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.

Mobile game testing during summer 2020, part 2 (Game Dev Tycoon & Girls X Battle 2)

During the summer I also tested two Android games I liked: Game Dev Tycoon (GDT) & Girls X Battle 2 (GXB2). I'll say a few words about those.

Game Dev Tycoon

GDT is a management game, where you're a game developer starting in a fictional reality apparently early in 1980's. It was originally released on PC in 2012, which I've never tried. Android version is much newer, but not sure if there are any actual changes in the game. During the summer I felt like oh well this is quite much praised game and I've bought only one game before, so let it go. I didn't regret - I did several few days for several hours with it. I nowadays rarely have time to put in more than 10 hours ever on a single game, so by a rule of thumb it's clearly a successful game if I feel myself enjoyed for more than 10 hours with a game.

Anyway, the game itself is quite simple. At the beginning you're alone and code games - coding is basically set by setting different amount of emphasis during three development stages, where there are three different sliders such as World Design, Graphic and Sound, or Gameplay, Dialogues and AI. Characters have skills in Design, Technology, Research and Speed - first two affect to making better results at different sides of the game development, while research is for generating reports and researching new technology. Speed then decides obviously how fast something is completed. If the project is larger than small, there is a need to dedicate one person to various fields during a phase - three people can do all the phases, but if the the project is too big, it's exchausting to be responsible of everything, and results will suffer.

During the time there will be time there will be new more capable computers and consoles availeable, and every now and then those are declared not supported by the producer, after which no more games can be developed to them. Devices model after real life devices with minor deviation in name and/or looks. New features will become available for research as well, and late game games are hugely more complex (indicated by points development and technical points required to finish) than the starter things. Also the company size will grow, there are various other choices too (such as genres and target audiences), your workers (and you yourself) will become better and more specialized, there are few semi-random events and eventually it's even possible to have own dedicated research department too. Overall everything is quite simplistic and abstract though, and various factors define which sides make a good game for this platform.

As a downside the game has in my opinion relatively poor replay value, because there is no randomness in game history course. Therefore I can always know beforehand that I'll need to stop making games for this device, as it's going to be shut down abruptly the next year, and likewise can know that soon there'll be a new device for which it's good to make strategy games and so forth (and actually since the devices are based on real devices, one can often foresee various things already on the first try). On the other hand at least it's possible to keep knowledge saved in game for the features which are important in some game combinations, and with multi-genre games etc. there are quite a few options in a long run. And of course needs to keep balancing with money, which seems a bit too easy though.

Overall a nice experience, especially for the first time, which can take quite a few hours already. Second time might go alright as well, but don't really feel like playing the game for many times through, mainly for reasons stated in the previous paragraph.

Later I decided to purchase in Steam a game in Early Access called City Game Studio. It is essentially a game like GDT with maybe a bit more crude interface at least for now, but also more features - even while it's not stated as completed. This also seems to have at least to a degree of variation with device development as an option. Will see if it will be the full mantle bearer of game developing simulations for me in the future - or if I'll just have already oversaturated myself with the genre.

Girls X Battle 2

Last year I tested and reviewed Empires & Puzzles, and deemed it had something a bit similar to Dungeon Link. This summer I thought I could go back to see the game and maybe do a review of it. Alas, I could not, the game had become victim of the modern times and the servers had been simply shut down. Now it's relatively difficult to find much about the game anymore from the Internet. Ok, that's not really true, there are still lots of sites referring to it, but still I see it's more like nothing stays in the Internet if not actively upkept. As I tend to think it's quite opposite to those who keep telling that anything placed to Internet will never vanish from there. Anyway, I'm digressing.

So since Dungeon Link was no more, I tried to find something more or less similar. I came across this game GXB2, which I'd seen in advertisements for quite a few times. According to the ads I'd probably never played the game; it was advertised by stupid 3D animations (completely unrelated to the game, in completely different style than in the game) where some guy is dating girls and dumping them hoping to get a better one. Essentially the advertisement videos gave the idea that it's a dating sim where all the girls are yours to be abused, even if some of them would sometimes ignore you. However, unlike with the Game of Lust, this time the actual game proved out much better than could've deduced by the ads.

So yes, it's a game where you collect girls (gotten from gacha balls), and there is kind of a date a girl feature, but it's really much more like tactical RPG management game. Girls must be fed to get levelled and then also merged to get empowered. They'll need equipment and have different skills, so the tactical side comes with combining the more efficient team - in case you can choose. There are also mild level of storytelling about sort of monster invasion to the academy...can't really remember much of it as it was so generic and meaningless.

Much like Dungeon Link, actually, except this time there is not as tedious grinding - but also no any tactics in battles either. On the other hand, most battles can simply be skipped thereafter, at least after few ingame levels. Also in Dungeon Link there were characters not only girls, and well, GXB2 is also filled with fan service anime, unfortunately. I'm fine with manga/anime style characters, but I dislike it when almost all the characters have overemphasis on bursting bosom, flashing knickers and having unnecessarily indecent clothing. Not to mention, most of the girls are supposedly underage, sigh.

If I'll rationalize, I can't actually even properly recommend this game. I mean it's a nice free to play game with ridiculously high possibilities to waste money for nothing while levelling your characters, and sooner or later the waiting will go on nerves of many people if not paying to speed up the progress. However, it's made quite nicely in my opinion, and to do the dailies it just takes few taps here and there and there's still stuff that is alright to play. Quite simple yes, but at least not annoying effort every day. Empires & Puzzles (and many other games) I played for some months until I got exhausted with grinding as F2P and not willing to pay, but this I've played several months without feeling tired - and therefore I felt I can actually pay a bit for the game. It's hard to explain, but I've enjoyed despite so limited actual gameplay options.

There is some humour also, even while not always that great, and I appreciate it that there are actually manga strips running ingame (with at least one strip falling under self-cencorship due to an incest reference - I think the game's normal graphical content is actually worse than this one relatively fun strip was). The manga is not necessarily my favourite comic as such, but at least it does make the ingame characters more lively and it's sometimes jesting with the ingame mechanics: eg. one character Giana causes her biggest damage after she dies, so in one manga strip Giana is used (reluctantly) as an exploding cannonball to vaporize the opposing team.

On the dark side though, it seems to me like every second girl in the academy is at least depressed. Some sound like they'd been abused or something, and several of them are plain mad (stuff like can I sharpen my chainsaw with your bones, master). I suppose it's supposed to be comical, but for some parts it almost sounds like if the developers would be human trafficked to do their game code locked into a dark cellar, and those little filler dialogue lines would be their only voice out from their personal hell. I'll never get to know if this is just my vivid imagination, which helps me across dull times in life.

Mobile game tests during Corona summer of 2020, part 1 with the lesser games: D&D Style Choice Game & King's Throne

During the summer I spent several weeks in a small town in Eastern Finland, obviously without my dear personal computer(s). At some point I felt like testing few games on my newly bought (second-hand) Samsung Galaxy S10. Might write a word or hundred about the games I tried, after I'll get to that.

This new old flagship model S10 replaced my 2015 model Samsung Galaxy J5, which was not very good for playing in a long run - performance was acceptable, but with only 8 GB of total internal storage it was not good. It could be acceptable if the 8 GB would have been actually available, but OS and bloatware took already away like 6 GB of it, and even while SD card can be used, most applications do not support running from SD card. Android 6 Marshmallow (best the J5 would officially support) would have feature of using SD as extension of the internal storage, but Samsung had decided to disable this feature in their OS version... So anyway with my old J5 it was therefore inconvenient to even have more than one or max few games on the device to begin with... 

I suppose those smartphones could already take their own post, but this is what happens when not writing anything for five months. To be honest, also each of the games alone could have been worth one separate post, but now I'll try to be short and pack a line or few of several, since I know I'd otherwise have a long hiatus between each comment. This already was supposed to be written two months ago. Work, studies and family do take their toll in time consumption - and actually just now a little hungry beast came to tell me that it is foodie time. Very well, I'll continue in a moment.

Originally I intended to write also about games Girls X Battle 2 & Game Dev Tycoon, but I think writing this all took long enough to make it two-part post. Maybe it won't take me months to get the second half of my summer 2020 games reviews written - those two are after all games I clearly liked more than the two following ones I tested first.

 

D&D Style Choice Game

You have chosen...
poorly

"You have found a clichéd Dungeons and Dragons inspired game for your smartphone. You are at your childhood home and feel bored. Nobody is around. What should you do?

A. Play the darn game!
B. Forget it, find out if there are some other people around.
C. It's already late. You can rest and wake up another day."

Actually there are quite a few
pictures in the game. Ads too.

The first game I tested was named in very generic fashion: D&D Style Choice Game. Well, I guess that pretty much tells what to expect from a game amidst endless hordes of other games one can download and at least try for free. So yes, it is a text based game where you'll read the story and then pick a choice, according to which the game continues and narration branches. 

This feels to me something really ancient; choice based text adventure games were a thing already in my childhood in 1980's (including analogue variants: solo adventure books, where results of choices are determined by turning into page X or Y). Those pretty much seemed to lapse into obscurity for most parts by 1990's, although not necessarily as deeply as parser based text adventures (which I believe were deemed as more advanced stuff in 1980's than choice based games). Then of course there were this related genre of visual novels, which were not as familiar in the West despite being constantly around during the decades in Japan.

I think it's fairly truthful to claim, however, that visual novels and even pure text based story games have gotten a renaissance also in Western gaming culture during the past ten years or so. Some material have clearly gotten inspirations from Japanese visual novels, however, these pure text based games have a bit different and more traditionally Western feeling on them. I also partially got inspired to try some of these, since I've been also testing Twine, which is sort of a game engine for making text based games (essentially as HTML pages). In addition could imagine that this kind of a game suits well on a mobile device, and I suppose I still agree with that.

Narissa, the dream girl of every RPG
nerd - she's even cladded in proper
armor instead of a bikini mail.

The game itself is essentially an "interactive novel", which is not exactly consisted of award winning narration as such. In fact the text reminded me a lot about my own high fantasy short stories I'd written as a teenager, riddled with a very traditional RPG fantasy setting (healer clerics with mail and mace fighting goblins etc.) not forgetting to gasp upon how hot every randomly encountered NPC female is. At least some of them are also well suited in combat against various beasts and abominations. This being said, in addition to sexual innuendo there is a fair deal of violence as well, so clearly it is not for children either. Maybe this is for someone who likes Twilight and Divergent?

The story might well surprise the reader though at times, as there didn't really feel like being much limit or rule upon what might get encountered by the narrator's random encounter table (the game events themselves are not random), but as such it also makes everything kind of meaningless, since pretty much all the characters lack depth and plot twists do not really need to follow any mature logic. Seen worse in games though, don't get me wrong, but the main point I believe is that I'm no longer the target audience for youth high fantasy which might have felt fresh to me in 1990. Age reference is a bit unfair though, since the cultural reference points feel rather like 21st century instead of 20th century, although with some impression that the author is not necessarily too familiar what was already written in the previous century. On the other hand while like insinuated in the beginning, I think the game developer has been either at late teens or young adulthood, yet he seems to develop as a writer as the chapters go on.

"Selling a quality virgin!"
Is this an obvious bad choice?

For game mechanics could mention that there are also items and few stats like health and strength which might increase or decrease during the gameplay. So that if for instance health and magic powers are in high level, can be fairly safe to take some risks or cast spells in order to reach for something more valuable.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed several chapters of adventures, until at some point my hiatus become infinite so far. One can get more adventures unlocked for free after finishing previous parts, and as light entertainment without better stuff available it's fine - and like said, it's also free. Then again, also libraries are free, if I want to read something.

Grading (5 star maximum):
Esthetics: **
Graphics are limited to few quite nice looking drawings and there are but few insignificant sound effects; mostly it's just text which wouldn't outshine even J. K. Rowling's texts.
Playability: ***½
Keep it simple sugarpie. There are options and some else, but mostly it's just picking up text choices by tapping. However, playing is frequently interrupted by ads as a free player.
Value of time and money: ***½
It's a free game but not world class literature.
Content: **

Lunchtime!

There are lots of text-only adventures, they are fairly easy to make, and I can hardly think of anything too special in this one.
Challenge: **
I don't think this is meant to have real challenges but that the player can just keep progressing the story. You can choose wrong though (and have no way to determine without trial and error which choice causes bad results), but it's also always possible to just try again.
General grade: **½
If you have nothing better to do, enjoy generic adolescent aimed high fantasy and want some light written entertainment of that kind on your smartphone, it's free to try. Arguably the narration and hence the game gets gradually better as the story goes on.

King's Throne: Game of Lust

Where choices matter not.

I could have mentioned more clearly about the Wizard's Choice and other Choice game chapters above that as a free player there are actually stops for ads quite frequently, which on the other hand seem to be a commonplace anyway. Commercial propaganda claims that advertisement are for conveying information, so maybe in this context it's fair to admit I first came across this King's Throne - Game of Lust with advertisement while playing the previously reviewed Choices game. The advertisement gave me impression of a game which would be likely more or less stupid but also seemed to have some potential as a kingdom management game. However, even if I expected not much, I still was disappointed and didn't feel like playing this one for a very long time. In fact I would not really feel like even writing this short review of mine, especially as I'm not hired to do so by anyone else but myself. I should ask myself a raise, but that is hard as a voluntary worker.

In any case, the subtitle of the game obviously is a reference to Game of Thrones. While that series obviously contains stories of lust (2nd hand knowledge - I've never gotten aquaintanced with the TV or book series), having lust included in the subtitle makes it sound like the game's carrot is being intentionally lewd. There are hentai games with great narration apart from their often absurdly unfitting and out of the blue appearing lewd sections, and this didn't seem nearly as frivolous after all, so I figured maybe it's something tolerable. In the modern world the audience might not believe it, but regardless I have to say that this lustness part was not something I really looked after, but the kingdom part and potential narration and doing meaningful choices.

Well, unfortunately choices matter only to the degree whether you'll want a bunch of soldiers or bag of gold. Kingdom management is all about tapping more resources with no effect to anything whatsoever, no matter if you're being a tyrant to the peasants or order your troops to seize some highwaymen, the choices are just very thinly veiled selections of tap to get more resource A or B. That is very boring. 

There are no tactics to employ. Numbers are absurd and all victories are pyrrhic. Every battle ends up as a bloodbath no matter how strong you are.

Some math might give an
impression about grinding efficiency.

It also doesn't help that there are like half dozen of similar resource boosters that will only give a small amount a time, you can tap them like max 7 times (can't remember exact counts) and then they'll regenerate one in 5 minutes. This means that you'd need to keep the game constantly open and keep tapping every few minutes to get almost nothing useful. Really grindy in the worst mobile game fashion, if I'm asked, and it doesn't help that nothing really has narration or anything that actually matters either, even while almost everything is attempted to be disguised as something that there'd be some "story potential" around. Or well ok, there is sort of storyline which starts by beating rivaling relatives or something, whom you'll get them imprisoned, can't bother to remember and didn't really seem to matter. Wars also are like you'll need a million soldiers to beat enemy's 10000 troops, yet those numbers also are just very meaningless numbers of resources. YAWN!

What about the lustful side that was advertised? In the ad actually there was like choices of save the princess (and get laid with her) or let her rot in prison. Well one resource source is to "find" maids, and this actually seems to be some of the most sophisticated content of the game. After a maid is found, you can flatter and bribe her to make her like you more until she becomes another wench of the lord whom he just screws alongside other maids in order to breed kids, who can then apparently be married with kids of other players and so forth. Didn't ever get to really see much of it as playing seemed so effortsome and boring. There also is the town where it's sort of possible to go get random encounters with citizen and even find more maids, but everything just seems so much like there is core by no content. These advertised choices also do not really exist in such fashion as the advertisement gives the impression - obviously I've noticed a long time before already that advertisement of mobile games usually contain very little truth of the actual game, but I was semi-hoping that there could have been something like quests in Fallout Shelter for instance. 

In this game women are around
to provide sex and offspring.
Also the main point in the game?

(Speaking of Fallout Shelter, Hustle Castle, a blatant clone of Fallout Shelter, was also in some advertisements. Those advertisements gave the impression that HS would also have similar quest mechanic as Fallout Shelter. I started wonder if it is true nowadays, since such features did not exist back then when I tried Hustle Castle maybe two years ago. Like said, ads are generally full of lies when it comes to mobile games, but at least this time the ad was implemented by actual game graphics - not necessarily from actual gameplay, and I doubt they'd have it even close to the ad really, but at least characters were the same kind of figures as in the game. Also like said Fallout Shelter had that stuff already a long time ago, so it would make sense if a clone game gets the same content. Didn't bother to try though.)

As some final nails in the coffin I felt that humour is bad and some parts of graphics and representation are just made in bad taste. Like the mechanics of prisoners. They're just extra resource sources, but the representation of "interrogating" them is just disgusting: essentially the player needs to tap the prisoner to torment him until blood has been spilled sufficiently. I'm not sure if it has been meant as fun, but I don't find it so. Again, even while I would not get so enthusiastic about violence in games anymore, back in the days I've found over the top violence rather entertaining already decades ago like in executions of Commando Libya, excess jumpy slaughters in Cannon Fodder and gruesome torture chamber murders of Chiller. However, something just doesn't feel fitting at all in King's Throne's torture chamber. 

Overall the lord seems like a douchebag, and you're forced to play as that character without a choice. Maybe the developers have thought about it, having just forgotten to leave any potential of philosophical aspects openly implemented or even mildly insinuated into the game. Honestly though, I doubt it. Too bad, as actually with some decent content writing the game frame could have made something acceptable.

This is how I felt playing the game.

Grading:
Esthetics: ***½
Drawings are fairly good looking, and I guess the style is even more or less personal comics style stuff. Although I dislike the modern animation style where drawn characters are "bent" back and forth in stupid looking fashion to make them look more lively. However, content of the drawings just tends to put me off. I can't remember much about sounds (I usually turn them off after testing, since sounds would likely bother other people around), but I don't think there was more than some generic sound effects and not much of music.
Playability: **
Interface is quite standard no problem modern mobile game, but there are too much unnecessary menu layers (disguised as castle sections or such, which of course sort of improves atmosphere). Unfortunately there is way too much tapping here and there to get bits of resources with both too long and too short regeneration times of charges.
Value of time and money: *
A free game with micropayments for this and that. Actually in the current state I felt like I should get paid instead to bear to play the game any further.
Content: *
Under fairly pretty cover this cake is both hollow and rotten inside.
Challenge: **
Actually I played too little to comment much about challenge. If you pay, all gets faster no doubt, if you play for free, price is sanity. However, I suspect the sanity is lost in any case if the game is played much further.
General grade: *½
I don't know if the game lacked a proper content designer who'd actually try to make the game enjoyable and interesting, or if this person was just not given resources to do anything as intended. Frame seems fairly alright, but design solutions are mostly just poo for what I'm concerned.

Server Stories, Pt 2 - The Hunt for Yellow CAT

Noticed that an accident had happened: this blogpost was supposed to be published months ago - in fact before the previous update. My bad, somehow I thought I had already done this. On the other hand my notes got a bit messy as I forgot to write everything more clearly early on, and then it become happened a long time ago... I'll have to reconstruct and recall from lost memories some details, since doing all the tests again would not feel like being worth it.

In a summary I went on testing how transfer speeds would variate between transferring to and between SSD/HDD and if there was noticeable difference between software RAID 1 setup and separate drives. All my testing went pretty much bogus from the beginning, as I got shocked by my transfer speed through the network becoming just a fraction of what it used to be earlier though the network...

From Dr. Serverstone's jungle diary:
"Mon  6 Jan 15:35:15 EET 2020:
Transfer to SSD (second test below) is basically just as fast as on HDD (first test below). Networking is the bottleneck now. There is a setup where the sending computer is connected to switch and then router, while the server is hooked directly to the router. This might be an issue.

Transfer package 15.9 GB. Transfer speed was maybe around 11 MB/s.

Test 1, time cp to HDD: 22:45.97 min
Test 2, time cp to SDD: 22:41.18 min

What the fart has happened with the speed though?!?"

The diary doesn't directly tell me whether that was a copy on RAID drive, but as far as I know the RAID was disabled at this point. At this point I had installed a new CISCO Ethernet Switch, and I started to suspect it actually caused some serious slowdown even while that should have not happened.

Is this the culprit for lost networking speed?

More notes from Dr. Serverstone's jungle diary:
"Mon  6 Jan 16:10:37 EET 2020:
New test - both computers straight to router. Transfer speed to SSD up to around 56 MB/s with dropdowns to around 25 MB/s probably during file switch. Package size 8.2GB. Transfer to HDD seemed more or less similar, however, at least dropdowns seemed less deep.

SSD test: 3:59.37
HDD test: 2:57.62

Transfer speeds were now largely as expected regarding to networking. As a surprise though, HDD transfer this time was 25% less than the SSD transfer. This would suggest that the motherboard connection employs SATA 1 connection while the PCIe card with SATA adapters go with SATA 2. This also means that the SSD seems speedwise practically useless on this drive."

Of course there could have been some random variation as well, since there were no repeated testings done. The old computer's resources were considerably limited, so sometimes the computer just started hickuping with background processes that would be nothing for a modern computer. This was of course one important part of my testing too.

Server Jungle diary continues:
"New test - both computers connected straight to router. Transfer speed to SSD up to around 56 MB/s with dropdowns to around 25 MB/s probably during file switch. Package size 8.2GB. Transfer to HDD seemed more or less similar, however, at least dropdowns seemed less deep.

Transfer speeds were now largely as expected regarding to networking. As a surprise though, HDD transfer was 25% less than the SSD transfer. This would suggest that the motherboard connection employs SATA 1 connection while the PCIe card with SATA adapters go with SATA 2. This also means that the SSD seems speedwise practically useless on this drive."

So yea, something often overlooked with recommending SSDs as a boostup for an old computer: if it's a computer old enough to only use SATA 1, it's not really of use anymore... My wife's old laptop Lenovo Thinkpad T61 from 2007 (which she btw used no problem till the Autumn, and still occasionally uses - I bought her an used Thinkstation S30 desktop computer from 2013 as a replacement for sort of a late Christmas/wedding gift, so that we could play World of Tanks and some other games together more properly) was boosted with an SSD drive and there it worked fine and speeded up a lot - but only after BIOS upgrade, since the stock BIOS did not support SATA 2 even while the hardware itself supported it. Although it also must be remembered that an old HDD is often also a lot slower than a new HDD, and these HDDs were brand new Western Digital Red NAS drives.

Server diary continues:
"Mon  6 Jan 16:51:49 EET 2020:
Important general test result:
SSHFS process was constantly below 50% CPU now that there was no software RAID applied to. With the software RAID the CPU was regularly hitting at least over 80% values.

Test with HDD moved straight to HDD. There seemed to be a longish hiatus at the beginning of transfer, after which the transfer rate seemed to jump all the way to around 59 MB/s, before returning to similar transfer rates as before - but the minimum apart from file change drops seemed to be around 55 MB/s.

HDD: 3:27.71

Slower than with HDD in SATA adapter but faster than SDD on mobo. Weird results. Testing yet another part with bigger 15.9 GB package. Previous packages were those 8.2 GB.

HDD on mobo SATA, 15.9 GB package: 4:59.34

This transfer result is still faster than earlier tests for the same package on RAID and direct to SSD. A bit puzzling, might be certain degree of random variation included... For confirmation, maybe one more test with this specific setup is recommended.

Last test with this networking is a transfer to a solo HDD on PCIe SATA adapter. Transfer speed shows huge fluctuation now constantly from 14 to 57 MB/s or so with this 15 somethin GB package. In the end the transfer went on stable high rate again, so all this fluctuation might be due random factors with networking or computer processing.

HDD on SATA adapter, 15 GB package: 7:45.14

Overall I should've made multiple times the same test and take the average.

HDD on SATA adapter, 8 GB package: 2:42.61

Nevertheless, now the SATA adapter package on HDD won again with the smaller package - the fastest time of all in fact. I guess I'll simply plug in both drives to the adapter as they used to be, adds to clarity both inside and on operating system as well.

However, I should yet confirm that the speed is sufficient if both computers are going through the Ethernet switch. And that is where the disappointment comes up. With the CISCO switch the transfer speed just can't get past 12 MB/s or so. Not even while the both computers are in the same network.

HDD through switch, 8 GB package: 12:37.09

Switch instructions say to connect the switch by address 192.168.1.254, but that doesn't work unless if my computer is in the same subnet...which is not true. My computer is in 192.168.10.x, so how do I access that address? The switch should be suitable for up to a gigabit transfer rate (125 MB/s), but now it's only running apparently with 100 megabit speed. This should be configurable, but I can't access the web utility now...

Solution to access the subnet was by changing the LAN settings from router. Then I could access the switch and set it go back to the wanted subnet, after which I set the router settings back again. Unfortunately this flushed my old IP address settings as well down the drain, so some of my manually made scripts will now have incorrect IP addresses. Oh well, it's not so big thing I guess. Maybe some of the biggest things are about setting couple old LAN games working again by the correct IP such as Borderlands.

In addition obviously my connections with my server got quite messed up since I didn't shut down everything before changing settings..."

IP address calculations with all the subways and gateways can actually mess up my head quite nicely when the numbers start to roll around, but it was then found out that there was not so much to adjust with the switch settings manager. Or should I rather say, there was no need to change much.

Diary comes to its climatic plot twist:
"Mon  6 Jan 19:25:26 EET 2020:
Then I found out that Port Settings from the Switch allowed only 10FDX speed to my main computer. The unthinkable had happened: I had used an old Ethernet cable was which was of Category 5, not even 5E. CAT 5 is basically obsolete and it should not be able to reach higher than theoretical maximum of 100 Mbps speed. Now that I changed cables to CAT 5E the Switch shows port speed as 1000FDX, which is more appropriate.

Just. Single. Letter. Difference. One doesn't encounter CAT5 much nowadays.

However, to my shock when I start my copy process once again it shows transferring to only hundreds of kilobytes per second! For a moment I thought that'd been now megabytes due improved setup....fortunately, that apparently was just some temporary delay in processing, as after few moments the actual speed rose up to the preferred 50 +/- something MB/s again. Finally the speed seemed more or less expected for the home setup.

HDD 8GB with Switch and CAT 5E: 3:36.57
HDD 15GB on the same setup: 5:21.64

Then finally I plugged in my server directly to router again with my desktop client behind router & switch. This is because the switch and desktop are in another room with other computers, and the cablings would go awkwardly should I connect also the server to the switch. Transfer speeds seem all sufficiently decent ~50 MiB/s +/- something again also this way. Might in theory be marginally faster to have both computers running through the switch, but to be honest it doesn't matter that much anymore, and it might just as well be all random variation in every transfer anyway. In addition, at least the final test yielded in any case the fastest transfer results.

2:53.58

For the end I'll just yet reconnect both HDDs on my obsolete Fujitsu-Siemens server back to the SATA adapter card and close the case for now. Next stage would be setting up the server accessable for all local computers and users with corresponding folders and so on. This I'm not going to do today, since I already wasted one day of a well deserved extended weekend day."

Again the diary doesn't define which package was that fastest transfer; it would make sense for it to be the 8GB package, but if it really was the fastest transfer, there was above one faster transfer case with 8GB. I probably was just being sloppy with my markings, since like said my notes were largely a mess. In any case, I was really happy after substantial amount of frustration to realize it was the old cable that caused slow transfer, and I didn't feel like testing RAID etc. again anymore.

Speaking of which though, the tests yielded one more important general test result:
"SSDFS [service process for file transfer through SSH] was constantly below 50% CPU now that there was no software RAID applied to. With the software RAID the CPU was regularly hitting at least over 80% values."

This means that the software RAID application mdadm actually does take a fair deal more of processing power - too much from this cake. In all documents I read about mdadm it was stated that in theory a software RAID might take a bit more CPU resources than a hardware RAID, however that would not have any practical significance... Well surely so if the computer used is less than 5 years old and not 15 years old! Nevertheless, I find it actually awesome that such aged device is still actually usable for real, even while in practice one could likely get something more powerful with less watts consumption by dumpster diving today.

Halt and Take Breeze

Next episode of ZaCoDe is under work and it will deal about MikroMikko Ergo X Pentium 133 MHz business PC from around 1995. Also included will be horrible crimes related to the computer, in a suitable detective fashion. On the almost finished drawing by my wife is an adaptation of The Scream by Edvard Munch for the episode, as I requested from her. Pukiupipiol.

Horrible things are happening...you'll see...

How about a Corona beer?

Besides computer things, I've been reading books and watching movies & series. For books I'd like to mention  two books, neither of which are about computers this time. Firstly I'll talk a few words about Pussikaljaromaani (literally Bag Beer Novel) by Mikko Rimminen from 2004, which was a Finlandia nominee at the time. The novel was compared favorably to old modernist (from early 20th century) one day novels with stream of mind narration, Alastalon salissa by Volter Kilpi and Putkinotko by Joel Lehtonen. Those on their own part were back in the days compared to Ulysses by James Joyce.

Shortly, I was not impressed. For structural reasons I can see why it was being praised, but I just didn't find it very fun or pleasant to read. Content did not give anything to me and it felt more like a phony-funny postmodern parody of those modernist novels, and more of a chore to read than the old books.

I do admit though, that I found it better than most Finnish books - on the other hand I have hard time thinking of a handful of Finnish books that I'd ever liked of. Also to be honest it felt like a book I could have imagined to write myself, not to mention how in literature studies it used to be common to come across with "unusual" features in literature. Those might be two reasons why I didn't really like the book: to me it felt like something too much dealt about both on narratological and content-wise level. What feels like a cliché to me is often not that to the big audience. Unfortunately that goes also vice versa at times: I follow mainstream entertainment so little that sometimes the most typical events in everyman's entertainment fiction feels fresh to me.


Samurai

Another book I'd like to talk about is Samurai - Japanilaisen hävittäjälentäjän muistelmat by Saburo Sakai and Martin Caidin & Fred Saito, which is a Western variant of Japanese flying ace Saburo Sakai's autobiography. The Finnish translation was released in 1958. I had had this book on my reading queue since at least 2000's, but I'm actually recalling I was supposed to read it already in 1990's. I had it once borrowed already from the library of Tampere, but I had so many other books as well that someone reserved the book before I had started it. That was unexpected, since the book was a storage book which had not been borrowed very frequently.

After having read the book I also found out that it's argued that Caidin exaggerated various factors in the book in order to increase its sell value in the Western markets - there'd been no proper possibilities to check facts in 1950's anyway, and the English language original book was never released in Japan as such. I have no proper ways to check facts either - there are many cases in the book which are about to suspend disbelief, yet they could well be possible. For instance there is a case where Sakai encountered 15 Grumman Hellcat planes and came close by because he thought they'd been friendly Zero planes (Sakai had lost sight on his another eye from earlier wounds). However, he managed to survive the encounter intact back to base on Iwo Jima after long pages of evading (p. 256-265). If the opposing pilots were inexperienced, it definitely could've happened. Nevertheless, my point here is, that I can't confirm these cases: from Wikipedia I can find this case being referred to another book from 1985, but since I don't have that book, I can't check if that book has gotten its data straight from Samurai for instance.

The translation does not exactly alleviate the issues with text. In Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saburō_Sakai) there is an English quote from Sakai about ruggedness of American Wildcat planes:

"I had full confidence in my ability to destroy the Grumman and decided to finish off the enemy fighter with only my 7.7 mm machine guns. I turned the 20 mm cannon switch to the 'off' position and closed in. For some strange reason, even after I had poured about five or six hundred rounds of ammunition directly into the Grumman, the airplane did not fall, but kept on flying. I thought this very odd — it had never happened before — and closed the distance between the two airplanes until I could almost reach out and touch the Grumman. To my surprise, the Grumman's rudder and tail were torn to shreds, looking like an old torn piece of rag. With his plane in such condition, no wonder the pilot was unable to continue fighting! A Zero which had taken that many bullets would have been a ball of fire by now. "

This section also is in Finnish in the book I read, or at least almost:

"Tältä etäisyydeltä en tarvinnut tykkiä; lasketin 200 konekiväärinluotia sen ohjaamoon ja näin niiden repivän rikki ohutta metallia ja lasien pirstoutuvan. En voinut uskoa silmiäni; Wildcat jatkoi suoraa lentoaan kuin mitään ei olisi tapahtunut. Zero, joka olisi saanut niin monta luotia sisuksiinsa, olisi ollut nyt jo yhtenä tulipallona."

The Wikipedia reference's source is not fully clear, because it refers to a webpage which claims the quote coming from Sakai's book "Zero", but I can't find reference to a book exactly by that title. Therefore it might well be that the English quote is not from the English version of Samurai but another book where the quote is dealt differently - I don't know.

In any case, for those who can't read Finnish, the differences (in addition to obvious abbreviation) are that in the Finnish text it's claimed Sakai shot only 200 bullets to the cockpit of the plane. These claims of 200 bullets to cockpit are already internally a bit inconsistent, since elsewhere in the book it has been insinuated earlier that 200 shots per shot down plane was a fairly nice result. In addition it sounds odd if shooting specifically the cockpit did not kill the pilot - Sakai is told to go closer after shooting to look hail the pilot while wondering how it was still just flying forth. In my quote there are no remarks about the shredded rudder, but that actually is in the book later down the page.

Sort of an Easter egg:
Doesn't this look like a murder weapon?

Assembly mnemonic HCF

Then is the turn of a television series - although I'm not even certain are fictional video series entertainment really counted as television material anymore, since more and more people are not exactly watching them by television broadcasts. At least as far as I know, nobody I know would call direct-to-video shows or movies as television programs if they're not actually broadcast by a TV channel. Anyway, I watched a full season of a modern series (2014-2017) for the first time since the 2003 launched Battlestar Galactica (which on its own right was approximately the first contemporary non-animated fictional series I had seen since 1990's).

The name of the series is Halt and Catch Fire. It was their last, best hope for a better IBM PC compatible computer. It failed - to become a Macintosh before Macintosh. And I'm well aware that I'm having an allusion to a completely irrelevant another series. In any case, I had not really seen much fiction which would have a strong plot device on historical computer(s). As in this was not retrocomputing even while I think one reason they decided to make a period drama revolving around computer emergence of 1980's, was that retrocomputing has been sort of fashionable in 2010's. Nostalgia bites sweetly.

Basically content of the series was nice, although I was slightly annoyed by so many storytelling conventions that I assume are trendy nowadays with most American "quality" fiction series. Those things would probably be also part of the reasons why those series are nowadays popular and compared favorably to older style of making series TV fiction. That is drama for reasons of drama. I found the characters highly fabricated - not so much of uncreditable by acting, but rather made filled by "drama potential" by their nature just for story reasons. Ie. every character in the series seems really wrecked from some point of a view in such fashion that it will "naturally" cause conflicts with other people, and therefore there will be gain of dynamic events and excitement from plot twists all the time. That feels to me mostly as annoying and estrangening - especially as of as two of three (or four) protagonists annoyed. Again, I'm not sure about how common this is, since I don't watch series, but I have indirectly gotten the impression that this kind of scriptwriting would be typical lately. If it is, I just find it a stupid fashion which got old 10+ years ago. Still, the core content and some other characters carried out the season easily, despite the sides which I disliked in the series.

At least I won't get spoiled with German texts.

Now I might start "Staffel 2" of Halt and Catch Fire. I had to hunt for getting the series on a disc here in Europe, but found it from Germany by eBay in unopened store plastics. Fortunately it has original English audio, although needs to survive without subtitles (I'm way more skilled in written than spoken English, and sometimes it's hard to hear what people say in television, when there are people in my house making other sounds). Unfortunately it is not a Blu-ray, and maybe even more unfortunately there are not, for what it has seemed to me, seasons 3 and 4 available on physical media at all. Reviews have suggested that the season 2 (likewise as 3rd and 4th season) was much better than the first one, so I can't deny I'm quite curious how I will feel after watching this.


Hollywood went computers

Finally movies: I have had this theme of "computer" with films I've been trying to muster for watching. Since I've already written so much, I'll try to abbreviate my comments on movies to only a sentence for two movies:
1. The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969) - a disappointment, since most of the movie the "computer" was really just a kid who got his brains act like a computer, but what should be expected from a Disney produced comedy.
2. Electric Dreams (1985) - otherwise an average romantic comedy/drama apart from the very prominent presence of a vintage computer in da haus which made me quite excited and perplexed about the model of the device used in the film; also from a modern point of view the natural 1980's contemporariness felt really fresh after all these years.

Server Stories, part 1

An associate of the Retro Corner

I have a corner desk in our living room with few old computers, and one of them is a Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo P. This Pentium 4 CPU equipped cream coloured mini-tower computer is an ordinary computer from late 2000's. An exact model and year of release are not in my knowledge at the moment; it looks outside like Esprimo P5905, which also used the same D2151-A1 motherboard. The 5905 was at least originally shipped with Windows XP though, whereas this unit came with Vista, which was not even released yet in 2005 when this review (https://www.alphr.com/desktop-pcs/28016/fujitsu-siemens-esprimo-p5905-review) was written. Probably at least essentially the same computer nevertheless, just presumably sold couple years after first release as a low-price model. As a side note I actually bought a Fujitsu-Siemens computer in 2005 as my first own genuinely modern computer, and I was quite happy with it, but that was different model and overall it is another story.

The computer barely fits into retro category, but I'm also not using it for retrocomputing purposes; this is my new home server. Or at least it is intended to be one. So far I have installed some new hardware on it (960 GB SSD drive and two 4 TB hard drives for storage purposes through a PCIe SATA-II card), but most importantly I have installed new operating system on it: openSUSE Leap 15.1 Linux.

A fake server hiding under family art.

OpenSUSE Leap 15.1 is stated to require as minimum system requirements 64-bit CPU, 1 GB of RAM (2 GB recommended) and 5+ GB disk space (https://opensuse-guide.org/installation.php). My old F-S computer's specs are easily above minimum: the processor is 64-bit version and there is whopping 3 GB RAM on it. It should be possible no problem to get even 64-bit Windows 10 installed on this, but I just wouldn't want to actually using that combination. However, installation of a modern OS did not go through by default settings. I made my boot DVD and the computer booted with it no problem (the installation even had a fancy winter/christmas theme if I recall correctly for the first try, as the computer's Real-Time Clock battery was missing and hence the time was well off), but when I tried to start installing, the computer worked on quite a while until eventually process counter froze at 100% and nothing ever happened.

Shots into troubles

In a typical modern installation guide like in the homepage linked above there is no troubleshooting, and the mostly self-explanatory installation process just goes through like a dance when you're the prom queen. Of course most people wouldn't go install new operating systems to old computers anyway, so the inevitable issues would be met by only us few...in any case I had to figure out what went wrong.

The thing was with BOOT menu settings for Kernel Default, which had to be changed first by pressing F5 on bootup/install menu with the DVD's GRUB startup. This computer was old enough to either not support APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controllers) at all or at least not the version expected, so I had to turn it off for installation. Later on I had to edit my /etc/default/grub file probably due this, otherwise the computer would not shut down by software commands, but after that the ATX software power control seemed to cause no issues.

Anyway, after this setting change I was able to install the new Linux distro. I've never had openSUSE, so it would be a new learning experience after having mostly used Debian based distros. Especially as I opted to not use GUI at all - there wouldn't be excess amount of computer resources to waste, and for most of the time I was not intended to be exactly sitting next to a monitor with this computer anyway. SSH would be the way of control for this partner in computing, straight from my main workstation the next door. I'll just need to install SSH server (sshd, actually SSH daemon) and set my firewall settings properly, including swapping the default port 22 to something say 5 digit numer for additional security. First things with new Linux distro comes up: to install stuff I can't use apt-get commands but zypper, and the default firewall application is not UFW but runs just by firewall-cmd.

This being said, about not having GUI, I do recommend installing fish shell for making life with CLI a bit easier - even if using terminal just occasionally. Fish shell gives a bit Powershell-like option to browse available commands by TAB and does other usability assistance features such as adding colours to terminal text a bit similarly as programming text editors do (ie. IDE applications). Default Bash might be powerful for sure, if you know how to use it, but that is essentially just an enchanced version of 1970's technology. Barebone Unix shell can be really daunting to use if you have no long experience, no tutor to support you, or no proper thick manual within reach.

Yea, you can google around every command separately if you have another computer around (or use remote access), but googling is just a terrible mess in comparison to having any of those three. Googling gets stuff done, but it's really like going to nearby woods to fetch some berries or mushrooms; you might know how to find them, there might be fresh stuff around to pick, and then it's just a matter of time, but it sometimes takes a lot of time to find what is needed and usually there is need to search for multiple places at once. Not to mention that lots of data in Internet is already well rotten with their due date already ten years behind or it's worm eaten to begin with, and it can be hard to see from afar which one is a good pick - at least with books it's possible to judge by the cover (or front pages) when it was originally released and that books in theory are more prone to have more certified facts. That of course is not always true either, but now I'm getting sidetracked.

Server is up and sitting

So now I can access my fancy home server from another computer in my local home network (actually I set it up to be accessable also from outer web, but that needs to get more strict security rules on how who and where). What then? What to do with a home server? Many people don't really seem to have a clue what to do with a server, and I suppose it is understandable, especially as I can't do just whatever with this. Nevertheless, let me think of few options.

1. File server. I can set a private file sharing server that can also provide network drives for all local devices we have at home. Alternatively it could be used for transferring data to other people. Sure there are all kind of free cloud services available, but if you care about privacy the free ones become a bit less tempting. On the other hand if you need space for hunderds of gigabytes of data or even terabytes (video material in my case hogs probably like 80% of my used terabytes), the free services are just not sufficient and paid services might actually become pricey with higher storage uses.
2. Web page server. Well I'd lack DNS support, so people would need some fancy http://111.111.111.111/sakariaania style address to access it, but I might be able to use it myself for something like own data, easy checkup whether the server is still up, and could provide direct links for people who could need it. Would always amuse me to have own www server at home.
3. Surveillance camera. "Why would you need that?!?" Yea, I don't have nothing to steal and I'm always at home anyway, right? Any home could be broken into even if there is nothing really valuable inside, and getting photos of the intruders and time of the event might help a lot on figuring out the possible crime. Like risk of fire, such things are unlikely, but it's still best to have some preparation for this unfortunate thing to happen. On more practical side though, I could check if there is any mail arrived in case I'm actually not at home.
4. Mail server. Okay, for this too to work properly I'd need some extra services set up, and I might be quite content with having some other email addresses...but at least it would make it possible for my server to send email notifications if some service fails - or even to build up some kind of MFA system.
5. Remote control. Technically if there is anything I can control by a computer and I wish to have remote access for controlling that, a server with just SSH access could become a tool for that.

There'd be of course various other possibilities, but those would hit as something realistic and usable.

In addition to this all, for me it is also largely just about testing and learning. If I'd really need a server, I could more easily set up one, and also I may encounter things that can help me understand things I encounter at work. Hands-on method teaches a lot more to me than being given server IP and credentials for remote logging some server so I can do some Active Directory management for instance. That doesn't really tell me 'what' is the server for real. By setting one up I'll get a bit better impression - even if no enterprise environment would rely on setting up a server on 10+ years old home computer, especially as nowadays hardware servers are less and less frequently set up when you can just have virtual servers.

RAID over Sakariaania

For now I'm only going to go for the file server option, as that I actually need. Since I bought two identical 4 TB hard drives for this specific purpose, I also felt like testing RAID 1 state with them. For a moment I thought my PCIe SATA card with RAID controller would actually work as a hardware RAID, but then I found out that these are deemed as "fake raid" devices. Not only that, but especially on Linux it is recommended to use software RAID setup instead both because the "fake raid" could cause technical issues (including reduced reliability: should another drive or the computer itself fail, the other drive might not be recoverable on another platform) and because Linux's own software RAID application is supposedly very good and robust. It just might, maybe, take slightly more resources than the hardware controller supported "fake raid". Is my old Esprimo up for the task?

SATA-II PCI-Express Card still unpacked.

First shock came after installing the card and drivers. The card itself was supposed to have its own BIOS for automatically setting up a RAID that could be started by pressing a function key during computer self-test. I guess the key was correct, since pressing it froze the whole system. When I merely started the computer I could not find the drives at all. Oh dear, did not the card work on this computer at all? Silly me, however, I forgot that the new HDDs were completely unprepared. I went on my other computer, created partition tables and formatted the drives. After that I could find the drives on my Fujitsu-Siemens as devices but not from the file system. For a little moment I also had forgotten that on Linux like this the drives would not be automatically mounted either...such corruptive effects all those modern convenience features can cause. So after partitioning, formatting and mounting the drives could be found on the server computer - as their separate entities.

The Linux application 'mdadm' is an application with which you can set up a software raid on whichever partitions on whichever drives available, so that is the recommended option for setting up a software RAID. I can already tell that it worked no problem and wasn't too hard: just needed couple commands to assemble the RAID and then to enable it. As another option I'd had potentially 'dmraid' application with which it should have been possible to work with the PCIe card itself, but I ended up not even trying that for real. Like referred to in the previous paragraph, I was never able to reach this card BIOS on this computer, which was a bit of a bummer. Fortunately, the disappointment faded away gradually after I first found out that this 'dmraid' could have set up the necessary things, and even more after I found out this that it's not likely a good setup anyway.

If I'll now check on my server terminal for instance disk free status on all drives by command 'df', I'll have this RAID disk called /dev/md0. After a moment I can mount it as a network drive on my main computer. Mission successful? Not quite. This is just a start. On the other hand, because this is also a test, I will yet change my setup with drives a bit.

First test of copying was not perfectly impressive though. The computer is rather silent normally, but when I for the first time tested copying few GB worth of data over the SSH file transfer protocl just for testing functionality, CPU hit 100% and computer fan jumped from like 1100 to 2600+ RPM and that made it rather loud. It was night time too...oops. Copying locally from drive to drive the CPU hogs "only" around 80% and doesn't make much sound. Normal idling temperature of the fan is like 40-50 C, yet this 100% CPU transfer situation took the temperature close to 80 C - but barely further. So temperature was not that bad, the computer made it ok and main issue was just the fan. I might consider either swapping the fan or adding another silent one to make cooling go better at some point.

Nevertheless, this test made me reserved with the RAID setting. Was the software RAID too heavy after all or was it just the SSHFS? On my subsequent file transfers there was no similar heavy fan load for whatever reason, and when I checked the process resource drainages, actually it was not mdadm which took resources but sshfs. Also it took lots of resources to transfer to the non-RAID drive as well, so I suppose the software RAID is not really a problem. It just is heavy process for that computer to transfer the files over the connection. Although that is somewhat difficult to say, since the md0 synch of RAID drive seems to cause multiple processes that can take few % CPU even when nothing is really done, so that might stack up on unnecessary drains on an old computer like this. I'll probably eventually remove the RAID after testing - it's not really needed after all, but I had never tried it. Instead I can just use scheduled backups every now and then.

Linux command line has also this convenient command 'time' to check up duration of any command. Therefore I could test transfer speed. So by hitting the command "time cp [/source/path] [/target/path/through/sshfs]" I got following results on two different tests:

From local HDD to server RAID HDD.
real    5m55,582s
user    0m0,212s
sys    0m25,496s

From local HDD to server SSD.
real    5m31,433s
user    0m0,238s
sys    0m25,763s

My test package was 15.9 GB worth of video files. Transferring to SSD was a bit faster than to the HDD RAID as was expected, although I'm also sure the SSD can't use its full potential on that computer. Also I'm actually thinking the motherboard SATA is only SATA-I whereas the PCIe card should at least in theory provide SATA-II connectors. Although I guess 45-50 MB/s might be fairly decent transfer speed for this kind of a setup. I'll have yet some more tests to go with for further conclusions. Also I might yet test if I can actually get the RAID set up by 'dmraid' command set. We shall see when the next part comes.

Can't deny though - this kind of a warrior pair is more or less asking to join a RAID.