The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!!

The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - Printable Version

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Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - Running Bear - 10-24-2013

One of the things I worked on today. An old Apple disk drive. Yes, it's solid black. I'm getting it to run fairly well but can't get it to track as tightly as it needs to. I need to get the read/write speed set. I have no diag software so it goes on the back burner for now.

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Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - nachoman - 10-24-2013

RB - when I was a kid we had a commodore 64 with a 1541 disk drive. I never remember having any problems with the disk drive or it needing any adjustment. Are the adjustments you are doing because they are old drives, or did they need adjustments even when new?

Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - Running Bear - 10-24-2013

nachoman Wrote:RB - when I was a kid we had a commodore 64 with a 1541 disk drive. I never remember having any problems with the disk drive or it needing any adjustment. Are the adjustments you are doing because they are old drives, or did they need adjustments even when new?

Normally they wouldn't need adjustment for several years. This drive is 30+ years old and it has a clone (Mitac) board in it. Your Commodore drive also had it's own onboard power supply. These old Apple drives get their power from the computer and sometimes that isn't spot on and so can effect the drives speed.

Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - nachoman - 10-24-2013

RB - cool that you know how to do that. I used to love writing programs for that old commodore when I was a kid. Do we get to play your game when you are done? Cheers

I used to LOVE Zork!

Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - Running Bear - 10-24-2013

nachoman Wrote:RB - cool that you know how to do that. I used to love writing programs for that old commodore when I was a kid. Do we get to play your game when you are done? I used to LOVE Zork!

I'm a self trained tech and programmer. I never went to school for this stuff. Picked it all up from books, hands-on and taking programs apart to see how they were written. This game is based on Zork and is written completely in Basic. Yes, you can play it but only if you have an Apple II series computer or a compatible that'll run Apple's DOS 3.3.

Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - Running Bear - 10-24-2013

I didn't get much more accomplished today than I've already posted so I won't bore you by posting it again. I did however make one slight change to part two of Native Fury. The character can now find a hole in the fence around Mr Addams' garden and get in. Trouble is once he's in there he has to get away from a very determined triffid. What, you ask is a triffid? It's a tall, mobile, carnivorous and highly venomous plant that's fully capable of hunting down any animal or person it detects. Don't worry. It's fictitious as well. It exists in a few novels, some TV series and a couple of movies that I know of and now it exists in a private game written in a nearly dead computer language on a computer that's more than half my age and I ain't exactly a spring chicken. Well enough humor for one day.

It's time for me to call it a night. See y'all tomorrow.

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Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - Running Bear - 10-25-2013

Good morning. It's 50° with 81% humidity. The high will be 70°. Sunny with some clouds.
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No plans for today. I have someone coming to pick up a copy of parts one and two of Native Fury. He'll beta test it on an Apple IIc for debugging and will recommend changes. Meanwhile I'll be going through another copy seeing what I can find.

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Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - FiatFan - 10-25-2013

Greetings, gang.

Clear and 25 degrees this morning with an anticipated high in the upper 50s and a little breezy with winds up to 30+ mph.

Today we are taking a friend to her doctor's appointment. Then my wife will stay with her until sometime next week. I'll be home alone but with plenty to do. The leaves need to be herded and there's football on Saturday and F1 racing on Sunday. Then on Monday I will pick my wife up from our friends house and we get our eyes tested for new glasses.

RB - I remember triffids very well. This past summer we had a yucca plant bloom for the first time. I saw the top of the stalk sticking up over the garage extension and the first thing i thought of was a triffid.

All stay safe.

Tom

Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - sir james - 10-25-2013

Good Morning Blue
Some sun and 40 degrees right now. We started daylight at 32.
No toy train news this morning so I'm just checking in with a nice new haircut.
Now I can see again.
S.J.

Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - Running Bear - 10-25-2013

My friend showed up today with his Apple IIc+ and beta tested part two of Native Fury. He found plenty on the copy disk to keep me busy for a bit. He'd come across a syntax error which was usually the lack of an '=' in an 'if-then' statement (IF A$ = "N" THEN GOTO 200) or a forgotten 'PRINT' statement in a line that was supposed to be printed on the screen. He'd tell me what it was and where and I'd correct it in the master file. He also brought with him a diagnostic program disk. We went through and tested each of the drives to see if the speed needed to be adjusted. The speed has to be between 198.0 and 202.0 MS to be in the correct range. Faster or slower speeds means the drive won't write the tracks correctly. Too slow and the tracks will be too short, too fast and they'll be too long and overlap. We found that the black drive I was working on yesterday has a bad board. It looks to be working OK but it's only going through the motions. Send it a command to save a file and the drive would run, you could hear the head moving but nothing was being written. SO I'll be looking for a donor drive to cannibalize. I should be able to find one on Ebay easily enough. Problem with that model drive is it's so heavy it costs a bit to ship.

I put a new CMOS battery in this computer today, reset the CMOS and entered all the setup info and it fired right up. The hardest thing was having it ID the hard drive. It checked all the Sata ports and came up empty. I had to redirect it to search the RAID Ide port. I'm using an Ide drive and that's the only place I can connect it.

Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - Running Bear - 10-25-2013

Well the beta test and debugging has been done on the forest module, otherwise known as part two of Native Fury and it's as they say complete and in the can. At a size of 114 I was afraid it would be too big to run in a 64k environment so earlier today I pulled the memory board out of the IIe effectively cutting it's RAM from 128k to 64k and then ran part two. It ran perfectly and there wasn't a single 'OUT OF MEMORY' error. Now I'm getting started on part three of Native Fury, the cove module, also known as 'Paradise Cove'. I have the street system laid in already. There two roads, Nelson Street and Aurora Drive. There's no particular significance to the names, I just like them. The street layout itself with it's variables constitutes twelve to fourteen program blocks. I haven't even started on the homes and land yet! The line numbers for the streets start at 100 and end at 1200. The line numbers for he homes and land start at 1000 and go to 17500. That should keep me busy for a little while.

Nothing special happened today save for Mr Raintree coming over to help earlier. He's requested to be put into 'Paradise Cove' ans I've already got a place picked out for him and his wildcats.

I mentioned earlier about replacing the CMOS battery on my MS-DOS computer that I use online. Well it didn't have the desired effect. CMOS still forgets about the hard drive on start-up. Doing a Ctr-Alt-Del restart usually gets it going on a normal start. Could be it's getting to be time to think about replacing the main board. I have one up in my closet at home (might as well be on the moon) with what I think are the proper memory sticks. It needs a video board though. As far as I know I have one of those coming.

I did get all of my IIe's working A2M0003 type disk drives checked out and they're all (four out of five are still operational) in the proper speed range.

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Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - Running Bear - 10-26-2013

Good morning. It's 44° with 99% humidity. The high will be 75° and feel like 80°. It will be partly cloudy today with a 5mph southeast wind. Low tonight will be 55° and there's a 20 percent chance of showers after midnight.

I was considering stopping my posting of layout photos due to some very descriptive anonymous emails I've been getting saying that my layout photos look like crap. But I've decided that I'm not going to give that pleasure to someone who's too much of a coward to even give me an address to send a reply to. At least then I could send them a token of my appreciation and give their anti-virus software a chance to prove itself. All I can find is a dummy IP (different every time) that seems to bounce all over Europe. I have friends who can do something similar to that but it's a service they pay for and the providers ID is always on the IP along with other information. In this case all I get is the IP# with no info, no sender info on the email and as I said it's different every time. Whoever it is they're doing a great job of evading an old-school hacker like myself. Well I guess if that's the way they get their jollies one way is as good as another.

My plan for today is to start mapping the location blocks for the Paradise Cove module (part III) of Native Fury. It'll be interesting to see how many monkey wrenches get thrown into that plan before the days end.

The only model railroad news I have is that my Big Blue and Gauge RR boxcar fell off the top of my monitor yesterday and broke one of the couplers off. A plastic Bachmann EZ-Mate.

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Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - ezdays - 10-26-2013

Good Saturday morning to ya all. We are looking at a high of around 90 today, 5 degrees above average, but by Tuesday, highs will be in the low 70's, about 10 degrees below average. Morning lows are getting chilly enough that it's about time to break out the light jackets.

Today, some of our friends here are holding open houses. I wish I could see their work, but it's a bit much for me to get to the east coast in time now. Besides, today I'm heading out to the range to go trap shooting. It's been a while since I've been there, but my friend that I usually go there with had a medical issue almost two years ago, but still can't drive and lives a good hour away in the wrong direction. We usually target shoot out in the desert, but for trap shooting, we go to the shooting range. We try to be mindful of our environment, and we can do a pretty good job of cleaning up after ourselves in the desert when we shoot pistols and rifles, but shooting trap requires clay targets that they are hard to clean up after, and they would take hundreds of years to disintegrate, if at all.

Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - FiatFan - 10-26-2013

Greetings, gang.

It's sunny and 37 degrees with an expected high around 50. Breezy again today with 20-30 mph winds from the northwest. Yesterday we had winds from the southwest at 30+ mph. Then tomorrow the winds switch back to the southwest at 20 mph.

Got a busy day planned for today. First up is a trip to Walmart. Then it's time to rake the yard until 11 when football starts. After the game I'll work on the yard some more.

All stay safe.

Tom

Re: The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!! - sir james - 10-26-2013

Good Morning Blue
We have a dreary looking 43 degrees this morning.
A good breakfast though. Eggs and fried potatoes. 1 wheat toast. I have been a white bread eater all my life but have switched, they say brown bread is better but I don't understand why as the food chart doesn't seem that much different to me.
A football Saturday is at hand.
S.J.