Off Topic Ramblings

Old museum pieces...

Hello Ivan,
I remember my first daughter who´s 44 now, using Zip drives to store her AutoCad plans when she was studying. The only other possibility was a .zip file covering multiple floppies - a drag! If I´m not mistaken, the capacity of a normal one was a couple of Mb, but there were larger ones with 10 Mb.

I´ve never seen a SCSI HDD. A 9 Gb one of these back then must have been not only huge, but a real hot-rod. Interesting!

So with another development machine underway you can be further safeguarded against future hardware failures. Old hardware in good working order is vital, as one never knows how long it will last.

Old software does jobs that the new stuff won´t do, at least not in the way, so our private museums are great!

What´s amazing are the high prices well-working old machines will fetch on E-bay!!
As much as a low-end modern machine!
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp
 
Hello Aleatorylamp,

Actually it has been so long since I used a Zip Drive, I can't remember the capacity.
I know I have two different versions with two different capacities though.
The USB version is the more advanced. The one I recently found is an older version.

The 9 GB SCSI drive isn't really that big. It is still 3.5 inch form factor but it looks to be just over an inch in height.
If it doesn't work, then I don't suppose it really matters what the form factor is.
I have too many things going on right now to do any testing though.

I am not necessarily a fan of old computer hardware. I just don't want to spend any significant amount of money is all.

- Ivan.
 
Hello Ivan,
I didn´t know about the form factor. By "huge", I meant the 9 Gb capacity.
I think it was at the beginning of the 90´s when 10-40 Mb Hdd´s were common, and a bit later they went up to 850 Mb, still under 1 Gb. In 1998 I bought a 4 Gb one for 200 $!

About the money, I don´t blame you. One has to defend oneself from the "system" that constantly seems to want to pull it out of one´s noses, so it´s better spent on more important things. So, if something works and does the job...
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp
 
Hello Aleatorylamp,

I believe your time lines might be a little off.
This 9 GB SCSI probably isn't as old as you think it is. I looked for a manufacturing date but could not find one though.
The IBM PC/XT came with a 10 MB "Winchester" drive and the IBM PC/AT came with a 20 MB drive and that was in the early 1980's.
When we bought my IBM PC, the XT and AT were also available but the 10 MB drive was not optional and it added $1000 to the price tag.
The AT was a couple thousand more and that was entirely unaffordable to us at the time.

As for spending money on computers, there is always a little bit spent on small things.
I will probably need another monitor at some point and that should run about $150 or so.
There is a constant stream of Flash Drives coming in.
I will also need a new battery for the motherboard and probably also a CPU fan because this one is making some serious noise.
I also just ordered a AGP Graphics Card (new) but that is less than the cost of a typical lunch.

- Ivan.
 
Hello Ivan,
My time lines for the appearance of the hardware on the market are definitely off, and such prices were completely unaffordable. Sorry, I hadn´t specified that I was rather referring to the time this hardware had become a bit more accessible to the general public.

Hopefully your new AGP graphics card will throw its weight!
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp
 
Merry Christmas Everyone!

I hope everyone had a good holiday (or at least had the day off.)
This is the first time in many years that we have not set up a Christmas Tree in our house.
There has been quite a lot going on and we just got a bit too busy with other events.

Recently I have been watching a few Science Fiction videos online and came across some about robotics, artificial intelligence and the ominous things AI robots have said. One of the most famous of these robots is named Sophia.
When I mentioned that to my Daughter who is home from college, she told me that Sophia will now be attending college as a Freshman.
Sophia already expresses some interesting opinions. One has to wonder what changes "higher education" will bring.
Is this a seed that we humans never should have planted?

- Ivan.
 
Happy New Year!

Happy 2019, Everyone!

I hope the changing of the calendar finds everyone with loved ones.
May everyone have a wonderful year!

- Ivan.
 
The Dell / Sony 17 inch monitor had been misbehaving for quite some time.
It would start with a narrow screen and when it warmed up, the screen would go to full size.
Just having it on was not enough to warm it up. Leaving it in CFS seemed to do it reliably though.

As of a couple days ago, letting the monitor warm up doesn't seem to make the screen wide any more.
It stays narrow even after a couple hours in CFS. A Dell / Nokia 17 inch is getting swapped in whenever I get the chance.
The Nokia monitor is a LOT bulkier and also a bit heavier than the Sony. Hopefully that was the only real problem.

- Ivan.
 
HDD Failure to Detect

After a couple years of pretty reliable service, it appears that I now have another hardware failure.
This one if it is permanent is a bit more catastrophic.
The last failure, of the motherboard, was just a bit inconvenient. It cost another desktop machine that was not serviceable anyway, but I had spares.
This time, it appears that my second SCSI HDD is failing to detect. If it is a controller failure, I can address that with a bit of inconvenience. If the drive is actually gone and not recoverable, a lot of data that was not in a state to be archived would be lost.

We shall see.....

- Ivan.
 
As for the Disk Failure on the Development Machine, if I cannot recover any data, I may be down for months or even a year because I only have some source code archives dating back about a year or so. Data analysis I have been doing would be completely gone.

I can't even begin to look at a data recovery attempt until I can round up some appropriate replacement devices.
The failed drive is a Seagate ST318417W which is a 68 pin SCSI-3 device and those are a bit hard to come by these days.
I will probably have to go with multiple 9GB devices to replace the original 18GB drive.

The Seagate did run for about 20 years before it failed. The IBM 4.3GB drive is about 24 years old and is still going.....

- Ivan.
 
Hello Folks.

The last couple years have been eventful in the computer world and not in a good sort of way.
I have also been quite frustrated because things seemed to keep breaking faster than I could address them.
After the Development Machine died, the Game Machine had a HDD failure.
That was annoying but not too much of a show stopper because the Game Machine was really just for testing purposes and for general messing around and for testing Gauges. It had an IDE drive which wasn't that hard to replace with old stock and I reloaded Windows 2000 and CFS and an old archive from the Game Machine before it died. It wasn't the newest stuff but it had a couple hundred aeroplanes.

The really BIG show stopper was when my laptop that I was using for Gauge Development, Archives of reference material, Reference Drawings, Datasheets, Utilities and such suddenly stopped booting. This was a Core I7 4710MQ.
I waited about a year before buying another laptop. The new one is a Core I7 12700H.
I configured it but never bothered to spend the time to load any software on it. I just got lazy and used an older laptop borrowed from my Daughter for general work and browsing.
About a month ago, that borrowed laptop started having some serious problems with its fan and now will not stay running reliably.
I figured it was time to switch to my own laptop that had been sitting unused for over a year. With my new laptop, I have a browser and that is about it. I have no image processing, no word processing or utilities.
Recently I had gotten into some forum discussions and had to go looking online for information. This was a pain especially since I knew all that information was on my old laptop in the datasheets that I kept on each project I worked on.
I figured it was time to perhaps pull the drive from the old laptop and see what I could recover from it as an external drive.
Before that, I tried to give it one last try to boot up..... Surprisingly, it booted with no issues other than a bit of fan noise. It is pretty quiet new and is what I am using to type here.

So..... What this means is that for however long this machine stays alive, I have access to the Gauges I may have discussed in the other threads and a lot of old archived downloads of CFS material (mostly aeroplanes). If someone is looking for something in particular,
ASK SOON and I will see what I have. Right now, I don't even dare turn the machine off.....
The replacement gaming machine seems to have other hardware issues, so I currently do not have a CFS computer to test anything on.

- Ivan.
 
Hi Ivan,
Long time no see, and I hope you are getting on fine!

Sorry to hear about your hardware issues, and I wish you the best of luck with the necessary repairs and substitutions!

I myself found that my WinXP was getting worse and had to migrate to Win8.1 on my now also old QuadCore - which of course posed problems for Aircraft Factory 99, FS98 and AA. However, I found the computer was just fast enough to handle a virtualized WinXP installation for AF99 and Win98 with Virtual Vachine Player 16, which allowed me to continue building and testing, and jump between guest and host machines easily with a shared folder on the hard drive.

Then, Win 8.1 also went obsolete, and I was forced to install Win10, which went OK, together with the virtualization, so that was OK too.
Last year I inherited my daughter´s HexaCore, and transferred everything onto that machine. It even has an on-board SSD, so it is extremely fast, so things couldn´t be better.

So, apart from getting an old computer, if a modern computer is fast enough, virtualization is a solution for AF99, AA and Win98, and then planes can be built and tested on the Guest machine, and can be transferred to the Host Machine for CFS1, so perhaps this could be a viable a workaround to the limitations of modern hardware incompatibility with old software!

A few years ago I had started making CFS2 adaptations of many of my planes for a group of developers called Westfront, and the, a few months n one of the members learnt to use Gmax, and upgraded all those models with tremendous detail, and a few months ago, one of the members taught me how to run the AF99 models through ModelConverterX so that they could be imported into Gmax, and then wrote me a n FS9 conversion tutorial so that the models´ animations could be recovered, and turning wheels and some other enhancements could be added.

Anyway, I have done FS9 upgrades for my old FS98 Avro Triplanes, which I plan to upload on the FS9 library soon. As they were not warplanes, there was never any point of having CFS1 versions for them.

My current project is an FS9 upgrade of the FS98 Caproni Ca4-42 trimotor triplane, and I was also thinking that I could make a CFS1 upgrade for it. As Parts count is too high for guns and crew, I´d have to include those using SCASM. We shall see...

Must rush!
Cheers,
Stephan
 
Hello Aleatorylamp,

Glad to see you are still here as well.
Have you looked at the CFS aircraft downloads area? That needs some serious cleaning up and repair.
Seems like nothing irreplaceable was lost but descriptions are pretty badly corrupted.

So far, my old laptop has been running fine for about 4 days straight. I have not tried to power it down because I am not entirely sure it will power back up. One interesting thing is that it seems to be running fairly cool and it really ran quite hot in the past. The problem that it had is that it would not power up. The power switch would not work. It happens to be sitting right over the exhaust fan and that area was always hot to the point that it could burn you if you touched it. I believe some of the plastic of the case (HP Envy computer) was damaged due to the heat exposure over the years.
Before I take a chance on turning it off, I want to purchase some large flash drives and another USB Mouse. It is getting annoying having to swap a single mouse between machines when I have both of them running. I did one thing that was fairly smart. I stuck a very low profile flash drive on the old laptop very early and it was an archive for some of the data. Even if the HDD was not recoverable, I would still have had a substantial portion of the reference material I had collected.
That is my first goal, copy the reference material (aircraft manuals and pdf books) onto a couple large flash drives for archive and to transfer to my newer machine. Then comes the actual CFS utilities and Gauge Development stuff.
One interesting thing between the old laptop and newer laptop is that their processors generate about the same amount of heat (about 45 Watts low to about 145 Watts High). I might also want to transfer the source for a Java language Chess program I wrote a couple years back.

What had actually started me looking at my old laptop was a discussion I had in a forum about some of the research and conclusions I had reached when doing the flight model for my version of Eric Johnson's Airacobra. I had to go back to some of my reference material.I am fairly certain the research was good but even after having worked on the flight model for over 6 months, I am not so certain that some of the things I used to tune the flight model, I completely understand. I eventually managed to get the Cobra to tumble on a vertical zoom climb but not every single time and Never got it to tumble from horizontal flight.
One of the other things that came about from forum discussions is that I will probably never build the Ki-43-I Hayabusa which was the original reason I had started working with propeller tables.
That is all a long time down the road. I must first get the laptops and reference data settled, Get a Gaming Machine up and running and then try for a less ambitious Development Machine and the last part depends on what I can recover as far as AF99 Projects which is not hopeful.
I had also put a flash drive for archives on the Development Machine but I only archived projects which I thought were completed and I only archived MY projects. That means that some things such as the work on Alex Simon's Doras is probably gone and the release of the Me109Es are never going to have improvements.
In the meantime, I think I will try to build a plastic model. I haven't done that in years.
 
The newer laptop is satisflyingly fast.
I bought two 256 GB Flash Drives for use on it as archives.
There is one quite annoying thing about the new machine: Its power switch is exactly where the older laptop's PageDown key is.
You can imagine the consequences.....
 
Hi Ivan,
I remember times when laptops were always slower than towers with the same CPU. Nowadays it is striking that they can be so much faster.
Good luck with the keyboard!
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp
 
Hello Aleatorylamp,
My newest laptop is a little over a year old.
Its processor was first released about two years ago. It is a 12th Generation Core I7.
It just compares very well against a 4th Generation Core I7 from a laptop I bought in 2005.
It isn't anywhere near the hottest processor today even for a laptop. Even when new, it wasn't the fastest processor when compared to desktop machines. Desktops don't have the power limitations of battery life and cooling issues to be concerned about. Typically they are running K class processors at higher clock rates. Mine is just a H class. The other was a much older generation MQ.
Even today, the old MQ processor is fairly credible against the U class ultra low power processors that can give a battery life of a full day or so.
I figure even when brand new, the MQ had a battery life of about 4 hours maximum depending on what you were doing.
I never buy the most expensive machine around.... except once with the Athlon 1.33 GHz and that was because it wasn't that expensive.
The hottest machine typically remains the hottest machine for about 3-4 months at best before something better comes along.
Better to just get the features you want in a package that will endure the long haul and remain credible for a few years.
My laptops never cost more than about $1100 and usually it is close to $1000. The budget is higher when purchasing machines for my children.

- Ivan.
 
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