Interviewees: Carla Meninsky, Jum Huether, Nolan Bushnell, Tod Frye, George Kiss, Jerome Domurat, Rob Fulop, Larry Kaplan, Bob Polaro, Alan Murphy, Eric Manghise, Rob Zdybel, Suki Lee, and Dave Staugas.

The training rooms are perhaps the most significant departure from the original. While the new visual look and great audio soundtracks do not change the gameplay experience, the training exercises are designed to enhance the game with a public ranking system and add a competitive edge for those who would not be completely satisfied by Bionic Commando's mission based levels.

For those who like item and monster records in their games, and I am one of those people, this game adds that feature to a genre which has traditionally shied away from such features. GRIN has also revised how you hack the enemies communication systems. Instead of simply selecting the "hack" option and then waiting to see if you have been detected, Rearmed starts a mini-game where you need to direct a ball to various target spaces in a cubic grid.

However, the most important feature the GRIN team has added is to ensure that it feels like Bionic Commando. I hope you give it a try and let me know what you think about the remake.

Core Memory

Just finished another classic computing book entitled Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers (ISBN: 0811854426), written by John Alderman and photographed by Mark Richards. While I did enjoy the photography much better in this book than in Digital Retro, I found both the context of the photographs and the text provided somewhat lacking in substance. Although I did find the photographs to be colorful, I do not find so many pictures of wire bundles and wiring trunks to be especially interesting. While it is interesting the see the complexity in wiring for one or two of these machines, it would have been more intriguing to see various parts of the machines, and to have those parts labeled.

I have not had the pleasure of using one of these machines, let alone putting them together. I can readily identify electronic components, but without providing context for the photograph, it's just a jumble of wires or components with no discernible purpose- however pretty they may appear on camera. It would also have been a great opportunity to provide more technical details on the machine, sample machine code or instruction sets, screen shots or running software (assuming the machine could even be turned on), and what not. It would have been fascinating to have a detailed list of primary technical components and their functions for each machine. Since some of these machines occupied so much territory, it would also have been informative to have a common layout diagram with a typical installation. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this book and all of the machines are photographed very well, but I think it would have been better to have smaller spreads and more annotated pictures.

Pictures of the units themselves abound, but most are of poor quality, so a well lit photograph goes a long way to documenting what these computers looked like. However, once you have taken a photo of the front and back, there really isn't much left of the exterior that is interesting (not including the few machines which actually took advantage of the third dimension and had features on the sides of the unit). With all of the pictures, it left little room for text, and the text contained little more than a summary one could pull off a Wikipedia page. To be fair, the summaries are concise and some columns are filled with interesting tidbits. My favorite is on the last page within the section which documents the NeXT Cube. The page is almost completely filled by the monitor for the system, but there is an excellent piece of information which describes how Steve Jobs acquired the Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) division of Lucasfilm. Basically, George Lucas was in a bind after an expensive divorce and need to raise about $30 million dollars in capital. After a few failed attempts from other buyers, Lucas eventually accepted Steve's low-ball figure of $10 million. Needless to say, ILM eventually payed back huge dividends since they eventually released the enormously successful film Toy Story, which grossed over $362 million worldwide. ILM produced a number of large films and when you top all of that off with a lucrative IPO, Mr. Jobs is sitting on a mountain of money which probably has its own zip code. 

I find the book to be a excellent coffee table reference and the columns do make for a quick and easy reference, but I would have enjoyed the book a lot more if it went the extra mile and showed me things most books never touch upon.

“CMOS Checksum error - Defaults loaded."

Back in the late seventies and early eighties, there was a lot of heavy and dirty competition between the fledgling computer companies of that era. Because many of the hardware engineers and executives from different companies knew each other, often the competition rose to personal attacks not often seen today. This aggression is evident in the books written by these people or the journalists who are trying to capture the tension during the personal computer revolution. Brian Bagnall's book reveals many interesting tidbits of information, although some were easier to extract than others as the stories often overlapped and flip-flopped. In certain chapters, the text feels very biased and the passages from former employees are often rife with bitterness and frustration seeping from their words. These emotions actually helped to propel me into the book, since it seemed like I had something invested in finishing it, just like they invested their time and even their life to building those wonderful machines. Some of the people involved (like Chuck Peddle) were obviously still licking their wounds even after three decades. They'll claim indifference, but if the quotes are at all accurate, there's a seething tension which becomes obvious as the book plays out. You will walk away from this book feeling a much deeper connection to your favourite Commodore machine, be it an Amiga 2000+, Commodore 64, or the Commodore PET to name just a few. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the technological developments during this time period and the people who made it happen.

"CMOS Checksum error - Defaults loaded"

Usually this is caused by a dying battery. Rolling up my sleeves, I went and bought a replacement, cleared the CMOS, saved a new configuration using Award's snazzy 1997 BIOS interface and... presto! Nothing changed. I tried this a couple of times with no luck. Before I reset the CMOS, I noticed something odd. It seems the jumper was set in the clear position for a while. I'm not sure for how long exactly, but the last time I exumed the motherboard from the old chassis I seem to remember the jumper falling off. With my attention focused on something else, I guess I just slid the jumper back on without checking the configuration. I'm wondering if that eventually lead to a small corruption in the original copy of the BIOS. Will a simple reflashing solve the problem, or will it lead us down a different path? Stay tuned for another exciting episode!

I'm trying to run with the concept of an open system (no case) which is essentially mounted to a peg board. The boards could slide into slots on a rack which would save on space because there would be only one rack. Or I could create a rack capable of suspending multiple motherboards, which would then be mounted inside a cabinet. The cabinet could have a table top for the monitor, or the monitor could be mounted on the back of the cabinet. The hard part will be find the right cabinet... obviously, I'm still mulling it over.