Xerox Alto Restoration Part 14 - playing Astroroids
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- Опубліковано 18 лют 2017
- Xerox PARC graciously loaned us a couple historical Alto disc platters. We setup to explore their contents, and find as usual pretty surprising stuff for a 1970's machine (Ethernet phone anyone?). We end up trying a few games.
- Наука та технологія
Impressive! That was actually my disk pack! I am amazed it still runs. When I was there I worked on a fair number of communications things, including the "1822" interface to the arpanet IMP and DARPA packet radios, and on Etherphone, which, yes, was a real Ethernet telephone circa 1982. (And Bell Labs, MIT, ISI, and Lincoln Labs were doing voice over network research then too.). I;ve got an 1822 board in the basement, if you have an IMP :)
Awesome, the author himself! Lawrence, can we get in touch? It would be nice to recreate that audio interface. Can you send me a UA-cam personal message, or just go through Al Kossow. And yes, CHM has an IMP or two...
There are (at least were, a year or so ago) a couple of etherphone/POTS interfaces in the PARC display area. If I remember correctly it used a down-rated ethernet at about 1-1.5 Mb/s (?). Another source of Etherphone lore is Dan Swinehart who is also around the area.
+Nick Briggs: They are still there. A couple Etherphones in the PARC lobby museum. I had never noticed them before!
I Hope Bill Gates is Paying you Royalties for all the Software he Stole from you Guys!! 😉 What a Fraud & Vile Genocidal Maniac Gates is 😁
Ethernet, laser printing, optical mouse, graphical user interfaces.... Xerox could have become a giant like Apple!
Unfortunately, they couldn't.
Remember the Apple Lisa?
It was a disaster! Too expensive.
So was this computer.
No one would buy it back then.
That's why the government and similar organizations were the only ones that could get this.
We're not talking about several thousand dollars.
We're talking about, several hundreds of thousands of dollars!
(Don't forget about inflation.)
_Taking inflation into account, it would cost about $111000 US, today._
The only way one could possibly make this stuff affordable back then would have been to do full vertical integration like SpaceX. They’d have needed to have possibly a silicon fab, but surely chip design, hardware design, mechanical, software, everything really under one roof and tightly integrated and rapidly taking advantage of ongoing development to cross-pollinate across what would otherwise be engineering “departments”.
And it would only be cheap if the investors were willing to amortize the R&D costs over a long time. It’d take a massive investment to develop, and would need people in charge who could imagine the final product well and maintain the course.
The only way you could do this stuff and be competitive would have been to have a fully integrated engineering system, where you dogfood everything and use your own prototypes to speed up development. They’d need in-house CAD and EDA tools, software development tools, etc.
They’d have literally needed someone to imagine and implement the equivalent of git (the software versioning system), for crying out loud. You can’t do fast development in big teams without proper version control. I have read about some solutions companies had in-house at that time, and it was extremely crude. Better than nothing, but today’s software development environment is generations ahead of what they had.
You could buy such tools as mutually incompatible systems from various vendors, but it was a mess. Nothing was standard. You could get a PCB layout system (this meant hardware + software!) from vendor A and then a 2D CAD from vendor B and they were nothing alike. Completely different key bindings, command flows, menus, file structures, etc. Often completely different microarchitectures of the underlying processor units, etc.
Today, if you’re quick and have experience, you can make a rudimentary C compiler in about a month, and can use that to bootstrap other tools. But you are starting with an already working dev environment full of tools that make that easy. Using these tools to re-develop it all from scratch is reasonable. But now go back in time and see how it was done on some minicomputers (think PDP) one would use to develop on back then. It was comparatively arduous. Everything took much longer. All the while you’re trying to develop something that has to be cheap and ubiquitous.
Oh god, I'm stilll wishing I had one of these now. Imagine if a few of these in perfect working order made their way into the hands of some hardcore demoscene people... we'd get demos and probably a few killer app games for the platform.
I can't wait for someone to re-implement an Alto on an FPGA and attach a portrait LCD of the same resolution.
As a hardcore demoscene person, it seems to me that that Alto's RAM-based microcode that also handles screen and I/O has a lot of potential that is vastly underused by the existing software. I was a bit concerned about the availability of audio, but there indeed seems to be a DAC and even some music software available.
Surprisingly fast machine for this era.
Very impressive.
amazingly a lot of old machines of the area appear very fast, the sad reality is we just over-engineer a lot of our code these days, to abuse the vastly copious amounts of system resources available in modern machines (by comparison) where as back then, software engineers had to think very carefully about how they wrote their applications, and for the most part it was written against the hardware, rather than the comparably inefficient and sloppy 'general purpose' methods seen in todays software. (because we have the resources to compensate for the increased croft)
I agree Ron. On my page, I started experimenting with GeoOS (GeoWorks specifically) on an old 8086 computer of mine, and was shocked to see a machine with only 8MHz, 640KB RAM, and a 2GB fixed drive, running a full GUI with Motif, multi-tasking, paging to disk when RAM is low, and with 16 colors in full VGA resolution, with reasonable speed, that I would be perfectly happy to use even today.
The code was just so optimized that it really shows what you can do, just like I see here with this Alto machine. It's a testament to what these machines can really do.
Makes me want to play old asteroids again.
Just so modern, despite it's age. I hope you were able to back up the disk info.
Xerox ALTO, helping people waste time since 1979:)
Actually the Xerox Alto was first introduced in 1973.
The Alto 1 is from 1973, but it was said that this is an Alto 2 from 1978 in the first video.
The ultimate piece for one's retro gaming collection.
I always love your videos, please don't stop making them! :-)
Sean Sallis-Lyon Agreed 100%!
Woah! The Asteroid is EXACTLY what became Minefield on the Vectrex in 1982 oO Impressive. :D
What an enjoyable series. Thank you for taking the time to film!
The most expensive Vectrex ever.
Alto uses a raster, not vectors to do games.
Hakemon Mike indeed.....but the resolution is pretty damn high so it does a great job at mimicking vectors....look at the explosion of the players ship at the end....very nice.
They copied the Galatian graphics very good as well....
Clean Graphics for mid '70's Heaps Better than Atari 2600 I had as a Kid!😁👍
I feel like this should have been mainstream in the 80's - we're 15 years behind where we should be.
Actually we were behind by more like 30 years.
Today we've pretty much, caught up to what was created on the Xerox Star.
Ethernet speeds surpassed the slowest Xerox 1976 (3 Mbit/s) speeds in 2003, and we finally surpassed 10 Mbit/s (1980) in 2006.
Also, you have to take into account, that it would've been impossible to push this technology to the masses, back then.
It was just, too damn expensive.
People wouldn't have been able to buy this.
That's why, only the government and similar organizations could get their hands on the Alto.
stunning machine for sure.
Great series of videos.
0:18
Now that's what I call disk cleanup.
Hopefully you were able to archive those disk packs! Great finds!
The computer history museum has archived bits from a couple hundred Alto disk packs. Al Kossow and I built a thing to transfer data from an Alto over a parallel port to a PC, since no 3 Mb ethernet cards were handy.
We need to dig these out. Carl's disk tool is actually developed in collaboration with Al with the Museum archive in mind (the orange Diablo we use for developing to tool is from Al), so we can archive more packs.
Amazing!
One more time Amazing job
3 mb/s is a very fast network speed given the size of the files at the time. It's worth pointing out that Donald Davies who developed (independently and concurrently with Paul Baran) packet switched networking at the National Physical Laboratory also had telephone calls over a packet switched network quite a bit prior to the Alto.
Awesome. I didn't use an Alto but spent plenty of time playing with Mesa on the Star. The Star had an interesting design feature... the off switch was almost exactly where your knee was if you put the unit under the desk so quite often you turned it off by accident at a crucial moment. Lovely engineering for the time.
For your next trick you should see if you can get a Dorado running. There may still be a pair at PARC, unless they've been shipped to the Xerox Archives. At least one system was operational before it went into storage.
Yes, we are very aware of them (through the designer who donated them!). Unfortunately they have been shipped to the Xerox Archives storage in the East Coast. It would be nice to get them going again.
I swear, that thing was SO ahead of it's time. It's all the base functionalities of a modern computer. Xerox where fools to not know what they had.
Amazing the first get functions
Asteroids was released in November 1979 by Atari and Galaxians released October 1979 by Namco (Japan) but here you are playing both games on the Alto from a disc that appears to be from the same time period!!!
Does the Alto time stamp it's programs? because it would be very interesting to find out who programmed the games for the Alto, especially if the disc is prior to October 1979 because that would mean someone at Xerox programmed those two games for the Alto BEFORE Atari and Namco released their versions on coin-op machines.
The bottom left hand side of the screen whilst Astroroids is running shows Programmed by Clinton W Parker.
Amazin!
5:30 Far less weird than you might think. Back in the day of the good old 386, none of us had any hope in hell to buy even an Adlib sound card, let alone a SoundBlaster or (oh gosh!) a Gravis Ultrasound - so my first experience of sound coming out of a computer (beside the built-in beeper) was a stereo set of parallel port-attached DACs, commonly known as COVOX at the time, for software that supported it. It played absolutely magnificent music - from MOD (and S3M and XM) files (all of which I still have because of course I do...), seeing as how mp3 hasn't been invented yet and storing actual digitized sound longer than a few seconds on a PC was just NOT a thing anyone did.
Great insight into the incredible Alto and your ongoing efforts to bring it back to full working order. I wonder what other delights are hiding at Xerox PARC waiting to be rediscovered? Can't wait for the next installment!
PARC, not Park.
douro20
Auto-type, NOT intentional.
Flyback lines showing on screen at 8:53 may want to turn screen voltage down!
very nice!
Impressive games for a alto
Marc mus be teasing, he certainly knows what a Xerox/Diablo printer is?
Now you need a Xerox 7000 laser printer to go along with it. Maybe a 4045 or possibly a 4030II?
I see in the upper left corner of the screen "Executive II". Interesting that this term was used in the beginning.
Next a Xerox Executive 8000 or 8090 server to store all of the archived disk packs on?
How about Flyswatter? Which was used to help new mouse users learn to manipulate the mouse.
I have whatever I was able to grab off of OSBU South many years ago and whatever was give to me on floppy from a friend at XBS Culver City when all of their 6085-1s were pulled.
If only there was a way I could read the Documenter format floppies, I could email someone the files. :(
I'm sure Digibarn also has much of this software too.
Flyswatter is on one of the cartridges.
Alright you've got yourself a subscriber.
Astro-roids? That'll get you banned from Olympic competition and give you the rages for sure.
Love this series! Is there any effort to convert discs into a more reliable medium? That device to read and write discs is awesome!
One of the guys built a tool that can read disk packs
Wish i had access to one of these things, could build a usb adapter and filesystem driver, plug-n-play disk pack
Even back in those days, PC gaming was better than console gaming.
In text mode it looks like that one scanline is missing.
It sure does. We have not yet looked into why that is.
Awesome, xerox alto introduced in 1970's. Why IBM came with their PC using DOS instead full graphics UI like this?
xtalplanet Because the possibility didn’t imply feasibility :( Nobody would buy a PC that had features of an Alto. It was out of reach of the market. The original PC DOS ran on 128k of RAM. That’s less RAM than this Alto got for the screen frame buffer. Text is all you could do. Could IBM have done much better at the original PC software? Sure! But that’s the benefit of hindsight.
Is there enough memory to implement Postscript?
Yes. While they were at it they invented the first laser printer and the language that went with it, all driven by an Alto. The page describing language had another name (escapes me right now). One of the guys that invented the language was named John Warnock. He quit Xerox, founded Adobe and it became PostScript. As they say, the rest is history.
. . Those Games are of such high quality? The Asteriods looks like vector graphics (although I assume it must be bitmapped) - Who wrote these games though? Xerox Parc Programmers? If so it must have taken them a while and for games hardly no-one ever saw . . .
The whole segment of "Astroroids," I'm here humming the music from the Atari version.
I LOVE YOU
Pretty good for a system which had no dedicated graphics hardware, only a frame buffer whose content represented individual pixels on the display.
douro20 Modern GPUs aren’t dedicated to graphics either. They are just massively parallel CPUs that you can program to do graphics. Nobody actually puts Bresenham algorithm nor a rectangle fill directly in the digital logic :) But you can do an absurd number of rectangle fills with fragment shaders per each frame :)
Alto was quite ahead of its time, in that its system was similar: it has a microprogram executor - with code in RAM! - that implements the actual processor behavior, so you can make it do whatever you need at a low level, not unlike in a GPU. There’s no need to even have a framebuffer, the microcode can render text mode directly from a character buffer, and I bet you could implement a basic line-oriented text layout that reads something like a buffer with markdown text and paints it in real time, so that there’s neither a framebuffer nor even a rectangular character buffer.
They bit-bang the screen pixels (or is it scanlines?) using microcode, and could implement a crude approximation of a modern GPU’s pipeline. Monochrome fragment shaders :) A modern PC does just fine doing rendering in the primary CPU (I don’t mean the integrated graphics either). It’s only when the number of primitives or per-primitive operations explodes that the main CPU gets too slow. Remember DOOM? Original Quake? Low triangle/quad counts, simple texture mapping, no lighting etc. That was all done on a framebuffer, using the good old x86 to render everything into said framebuffer.
When you zoomed in it seems like there's some lines missing in the text. Does the screen on the Alto interlace by any chance?
Yes, it's interlaced.
Interesting, thanks for confirming that.
Any tips on cleaning hard drive plates? Were you using simply a dry cloth?
Not any cloth. I was using lint free cleanroom wipes, clean room grade. Guaranteed free of contaminants. They are somewhat hard to find and worth a fortune (Grainger has them). Not dry either, but using isopropanol. Blow dry with a can of purified compressed air.
Awesome. Thank you. I need to take care of my Lisa 2 Widget and this info will come handy.
Did you ever solve the issues you were having copying discs in the previous video?
We were working on it today. We got a better logic analyzer setup and could finally pinpoint exactly where things go wrong in the word task microcode (the task that reads the disk data) when it tries to read the disks written with Carl's FPGA tool. Not solved yet, but getting close.
More games than the Switch
I probably missed the explanation on an earlier video but what's with the scan artifacts? specially the yellow blotch and the flashing
Happens any time you try to video a display, unless they're sync-locked. Not just an Alto thing.
Yup, mismatch between the scan rate of the CRT and the camera shutter. The phosphor is white when activated, and fades to a green as it gets dim. The CRT in my Apple Lisa does the same thing.
Interestingly enough, modern cameras (even those in cellphones) are plenty capable of sync-locking to a CRT display, using solely the microcontroller firmware that controls the camera chip, except nobody bothered to actually write the firmware to do that (AFAIK). All the hardware is there to support it.
This gigantic protection mechanism should have been mignaturized for floppy disks , they would have been more robust (and more expensive)
it reminds me of a ZIP disk, those were robust
Since Altos weren't really consumer machines, I assume the games were homebrewed, unofficial ports, possibly created by PARC employees?
It should have been called hemroroids. 8)
I wish so much i could see this file systems , and this source codes ! anyone have this ?
A significant portion of the source code has already been donated by Xerox and released here:
www.computerhistory.org/atchm/xerox-alto-source-code/
So, I'm here in Rochester, NY, and I see on the pinball game playfield: "Parker, Rochester, NY". I don't see a Parker pinball manufacturer in the pinball database, and this game was written by Gene Ball, according to history-computer.com. Anyone have clues about the meaning of that? (I suppose I could drop an email to Gene and ask...)
Actually, apparently Gene was a grad student at the University of Rochester in the mid 70s, who had Altos.... hm
This game was developed at University of Rochester. Avie Tevanian (destined to become CTO of Apple) developed a few others while he was there too, I think we demonstrate it in one of the videos.
Scott Lawrence My dad Clinton Parker actually wrote the pinball game you are talking about while at Rochester.
Here is a cool article on early gaming and hacking in Silicon Valley and Xerox PARC www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html
You wiped the drive? You mean like with a cloth? - Hillary
stonent shut up
Isn't just called PARC now? I thought Xerox sold them off like fifteen years ago.
It is now named - PARC, a Xerox Company
Interesting, they must've bought them back. In the early 2000s, they were a pretty crappy copier company, and ever since all their major assets are services. They probably bought back PARC at a discount
PARC went from being part of the corporate research and technology group of Xerox to being a wholly owned subsidiary. Nothing has changed since then, except that Xerox started to insist that it be "PARC, a Xerox Company" instead of just "PARC".
Ah, I run into Ken Shirriff again in my old computers youtube vortex. His Hackaday talk will no doubt interest anyone here who hasn't seen it: ua-cam.com/video/aHx-XUA6f9g/v-deo.html
who tf had made dislike
Can you ask for permission and publish full images of those disks?
Maybe get a virtual Alto we can try with the disk images loaded.
There is an emulated Alto out there, the SALTO and there are some disk images included.
It's a little buggy but it is Open Source so maybe it will get better
toastytech.com/guis/salto.html
Use Josh Dersh's Contralto instead, from the Living Computer Museum website. Very high quality emulator:
www.livingcomputers.org/Discover/News/ContraltoSetup.aspx
Thanks for the advice Marc
What about publishing those disk images?
Astro roids sounds like alien steroids.
But can it run crysis ? xd
Yes