Go tech, Amiga!...and other digressions

Normal external FDD, Gotek modded external drive and Edirol FA-66 doing acrobatics.

Recently it has again taken me a while to progress with the videos as so much time of my so little free time has gone with Amiga.  After all, since I don't exactly have any fanbase, my retrocomputing hobby (videos included) is quite exclusively for my own amusement. Of course, should I have actual followers, the situation might change.

Then again, nowadays it's also clearly harder to get any visibility in web without tricks or money. This blog for instance can't really even be found by googling unless it's been already pre-customized to search by multiple visits on the site like I have myself. In many platforms I have noticed that the free postings will very easily sink with the stream, and only few of the many possible visitors will even get notified of the opportunity. If an example is wanted, Facebook being perhaps the most well known name where such stuff happens - I don't see most of my contacts' interesting updates without specifically going to look their pages and likewise other people whom something I write might concern won't often see. Of course I have never been very fond of Facebook anyway, and even then in many ways that site is long past its heyday in my opinion.

Various popular social media celebrities have also admitted that they have more or less agreed upon having liking circles with other popular posters - when you leave your virtual bookmark on page of another popular poster, the algorithms will note them more likely and boost up visibility of them both. Manipulating popularity lists has of course been happening pretty much always when it just has been possible. Back then when MySpace was still used, it was a common convention to post something on the pages of other bands, as that would bring visibility to yourself too. Although then I believe it was more primitive as it simply left a link to your name to more places, and there were no similar "news streams" as there are nowadays. Already back in 1960's it's told how they made Jimi Hendrix's first single Hey Joe on charts by hiring people to buy the record.

In whatever case, I'm digressing a bit now, as usual. Yet let that be happened, especially since this posting was not meant to be very stricly about just one thing anyway. Yes, I know such behaviour is not a recommended fashion of writing stuff, as it tends to confuse the readers. In "diary" texts and letters, however, I prefer  to rather give representations of my mental activity than to write a coherent text.

So let me return to Amiga for a moment. I remember how Niko Nirvi remarked in the most significant Finnish computer gaming magazine Pelit in 1990's something like Amiga would need to be missed only if likes (cute) platformers and action games, and he was never really into those. He was understood to be an Atari ST guy before moving to IBM PC compatibles, and on ST Dungeon Master apparently was his favourite game back in the days (for the record, Dungeon Master on ST appeared in 1987, for Amiga in 1988 and for PC in 1992). I agreed myself in the last post how rationally thinking there actually aren't that many reasons to obtain Amiga specifically if wants to enjoy some old games, as most games actually worth still playing would be also available on other platforms and the Amiga version is not often even the best port.

The box opened: FDD on top and Gotek under it.

Gotek is more visible now as intermediate
inner layer has been taken away.

Therefore I'll openly admit that many games I've played recently I've played largely due letting myself indulged with nostalgia - it's been a fun experience to play several games that I had played as a kid, yet I would not likely care to play them really without having played them as a kid. 25+ years of break has also affected to my gaming skills - it took me more than a couple of tries to reach to the last level of Batman the Movie, but it didn't take me long to reach way further in evolution in Eco than I'd ever managed as a kid. This is saying I'm obviously beating 10-1 my childhood self in cognitive sense, but senso-motorical skills/memories are not quite as sharp anymore. I'm not sure if my actual reflexes and fine motorics would be any worse, might even be the opposite still, but lack of practice has caused me need to rub some rust out from my bodily cogwheels.

Aside from playing and checking some old software on Amiga, I have also been improving my related hardware setup. As already mentioned in the previous post, I'm using Gotek floppy emulator for running my software on Amiga (does someone actually still rely mainly upon genuine floppies if actively using Amiga?). What I did not mention, though, is I've made certain arrangements so that I could also use real floppies when needed. There is visible on the previous post's photo next to my Amiga both an external FDD but also a brown cardboard box. The Gotek is in the box. But why?

Well first of all, I didn't want to install Gotek inside the Amiga case like so many do, because I have need to also check what some old disks contain. I still have a lot of genuine Amiga floppies inherited from my big brother, and some of the demos included are not necessarily available anywhere else, so I'm intending to save what is left to be saved anymore. I might have mentioned this somewhere before. Therefore I want to have both Gotek and FDD set up in such fashion that I can use either when needed.

Ribbon tongue from the mouth of Amiga.
Micromys V4 adapter for PS/2 mouse on the background.

Previously I arranged this by simply having the floppy cables stick out from Amiga diskette port, which allowed me to change cables between FDD and Gotek when needed.    This caused certain inconvenience though, because then I needed to have both Gotek and FDD just laying around somewhere on the desk (or put another aside every time when not used). Also FDD was prone to either cause noisy resonation while placed directly on the desk and wrong types of items might have poked the disk rolling mechanics that were now partially on open from bottom of the drive. That made me think of a case, so I prototyped a casing for both of them of a cardboard box. Happened to find a headphones store packaging quite fit for the purpose, as it had readily an inner layer that could be easily removed - therefore I could place both drives on sort of two levels, if I'll just cut holes for cables. Now the drives would be both more conveniently packed and dust covered while still available for use. This also removed the FDD resonation/mechanical hinderance issue. I made some holes on the box/inner level bottoms from where I could either stick some needles or bolts that would keep the drives sufficiently firmly on spot inside the box.

Another thing I realized is I could actually connect both drives simultaneously if I'll just swap the cable. I modified one old PC floppy cable which had connectors for two drives to function with Amiga; for PC disk drive there is a twist in the ribbon cable for A drive which needs to be straightened up so that it works for Amiga - the B drive connector in the same cable is readily usable for Amiga floppy disk drive. Now I had a disk cable to which I could connect two Amiga drives straight on.

Wait a minute, someone should exclaim now, you can not have two disk drives running on Amiga like that simultaneously! That is correct, I can not do that - additional simultaneously used disk drives must be connected from the external FDD port, and the system will get messed up, if there are two drives chained and powered. However, I'm not intending to power up both the same time. This means I can have the ribbon cable connected to two drives and just swap the power when I want to swap from Gotek to FDD. A lot less effort! If there are two drives connected in the ribbon cable, it doesn't matter if the other one is not powered up (although it does look a bit spooky when the Gotek OLED display will lit up just from ribbon cable signals when using the FDD in this setup).

Unfortunately the prototype setup doesn't yet work fully as intended. Because my desk setup with Amiga hiding under a small monitor table is so cramped, the ribbon cable is barely long enough to keep both FDD and Gotek connected the same time. Also the box itself makes it a bit effortsome to deal with Gotek USB port if I'll need to load some new images on the drive for instance. Despite these issues, I find my setup a clear improvement over earlier settings.

Regarding to using Gotek, I referred in the previous post how swapping Gotek floppy images in multidisk games is sometimes somewhat effortsome, even while it's not as bad as dealing with genuine disks. After the post I came to ponder about it a bit more. I happened to have two old external floppy drives, out of which another I got basically for free as it was stated as broken by the previous owner. I figured that inside the external floppy drive case is most likely just a normal FDD connected to an adapter board for making it usable via the external floppy connector, and opening the case showed it to be exactly as I had anticipated.

This meant that in case the broken external drive would be broken by the drive itself, I could simply swap the drive with another Gotek, which I happened to have purchased several months earlier. And how do you do, that just worked out fine in the end! Found out that it was the drive broken somehow (it rolls the disks but does not find anything - probably fixable fault, but might be currently beyond my skill and knowledge to repair it), and a replacement Gotek would fit just fine. Setting it up didn't go fully as expected though, as after reconnecting everything I had hard time to read the newly set USB pendrive for the second Gotek and even running the Amiga itself at all.

Finally I found out first that certain cables had been connected incorrectly (the adapter inside was "upside down", and there were no normal indication of anything in which way the cables should be connected). Secondly I found out that for whatever reason the first Gotek drive will cease to function if the external Gotek is connected with power off (!!!). So now the first Gotek only functions, while the second Gotek is connected too, in case both are powered up. Go figure.

Therefore with the strength of two Gotek drives some Amiga games are a lot more convenient to play with. Tested for instance Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which as a kid was a bit painful due several disk swaps while loading the game for startup (despite being on only two disks) - especially as after game over the game needs to be loaded all the way from booting again... An experience a bit similar to Commodore 64 multiload casette games... Not too fancy game really though, and actually very short albeit difficult, yet it has some very fancy cartoon graphics. Another example of increased convenience is Wings, where every mission start and end would require a disk swap - now just needs to wait for the load.

Nothing is like a dream with these systems of course, and it is not necessarily super convenient to actually set up all the disk images on both two USB drives though. Even more grey hair could potentially cause the fact that I don't have another OLED display, so all the information Gotek gives itself is a number of the selected floppy image... WELL, I can live with an external list of disk images set - at least for now.

Yet another arrangement I've done is to have Amiga audio sound better. I happen to have Behringer Truth B2030 monitor speakers that provide pretty nice audio output. Downside is that I can not usually simply plug them in on any computer or else directly, as that tends to cause a lot of interference - in addition to the fact that there are no straight 6.35 mm audio jack plugins in any standard computer internal audio interfaces.

So I'll need some sort of a mixer or intermediate amplifier in between. Coincidentally my old Edirol FA-66 Firewire audio interface happens to have very conveniently two RCA inputs that I can connect Amiga to as direct monitoring mode. Plays just nicely now, as long as not keeping the Edirol or cables on top of the Commodore 1084 CRT monitor to take too much interference. I used to have Amiga sounds played from this monitor's internal speakers, but the quality is not too fancy and it's only mono.

If you wonder what are the two audio jacks going in the Edirol's main inputs on front though, that is my main desktop at the moment. Funnily enough, I found out due software issues (there is no official support for such Windows XP era device on modern operating systems) that it is actually easier for me in most cases to use the Edirol as a plain mixerbox for speakers instead of a genuine computer audio interface. In addition of slight effort of need to start up a virtual audio server for Edirol during each bootup (yes, this could have been scripted to run automatically of course), I could not get the Edirol output properly directly from computer without lapses or crackling when running some more resource requesting games, so made this workaround. Things won't often work as expected, but usually it's good enough if the outcome is as desired.

Looming weavers of Amiga

30 years of computing cooperating on my desk.

Back in 1990's, Lucasfilm (LucasArts) and Sierra adventure games were some of my favourite games of them all - especially the ones from late 1980's and early 1990's. In fact I'd even daresay those made the basis of my good English skills as a kid, and that was also one reason I liked them. There were few of their games from the era though that I never managed to obtain myself to play.

Loom by Lucasfilm Games had been until now probably my most significant loss, and only now I also understood the name correctly. As a kid I thought Loom would be just a name - maybe some entity in the game or a character. Then I assumed it'd been about verb to loom - and this was supported by screenshots of the game that seemed to have kind of looming atmosphere there. I suppose it might still be a pun and have this intended looming in the background, but as a direct reference the name Loom refers to a loom in the game. And the protagonist is not a wizard or cultist despite his looks with hooded cape and staff but a weaver from the Guild of Weavers. Weavers with loom, I see, makes sense.

So in any case, since I have had my dear Amiga 500 set up recently and I happened to have Amiga Loom available, I finally decided to give it a shot. In my youth I was somewhat concerned about the gameplay of Loom (I knew about it through reviews), since it was experimental and lacked the traditional verbs as commands. This was few years before icons or mere mouseclicks become commonplace, and I certainly did not complain that Lucas still released few more traditional verb based games in 1990's. In Loom instead the player would simply point and click and occasionally use 4-note tune patterns as spells to interact with the objects.

For what I know, Loom was never quite as successful as many other Lucas adventures, despite it being referred to in many subsequent Lucas adventures. For the genre options from the era it surely is worth playing, however, it is more of a snack than a full meal like most other titles better remembered. A bit like Full Throttle several years later I suppose.

That is, I find Loom fairly easy and short - even by modern standards; I spent few hours with it on my first try to get it completed, and only in two occasions I had to stop for a moment not knowing what should I do. The first one was quite much in the beginning and I had not yet realized that the patterns would be usable in the opposite order: so if ECED would be opening, DECE would be closing. The second case came when I did not notice that there was a place to click in one screen.

This is saying that the game is pretty straight-forward, and part of the easiness comes with the interface: there are not close as many objects in the landscape one can interact with as with most other Lucas games I'd played. The few items you'll simply pick by double clicking, which also is true with talking and other things you can do - and usually there is only one to three things on each room to interact with for only one purpose, in addition to exits and entrances.

Usually the interaction is done by casting a musical pattern or spell which have quite obvious effects in less than difficult to figure situations such as healing an injured or waking up a sleeper. In most cases the game puzzles are just to find which spell to cast where and from where to get the spell and skill to cast it. At least no hassle with items! Generally if there is a spell that might seem logical to cast, it will progress the plot on tracks. There are couple a slightly more twisted puzzles with stairs and dragon, but since in most cases there are all the time only so many rooms you can access, objects to interact and patterns you can weave, it won't take long to even just iterate "try everything everywhere" kind of activity. Also can not die or fail by any action - except by not taking a record of a pattern heard before - there is often no returning to old zones.

On the other hand the narration is quite alright and game-wise not all that standard and stereotypic, where there simply is a great evil fellow that needs to be defeated in order to save the world. I guess there are things similar here too, but that is far from being the actual plot or anything like that. On a yet another hand, the fantasy setting and storytelling gives some very possibly unexpected twists and even fun transitions, but actually in many cases I think they go a bit too fast and a bit too much of Deus Ex Machina style. I mean that there is fairly much of moon logic at least in the events - you'll just do what you can, and that makes you getting dragged to something completely else without looking back really. In addition to gameplay differences it would have felt like more depth also in the storyworld if I would have needed to walk away from the region by my own decision because I think I've seen everything - now it's largely that if it's just possible to move on, there is nothing that could have done before.

The game is also not necessarily very consistent with style of content. I mean that despite looming dark atmosphere in the beginning, the spirit (music included) is rather kid-friendly and maybe partially even too juvenile fairy-tale like. Yet later in the game there are almost horror themes and even violence that might not be fully approrpiate for the youngest of the family, and that was a bit of a surprise (and amusement) to me. Although actually many old games are "inconsistent" with style, and in adventure games especially you can just encounter anything whenever whereever.

As I was earlier speaking of time spent for walkthrough, I reckon I'd spent at least one third less time had I played the game on PC. Testing wrong patterns on Amiga takes a while, since tunes are played with a very peaceful pace on standard Amiga 500 (RAM expansion doesn't matter). Overall much of the animation especially when there are few more things on the screen is quite time consuming from modern impatient point of view. In fact I do remember also back in the time how it was frustrating as in many games there were several scenes where the player just needed to wait till the character walked across the screen without anything to do. Loom even has the "era mandatory" maze, even while at least that is fortunately almost as straight-forward as most of the game.

Speaking of slowness, of course there there are some disk swappings too, but they are not too bad on Gotek floppy emulator where swapping a disk is just a click. It's a bit annoying when needs to do two or even more disk swappings when changing a scene though. Also has to wait for some loadings - I can live with that, and emulated loading sounds have some spirit in them, yet I wouldn't mind having a disk turbo on Amiga should one not hamper with compatibility.

Nevertheless, what is more of a problem is that needs to be quite careful with swapping the disk images on floppy emulator. There is unfortunately no way to write protect the floppy images, and swapping them too abruptly can cause the disk image to get corrupted. This is especially due the way Amiga loads and pauses a bit every time a disk is inserted, and as with Gotek the disk swapping is easy enough it can even be done by accident. So in the end I managed to corrupt my game disks and worst of all my save disk twice - first in the very beginning of testing if I can save in the first place and second time after I had already completed the game. The second time the save disk did not get spoiled completely though, so I didn't lose the saves. The risk for lost records is real with the system here. Always have a backup of your disk images elsewhere but your USB stick when dealing with Gotek, and consider backing up the save images occasionally as well!

Fantastic loom of the game is there.

Those things leads to one sad thing: rationally there are not so many reasons to play quite a few Amiga games, if you just can select any version available. Especially as for most people nowadays Amiga (even emulated) is not the platform most likely available. There are lots of games that are only for Amiga or where the Amiga version is the best version. Unfortunately the latter applies mostly to games from late 1980's, when Amiga was the super home computer in the Europe, while the former applies mostly to games that are not of my favourite genres - various action based stuff.

Playing with Amiga is not a rational but emotional choice, however. I do have lots of nostalgic feelings with this device, as it's the first computer I have really in my life. Still there is also something weirdly fascinating in Amiga and its software. It just doesn't feel like any other computer, apart of course its rival Atari ST, and therefore even titles familiar from other platforms might feel like curious experiences at least in small batches. Not to mention demos... This stuff would already call for their own article, so I'll better get back to having more of some good Amiga time.