Retrochallenge Winter Warmup '08
Week Two: 01/06/08 - 01/13/08
01/06/08:
Holy snappin' assholes! Tabbed browsing!
Those were the exact words out of my mouth when I saw this a few minutes ago. I was reading the other RCRs' blogs in iBrowse and, completely by accident, hit "open in new browser" instead of "open in new window". I am thoroughly impressed with this feature. Wow, tabbed browsing on my Amiga... I suppose I shouldn't be this excited over something that is now the de facto standard in web browsing, but I never, ever expected to see it show up on an Amiga. Ever. Almost makes me wish I'd registered iBrowse instead of the Voyager web browser all those years ago. Heh, and I really only downloaded iBrowse so I could play around. Talk about being pleasantly surprised! (And to think my other beloved retro-platform, the 68K Macintosh, has had tabbed browsing in iCab for years!)
So, as soon as iBrowse is again available for purchase, I'll be ponying up some of my hard(ly) earned dosh. (Can you tell I've been reading old issues of Amiga Format and CU Amiga? All that British slang... well, I AM of English descent, so nyah boo and sucks to you!)
Not feeling up to tackling my Toccata card today. Decided to clean the house instead. I'll play around with the Toccata tomorrow after work.
As an aside, it's interesting reading about the others' projects with the Apple //c... more so now that I have one of my own! One of my coworkers (a young lad of 19) had had one sitting in his closet for years and knowing that I'm a sucker for such things, donated it to the cause! It came from a school, and had a bunch of floppies (Appleworks, etc) and included an Imagewriter printer to boot! Took it down to the lab so I can play with it once the Winter Warmup is over. I seem to recall having a 3-1/2" floppy drive for an Apple //c around here... The fun of having more computers than you can possibly use.
01/07/08:
Tackled the Toccata card today.
It tackled back.
For the second time this challenge, I managed to thoroughly bugger Ami-chan up. Popped the card in, rebooted, inserted the install diskette, started the install and... it started installing!
Halfway through, it stopped dead, then Ami-chan rebooted.
If you've ever owned an Amiga, you'll know one thing... if the machine crashes while it's writing to the hard drive, you're screwed. The file system won't have a chance to auto-validate itself. In PC terms, think of your FAT becoming corrupt. Yeah, not fun. Luckily, I made an emergency OS3.5 boot disk... heh... guess which disk I inadvertently formatted so I could make the Toccata install disk? Oh, the irony...
I rebooted Ami-chan, this time opting to boot without going through my startup-sequence (similar to autoexec.bat for you DOS people). Fortunately, I'd had the presence of mind to install DISKSALV, an HD repair utility by Dave Haynie (look him up). Started it up and... halfway through, it crashed and rebooted.
Things got worse. Much worse.
My 1.3Gb SYS: partition was reporting itself as a 13 terabyte partition. The "echo" command in my startup-sequence , which does little more than print a message on screen, was causing Ami-chan to hang while booting. And somehow, I was showing 13 Zorro II cards in a machine that can only hold 5. Something was seriously wrong. So, I powered off the machine, yanked the Toccata card, made a sacrifice to the Ancient Computer Gods, rebooted without startup-sequence, and started DISKSALV again.
It worked. The Ancient Computer Gods were appeased.
So, an hour, several heart palpitations and several more grey hairs later, I'm right back where I started.
Turns out, the Toccata card is defective. Tried it in my work-in-progress Amiga 4000 and got the same results. Ah well. In the end, all this means is that I have no way of recording audio on my Amiga 2000. Yet. I'm planning to pick up a soundcard, but likely not until the Winter Warmup is over, owing to lack of funding...
Well, that effectively killed my Retrochallenge plans for the evening. I'm off to finish off my pizza, have a Campari Soda or two, and hit the sack.
01/10/08:
It's been an interesting couple of days.
Got an email from the online store from where I ordered the digital camera program for my Amiga. Apparently, they're out of stock and won't be getting any more in. Meaning the professional digital camera software I'd planned to use for my many projects will not be coming. Damn... and my "new" digital camera (a vintage Olympus D-460) arrived yesterday too.
All is not lost however... there are several freeware Camedia packages on Aminet for my camera, so I'm not too worried. However, I won't be able to use the Olympus during the Winter Warmup, since the camera did NOT include a Smartmedia card, and nobody has them locally. No biggie. The cable for my other vintage digital camera (a Kodak DC20) should be here tomorrow or Monday. So I may yet have some digital pics up before the Winter Warmup ends.
The online retailer offered to refund my money, or to put the payment I've already made towards another purchase... which I did. Picked up an app called VHI-Studio, which allows capturing video from many different sources (such as my VLab card...) and editing it... it can also be used as webcam software... but likely won't make it here before the Winter Warmup is over... seems to be the going rate, eh?
In any case, using nought but Ami-chan has been interesting to say the least. I find there are certain things I can't do (such as online banking...) but somehow I can navigate eBay reasonably well, albeit slowly. Instant messaging is easy with Jabberwocky and STRICQ, I can hit the newsgroups, and I even have tabbed browsing! I've done my monthly budget up using FinalCalc, and am busy writing a proposal in FinalWriter for a media project I want to join. Just gotta find some decent fonts... postscript? Hopefully, I'll find a bit of spare time between researching and writing to visit the Retrochallenge BBS soon...
In other words, I haven't done anything exciting yet. Just the monotonous, unglamourous daily drudgery.
01/12/08:
This whole endurance challenge is getting to be a headache.
Well, not really. I'm just losing patience with things. For some reason, the hi-speed serial port on my GVP Combo-II accelerator isn't responding. Somehow, the driver has become corrupted, so I reinstalled it. Still buggered. So, I'm stuck with Ami-chan's built-in serial port (little better than 14.4k) for the time being... I managed to null-modem into my Sun Ultra 5 running Debian, but more on that later.
I've had a few other software issues, too. I installed Scala MM300 (like Powerpoint, only good!) this morning, so I could put together a few snazzy graphical presentations for the Winter Warmup. Turns out the "full version" that was on a CU Amiga Coverdisk was missing a few things. Such as the fonts required to use the program... which won't run without them. Damn it, I'd kill CU Amiga if they weren't already dead (kidding)!! Nothing insurmountable, just have to find the fonts online. I found most of them inside a Scala presentation someone had uploaded to Aminet, just a matter of finding the rest. Still, it's pretty unprofessional to "forget" key parts of a program and call it a "full version". Thought I saw a demo version of Scala MM300 around on Aminet, will have to look for it later.
So, back to my serial port woes. I had planned to sync my Palm M105 with Ami-chan. but Spitfire2 (the Palm Desktop clone) doesn't seem to want to work with either my GVP's serial ports or Ami-chan's built-in ports. Meaning I may also have trouble with my digital cameras when the serial cables arrive. Time will tell.
STRICQ and Jabberwocky both quit working last night. Not that it's a concern (I've been saying that a lot lately, haven't I?), instant messaging was just a gimmick for me - I rarely use it on my more modern machines either. And for some reason, I can't seem to connect to the Retrochallenge BBS using any of my Amiga telnet clients (AMTelnet, VirTerm, and DCTelnet.), which is odd, as I'm perfectly able to log into my account at SDF. Probably have to tweak my settings. So, Lorance, if you notice a little spate of unusual activity on the Retrochallenge BBS, it's probably me! I did manage to null-modem into Cinq, my Sun Ultra 5, in order to telnet to the BBS. So, we's cool there, mon!
Tonight, I'm going to work on my telnet clients and try to log into the BBS. After that, it's off to get Scala MM300 working, then finally start working on my graphical projects. I had planned to format Ami-chan's hard drive and reinstall OS 3.1 then OS 3.5, but with the way my luck has been lately, my install floppies will be unreadable ;)
UPDATE: 9:08PM:
Out of boredom, I telnetted over to SDF and went underground into gopher-space (a favourite pastime of mine since the early 90s). Did a search for AMIGA in the Veronica gopher-space search engine and found a ton of Amiga stuff... including Boing Bags 1 & 2 for OS 3.5! (The Boing Bags are basically OS updates, incidentally!)
So, I installed both BB1 and 2, and am actually noticing some improvements... such as having slightly more RAM available in Workbench. Boing Bag 1 also reformats the Amiga OS 3.5 documentation on the system, so it's prettier and actually easier to navigate. I also switched my "busy" backdrop to a simpler one that came with OS 3.5... entitled "Simplify". It's also a quarter the size of my old backdrop, so that freed up a bit more RAM, too. Which is important when you only have 18 Meg...
This is what my "new" Workbench backdrop looks like. I'll be putting up a gallery of screenshots starting tomorrow, detailing my progress as I tweak the look and feel of both my Amiga and my website. I am really looking forward to next week, when I start making changes!
