Not much time to work on things today. I spent about an hour in the basement, moving stuff around to make room to finally test TV sets (yeah, I haven’t done that yet). Don’t expect problems, but I’d rather be safe that sorry. So, I now have a space to plop down TVs, plus ‘em in, and test them out. Yeah!
I also made a slight change to the Strawberry iMac – I remembered to change it’s IP address – don’t want any network conflicts during the Quake LAN.
Back to studying…
I had some time early this morning, and I mean early, so I finally got around to hooking up and testing the Quake LAN. For now I have just four machines, three from last year and a brand new one for this year (even though it is an old machine). It was nice to get the LAN running on a new router, with only one hiccup for the hours that I tested it (hiccup – as in one machine crash – it happens). I’m still shooting for an all iMac G3 LAN this year, so I have more machines to work on, but at least I’ve got it officially started.
So at this point in time, the Quake LAN is ‘four-player’. This should go up to at least ‘eight’ by show time, but I won’t make announcements on that until the equipment is ready for it. Just glad to get it started!
Promised to post something everyday till the MGC show. However, for today, I just put some more RAM into a Bondi iMac and made sure it worked by playing Quake. I actually finished the first part of the game! Never got that far before, which was rather cool. I’ll hopefully be doing LAN testing early Sunday, or late, depending on how things go.
More to come soon…
The Vectrex is a fairly popular video game machine in regards to it being in the Underdog Chamber exhibit. I’ve decided once again to display the Vectrex system for the MGC ’10 show. Testing was easy, as it has been for years. Plugged it in and it ran just fine. I’ll have a series of game for this at this show, not yet determined. The old B/W Vectrex is such a cool and unique system from the early 80′s.
On the side, I finished testing a new video cable for the TI 99/4A, which turns the signal from the TI computer into video signals for my TV sets. This way I do not have to deal with that somewhat large RF box, which is a good thing in my book. It does give off a bit of audio feedback though, but it isn’t bad enough for me to consider it not worthy of use.
I also bought another old iMac yesterday from a nice guy out in Waukesha (off of Cragslist). It was a great deal on a Dalmation G3 iMac (thanks Keven). I’ll post a picture of it some other time, after I’ve opened it up and gave it a thorough going over. I hope to have this in the show this year, as it is a rather unique looking older iMac.
One other thing too. I’ve decided not to have the Atari Jaguar in the UC area this year. I’ve been wanting to, but it will be in two areas of the show, one which will possibly be right outside my area. If this is the case, I’d rather not have it then this year. Not a big deal, as I’ve got plenty of systems to choose from. More on that soon (I hope).
I finally went and pulled out the old Texas Instruments TI 99/4A computer that I bought in 2004. I originally bought it for the show, and at last got around to actually testing the system. While I have only three working games (the 4th one was DOA), I am putting the TI 99/4A into the 2010 Underdog area anyway. Why? Because it is a real underdog computer system, and I’ve wanted to have it on display for a while now. The lack of games is not an issue with me (but I hope to pick up a few more at the MGC show). I’ve got three good games, and that works for me. TI Invaders is one of them, and it is a very good Space Invaders clone, with a few unique twists of its own.
Welcome to the Underdog Chamber Mr. TI 99/4A!
