4-18-2023 - Retrobattlestation build-out, part 3: DOS gaming!
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First, a note: it is now month four-ish of my journey (back) into
gopherspace and I gotta say, it's been really great. I've found
enough other like-minded individuals here that reassures me that
gopher is still very relevant. The practical use of gopher for file
sharing / searching -- especially in the retrocomputing context --
has been awesome, but it's the Goldilocks-zone inhabiting socialness
of the social gopher web that has been truly refreshing. I've really
enjoyed the content of the other gopher logs (phlogs) I've come
across and look forward to offering my own contributions here.
One thing it my gopher journey has unexpectedly taught me is to
appreciate one of those most ancient of Internet features -- email.
I've always rather disdained email, but am trying to reconnect with
this ancient form and finding that it's rather a nice fit for the
post-Twitter world. I'm reaching out to fellow gopher loggers
via email and finding it to be more meaningful than any DM. I think
Between gopher and email, the future's past of the federated Internet
looks bright! ;)
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Now, about that DOS gaming... Part of the reason for my note above
is to say that it is my recent correspondence with MMWW[1] that
prompted me to revisit DOS gaming on my Performa 640CD DOS
Compatible. He had asked how it performed for DOS gaming, and I
realized that while I had recently updated the machine, there were a
couple of tweaks / repairs I needed to make to really bring DOS
gaming back for me...
To start with, this Performa is just a really cool machine.
Performas don't often get much love from collectors' sites, but in my
opinion, (next to the Quadra 700) this machine is the best 68k-era
Mac to collect. This particular Performa is nearly maxxed out, and
let me tell you, it offers a lot in the way of expansion.
Here's the rundown:
- Replaced 68LC040 with full 68040
- Clock-chipped to run at 40Mhz
- 40MB RAM
- Internal IDE HD
- External 1.2GB SCSI HD
- Intel 486DX2-66 CPU on PC Daughterboard
- 16MB RAM
- SoundBlaster
- Shared Disk /Networking / Video / etc. b/w PC and Mac
- Plextor SCSI 24x CD-Burner (New donor part!)
It's this last item on the list that was the repair I needed most.
You see, the original Apple 300i drive had apparently bitten the
old drive dust -- and the DOS game I most wanted to play again on
original hardware was X-COM -- and for this I needed a working CD-ROM
drive. After a brief search on eBay, I realized that I had a
(possibly) compatible SCSI drive in an old Pentium III PC -- a once
state-of-the-art Plextor 24x SCSI CD Burner drive.
Long-story-short: The drive turned out to be compatible, and I'm now
enjoying a luxury few 68k Mac users were afforded in those days --
Toast CD burning! Also, I managed to somehow preserve compatible
drivers so that the PC environment can pick up the substitute drive.
I reinstalled X-COM and got right back into it -- CD loaded
beautifully! The only complaint is that I have to disable sound
effects because I think the sound hardware is actually faulty. I had
once suspected that the clock-chipping had affected the sound output,
causing popping/static noises, as this was (maybe?) observed after
the clock-chipping operation.
In terms of performance, this upper-end 486 should handle most any
DOS game pretty well. The graphics hardware is standard VGA, and I
still want to do some testing with some of the more demanding titles
from the early Pentium-DOS-overlap era.
Anyway, the other thing to note about this Performa is just that it
is now set up with working IP stacks on both the Mac (running System
7.6.1) and the PC (running Windows for Workgroups 3.11) and I
regularly browse gopher using native gopher clients for each platform
- TurboGopher on Mac and WSGopher on Windows.
Having useful services, including web proxies, available via gopher
allows these old machines to continue to have meaningful use in the
modern, sub-surface web.
Anyway, I'm out of gas on this post, so that'll be all, for now.
Maybe later I'll revisit try out those demanding games and post a few
screenshots of X-COM, too. Until next time...
