new blog post asking about a "random shareware operator in the late 90s with a wizard on the cover." and ... well ... I don't expect any comments on this post, let alone a ficticious wizard post. Fortunately, buried in the depths.. I had a hint of "Warlock" software, with a wizard.. then "Walmart".. and then ... don't ask me how, but I came up with "Walnut CD". A quick search of that lead me straight to a suite of CDs on archive.org. Get out of here...

It's that #$%#$%#$%#$% wizard. Time to digress: Back in Canberra in the 90s, we had BitStorm in the Canberra Centre, ACTCom in Belconnen Mall and Boomerang Software in the Tuggeranong Hyperdome. The first sold me Screamer. The second showed us Doom I running on a demo PC in the store and the last sold me countless shareware floppies, Settlers I, a Dreamcast and so much more. Whatever happened, Boomerang Software, when it was in the Hyperdome near The Candy Shoppe and Cafe Rendezvous, was at its peak selling shareware with its own branding. It also had an amazing selection of second-hand software and hardware and I'd check it out every friday night.

It was at Boomerang that I bought a Walnut Creek shareware CD and I could not tell you why... but I'm sure there was something lucrative on the title. The cover art was navy/purple and the wizard was on it, and this was all I had to go by as I had no method to check the quality of the media as the cases were shrink-wrapped. I vividly remember their price-tags being 20mmx20mm and split horizontally. Top half having the current sale price and bottom half showing the price you'd get if you traded the same item in?

Either way... this CD had the bird animation on it. I'm only sure now as I went through the entire ISO collection on archive.org looking for a file with BIRD in the name. I had expected BIRDFAIL or BIRDDIE or BIRDPLANE... but it seems I should have been searching for BIRD_ANM. It was just this name that appeared on the September 1994 version of Walnut Creek CICA Windows Shareware. Interestingly, I don't remember the CD art in that listing's shot... however I do click with the cover art from April 1994.

Regardless, I ripped open the zip archive and inspected the BIRDY.TXT text file...

FINALS WEEK PRODUCTIONS
=======================

PROUDLY PRESENTS THE 1RD INSTALLMENT OF THE "NATURAL SELECTION SERIES"

TITLE: Survival of the Fittest!!
COMPLETED: May 1, 1993
AUTHORS: Jeffrey Cubillos and Alfredo Rojas

Bird, vs. Plane?, Survival? How can this not be it? The names don't match... but... wait... how do we even test this? Install Virtual Box, Install Windows 95...

It'll crash when trying to boot.. so install the "Fix CPU" patch...

And keep fighting...

So, Windows is running... mount the CD and..

It has an interactive text menu? and it UNZIPS THINGS FOR YOU? WHY DOn'T I REMEMBER THIS PART? Screw the animation... this is actually the systems integration part that pays the bills!

Because I'd found the location of the ZIP in archive.org, I knew which folder and which ZIP to extract. It was quickly deployed to C:\

The moment was then upon us... was this the file?

No way. It was. That's it! I got the names slightly wrong and the bird was also flying in the wrong direction... but the rest wasn't far off... at all?

The worst part? It was all of 4 seconds of animation! Those 4 seconds, on a CD-ROM, in ~1994 stuck.. and somehow in 2025 (do the maths.. that's 31 years?) I wanted to see it again... and.. it existed?

.. now to find the other animation! ... but in the meantime, here's the backyard tree that has also had 40 years to grow:

Enjoy.

Toshiba T3200 + Fairy YL-23 IC Tester

This beast happened to be in a store-room at work and was about to go into the e-waste bin... rest assured I prevented that from occurring! Thanks to my eagerness, I was then tasked with taking a backup of the HDD. Would it even boot?

Sorry, yes, it was already in pieces on the workbench... I should care more about blog photography, I suppose.

Don't apply power, check the caps first!

I didn't want to send unwieldly voltages into the motherboard, so I pulled the unit apart. The unit was caked in factory 'dust', so this also gave me a good chance to clean it. Thankfully there were actually no problems detected internally.

I had planned to extract the data by extracting the IDE HDD, but it turns out this unit is MFM! I'm going to have to do something trickier.

First boot in 25 years

Although this unit seems to have had a hard life, I was quite sure it hadn't been turned on in ~25 years. Knowing that the capacitors in the power supply were stable, I plugged in the 240v cable and sent it. The fans, display and HDD all came to life!

Look at that glorious screen! I've seen numerous posts where these screens have expired, so I was very happy to see this come to life.

Floppy woes

The floppy disk would seek to track zero and nothing else. As I've done on the PC-98s before, the first bet is to clean the heads with isopropyl. That didn't work, so I then extracted the drive and checked out the drive-speed sensor circuit.

Oh sure, that cap is crap... I touched it with tweezers and it took the pads with it! Fortunately the traces could be beeped out and a ceramic cap was installed instead. With my bodge in place, a DOS 5.0 boot disk loaded!

Backing up the HDD

The HDD was loading fine, so I had to find a way to get the data off the system. Via floppy would be a last-resort as it'd take a few of them. As nostalgic as spanned-volume pkzip'ing is, I'd rather not. Instead, I grabbed my trusty XT-IDE and found a 48mb CF card. I used the default configuration on the card, only setting the CF to 'slave' via the dip-switch.

Sure enough, with the CF as master, the card booted into it's copy of DOS 5.0 and XCOPY was used to transfer the entire HDD contents (all 19.4mb!) onto the CF card. Success!

Games!

The CF was also used to bring games to the system. Police Quest, Space Quest, Kings Quest, Alleycat and... A-Train? Railroad Tycoon?

Everything of the correct vintage worked fine!

Fairy YL-23 EPROM Programmer And Chip Tester

I'd purchased this ages ago via FB Marketplace and hadn't found a need for it yet. Also, being ISA, I'd have to keep my P2 in an accessible location to be making use of this device. What better host than a chunky 286 laptop? Yes, this laptop has ISA slots!

With the card in the slot, I realised I had no idea how to orient the cable! I extracted it again and checked for grounding. Here's a clear example for anyone else:

Back in, with the laptop powered on, no life was shown in the unit. The software was downloaded (two exe files, only YL.EXE is really needed!) and copied over via CF card.

Cool! The menu was easy enough to navigate. I chose to test some 74LS00 chips first:

Running the IC Tester (option 1) made the software try and guess the model of IC:

You could also force a test of a specific chip:

I then grabbed some SRAM and tested that:

Very nice. It all just worked!

PC-98 – 110-Pin Cables And External I/O

This was something I had always wanted to try: I had my trusty PC-9801N NS/A and the 110-pin port worked, as I'd tested it with both an Ethernet Adapter and SCSI Adapter.

What else can you do with this port? Well, it turns out that it's a full interface to the PC-98's C-BUS. I mean, that's why the Ethernet and SCSI adapters work so easily... they're actually mini C-BUS cards built to fit the portable asthetic of the 98-Note and its 110-pin connector.

It turns out that NEC released an entire external chassis, known as the PC-9801N-08 External I/O Unit, to hold three C-BUS cards. This connects to any 98-Note with a 110-pin port (later 98-Notes have a much larger port!) via a chunky cable, of which I've never seen one in the flesh. What I have seen are 110-pin to Floppy Drive cables, but these have a centronics 50-pin plug at the far end, instead of the required 110-pin at both ends.

The moons aligned: The right items appeared on Buyee at the right time for the right place... so I collected them.

Can I make a cable?

I set off to find the appropriate 110-pin connectors, but the best I could gather were 'external floppy cables' for the 98-NOTE. Fortunately, these have the correct connector on one end!

Look at that tiny-centronics goodness! Before-long, I had the casing off and the plugs dismantled with minimal damage.

The plastic casing can be prised off...

As expected, the floppy interface didn't need to use all pins, so only a small amount of wiring existed. The plugs are actually crimp-style, so further dismantling occurred to get them apart.

Ok, we're torn-down with minimal damage... a few broken clips, but nothing structural! I grabbed the nearest 50-pin IDC SCSI ribbon and tried to make it fit...

And it was never going to work as the cable was too thick. I couldn't think of viable alternatives... so I went down the solder route. DON'T DO THIS!

I ended up wrecking that plug, so jumped back on the auction site and shelled out too much for yet another 110-pin to floppy cable... it's in the mail.

The proper way to re-wire!

I ended up murdering a few data cables, that had been happily chilling in my box'o'junk, whilst looking for appropriately-girthed wires of a proper length. First up was a 50-pin Centronics SCSI cable... how could that not be tiny-strand?

Crap photo... but that far-left light-blue is the SCSI wire and you can see it's double the thickness. What else? Apple Serial cables were also too thick...

And then I hit the gold mine! DVI cables! Who doesn't have 6 million of the ugly things sitting in a box? And so I got started...

Some of the internal wiring of the DVI cable was twisted pair, probably for the colour video signals. These could still be used, you just needed to strip back more shielding...

The wires locked in to the rail nicely and even happily bent 90-deg, as required for the plug.

And look at that! It happened. I then realised I hadn't recorded the colouring, or even started on the other end... so I had to BEEP OUT the entire thing to wire it up. I mean, this was also a good quality verification process!

Meanwhile, as that I'd murdered the plug for the other side with solder, I couldn't even finish it. 75% done though!

Why was it never going to work?

Whilst waiting for the next cable to arrive, I decided I should investigate the I/O Unit end. Whilst beeping out the pins on the 110-pin connector, I realised that both extremeties of both rows of pins were ALL grounded. ALL GROUNDED. Looking at the pinout of the 110-pin port, these should all be +5v or other signals.... there's no way that these should be grounded on the I/O end?

A quick further googl' pointed out the obvious. In this Japanese forum post, one user asks if they can connect the unit straight through and is quickly told (via googl's bad translator):

However, looking at itp's post, it seems that there are cables (2 pieces) and an interface adapter for the expansion box. Without this, it is practically impossible (to connect a laptop directly). If you look closely at the connector on the back of the I/O Unit, it is not 110 pins. The manual says "100-pin connector".

It's what?

Haha... that's one of my 110-pin Ethernet modules lined up against the 100-pin (Yes, NOT 110-PIN!) connector on the I/O side. All that hard work above was NEVER going to work. Then again, maybe I'll finish the cable as it could still function as one-of-two of the cables needed if I ever manage to find/build the interface box! But then I'll still need a 100-pin amphenol plug!?

We'll chalk this one down as a huge (mildly-expensive) time-sinking failure!

RUNTIME_CONFIGURATION_ERROR_VHDOVERRIDENOTFOUND: Livy session has failed. Session state: Error. Error code: RUNTIME_CONFIGURATION_ERROR_VHDOVERRIDENOTFOUND. Cannot find vhd based on override: Message=The system did not find a VHD copy in the system for creating the ClusterName=12341223-5555-4444-3333-63c446fe4d8b, Workspace=synws-d-e-v-d-e-v-01, Subscription=, Location=australiaeast, isVhdOverride=True Source: Dependency.

Update-AzSynapseSparkPool -WorkspaceName ws_name -Name pool_name -SparkVersion 3.4