Rhiannon Software - Sierraesque adventure games before Sierra

Women, programming and adventure games

I was rather blown out last night while watching my next episode of The Computer Chronicles: Women in Computing from 1985 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMMAlmF2dv0). In the beginning of the show, host Stewart Cheifet tells to Gary Kildall: "Gary, we have up on a computer here an adventure game called Cave Girl Clair, that features a young girl as the name figure of the adventure game." They have an Apple II by the studio desk running the game, of which a few second glimpse of a game is shown.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMMAlmF2dv0&t=73s)

In the cave there is a girl so small that she can be barely seen!

Why Stewart and Gary are featuring this specific game, is because of the episode's theme is like title suggests women and computers. In 1985 it would take one to comb a planet to find games with female protagonists (today you can go to MobyGames and view "Protagonist: Female" classified games listed, to see that they have only three pages tagged like this from 1966-1985 out of 94 pages total - https://www.mobygames.com/game-group/protagonist-female).

Many early computer pioneers especially regarding to programming were women - for instance the first computer algorithm was made by Ada Lovelace in 1840's, the first general-purpose digital and Turing-complete computer ENIAC was initially programmed by a group of women in mid 1940's, and Grace Hopper's designs in 1950's led to a programming language called COBOL, which was one of the first high level programming languages. Regardless of this, men had taken the glory of successes with computers. By 1970's rise of microcomputers, the computer field had been occupied by boys and men, and hence by 1980's this history of women in computing had been largely forgotten. Since 8th March is the International Women's Day, I think this topic rather suitable to be brought up now.

However, my attention was additionally caught by something that Steward and Gary would to not pay attention to due to a contemporary people lacking historical context: The game Cave Girl Clair seemed externally curiously similar to Sierra On-Line's graphic adventure games starting with 1984 published game King's Quest I (numbering was given retrospectively). Sierra had made few graphical adventures prior to this, but they were "traditional" text adventures where the player types commands (eg. TAKE ROCK, THROW ROCK) and rooms/scenes are flavoured with more or less static images.

Clair is happy to TAKE BEETLE

King's Quest was deemed revolutionary because instead of static background graphics with all text descriptions, the protagonist and other game characters in King's Quest were actually moving animated in the landscape directly controlled by the player and/or computer. Rooms had now areas to move, and location mattered because can't interact with something in the same room unless if the player was close enough (which other cases might also result with death). King's Quest paved the way to numerous other Whatever Quest N+1 titled games all made in the beginning with the same (various improved versions excluding) game engine Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) engine, which was replaced in late 1980's by Sierra's Creative Interpreter (SCI) that had similar text parser interface, until soon in early 1990's mouse-icon controls replaced writing.

Clair is Jesus

Since King's Quest was known to be the first adventure game of its kind and a well known competitor in the genre, Lucasfilm Games would release their first graphic adventure game Labyrinth in 1986, I was surprised to see that they had had copycats already in 1985 with this Cave Girl Clair. Except that Rhiannon Software was not likely copying Sierra, since while the Commodore 64 version I was able to find from my own copy collection of program images was released in 1985, Apple II version was released already in 1984. Since developing and releasing a new game tends to take at least months, it'd been quite tight to check out King's Quest released in May 1984 (according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest_I) and make a similar new game the same year. Especially considering that it's referred in the game that it was actually developed already in 1983.

To make things even more obvious, Clair was not the first game by Rhiannon Software. It's a bit difficult to dig up reliable data from those days, but it seems like Jenny of the Prairie was their very first game released already in 1983. That surely predates King's Quest, and is a very similar adventure game to Clair, so being inspired by Sierra's later on well known animated adventure games seems unlikely. A precursor artifact found!

At least not Johnny

On the other hand, it seems unlikely that Sierra would've gotten inspirations from Rhiannon Software games either:
1. King's Quest was reported being worked for 18 months to complete from late 1982.
2. Sierra had already made (also graphical adventure) games with innovative techniques.
3. Roberta Williams had reportedly missed better animations already in earlier games.
4. Games by Rhiannon Software and Sierra have actually quite much differences.
5. It's actually very common that people come across the same logical conclusions from the same/similar background knowledge available, and then invent something very similar around the same time without knowing about each other (a classic example of this being light bulb: Thomas Edison was claimed to have invented the light bulb while he was "just" the first to successfully commercialize it - before that Joseph Swan had already had his house lit by an incandescent lamp, and it's later found out that several people before either had actually invented more or less functional lamps).

Sierra would've killed Jenny

I tried to search for for more data about Rhiannon Software and their games. Unfortunately, besides the Computer Chronicles episode (the co-founder of the company Elizabeth Stott is a studio guest) I could only find very little in addition to MobyGames entries, a short Wikipedia entry of Jenny of the Prairie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_of_the_Prairie) and a gameplay video from 2013 with less than 800 views in YouTube for Atari 8-bit version for the same game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsgYqUjtPj8). After the video I figured I want to test it myself to get a proper picture.

First hand testing of the actual games

My expectations were not met exactly. I was assuming that the games would be more or less simply choosing A or B while the girl would automatically travel from place to place. I was wrong - the player actually does move the player oneself freely for most of the time, and actions must be chosen accordingly.

One needs to explore and look around for stuff needed, pick up items and supplies, and even do some little puzzles. Sounds just like a full-fledged adventure game indeed! Well, it's quite simple and not terribly sophisticated, and there is only a limited set of pre-known commands instead of free writing, but then again it many early adventure games (or Sierra's games) there were not very complicated commands anyway. Especially as this is "educational" game meaning in practice I think that it's marketed for younger players - it's not very hard. Sierra's children games like Black Cauldron and Mother Goose have simpler interface.

Curiously enough these are not only adventure games, but also actually very first survival genre games; the games have with some variation need to find (hunt/gather) food, drink, firewood (to cook and get warmth) and other utilities in order to survive in the wild. There also are dangerous animals to avoid/fight with. Actual idea of their games are pretty much that: to survive over winter or some other phase X.

Prairie Trail can be dangerous too

Usually the earliest computer game referred to I've found for the modern "survival game" genre precursors is Seven Cities of Gold from 1984, but I think that is quite a bit different type of a game, and in my opinion early RPGs such as Rogue from 1980 already feels more suitable for a survival game precursor than Seven Cities. Maybe also Oregeon Trail could be deemed as a survival game, and that is originally already from 1970's.

This is again a thing that could get its own book even - genres, and how they are rewritten to the same games over and over during the time, often retroactively and hence sort of anachronically. However, this is also a reason why contemporary people would not really even need to care about such "new genres" being represented in a game - so many games still had so much differences over each other in early 1980's that seeing something completely new was not really that startling as it may feel like today.

Supposedly first game by Rhiannon Software is Jenny of the Prairie - perhaps inspired by a contemporarily broadcast historical drama series Little House on the Prairie. I got to test that myself on Apple II emulator, likewise Commodore 64 emulated version of Cave Girl Clair. These are very similar games by their interface, setting, gameplay and even game name structure - just that Jenny has to survive in the prairie, Clair is to survive in a prehistoric world and they'll have different animal friends (fox for Jenny, bunny for Clair). There is also Chelsea of the South Sea Islands, where a young girl has marooned on a small island, which according to description and screenshots (https://www.mobygames.com/game/chelsea-of-the-south-sea-islands) seems just like the other two - just with a kiwi as the friendly animal this time and so on. Essentially one game made three times with the same engine and slightly different setting and keyboard controls, which of course was and still is quite common and commercially reasonable.

During its supposed years of activity 1983 to 1985 I could find references of, Rhiannon Software also released two more games: Sarah and her Friends & Kristen and her Family. I could not find those to play, but I think were unlike these three adventures. From pictures and descriptions (and a glimpse in the Computer Chronicles) those seemed more like software toys for even younger kids (girls) where you choose dresses etc. that are nowadays common on smartphones.

So I've found a forgotten classic game gem of the adventure genre which also acts as an early survival genre game? Well, yes and no. Yes, so that it is surely forgotten or rather never even heard about by most people apparently. By the time I saw the episode of Computer Chronicles, it had only 9100 views in YouTube since its uploading in 2012, so it's not like this would be the hottest topic of today. Also like said before, I could not find much other references to those games.

Clair is walking in the air... I mean tree.

On the other hand, no for the part that I wouldn't call it a classic. The games are not really masterpieces that would be necessarily worth seeing anymore today, but then again, how many games of them all from before mid 1980's are truly worth playing apart from historical curiosity. That is saying, I don't think King's Quest I is a terribly good or enjoyable game by modern standards either. Yet, in addition to being considerably larger, Sierra's games seemed more refined as well: for instance background graphics in Rhiannon Software's adventures are mostly just backgrounds where it doesn't make much difference where you walk, not to mention that it would be possible to say walk behind a tree as a "3D effect".

However, had I encountered these 30+ years ago, I'd surely been impressed about them. Storytelling goes a bit thin, but it's still exploration and adventure. Most of the time they're not overwhelmingly oppressive by their gameplay as many action adventures of 1980's (if you leave the girl standing on her own when there is nothing dangerous around, she doesn't just die - time seems to pass only while changing location). Graphics have some glitches and gameplay also has some quirks, annoyances and unintuitive oddities, but such things are far from uncommon in 1980's games - also I've seen much worse interfaces and some released games are actually broken for real.

Ok, fox, keep the change, I'm done

In addition, being clearly aimed for young audience, the games aren't very long or excessively difficult... Well, not excessively hard by 1980's standards at least, if you can figure out the controls... And to be honest I didn't finish even Jenny's cave session since I'm assuming I'd needed to gather get X amount of points towards firewood, food and cape, which become tedious fast, because Jenny can only carry limited amount of various items and it's very slow to move back to cave to fill up stocks. Therefore I don't really know how much grinding I'd needed to do to reach the end - and if I missed how much other things to do. Nevertheless, most of all, apart from games by Sierra and Lucasfilm Games there were not many interactive graphic adventures in 1980's that anyone seemed to be familiar with.

Bonus sections

For sort of extra material I'll include few things:
1. Miscellanneous notes about some details, quirks and comparisons in games Jenny of the Prairie, and Cave Girl Clair. Including links to the games on MobyGames and Internet Archive.
2. Couple examples of gameplay events in text.
3. Keyboard controls I for was able to figure out for Clair and Jenny, in case you want to try out yourself.

Bonus 1: Miscellaneous notes

- Jenny almost always appears in the bottom middle of the screen - regardless from which direction the location was accessed from. This can be first confusing when for instance going down at the previous screen and a Jenny appears seemingly from the bottom. With Cave Girl Clair this was even more distracting as Clair is actually animated to always walk to the middle from the bottom of the screen, even while technically this is more developed.

Jenny should actually walk out from
the screen to hear it's a no-path.

- Game "rooms" do go on a logical grid and there aren't actually that many places to go to, so getting lost for real is not that likely, even if at first times some places seem a bit too similar. Maps seem to be 3x3, so 9 locations total.
- In Jenny game the commands that are not suitable for the screen tend to give the standard "Jenny does not know what you want her to do" answer, which is given for almost every unusable key. With Clair the game is a bit more informative, and for instance tells that no need to climb up a tree or to use a weapon as there are no dangerous animals around. Completely unused keys on the other hand will respond as "Clair is not programmed to do that" - which works in quite distancing effect in fiction telling you bluntly that you're not getting immersed because this is a computer software.

- There are some hidden items at least with Jenny that you'll only find when stepping close enough. Sophisticated!

Remember, this is only
a computer program.

- For enchanced convenience, there is no need to write a whole word if there is no other items matching. Eg. instead of picking a 'berry' it's good enough to hit 'b' if there is nothing else that would match. However, if there'd be something like 'carrot' and 'cauliflower', one would need to write at least till the differences match to only one of them.
- For reduced convenience, keyboard controls are inconsistent. Sufficient to say that several things can be only done at "home base" and the same keys might perform a completely different action in different places/situations. More about that in below with controls.
- For even reduced convenience you might need to do some things numerous times over and again. Such as when you'll find food, you'll need to hit pickup (and tell what to pick up) repeatedly until you have enough. Actually this does reminiscent or foreshadow the more modern games' resource gathering/grinding...
- There are things that can be done only after having done something else first. The game doesn't necessarily give any hints about what should be done - or how - and sometimes it says too clearly what is missing.
- Jenny has to tame a fox (or depends on selected game mode). Clair has a rabbit companion already at the start, which can be ordered to come along or stay at the cave when going to explore (I didn't play far enough to get to know if the rabbit has some actual purpose). (And Chelsea would apparently have a kiwi - I didn't play that far enough to see it.)

Commodore 64 drawing a screen

Apple drawing a screen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
- Apple II Jenny swapped screens quite a bit faster than C64 Clair (assuming that the emulators were running on real speed). Also every command takes a while to process with Clair, whereas with Jenny everything comes up promptly. The game does not freeze though on C64, so you can hit "look" command, which prompts that Claire is looking now. Only after moving a bit it changes into something more informative. I suppose this is at least for some parts intentional by design - looking starts and then needs to walk around to see a bit. (Although with Vice C64 one can hit a "warp mode" by ALT-W, which makes everything roll 8x speed to skip loading etc.)
- Apple II Jenny draws graphics similar fashion drawing first separate elements line by line and later colour fill by fill when entering a screen, similarly as the Sierra games did. On C64 however, Clair'cccs screens are painted to their final looks row by row - and this is a lot slower actually.
- On the other hand character animations on C64 are more smooth and the game does not get slowed down by extra characters on the screen like with Apple II. These are obviously due to different ways the graphics are handled with these two different machines: Apple has no hardware sprites like C64, while C64 can't natively do as convenient colour fills and line drawing to arbitrary screen locations as Apple. Also C64's notoriously slow floppy drive takes its toll.
- Apple IIe emulator playable Jenny of the Prairie at the Internet Archive (woz-a-day collection): https://archive.org/details/wozaday_Jenny_of_the_Prairie
- Jenny in MobyGames: https://www.mobygames.com/game/jenny-of-the-prairie
- Cave Girl Claire in Internet Archive for Commodore 64: https://archive.org/details/Cave_Girl_Clair_1985_Adn-Wesley
- Cave Girl Clair in MobyGames: https://www.mobygames.com/game/cave-girl-clair
- Jenny of the Prairie in Internet Archive had 53 views by the time I found it, and it was uploaded 2020-11-11. Clair had 125 views after having been uploaded in 2018-09-03.

Bonus 2: Keyboard controls

Controls in Jenny of the Prairie:
Movement:
I - up
K - right
J - left
M - down

Actions:
U - pick up / use cave storage? (after fox is tamed)
P - shoot (only in an appropriate location) with a slingshot or spear
S - status
D - drink / put down (if not thirsty (!!!))
H - holding (inventory)
L - look around
C - chop wood to get logs (with hatchet)
B - something somewhere?

Controls in Cave Girl Clair:
Movement:
U - up
J - right
H - left
N - down

Actions:
E - eat (only at cave)
T - climb up a tree
I - Inventory
P - pick up (and eat immediately if edible)
S - store status (at cave) / season situation (when not by store)
D - dig
F - start a fire (only at cave & needs tinder/sticks, depending on startup selection game mode)
G - gather
L - look around
C - carry something (and keep it along you)
B - throw bola (only if a dangerous animal is on the screen)
M - show medicinal plants (if at the cave)

Bonus 3: Couple game example texts

Jenny is leaving the Clearing and
is going to the Berry patch.

Here comes Jenny.
> L [look]
Jenny sees nothing to pick up.
> U [pick]
What does Jenny want to pick up?*
> berry
O.K...Jenny picked a berry.
Jenny still needs 38 points of food for her own energy this summer.
What does Jenny want to pick up?*
> b
O.K...Jenny picked a berry.
Jenny still needs 37 points of food for her own energy this summer.
[...]
> b
O.K...Jenny picked a berry.
Jenny still needs 1 points of food for her own energy this summer.
> b
O.K...Jenny picked a berry.
Jenny has enough food for the summer!

---

Jenny can aim also left,
but it's harder to do.

> P [for shooting]
Does Jenny want to shoot with the slingshot or fishing spear (S or F)?
> F [I don't have the slingshot anyway]
O.K...Jenny is aiming right. [She's facing left though.]
Type 'R' for release. [And don't move or do anything else or the aim state silently fails.]
> R [When a fish is swimming at left side of the scren, to where Jenny is facing to.]
Jenny missed...
> P
Does Jenny want to shoot with the slingshot or fishing spear (S or F)?
> f
O.K...Jenny is aiming right.
Type 'R' for release.
> R [When a fish is next to Jenny not too far, at the right side.]
Jenny just caught a fish. [But does not pick it automatically.]
> U [to pick]
What does Jenny want to pick up?
> fish
Jenny can only carry one kind of food
at once.
> H [inventory]
Jenny is holding : 2 apples 1 spear
> L [look]
Jenny can see 2 fish
[The fish will vanish when I'll leave the screen and come back.]

This is survival...and the game will not take
NO as an answer.

The Farce of Getting a PlayStation 3

 Behind the practice

I have for a long time had this practice of not going for the first wave of whatever trendy new stuff there is. Instead, if it’s worth it, I’ll go for it after a while (like ten years or so) when it’s already kind of passé in general opinion, and can be obtained for a fraction of price of a new. This is also how my interest to retrocomputing originally grew up – it was 1990’s when I got Commodore 64 (many years after my brother had sold his unit), even while at the time the concept of retrocomputing did not really exist.

This has also been a way to filter out some futile work, since after all most of everything is more or less repeating other contemporary stuff that exists, whether it’s games or computers or books and movies. If something is still up and remembered after several years, it’s more likely something genuinely good and not something that caused attention just because of at the time some novel superficial idea that managed to gain marketing winds to the sail (something like Matrix sequels can be mostly just forgotten).

Downsides of this practice are on the other hand that obviously by the time this whatever reaches me, it’s no longer a hot topic that many people are too fond of talking about. Not that most people would matter anyway, though. Also if missing something as a new, might miss that something in a good condition. This can be especially true with devices, and like deemed so many times before, going for actual vintage computers there is almost always need for some maintenance, since decades old electronics tend to deteriorate in time. On the other hand I didn’t think this would be as needed with something only around ten years old, but oh well, getting a functional PlayStation 3 was not quite as trivial as I had expected by now.

Spoiler alert: the writer will get his PlayStation 3

Let us find the 3rd Station and Play!

PlayStation 2 was actually the first video game console I’ve ever owned myself, since I’ve always felt more attracted to computers – I’m not only into games. Nevertheless, PS2 was a positive surprise, and yes, it was already around ten years old device when I got it. I still got it and play with it every now and then – it has been a device of pleasure, so I’m not really surprised it’s been the best selling game console of all time. It has several well made and exclusive games, and there are also quite a few games in genres that are suitable for my taste, role-playing games predominantly. In addition I got to try some action genres I’ve never really been into – and I still think 3rd person games often have the most horrible controls with their rolling cameras. Grand Theft Auto 3 and first three Silent Hill games for instance are worthwhile experiences – even while actually the SH series I’ve played more on PC and that I could’ve done with GTA3 as well.

Despite this I was uncertain if I should ever get PlayStation 3. By then it seemed that there is only so little to see that I could not see on PC (or on some other console), and actually majority of the games would still be in genres I’m not that fond of – similarly as on PS2, but I’d seen that stuff on PS2 enough already. By time of PS3 the markets had changed so that it wouldn’t really matter as much which device to get, except that on PC everything could run more smoothly. More importantly internet playing was coming up, and already on PS3 it started to seem games are like PC games – play online and update the game before you play.

After thinking a while, I decided it’s not yet really like that. It’s the PS4 I could just skip as it would have nothing to give (especially as the next generation should have backwards compatibility, since the architecture was changed largely for the reason that porting games between consoles and PC would be more easy if the system’s aren’t that unique – money talks). Therefore I decided that I’ll get a PS3 before it starts to become a collectible as itself (PS4 with its network requirements might be deemed less of a collectible later on), even if I’m already lacking time to play with many other devices I have.

India was supposed to be just few thousand leagues to the West

Then I just went to online auction sites and looked after a PS3. But I become picky. There were too many packages available, and it was difficult to choose from. I decided to skip the first fat model, since I had read that unlike with PS2 with which the slim models were cut down on some features and also reported as less reliable, on PS3 the older models had nothing extra to give really (apart from the earliest PS2 backward compatible models that were never sold in EU region anyway and would therefore be really difficult to find) and that they’d be significantly less reliable than later models (overheating leading to YLOD – Yellow Light of Death). So PS3 slim or ultra slim would be the one to go for.

On the other hand some of the latest ultraslim models seemed to have extra small hard drives and maybe in not even rational fashion I felt like ultraslim models might have other cost reduction measures that I’d be best off with an intermediate slim model (unless if a good ultraslim package would come along).

In addition to that, I wanted to get Move controller(s), as even while I felt they’re probably not very fancy (or more likely, too few good games would exist for them), I’d want to try them. This stuff should be cheap by now, right? Well, not dirt cheap for sure. Maybe other people had figured out as well that PS4 and newer might no longer be that collectable, or then time just had not passed sufficiently. Many PS3 packages with Move controllers were set on prices of even hundreds of euros, which might be affected by that I got this impression that PS3 Move controllers would still work in PS4. Not sure about that, but nevertheless.

This led to the situation that it was difficult to find a PS3 package with a decent price and content of something that interest me (Move controllers plus at least some games I’d want – something like Red Dead Redemption, Dark Souls or Uncharted included could make my purchase decision). I also found out that I was not quite the only one interested about PS3, even while it was supposed to be so popular that everyone else was already bored with it. Maybe this is also emphasized by lockups of 2020.

Whenever I found a seemingly good package, I’d send a message that I’ll buy it and can fetch it too. Then the next day I might get a reply that someone else already bought it. In these certain Finnish online sales sites (Tori.fi) you can’t close a sale but you’ll need to contact the seller who then does whatever he/she wants about it, so can’t just call it a purchase that will tie both the buyer and seller like in Huuto.net (similar to Ebay.com for instance). Therefore there came up cases where I’d send a message I’ll buy it and get a reply the next day sounds good when can you fetch. I’m at work by the time I’ve gotten the message, so I’ll be only able to answer in the afternoon, by which time the seller replies it was already sold to someone else as I didn’t reply immediately. Sellers always complain about buyers, and buyers have always reason to complain about the sellers – might be my personal distortion, but it still feels like that an old mainstream product like PS3 has higher chances of impatient and unpleasant sellers (that is, more ordinary people) than with actual retrocomputing material.

Finally there, right?

Story goes long, but finally I’ll catch a package which pleases me: PS3 with a Move controller and a bunch of games with Dark Souls included. It’s in a neighbouring town and we agree for a delivery by mail. This would appear for my birthday in December 2020. I was somewhat concerned with the seller though, as it seemed kind of too easy going now, replies kind of died after the trade was agreed upon and somewhat weirdly the seller nickname suggested a female person yet the account to which I paid was with a male name. Did I slip into a fraud after an exhausting search for the device?

All seemed fine first, and the parcel appeared soon enough. However, the parcel could have had a bit more padding; the package is somewhat damaged and sadly I’ll also find some pieces of plastic inside as well from the jewel cases of BluRay disc games. Clearly the delivery has included some rough handling, but that’s how the Post office can just do. The device starts no problem though at first – what a relief. Unfortunately, that’s where it stops – I can’t even insert a disc properly.

A piece of a broken
PS3 game case

It seems that the the device had gotten sufficiently hits that optical disc mechanics had flipped off their stance and hence when I push a disc inside, it just gets stuck there. I wasn’t familiar with the device beforehand, so I didn’t know exactly how early it should suck the disc in – and by the time I realized it’s broken, it was too late. Now all I got was that the PS3 boots normally but drive only gives desperate whines and nudges, and obviously without a disc drive I could not start anything.

Time to break the “no warranty” seal stickers and peek in the device then. For additional fun fun I realize that Sony has been nicely far more anti-consumer with PS3 than they were with PS2 more ways than I knew (I already knew that they’d locked the devices further so that similar hacks to play copied discs would not work as easily as on PS2, and I’d gotten the impression they’d used lower quality components on PS3 to make more profits, for which reason many of the old models broke down after few years). That is, the PS3 case screws are not only security screws of star shape but also some special security screws where the normal star shaped screwdriver would not fit because there is also a peg in the middle to block the normal star head… Fortunately and ironically this meant though that one can actually just use a normal flat head screwdriver on those, although it took me a moment to figure it out and I did damn Sony for their hostile behaviour in design.

After I finally got the case open, I could realign the mechanical parts and get them moving again, so the discs should go in and out. This did happen, I got the drive working – mechanically. I also did some cleaning to the lense and lubrication on the rails at the same time. Time to close the case again.

Unfortunately this didn’t help. The discs will now go in and out, but they’ll just keep quite much of noise for a while until it’ll give up without going anywhere. It may be that I managed to spill some of the lubricating grease on the lens so that it might read better again if I’d clean it up. I didn’t notice this happening though, and might be nothing like that happened. Might well be that the laser was also broken during the impacts that the package got.

The seller told that it functioned fine before sending (I have no means of confirming this), but she also offered a partial refund. I accepted that offer. Original price of the package was something over 100 € and now it fell below. Unfortunately I’m no longer a poor student who has time but no money, and now I just had no console to play with.

For once when I was not looking for
a retro repair project...

Try Again

I could have yet tried to try to clean it up once, but I didn’t buy PS3 as a retro repair project, and I felt tired. There are companies who repair PS3 devices, but I figured I could just buy another device for less price than the repair would cost – individual PS3 devices seemed relatively plenty on markets for quite low price, it’d be the accessories and games that would make the price. Quite soon I found another seller who didn’t bail out and we agreed for a price of maybe 50 € and fetch from the railway station.

Or more accurately he suggested that we’d meet at the “upper parking lot” of the railway station. There are more than one one parking lots out there, and I referred to this in my reply message and asked if it meant the one next to the rails and station… Yes, that it would be! Except that it wasn’t: I went to snowing freezing day to wait at the place I thought that was meant, and sent a message that I’ll be waiting. He called and explained he’d be in another place. I can move to other side, no problem. I never found out what was the place he actually was, as I went to the other side of the station and there was nobody. Eventually we found and did the trade, all seemed good and the not finding event seemed just like a small amusement for both in the end.

This time I’ll have no problems – PS3 works fine straight out from the bag. Finally I can play Dark Souls for the first time in my life, and quite soon I’ll die and have to start again from quite far away. This is said to be the spirit of the game. All’s well that ends well, right?

Prologue

Some weeks later I had again time to play Dark Souls and gradually got further ahead in the game. It’s not maybe the best game so far I’ve played, but it is worth trying at least. The drive makes some silent erk erk sounds every now and then while I’m playing, but I’m not paying much attention to that. I’m playing my new record in distance reached, but eventually I’ll die again. Nevertheless, this time I won’t get resurrected as usual. This time it all goes black. Nothing happens anymore. My game has died. Or rather, my PS3’s optical drive has died all the sudden. All it says is erk erk, and reads discs no more. Oh Globbit! I wonder if the game managed to save my status before it crashed.

If you will, The Computer Chronicles

Technology spearheaded by computers are providing many new innovations, practical applications and features that have revolutionary flavours resembling the industrial revolution of 19th century. To name a few, Artificial Intelligence, robotics replacing traditional labour, speech synthesis and recognition making phone call talks possible with a machine, 3D graphics competing with real life visions, virtually anything being designed by computer graphics applications, simulations substituting practical training, networking superseding individual offline computers, reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is beating CISC of x86 architecture CPUs, magnetic mass media being replaced by solid state drives, computers in education getting ubiquitous, and finally devices becoming so small that you can lose them like keys.

Does that all sound like state-of-art hi-tech in 2021? Well it shouldn't, since I'm talking about 1980's, and more specifically the topics and conversations gone through in The Computer Chronicles - a current affairs television series about computer related matters started in 1983. The series ran for almost 20 years till 2002, but since I'm watching it systematically from the beginning (or at least as systematically as I can get from YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerChroniclesYT - according to Wikipedia there is "only" almost all episodes, and sometimes the comments in episodes themselves seem to refer on episodes broadcast before that are still on the queue to come), I'm not be even close to 1990's yet.

I'll summarize the nature of the show. Essentially it's a documentary talk show, where in around 20+ minutes of real program time the hosts interview various visiting computer specialists, who also often have something to demo with on a computer brought to the studio. Sometimes there also are excursions to an external site (or at least some delivered remote footage shown in between), such as a computer factory or Xerox office showing laser printer functionality on a Xerox Alto computer with mouse and graphical user interface (yes, this is from where Steve Jobs and a few steps later Bill Gates stole their ideas for their Macintosh and Windows, correspondingly). Most of the stuff in the program is pretty much top tech of the time, much of it being still on prototype level and all of if is being rapidly developed at the time and in the years to come.

Skynet's time travel scheme is interfering the picture.

To me the series also works even as a sitcom; every now and then people are having predictions about computer future that go so badly wrong. Things like not seeing wide usage for optical media alongside floppy disks or anticipating that IBM PC compatibles will have no point in a long run. Since the series is over 35 years old, people debating about what role will some things have later on will naturally have brances that are nowhere close to what came to happen sometimes in just few years after. Retrospectively those "wrong" bets can be quite amusing in a good way, yet there are lots of people who have very acute perceptions about the states of fact.

One of the recurring co-hosts, Gary Kildall, is actually one person in the series who has several sharp insights on the way. I think this is to be expected too though, considering he was a person who in 1970's as one of the first people saw true potential of microprocessors as independent computers. He is best known for developing essentially the first non-device tied microcomputer operating system, CP/M, which also later on become the precursor of MS-DOS. I guess most computer users today don't remember even DOS, so I guess we're swimming quite deep here already. Killdall himself sadly died relatively young (52) in 1994, after various tragic events.

Obviously though it'd be unfair to judge people from failing to see the future, since they're simply making logical conclusions from the knowledge available at the time. There are always infinite amount of possible outcomes of tomorrow, so if someone in 1985 fails to foresee that there will be no more Soviet Union after ten years or that IBM has lost to PC clones, those people would not be to blame. In fact, had just some decisions been made differently at certain critical historical junctions, everything could be different also for today. That is why speculative fiction and scifi with time paradoxes have so much narrative potential, but now I'm digressing, as I willingly so often do.

For a contemporary viewer one might assume it has not so much to give - even if the actual topics could be made sound contemporary matters, everything in the show is of course de facto obsolete by today's standards. So is its value today just, if you will, retrocomputer enthusiast material? Not quite, not only that in my opinion. Of course it's history, but it is also some history which gives perspective for today.

History in general provides multiple points of views and I could talk of many, but we have just about a minute, let us just take one. Kids (including young adults) today sometimes joke that people in 1980's or before would be so badly dumbfounded by today's gadgets such as everyman's smartphones that they'd call for witch trials if a person from the future would bring such device to them. Again, not quite, I think, even with the hyberbole and intentional anachronism aside.

After all, for instance Dick Tracy had his call capable wrist watch already in 1940's and space exploration was a thing already in 1920's - ideas live for decades, sometimes even centuries before practical applications, so when someone actually gets some device functional, it practically always is already an old concept. Things like these are also always already considered about at the time when a science fiction representation is released. As an example I can remember an article from my childhood in MikroBitti (a Finnish computer magazine started in 1984) about Knight Rider. It was all about its scifi super car KITT and whether the technology used in it is anyhow plausible. Conclusion was that essentially everything in the series could theoretically be implemented - but that the car would be more like a truck than a sports car if all the features would have been genuinely implemented at the time.

This being said, much of the technology demonstrated in The Computer Chronicles is something which would not really be available for the general public at the time. Military helicopter simulators of early 1980's could run on a computer which has processing power comparable to a mid 1990's home computer (or, a personal computer - home computers usually refer to 8 and 16-bit hobbyist machines, while the term personal computers was typically referring to a more serious business capable computer). Artificial Intelligence as a concept was clear already back then, but only with today's seemingly infinite maximum memory and drastically grown processing speed it is becoming truely a capable tool. Similarly accurate speech recognition could be limited to one person's voice only at a set tone due to lack of processing power of the devices, even while as a concept it can be already made fully functional at least with expensive system. This pretty much goes with everything in the series - in comparison to 2020's much of the technology in 1980's is still either too primitive or even more often too expensive to be used in most imaginable situations. Yet I feel had this series been made today, they would have not put the emphasis similarly on actual facts and technical details - to me, this is emotionally rousing.

All this gathered, despite people decades ago would surely have been impressed by today's devices, I see no reason why essentially anything available today would be unimaginable for any reasonable being having lived during the past eighty years or so. They'd be more surprised to hear that people of same sex can get married, or that despite all the available knowledge so many people would rather believe in narcissist bigots than science. Ladies and gentlemen, we're out of time. Thank you for joining us with this episode of the Zacharian Computer Diary.

(Then in a moment I'm told that someone's parent would still see smartphones unimaginable today, that there are lots of people for whom the Earth is flat, trips to space let alone Moon were fake news, and someone living close to equator would take it as a lie to claim that elsewhere there are white winters during which it's possible to walk on water, oh well...)

Quest for the Rising Sun Computer: NEC PC-9801 BX/U2 from Japan - Part 1, First rumours about PC-98

This will be a long, multi-part story which has already carried on for years. Figured out that I could do some degree of intermediate documentation about this topic, as it's been taking so long and I don't know when (if) I'll get any video(s) out of it. Amusingly enough, also this post has been over 95% completed for months on my computer - I simply forgot to finish and post it. That's what happens when I have no active audience to remind me about things.

In any case, the topic for today is NEC PC-9801 BX/U2 computer. I purchased this mid 1990's Japanese computer already couple years ago from Yahoo Auctions Japan by using proxy service. Last Autumn I finally got that device into an actually usable condition. There is still work to do with it, but let me start it from the very beginning...

There was a time when this alone would have deprived me of any hope...

 

First rumours about PC-98

As a kid and actually till all the way to close to at least late 2010 I barely knew the existence of NEC PC-98 series (that there also is PC-88 and others before those I only found out years later...but that's another story). In some old computer magazines there were some random cases references to some mysterious "PC-98" as an alternate platform for some game, which was perplexing to me. PC for me as a kid used to mean IBM PC and compatible computers, so in the world I lived a "PC" meant ubiquitously an IBM PC compatible (even while I'd never see a genuine IBM computer almost anywhere). Therefore my logic dictated that this "PC-98" in computer magazines would refer to a "PC compatible" of some kind.

However, this did did not always fit the logic. If a game was already released on (IBM) PC, what for it would be separately mentioned that it is also released on PC-98? In addition there was this incident when in a major Finnish computer magazine of the time MikroBITTI, issue 1989/12, released an article about a console called PC Engine by this company NEC... So it's all about PC Compatible console or why such name? No, no, NO! It took me a while to get grasp of this alien PC-98.

I believe it was reviews of Cobra Mission and Metal & Lace: The Battle of the Robo Babies in MikroBITTI and maybe Pelit magazines in early 1990's where I'd for the first times genuinely noticed references to PC-98. At the time, they started to port some PC-98 games to West for PC computers. The most distinguishing features of these games seemed to be manga style graphics and nudity - both very uncommon at the time in European and American games (in mainstream gaming that is). In fact manga/anime materials were still fairly uncommon outside of Japan in early 1990's, so some people got their attention to the games purely for the graphical reasons. Fom my perspective those Japanese animations and comics rose to later mainstream popularity through video game & (tabletop) RPG nerds' limited circle studies, after which they also arguably lost their value as underground specials.

To me those games were meaningless back then. M&L was a fighting game and I didn't really understand what people saw in those. Cobra Mission on the other hand was linear-story JRPG, and despite my interest in RPGs otherwise, I saw JRPGs as boring console games. Also about anime and manga I started to get more interested only later in 1990's (through game and RPG circles, like referred earlier), as I realized there'd be much Sci-Fi and Fantasy stuff made in Japan, some of which being actually good storytelling.

I could add though, that by hindsight also the games had a bit unusual gameplay for the time in comparison to contemporary games available in the West. JRPG games were not too common yet back then, apart from some consoles, and having played Cobra Mission through later on it felt okayish. I mean, quite relaxing to just walk through - it's not endlessly long and especially it's not very difficult one, where you could get lost or wander pointlessly on your own very far. It was almost like going through some visual novel in the level of interaction and gameplay choices. I suppose those features would've not appealed to me back then anyway. Also, regarding to M&L, in my opinion it was not yet terribly common to have almost any degree of narration in between game scenes maybe in a slightly Wing Commanderish style in action games in 1993, even if the "narration" in this game wasn't necessarily that refined...

Of course it took me years to get used to various quirks of the manga/anime style, where there often is no consistent style but serious stuff can lapse into slapstick any moment likewise in adult oriented stories there might pop up some random and illogical sex scene unwarned. Or some stuff is stretched to ridiculous amounts and otherwise overall there can be huge degree of exaggeration with everything, and typically narrative arches gradually grow from individual to epic. Not to mention I still dislike how all characters look so much alike, apart from their clothes and hair style. If I was able to close my eyes from features I found stupid, I found long-term evolving narration uncommon in Western fiction in many ways.

Digressions apart, I was still far from comprehending the actual existence of NEC-PC 98 computers. To genuinely comprehend their existence, I needed to find the genre of visual novels somewhere in mid 2000's. By then we already had this Brave New World called Internet (later diminished into internet). It came as a surprise that this sort of weird genre (remember from a previous post how I refer to the death of text adventures in West by 1990's) had apparently insane amount of visual novel titles, out of which only very few were translated and imported to English speaking countries. Unfortunately, those translations were also plagued by hentai, which on the other hand maybe was the premise for some publishers to import them to West to begin with. Then again I found out that there were several titles that had interesting stories or atmospheres despite them being hentai games (or actually, I guess eroge is the word here). Nocturnal Illusions, Three Sisters Story and Critical Point were some examples, which I found quite interesting at least for parts, even while they had lots of scenes that seemed completely unnecessary. To be honest, might well be that should I now try them again after 15 years, I might deem them all (or at least some) simply horrible and disgusting in multiple ways, so perhaps I should not try them again. (As a side note I, figuring out the name of Critical Point made me stop writing here, as searching for it took the rest of the evening.)

Genuine interest of getting to try NEC PC-98 at this point was still very low, since I'd never learn to read Japan, and majority of the semi-interesting games (adventure, RPG, strategy) for NEC PC-98 platform seemed like they'd require language skills. Emulators probably already existed, but why bother for something I understood as a Japanese counterpart of IBM PC series with mostly similar games (apart from visual noves) just in a foreign language. Later on I found out there'd be much more to the picture than meets the eye, but that is to be talked about another day.

P. S. Speaking of videos at start, at Friday I took some videos with my Panasonic GH3 for the first time since April, ouch (to add insult to injury, this sentence was written in September 2020). On the other hand, that is when I bought my first decent grade smartphone S10, for which one of the main selling points to me was its camera. At Friday it took me like half an hour to get up all the equipment (lights, stands, microphone, camera...) in ready to use state. I had less than an hour time to do my videos until my wife and child returned to home, by which I started to finish my video making session and it took maybe ten minutes to pack everything up again. With the smartphone I'll need like 5 minutes to set up a light and I'm good to go - although then I'll also use no stand (don't have very good stand setups for a smartphone, yet at least). Smartphone video has features I'm not so fond of (such as being incapable of shooting in 25 or 50 FPS, so the format would be more compatible with my other camera footage), but if I'll have 30 minutes moment to record something, it would make no point getting out my more dedicated camera setup. Maybe some day I'll have a studio and will not need to unpack everything every time I try to do something.

P. P. S. About this MikroBITTI issue 12/1989: Very coincidentally and completely unrelated, our childhood unit of this very magazine issue was lost for decades. Last year I happened to see that on sale on a net auction, so I figured I'll just purchase a new copy of it to fill in the missing link. I didn't realize beforehand that the PC Engine article was on this specific issue, even while I so well remembered having seen it as a kid.