oh but printers, printers can smell fear. If your deadline is looming, and you fear the consequences of not having the printout, thats when they suddenly don't work. >:)
@@AlexanderBurgers havng worked with industral printers, this is very true, so very very true, sometimes i wake up in the middle of the night screaming print engine fault NOOOOOOOO
new ones often too like my pc right now is just doing the most random things and even my dishwasher now only works if i drag it to the right spot and my phone only wants to charge in certain rooms
As a former computer tech I agree with your point that sometimes computers can sense confidence and put you in your place… but they can also sense fear and not work for normal users and jump right quit into line when good technicians show up.
Sometimes just looking over the shoulder of a non-technical user is enough to make things work. It probably increases the user's fear even more but for some reason it often works.
yea for sure i am having an issue with my pc for years but every time i try to get help from some one who knows more than me the issue doesn't happen but as soon as they leave it starts happening again. basically if i use too much ram stuff starts crashing because i have no swap space .at first i thought it was because my c drive was full and windows doesn't want to use the other drives as swap space. but sometimes the glitch doesn't happen when the drive is full while other times it happens even when i got plenty also sometimes i reboot my computer and it doesn't happen but if i reboot again it starts happening again it makes no sense. when it didn't happen i kept my pc on on purpose. i filled up my c drive to see what would happen and it didn't start crashing. eventually i was forced to reboot my pc after weeks and the glitch was back trying to remove stuff from the drive made it so it would crash less quickly but it has very low storage so it only has windows related stuff on there now .and after a few weeks it was gone again i kept my pc on for as long as possible and i am stuck in this cycle .
A friend and I wrote multiplayer snake in assembly for the TRS80 color computer using joysticks. Whoever died first lost. It was 1kB of assembly supported by a basic front end. It was faster then you could blink and had to be delayed to play. 0.89Mhz 6809 processor.
That's awesome! The big bottleneck here are the terminals. At 9600 baud, there's only so much we cursor control and screen updating we can push through them. We could push them up to 19,200 baud and that would help a bit, but a proper graphics card and monitor would make a massive difference. The Centurion itself is using just a tiny fraction of it's capability running our little snake game!
@@UsagiElectric i don't like that you have to keep the keys pressed to move it, or even use 4 when only 2 keys is enough. Looks like a waste of bandwidth. Ideas for multiplayer games, not necessarily realtime action would fit this system, perhaps in a future museum use, MUD or multi player rogue like for example (bit like gauntlet?).
@freeculture You don't have to keep pressing a key to move the snake. Holding down the key makes the snake move faster. Chris said he wasn't holding down any keys when the food was in the corner. I can understand wanting just two keys for snake, but then you wouldn't be able to make the snake go faster like you can in this version.
Thanks for your hospitality during our visit, and for scheduling the perfect weather for the magnificent eclipse! Wifey and I had the best time. It was a total blast being the second player on multi-player snake game. The refurbished VCF terminal looks as beautiful in person as it does on video. Looking forward to the 32 player version. ;-)
That is amazing! When I saw the title I assumed that it was running under the OS with IPC via disk files. Building a bare metal multiterminal processing mini OS is next level! Mind blown!
Ahhh, this takes me back. My father and I wrote Games Pack 1 for the TRS-80 back around '79 when I was 19. One of the games was a 2-player snake game. It was a blast to write and to play and we got a lot of compliments on it. Great to see it running on the Centurion! Compliments to Ren 14500. We used the built-in BASIC with calls to Z-80 code for speed, but we didn't have to write an OS! Well done!
Computers like this one that allowed multiple simultaneous users were very important for early enterprise systems that integrated accounting, production planning, manufacturing, and order processing/shipping. Companies went from 100% manual/paper systems in 1965 to a fair amount of real time data by 1975. (Triumph came with a lot of late nights, hard work, brainstorming, and anxiety)
Too many people underestimate what the machines of old could do. Both in terms of hardware and in terms of software. And I have even heard people say dumb stuff like "those old insecure CPUs", as if such a thing as a secure CPU could even exist in the first place. Or some people seem to see the fact that you could directly access all the hardware directly as a bad thing. They actually think there was some kind of (never specified of course) benefit to having 3 layers of abstraction in between you and your hardware. I truly appreciate what you do. Especially the fact that you didn't just stop after you got the machine working and made some videos about it. You keep going and thus allow the machine to truly shine and live up to its potential.
Some of the Assembly techniques reminds of the threaded code used in Forth. In fact writing a Forth for the Centurion would be an interesting challenge and not too difficult considering you just need 30 or 40 'primative' Forth 'words' to bootstrap the rest of Forth from.
Imagine having such game in a 1980s office - no one would ever get anything done and you would just hear somebody screaming here and there where the food is ^^
[1:12] Those guys are so '70s. It looks like they came right out of a '70s police action-drama. (cue Sabotage by the Beastie Boys) So this wasn't exactly what I expected at first. I thought it would be independent processes running under the Centurion OS, with everyone having a snake on a single screen shared playfield. And that would have been a pain in the ass to create, and probably to play, too. What I didn't expect was running the game bare-metal as an OS, spanning screens with only one snake, and that really did work. As for the eclipse, I was just north of San Antonio, with 100% cloud cover, and the sun only peeking through for three or four seconds at a time every now and then. So I got to see... the sky darken, then undarken two minutes later. Oh well. And the next day, which was supposed to be wetter, was much less cloudy, just to rub it in.
that weather happened to me - I travelled to Penzance to see one of the previous ones, my friends in London who stayed there got a better experience and better weather
To be fair, I did get to see the annular eclipse here six months earlier, being at the intersection of both paths. There were a few clouds then, but nothing near full cloud cover, and they went away just as "most-ality" happened.
Those data center type printers were typically powered up all the time. Just like the CPU. Chances are you have a flaky capacitor which is why your printer acted odd. When I worked for IBM we had a 6262 that would act weird too if ever powered off to allow the caps to fully drain, BUT, 15 minutes later of powered ON and everything was fine with it. Within that 15 minute range however don't try to print or failure and odd behavior was imminent. So, you might be similar. Let the printer sit powered on and idle for a bit before trying to print and maybe it will work flawless in the future.
Your enthusiasm reminds me when I was young in that era, doing the same kind of things on different computers. Sadly time goes by, one picks up health issues, and even though I curse modern computers, I am glad that those old days are over… good on you for keeping those old memories alive,
I would take old computers any day over the insanity that is "modern" web development. Its a good thing I only work with native software that's not made with toy languages like javascript.
@@monad_tcp you're a bit delusional also maybe didn't watch the video. "Modern" web development gets you a Centurion emulator in the browser thanks to a "toy" language for everybody to explore hardware that's pretty uncommon.
A possible solution to your printer issue. As I have worked with older electro-mechanical devices (and this printer has a LOT of electro-mechanical components) I discovered that the more you work (or play) with them the more they "wake up". The mechanical components haven't moved in years, the switches haven't be switched in years and the sliding and rolling components have been stagnant for years. I think your printer just needed some exercise to begin losing up all the mechanical components and burnishing (thru use) of the switch connections. Hopefully this is what is going on and the more you use it the more it will wake up. Super cool stuff you got going on!
@usagi the original snake on the Nokia 6110 phone dld have a multiplayer mode. It used the IR HW to connect two phones for a game. It may be that the US HW variant didn't have IR. Sorry, that the details are a little bit hazy. We're talking about SW the game designer (Taneli) and I as team lead were working on in 1997 😁🇫🇮
We could return to wood grain, modern servers and storage still use the 19 inch rack, so a spare wood grain Centurion rack could be used to house modern stuff :-) In my last job we had a rack with two Nimble SANs about the same size as those Hawk drives, but of course this was an array with something like 12TB of storage each, connected by fibrechannel to the 4 server virtualisation system above it. I think wood grain would have improved it :-)
Complaint to TH-cam: There are videos where the like button is wholly inadequate, please try harder. More seriously, what a fantastic video, thank you so much 😀
What an outstanding achievement! I can't wait for you to essentially re-start Centurion Computers! The community you've built here is amazing, and the work they've done, even more so! Now I just need to figure out how to port DOOM... Or at least, something that kinda halfway resembles DOOM...
Although this video posted today, through the magic of TH-cam you were actually at VCF East working on that Hawk drive. If only you brought some of that green bar paper with you! Great to meet you and hope the lanyard situation works out. Thanks for the $5! Hope your “hammer” finds an amicable solution. Not so many giggles for “Jane” it seems. Maybe the VCF folks that made the mistakes can make it all smiles by “June”.
Thanks for hanging out while we worked on the drive! I had an absolute blast, and I think it went really well! The lanyard situation is already handled! My hammer is still looking for nails, but I'm glad she was there, haha.
Amazing technology for the time and if you didn't use it, you probably didn't know it existed until Usagi resurrected one. Always find these old machines interesting. Good job.
Just loved this episode because it contained extra levels of love for the passionate efforts of other enthusiasts, the warmth of nostalgia, and extra cooperation. The good aspects of humanity were all in copious supply. Thanks so much.
1989 I wrote a four player snake clone with network (midi) support on my Atari ST. Two players per computer one was using "w-a-s-y" the other used the arrow keys for navigation. Evey player had his own color and food. The other food where poisonous and would shrink the length Biting the wall or any snake would end the game. I wrote it as an extension of a two player Snake and that was an extension of a "normal" Snake. I called it "Wurmi". The Networking over Midi-port was really hard to get working reliably without any knowledge how to do such a thing. Sadly i only have a printout of an early version.
@@absalomdraconis It's not that hard to get the basics right. TOS has basic IO routines for the Midi port and supports a buffer. It has fixed baud rate and you only need two midi cables and no configuration. The Midi ports are also mostly unused and easy to reach. "loop back" to do the early development with one ST is easy. The hard part for my 14 year old self was the locking of the system while waiting for data when using the TOS routines. The waiting and data processing caused a lot of delay and hangups in the beginning. Hadn't figured out interrupt driven programming at that time. It was all running in a main loop. If i remember correctly i made one program the "master" that would request data from the "slave" and would update the slave after each request. All based on fixed length messages, with command-header data-body and checksum-foot. I hadn't figured out how they could figure out themself who is master and and who is slave.
head to head would be cool, spawn food to the same position on all the terminals, food is nuked on all terminals when first player gets it, players that didn't get it increase in length and food spawns to new location on all terminals. The ultimate bend over your opponent version of snake.
I grew up with the local radio station doing what they called "Mandatory Metallica" from 11:00 to midnight everyday. Planted the metal seed from an early age, haha. Although, lately, I've been heavy on Argent metal (essentially, Doom/Doom Eternal inspired instrumental metal). Because I do translation, I can't listen to music with lyrics or I end up writing the lyrics into the translation on accident, so instrumental metal has been a godsend!
@@UsagiElectric That's cool, man! My uncle got me interested in Metal back in '83 when I was 9 years old, he played Dio's Holy Diver to me. I guess I can call myself Metal Veteran now, haha! I really must recommend some Japanese all-female Metal bands to you. Man, those ladies really can play, truly kick ass stuff (oh, and they are very beautiful too 🙂 ). So here goes: Lovebites, Aldious, Nemophila, East of Eden, Mary's Blood, Ark Royal
@@UsagiElectric i also grew up with Mandatory Metallica! me and my friends north of Philly thought we were the only ones so blessed heh but clearly, this means our new metal band "Platters of the Hawk" is a go, right David?
@UsagiElectric Everything else awesome about this video aside, this comment is super helpful to me! I do a lot of technical proposal writing and I love heavy music, but my brain doesn't do well at writing while I'm hearing lyrics... so I'm always on the lookout for Instrumental metal recommendations.
I was thinking about Centurion episode 1 when you showed the clip. If you don't take the project any farther than this your have SUCCEEDED beyond anyone's wildest imgaination. My vision now is 32 screen CNAKE with your major contributors at the screens, such as REN, Curious Marc, etc. Let's see who is the best once and for all!
It's absolutely insane to think we started with a $150 pile of metal, plastic and silicon that was being sold as scrap, and now we're here with two fully working hard drives, multiple terminals and a (sometimes) functioning printer! I would love to get this thing online and have people remote in for cross-continent multiplayer gaming. That would be properly wild!
This was rather epic, man! I've had computers show out for me before, so I get what you're saying. There's an old joke: what do you need to be to train a horse? (Smarter than the horse.) We're smarter than any computer (at least anything _we're likely to work on..._ ), so confidence is still high.
Truly wonderful! Very fun to see the Centurion kicking back with some games! Definitely agree about old computers sensing confidence, too. They know when your guard is down, hah!
The XMOS xCore architecture is a current 32-bit processor that emulates up to 8 logical cores utilizing 8 separate register files for instantaneous context switching each clock cycle. Not as ambitious as Centurion’s 16 logical cores, but it is expanded out to 32-bits. They are odd ducks that go against the grain of popular microprocessor design.
This is just epic. thank you for the insane snake game. I really hope you can get a 32 player snake game up and running. now for super long multiplayer pacman.
Brilliant! The multi terminal snake reminds me of a game at Southampton where it was a bus (not a snake) that went around the network and users had to board and try and take control of it. Back in the days when software agents were a cool idea😃
This could have been devastating if it was released with the machine. "Will there be any room on the cargo vessel leaving June 9, 1981?" "Actually the entire company is running Snake right now."
Fantastic video, as always, great to see this classic computer actually playing a game. I would love to see somebody write "Oregon Trail" for this with ascii graphics, that would be awesome. Thanks for another great Sunday experience, looking forward to the next one ;)
Yeah, I could imagine this being quite a lot of fun, afterhours when the system is idle. a MUD would be the next development for GOS I rekon, could really make use of the multi-terminal features. A few years ago at a lan party a mate had found his dads old Dragon32 micro that he used for engineering CAD. but also had a stack of games. although we had counterstrike, BF1942, UT2004, balls to the wall gaming rigs, we ended up puttin alot of hours on the old dragon, and still had a blast. a good game is still fun, regardless if it was written in 1984, 2004, or 2024.
If you set up a VPN server (some routers have them or on say a raspberry pi) you can use esp-2866 modules plugged into the terminal ports running esp link and then you can have say mark and others play snake via the net,
The Cooperative Snake game play isn't what I was visualizing, but it turned out better. Mind blown with what you have managed. I'm looking forward to find out about that terminal 4 bug.
It's not the first multi-player snake; someone had a multiplayer snake on their video within the last couple days. It's very unusual by being coop with a single snake; the other multiplayer snake was 1 snake per person. But that does in fact look like a unique implementation.
I used to train people in software dev in the 90's (MCSD) and when students got anxious I told them to wait until I got to them, because the problem will sort itself out. My sheer presence was all it took for the problem on the course to give up. You are right though that you need to converse with a computer to coax it into doing what you wanted. I was observed in such bed-side talks to computers that were aberant or just stubborn! Poor things, they need TLC too, you know 🙂 I never thought of snake as a type of team-oriented ball game, but this really amazed me. Were you guys in the umbra or the penumbra of the eclipse (Wait isn't that an IDE?)
If you do poke around at a Centurion-on-Single-board-computer add-on for something, remember this: both RS-232 and DVI over an HDMI connector (which can interface with any proper HDMI screen) are fairly simple, AND (unlike HDMI itself) openly implementable. The only barrier is that the DVI approach would need enough microprocessor to run a terminal emulator (which is not expensive these days).
Printer very likely a capacitor in the timing or power supply warming up. Or a capacitor in some timing circuit that is leaking, look at small electrolytics on the boards that are attached to any TTL monostable.
One that might be fun with multi terminals would be an RPG or text adventure with the main terminal with the prompts and a second terminal or (line) printer with your inventory and status. Or possibly a rough map
You are so right with that confidence versus anxiety, joke. Til this day I control, S save documents every few minutes, just out of habit due to bad experiences with the blue screen of death
I think Ctrl-S anxiety is a hallmark of those of us who grew up through the 80s and 90s. I know I've got it bad when I Ctrl-S and then also click the save icon because I don't quite trust either, haha.
The printer is indeed very rhythmic! The hammer assembly shuttling back and forth creates a nice bass drum beat, and then the hammers slapping in a seemingly random fashion makes for some very interesting music.
I learned this game on one of the very early home computer versions - Snake Byte for the Apple ][. To this day I prefer the control scheme of that program - just the Left and Right arrow keys, and you turned left or right relative to the head of the snake. You could react more quickly with just two keys.
Old caps needed to charge. They were usually left on 24/7 so the caps were always charged. Warm up the printer for an hour prior to printing and see if that fixes it.
Newer computer systems actively try to suppress user anxiety before they fail catastrophically at the most inopportune time. It's almost a completely opposite approach to what was shown here with the printer. :)
In 1982 the original Lillith by Nicklas Wirth (first European computer with graphical desktop) came with (among other things) a bottle of furniture polish. Those were the days.
"old electronics require a certain amount of anxiety from the user to work..." - amen to that!
oh but printers, printers can smell fear. If your deadline is looming, and you fear the consequences of not having the printout, thats when they suddenly don't work. >:)
@@AlexanderBurgers havng worked with industral printers, this is very true, so very very true, sometimes i wake up in the middle of the night screaming print engine fault NOOOOOOOO
Just like muscle cars require blood sacrifices during maintenance... :)
new ones often too like my pc right now is just doing the most random things and even my dishwasher now only works if i drag it to the right spot and my phone only wants to charge in certain rooms
Printer: "Adequate amount erratic heart rate and pleading detected, here's your printout."
Me: "Oh thank the heavens..."
The next game needs to be "Global Thermonuclear War"
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
As a former computer tech I agree with your point that sometimes computers can sense confidence and put you in your place… but they can also sense fear and not work for normal users and jump right quit into line when good technicians show up.
Tech people also have the ability to to walk into a room touch a broken computer and have it automagically start working again
And printers need to feel fear to basically work, if you don't make them feel fear they don't work.
This is why whenever I walk into a new room I act like there's nothing I don't understand and am prepared and hopeful for a real challenge.
Sometimes just looking over the shoulder of a non-technical user is enough to make things work. It probably increases the user's fear even more but for some reason it often works.
yea for sure i am having an issue with my pc for years but every time i try to get help from some one who knows more than me the issue doesn't happen but as soon as they leave it starts happening again. basically if i use too much ram stuff starts crashing because i have no swap space .at first i thought it was because my c drive was full and windows doesn't want to use the other drives as swap space. but sometimes the glitch doesn't happen when the drive is full while other times it happens even when i got plenty also sometimes i reboot my computer and it doesn't happen but if i reboot again it starts happening again it makes no sense. when it didn't happen i kept my pc on on purpose. i filled up my c drive to see what would happen and it didn't start crashing. eventually i was forced to reboot my pc after weeks and the glitch was back trying to remove stuff from the drive made it so it would crash less quickly but it has very low storage so it only has windows related stuff on there now .and after a few weeks it was gone again i kept my pc on for as long as possible and i am stuck in this cycle .
What happens in this channel is absolutely on another level. I think this will eventually become a piece of history on itself
Copying a file from a hdd to a floppy is not my definition of "epic".
@@maskddingo1779 I can only interpret that you didn't watch the entire video
Thank you so much!
The Centurion journey has been a wild one, and I can't believe how far we've come with it!
A friend and I wrote multiplayer snake in assembly for the TRS80 color computer using joysticks. Whoever died first lost. It was 1kB of assembly supported by a basic front end. It was faster then you could blink and had to be delayed to play. 0.89Mhz 6809 processor.
That's awesome!
The big bottleneck here are the terminals. At 9600 baud, there's only so much we cursor control and screen updating we can push through them. We could push them up to 19,200 baud and that would help a bit, but a proper graphics card and monitor would make a massive difference.
The Centurion itself is using just a tiny fraction of it's capability running our little snake game!
@@UsagiElectric i don't like that you have to keep the keys pressed to move it, or even use 4 when only 2 keys is enough. Looks like a waste of bandwidth. Ideas for multiplayer games, not necessarily realtime action would fit this system, perhaps in a future museum use, MUD or multi player rogue like for example (bit like gauntlet?).
@freeculture You don't have to keep pressing a key to move the snake. Holding down the key makes the snake move faster. Chris said he wasn't holding down any keys when the food was in the corner. I can understand wanting just two keys for snake, but then you wouldn't be able to make the snake go faster like you can in this version.
Thanks for your hospitality during our visit, and for scheduling the perfect weather for the magnificent eclipse! Wifey and I had the best time. It was a total blast being the second player on multi-player snake game. The refurbished VCF terminal looks as beautiful in person as it does on video. Looking forward to the 32 player version. ;-)
pretty cool you gotta experience this!!!
Early 80's office minicomputer turned into multi-user multihead gaming system. Good job. 👍
Yeah, but look closely, it's not.
Turned into, or already was?
it was always supposed to be multi user that explains why it seems so bad for the era in terms of graphics its like a server .
There's just something special about getting a machine to do something it was never really intended to do!
That is amazing! When I saw the title I assumed that it was running under the OS with IPC via disk files. Building a bare metal multiterminal processing mini OS is next level! Mind blown!
What Ren accomplished is absolutely mental. Just a stunning display of CPU6 assembly!
Ahhh, this takes me back. My father and I wrote Games Pack 1 for the TRS-80 back around '79 when I was 19. One of the games was a 2-player snake game. It was a blast to write and to play and we got a lot of compliments on it. Great to see it running on the Centurion! Compliments to Ren 14500. We used the built-in BASIC with calls to Z-80 code for speed, but we didn't have to write an OS! Well done!
Computers like this one that allowed multiple simultaneous users were very important for early enterprise systems that integrated accounting, production planning, manufacturing, and order processing/shipping. Companies went from 100% manual/paper systems in 1965 to a fair amount of real time data by 1975. (Triumph came with a lot of late nights, hard work, brainstorming, and anxiety)
Too many people underestimate what the machines of old could do. Both in terms of hardware and in terms of software.
And I have even heard people say dumb stuff like "those old insecure CPUs", as if such a thing as a secure CPU could even exist in the first place.
Or some people seem to see the fact that you could directly access all the hardware directly as a bad thing.
They actually think there was some kind of (never specified of course) benefit to having 3 layers of abstraction in between you and your hardware.
I truly appreciate what you do.
Especially the fact that you didn't just stop after you got the machine working and made some videos about it.
You keep going and thus allow the machine to truly shine and live up to its potential.
Some of the Assembly techniques reminds of the threaded code used in Forth.
In fact writing a Forth for the Centurion would be an interesting challenge and not too difficult considering you just need 30 or 40 'primative' Forth 'words' to bootstrap the rest of Forth from.
I loved the mention to LGR :)
It would be cool if at vcf you had random terminals all over the room all running off the portable centurion.
Well, that card does have something like 5 serial ports? Might be good to do some testing...
I had the same thought.
A saying in IT Support - the reliability of electrinics is inversly proportianal to the need.
9:12 To me this seems to be every printer I ever owned from 1989 up to now 😂
I've found that newer printers are worse than the old ones.
Imagine having such game in a 1980s office - no one would ever get anything done and you would just hear somebody screaming here and there where the food is ^^
I wonder how many of us thought of LGR as soon as David started talking about woodgrain and computers?
Guilty
32 player snake sounds like an EPIC TIME!!
Yeah, especially when a fruit would reappear from first unit down at 32nd 😎
[1:12] Those guys are so '70s. It looks like they came right out of a '70s police action-drama. (cue Sabotage by the Beastie Boys)
So this wasn't exactly what I expected at first. I thought it would be independent processes running under the Centurion OS, with everyone having a snake on a single screen shared playfield. And that would have been a pain in the ass to create, and probably to play, too.
What I didn't expect was running the game bare-metal as an OS, spanning screens with only one snake, and that really did work.
As for the eclipse, I was just north of San Antonio, with 100% cloud cover, and the sun only peeking through for three or four seconds at a time every now and then. So I got to see... the sky darken, then undarken two minutes later. Oh well. And the next day, which was supposed to be wetter, was much less cloudy, just to rub it in.
that weather happened to me - I travelled to Penzance to see one of the previous ones, my friends in London who stayed there got a better experience and better weather
To be fair, I did get to see the annular eclipse here six months earlier, being at the intersection of both paths. There were a few clouds then, but nothing near full cloud cover, and they went away just as "most-ality" happened.
That’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen 😂 now I really want to find a Centurion to code for!
That printer sounds like a geiger counter gojng nuts. Loving this series.
Those data center type printers were typically powered up all the time. Just like the CPU. Chances are you have a flaky capacitor which is why your printer acted odd. When I worked for IBM we had a 6262 that would act weird too if ever powered off to allow the caps to fully drain, BUT, 15 minutes later of powered ON and everything was fine with it. Within that 15 minute range however don't try to print or failure and odd behavior was imminent. So, you might be similar. Let the printer sit powered on and idle for a bit before trying to print and maybe it will work flawless in the future.
Old computers require a certain amount of anxiety from the user before they work.
You may have said that as a joke, but it is very true.
Your enthusiasm reminds me when I was young in that era, doing the same kind of things on different computers. Sadly time goes by, one picks up health issues, and even though I curse modern computers, I am glad that those old days are over… good on you for keeping those old memories alive,
I would take old computers any day over the insanity that is "modern" web development. Its a good thing I only work with native software that's not made with toy languages like javascript.
@@monad_tcp you're a bit delusional also maybe didn't watch the video. "Modern" web development gets you a Centurion emulator in the browser thanks to a "toy" language for everybody to explore hardware that's pretty uncommon.
A possible solution to your printer issue. As I have worked with older electro-mechanical devices (and this printer has a LOT of electro-mechanical components) I discovered that the more you work (or play) with them the more they "wake up". The mechanical components haven't moved in years, the switches haven't be switched in years and the sliding and rolling components have been stagnant for years. I think your printer just needed some exercise to begin losing up all the mechanical components and burnishing (thru use) of the switch connections. Hopefully this is what is going on and the more you use it the more it will wake up. Super cool stuff you got going on!
Sounds like me at the gym.
Sounds like me trying to get up in the morning 😂
Some contact cleaner maybe? 😄
@@devrim-oguz: Electrical contact cleaner, regreasing, maybe going after some un-obvious grime.
Man, that was a kick-ass eclipse picture!
Thanks!
It was a pretty wild experience, truly awe inspiring!
@usagi the original snake on the Nokia 6110 phone dld have a multiplayer mode. It used the IR HW to connect two phones for a game. It may be that the US HW variant didn't have IR.
Sorry, that the details are a little bit hazy. We're talking about SW the game designer (Taneli) and I as team lead were working on in 1997 😁🇫🇮
We could return to wood grain, modern servers and storage still use the 19 inch rack, so a spare wood grain Centurion rack could be used to house modern stuff :-) In my last job we had a rack with two Nimble SANs about the same size as those Hawk drives, but of course this was an array with something like 12TB of storage each, connected by fibrechannel to the 4 server virtualisation system above it. I think wood grain would have improved it :-)
Multi monitor support via serial consoles is an interesting concept.
1980's boss: You're fired!
gets fired, makes a computer gaming company, those where the times
@@monad_tcp lol
Worth it!
@@UsagiElectric 🤣🤣🤣
2020's hacker: Who cares
Complaint to TH-cam: There are videos where the like button is wholly inadequate, please try harder.
More seriously, what a fantastic video, thank you so much 😀
What an outstanding achievement! I can't wait for you to essentially re-start Centurion Computers!
The community you've built here is amazing, and the work they've done, even more so!
Now I just need to figure out how to port DOOM... Or at least, something that kinda halfway resembles DOOM...
CNAKE! How appropriate of a name, for a wild variation on a classic game.
Sounds like normal behaviour for a printer.
I'm starting to learn that printers are a special kind of evil in the computing world!
@@UsagiElectric have you seen Office Space (1999)?
@@UsagiElectricat least yours doesn’t lock up if you use non authentic ink…. :)
Still. Printers suuuuuck
@@snooks5607 PC Load Letter? WTF is PC Load Letter?
Hundreds of years from now the one thing computing will have in common with today is printers still won't work correctly
This is absolutely bonkers. Massive kudos to Ren14500 for their programming skills!
Ikr. They could totally be hired to maintain old systems for governments and stuff if they wanted.
Vi keybinds for playing snake is honestly next level
Although this video posted today, through the magic of TH-cam you were actually at VCF East working on that Hawk drive. If only you brought some of that green bar paper with you!
Great to meet you and hope the lanyard situation works out. Thanks for the $5! Hope your “hammer” finds an amicable solution. Not so many giggles for “Jane” it seems. Maybe the VCF folks that made the mistakes can make it all smiles by “June”.
Thanks for hanging out while we worked on the drive! I had an absolute blast, and I think it went really well!
The lanyard situation is already handled! My hammer is still looking for nails, but I'm glad she was there, haha.
Amazing technology for the time and if you didn't use it, you probably didn't know it existed until Usagi resurrected one. Always find these old machines interesting. Good job.
A new found luxury... being able to print stuff.
Just loved this episode because it contained extra levels of love for the passionate efforts of other enthusiasts, the warmth of nostalgia, and extra cooperation. The good aspects of humanity were all in copious supply. Thanks so much.
I started my career writing assembly, and I remember all code was printed and stored when released. I don't miss those days!
1989 I wrote a four player snake clone with network (midi) support on my Atari ST. Two players per computer one was using "w-a-s-y" the other used the arrow keys for navigation. Evey player had his own color and food. The other food where poisonous and would shrink the length Biting the wall or any snake would end the game. I wrote it as an extension of a two player Snake and that was an extension of a "normal" Snake. I called it "Wurmi". The Networking over Midi-port was really hard to get working reliably without any knowledge how to do such a thing.
Sadly i only have a printout of an early version.
MIDI as general serial? That is indeed a rare endevour.
@@absalomdraconis It's not that hard to get the basics right. TOS has basic IO routines for the Midi port and supports a buffer. It has fixed baud rate and you only need two midi cables and no configuration. The Midi ports are also mostly unused and easy to reach. "loop back" to do the early development with one ST is easy.
The hard part for my 14 year old self was the locking of the system while waiting for data when using the TOS routines. The waiting and data processing caused a lot of delay and hangups in the beginning. Hadn't figured out interrupt driven programming at that time. It was all running in a main loop.
If i remember correctly i made one program the "master" that would request data from the "slave" and would update the slave after each request. All based on fixed length messages, with command-header data-body and checksum-foot. I hadn't figured out how they could figure out themself who is master and and who is slave.
head to head would be cool, spawn food to the same position on all the terminals, food is nuked on all terminals when first player gets it, players that didn't get it increase in length and food spawns to new location on all terminals. The ultimate bend over your opponent version of snake.
Coming back to this while doing a binge re-watch of the entire series was a fun watch. Love the Centurion videos.
In thumbnail pic David shows horns -> Me, old Heavy Metal fan: "Yep, definitely going to watch this". 😀
hahaha i thought the same thing
I grew up with the local radio station doing what they called "Mandatory Metallica" from 11:00 to midnight everyday. Planted the metal seed from an early age, haha.
Although, lately, I've been heavy on Argent metal (essentially, Doom/Doom Eternal inspired instrumental metal). Because I do translation, I can't listen to music with lyrics or I end up writing the lyrics into the translation on accident, so instrumental metal has been a godsend!
@@UsagiElectric That's cool, man! My uncle got me interested in Metal back in '83 when I was 9 years old, he played Dio's Holy Diver to me. I guess I can call myself Metal Veteran now, haha!
I really must recommend some Japanese all-female Metal bands to you. Man, those ladies really can play, truly kick ass stuff (oh, and they are very beautiful too 🙂 ). So here goes:
Lovebites, Aldious, Nemophila, East of Eden, Mary's Blood, Ark Royal
@@UsagiElectric i also grew up with Mandatory Metallica! me and my friends north of Philly thought we were the only ones so blessed heh
but clearly, this means our new metal band "Platters of the Hawk" is a go, right David?
@UsagiElectric Everything else awesome about this video aside, this comment is super helpful to me! I do a lot of technical proposal writing and I love heavy music, but my brain doesn't do well at writing while I'm hearing lyrics... so I'm always on the lookout for Instrumental metal recommendations.
I was thinking about Centurion episode 1 when you showed the clip. If you don't take the project any farther than this your have SUCCEEDED beyond anyone's wildest imgaination. My vision now is 32 screen CNAKE with your major contributors at the screens, such as REN, Curious Marc, etc. Let's see who is the best once and for all!
It's absolutely insane to think we started with a $150 pile of metal, plastic and silicon that was being sold as scrap, and now we're here with two fully working hard drives, multiple terminals and a (sometimes) functioning printer!
I would love to get this thing online and have people remote in for cross-continent multiplayer gaming. That would be properly wild!
This was such a perfect setup for him to say "Hi to the people Chris"...
the text on that terminal is so crisp! awesome programing!
Awesome! At first, I thought each player would control their own snake. Co-op snake is a neat concept.
The code for that game is pure art.
Ren is easily the best programmer I've ever met. Not just with CPU6 stuff, his work with modern systems is on another level too.
Possible world record attempt at the highest ever electricity consumption for a game of Snake! Call Guinness!
Old Sysadmin: "That's my secret, I'm always anxious."
🙃
Capacitors still reforming maybe? For the print issue.
This was rather epic, man! I've had computers show out for me before, so I get what you're saying.
There's an old joke: what do you need to be to train a horse? (Smarter than the horse.)
We're smarter than any computer (at least anything _we're likely to work on..._ ), so confidence is still high.
Truly wonderful! Very fun to see the Centurion kicking back with some games!
Definitely agree about old computers sensing confidence, too. They know when your guard is down, hah!
Back in the 80s I was the one they called. Computers came to attention when I entered the room! Those were the days.
The XMOS xCore architecture is a current 32-bit processor that emulates up to 8 logical cores utilizing 8 separate register files for instantaneous context switching each clock cycle. Not as ambitious as Centurion’s 16 logical cores, but it is expanded out to 32-bits. They are odd ducks that go against the grain of popular microprocessor design.
This is just epic. thank you for the insane snake game. I really hope you can get a 32 player snake game up and running. now for super long multiplayer pacman.
Brilliant! The multi terminal snake reminds me of a game at Southampton where it was a bus (not a snake) that went around the network and users had to board and try and take control of it. Back in the days when software agents were a cool idea😃
Now it's possible to play snake with friends in silence from the floppy!
What a brilliant video. Well done to you and all those people who have help get here.
This could have been devastating if it was released with the machine.
"Will there be any room on the cargo vessel leaving June 9, 1981?"
"Actually the entire company is running Snake right now."
Fantastic video, as always, great to see this classic computer actually playing a game. I would love to see somebody write "Oregon Trail" for this with ascii graphics, that would be awesome. Thanks for another great Sunday experience, looking forward to the next one ;)
That multiplayer CNAKE party is fantastic
Congrats to this ASM game
This is sooo awesome, never intended for it and likely never done before, so cool.
Yeah, I could imagine this being quite a lot of fun, afterhours when the system is idle. a MUD would be the next development for GOS I rekon, could really make use of the multi-terminal features.
A few years ago at a lan party a mate had found his dads old Dragon32 micro that he used for engineering CAD. but also had a stack of games. although we had counterstrike, BF1942, UT2004, balls to the wall gaming rigs, we ended up puttin alot of hours on the old dragon, and still had a blast. a good game is still fun, regardless if it was written in 1984, 2004, or 2024.
UT99 is way better than 2004.
I agree. With all that storage and multi-terminal support, the machine is well-suited to a MUCK/MUD/whatever.
Awesome use case for the centurion! Loved this weeks episode ❤
If you set up a VPN server (some routers have them or on say a raspberry pi) you can use esp-2866 modules plugged into the terminal ports running esp link and then you can have say mark and others play snake via the net,
The Cooperative Snake game play isn't what I was visualizing, but it turned out better. Mind blown with what you have managed. I'm looking forward to find out about that terminal 4 bug.
Old electronics are like steam trains. You forgot to put the printer to bed with it's blankie, now it's mad and won't wake up. XD
HOLY SHNAKIES! I call you and Ren for my team in the zombie apocalypse! NO BACKSIES
It's not the first multi-player snake; someone had a multiplayer snake on their video within the last couple days.
It's very unusual by being coop with a single snake; the other multiplayer snake was 1 snake per person. But that does in fact look like a unique implementation.
I used to train people in software dev in the 90's (MCSD) and when students got anxious I told them to wait until I got to them, because the problem will sort itself out. My sheer presence was all it took for the problem on the course to give up. You are right though that you need to converse with a computer to coax it into doing what you wanted. I was observed in such bed-side talks to computers that were aberant or just stubborn! Poor things, they need TLC too, you know 🙂
I never thought of snake as a type of team-oriented ball game, but this really amazed me.
Were you guys in the umbra or the penumbra of the eclipse (Wait isn't that an IDE?)
Rubber ducks helps a lot solving computer problems.
My 4 year old this week: why does he still look different
Me: he got a haircut
4yo: but you don’t cut your hair!
A PiDP like Centurion clone would be epic. I'd definitely buy one.
No step on snek! Great job, guys.
There's some cases now that have wood or bamboo in their construction! The Fractal Design North case has a couple of different wood accents options.
If you do poke around at a Centurion-on-Single-board-computer add-on for something, remember this: both RS-232 and DVI over an HDMI connector (which can interface with any proper HDMI screen) are fairly simple, AND (unlike HDMI itself) openly implementable. The only barrier is that the DVI approach would need enough microprocessor to run a terminal emulator (which is not expensive these days).
wow just WOW what a crazy idea and love the gameplay!
It has been done. QBasic came with Nibbles which had 2 player mode.
But that wasn't multi-screen co-op.
Printer very likely a capacitor in the timing or power supply warming up. Or a capacitor in some timing circuit that is leaking, look at small electrolytics on the boards that are attached to any TTL monostable.
One that might be fun with multi terminals would be an RPG or text adventure with the main terminal with the prompts and a second terminal or (line) printer with your inventory and status. Or possibly a rough map
I was thinking of a multi-player game based on something like Paul Alger's Galactic Conflict game, originally written for the TRS-80 CoCo.
You are so right with that confidence versus anxiety, joke.
Til this day I control, S save documents every few minutes, just out of habit due to bad experiences with the blue screen of death
Ctrl-S is a reflex for me now. I can't tell you how many times I've hit Ctrl-S while in a web browser or something that doesn't actually need saving.
I think Ctrl-S anxiety is a hallmark of those of us who grew up through the 80s and 90s. I know I've got it bad when I Ctrl-S and then also click the save icon because I don't quite trust either, haha.
Ladies and gentlemen, we now have an official diagnosis “control S anxiety”. Great. Another disorder I have.
Missed the early access notification so might as well catch it now.
Is a little known fact that old computer systems can smell fear.
I like that it thought the printer was music. Probably just detected a rhythm. It's very experimental music.
The printer is indeed very rhythmic! The hammer assembly shuttling back and forth creates a nice bass drum beat, and then the hammers slapping in a seemingly random fashion makes for some very interesting music.
You could say that, with Hawk drives, Finch drives and phoenix drives this thing is 'for the birds'. 😎
When I heard "multiplayer snake", I was thinking something a little like Tron Lightcycles
besides the awesome programing and emulator, it was cool seeing the 4 terminals up and running! have not seen that since the late 80's!
I learned this game on one of the very early home computer versions - Snake Byte for the Apple ][. To this day I prefer the control scheme of that program - just the Left and Right arrow keys, and you turned left or right relative to the head of the snake. You could react more quickly with just two keys.
Smiling the whole time 😊
So wierd, in a nice way, to play that snake game ok the centurion HW.
Old caps needed to charge. They were usually left on 24/7 so the caps were always charged. Warm up the printer for an hour prior to printing and see if that fixes it.
Reminded me of playing netware snipes back in the day…
Awesome!! No more words!
At first, when you talked about the Eclipse, I presumed it was a Data General. Then I realized... 😀
Oh… that reminds me to catch up on my Tech Tangents viewing.
When I saw the name CNAKE I thought he wrote a C compiler for this beast
1:13 the photographer was 'rubbed out' after capturing the four mob bosses' faces on handover day. RIP
When are you gonna turn dc on the bendix g15?
Newer computer systems actively try to suppress user anxiety before they fail catastrophically at the most inopportune time. It's almost a completely opposite approach to what was shown here with the printer. :)
In 1982 the original Lillith by Nicklas Wirth (first European computer with graphical desktop) came with (among other things) a bottle of furniture polish. Those were the days.