For those who might be interested, I met with Dr. Wilcox last year at his home and took possession of a number of items relating to his books regarding the 68000 CPU and his S-100 board. I’ve unfortunately run behind on getting these items onto the ‘Net as he was gracious enough to agree that I could post scans of all of his hand-written notes, etc., so long he received proper credit. I haven’t had time to start that part of the process, but I thought I’d make a quick post of his remaining 68k S-100 board, which was wire-wrapped. I’ve just now started getting enough of a system together to be able to bring some of my boards live, but look forward to booting this board as well as the N8VEM 68k board.

(Sorry, these are a little shaky. I haven’t quite gotten the use of the new phone yet. Will post better pics with wife’s camera.)

Also, does anyone recognize this enclosure/S-100 computer? It has a plain white top and bottom, black front and punched back for several DB25 connectors. It contains a CCS Z80 CPU board and (2) CCS 16K Static Ram boards.

The RMS Titanic sunk on April 15th, 1912 with many hundreds of people still on board. May they rest in peace.

I finally had a chance to upgrade my AROS 1.4 installation on my 223II0 (Fujitsu, Alienware, Uniwill, Systemax, whatever) to the 1.5.x distro. Actually, I went ahead and re-formatted as I really didn’t have anything significant installed. Just a quick note that everything worked on 1.4 with no problems, although I had replaced the MiniPCI wireless card with an Atheros-based one (the original was Broadcom).

The first thing to note is that my installation took about 20 minutes, not hours as some report for their systems. Also, everything continued to work out of the box, with the wireless note above. Basically, if you want an AROS laptop and 3D isn’t an issue right now, this might be a really good choice. The Atheros wireless card was $4.95 including shipping. I bought the laptop new in 2003 (I think) and paid dearly…

I noticed that there is a GMA950 driver that I have not yet tried as I’m using the generic VESA driver. This doesn’t seem to be a problem so far but I’m hoping to try the other driver. My integrated video is an old version so it probably doesn’t support 3D, but I like to tinker.

If anyone expresses interest, I’ll try to grab a few screenshots. I’m going to be installing some software over the coming weeks, but so far I’ve been very pleased with the performance of AROS. One issue that I’ve had across the board is using Live Update; it doesn’t seem to work from the Internet, requiring me to download update files instead. Not a big deal, but kind of defeats the purpose.

Just in case you’ve never seen such a thing:

Unfortunately, the last 4 battleships were decommissioned several years ago. A very good friend of mine was on BB-61 when the turret was blown up. Thankfully, he survived. I think this might still have some deterrent value, even in today’s world.

For those who might not know, the Navy tried to blow up (or at least break the keel of) our ship.

Yes, you can feel the deck drop out from under you, and yes, this is not a pleasant experience. On the positive side, this is one tough son-of-a-bitch ship. Incoming missiles? No problem. 6500 men, all working towards the same goal.  BTW, can you imagine the feeling as bulkheads are blown out of place, as rivets are snapped when several hundred tons of TNT are exploded 500 ft from your ship?

This is the ship that I was stationed on for 4 years, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, CNV-71. This is not a mock-up image or an artist’s concept, but the real thing. Unlike President Wilson from so many years ago, we weren’t “too proud to fight.”

Not sure if other carriers went through this… it’s one hell of an experience.

Well, the world doesn’t seem to have become significantly worse (or extinct) simply because the Mayan calendar expired today. Apparently, it was only one of their calendars that said that, anyway.

Since determining that I couldn’t afford to have $1300+ tied up in my day-to-day laptop (MacBook), and didn’t want to be beholden to Microsoft for every single aspect of my computing, I did some research and finally ended up with a Dell Latitude D630. The machine has proven to run Xubuntu 12.12 flawlessly. I did change the original Dell MiniPCI Wireless card to a more common Intel card, but the initial boot had only the existing hardware installed and didn’t require any trickery to get it running like so many laptops do. The only specific items required for installation were the latest nVidia drivers and the wireless card drivers. Everything else worked out of the box.

The D630 in question cost $80 from eBay, with an additional $12 for the Intel wireless card, $22 for 2 extra GB of memory, and $75 for a 1 TB external hard drive that was hacked apart for the drive (cheaper to buy the external unit than an equivalent internal unit, go figure). The machine has a Core 2 Duo CPU running at 2.2 GHz, so is pretty peppy no matter what I do. The memory is a total of 4 GB, which is enough space to run VirtualBox and Windows XP, although I haven’t used it for quite some time. This laptop has been in constant use in this configuration for over 2 months, which is probably a record for me. I usually reconfigure or change about once a month, but I just don’t have time right now to do so.

Time to drink to the Mayans; their prophesies might be wrong, and they might be a blood-thirsty race, but they were quite adept at many things while they lasted.

Generally speaking, I’ve been involved in RPGs to one extent or another since I was around 11 or 12. While many people disparage them, thinking of them only in terms of Satan or nerd-dom, the reality is that I learned a great deal and expanded my horizons far beyond what would otherwise have happened.

I’ve played many different games, although I started out with the Basic and Advanced D&D books. I moved on to AD&D, Traveller, Space Opera, Boot Hill, Gamma World, and many, many others. I tend to identify myself as a geek, however, as I generally understand the inner workings of things, not just the rules and regulations associated with nerd-dom.

I’m an avid reader and RPGs only increased that vice (can reading be a vice?). Over many years, I learned a great deal from fantasy, sci-fi, and non-fiction. Much of what I learned was then expanded into further learning, often resulting in much deeper study.

As it happens, I’ve ultimately moved away from RPGs slightly as there is little time these days to engage in such activity. Truthfully, so many games exist these days that it’s a daunting task to take them all in. Frankly, some of them are crap anyway, but it’s hard to spot them sometimes without study. What amazes me is the number of games that seek to capture that D&D (Greyhawk, Original books, Red and Blue book), AD&D, or other feel. Many of the games seem to be devolving because the rules have become so overwhelming that people simply can’t deal with them. Of course, at $100+ for initial entry (basic book, monster book, and game master book) required for many games, it’s no surprise that people are backing up and re-thinking this concept. RPGs are great, but the companies tend to be blood-thirsty in their pricing.

More to come…