VOGONS


First post, by dionb

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A colleague in another engineering department set up a late 1970s Pong clone last week. Our department didn't want to be outdone, so I hacked this together:

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486SLC motherboard
2MB RAM
Gotek
16b I/O card in 8b slot for the Gotek
Ara Tseng ET3000AX EGA/VGA card, used for EGA
MCE2VGA for EGA->VGA conversion (and yes, colours are much better than just using VGA output and choosing EGA mode in software)
IBM 8513 12" VGA monitor
IBM Model M Quiet Touch Enhanced Keyboard (rubber dome)

Have basically turned it into a console. The USB stick in the Gotek has 6 images active, all with a minimal DOS 6.22 install (just MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS and COMMAND.COM) and an AUTOEXEC.BAT to run the game in the image:

00 Arkanoid Revenge of Doh
01 Prince of Persia
02 Duke Nukum
03 Lemmings
04 Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards
05 Leather Goddesses of Phobos

Turns out two of my colleagues were complete Arkanoid-junkies in their teenage years, both were glued to the system this afternoon 😉

Reply 2 of 6, by Errius

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Right, the original Arkanoid only has nasty beeper noise but the sequel has proper arcade music.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 3 of 6, by dionb

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Errius wrote on 2020-02-19, 06:30:

Right, the original Arkanoid only has nasty beeper noise but the sequel has proper arcade music.

That's why I chose it. Problem: you can't turn it off - every few minutes it blasts across our lab. Will probably have to hack a switch onto the speaker...

Reply 4 of 6, by Errius

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You can run the game silently with this command: A2.COM E M N

Within the game you can use F2/F3 to toggle music/sound.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 5 of 6, by dionb

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That helps! 😀

Reply 6 of 6, by chinny22

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I wanna job where you work!