Notices by wohali 💯 (wohali@octodon.social), page 19

@InspectorCaracal @ben Oh, sure, it's not "cross the entire map just to get a rock and bring it back...20 times" bad like some of the Castlevania or JRPG titles I've played.

@ben To @InspectorCaracal 's point, though, there's a lot of grind in GW2 as well. Even if you ignore the super-grindy things like fractals, dungeons and raids, you've still got artificially time-gated things that are clearly unpopular with the player base (Skyscale).

@libc :eyethink: :thaenkin: :thounking: :thonking: :thonkery:

@matt I was never good at DKJ. :( Controls always felt super fiddly to me.

@matt Nice, not bad!

Here's the boot output of a WICAT (prior to the OS actually loading...which I haven't done yet, since I spent all day imaging the hard drives. 9GB of image files!)

Booting...
Valid ports are: 0 1 2 3
System clock rate is 16.7 Mhz
Memory test...
Good RAM detected: 8192K
System clock is good.
Calendar clock is running.

@bunnyhero they're really rare!

The biggest machines I have are the S-2255 and S-2275 machines. These are towers that slide out at the back, with room for 6 *full-height* 5.25" drives or 12 half-height. 2 bays are exposed (for tape drives, etc.)

The backplanes in this are double size (12 slots). Most machines have upgraded (68020, 16MHz) CPUs with multi-megabytes of RAM (4-16MB). This one has 28 serial ports and 3 parallel ports + a SCSI controller!

(4/4)

The next size up machines are S-1250s. They look a bit like PC-ATs or similar. They have the same number of backplane slots, but no built-in terminal. All comms are via serial port or ARCNet (or, if you're extremely lucky, Ethernet).

All the WICATs I have are Multibus based. Very late models had a custom backplane.

Here's a photo of the 2 I have, and the backpanel of one. Yes, that's 16 serial ports and 2 parallel ports. Sorry, it's not colour corrected (yet).

(3/4)

The smallest and first WICATs were the S140/S150s. I have 2 not-complete S150s; I have the MFM drives but no controllers (yet), and no keyboards. Here's a picture. Keyboard plugs in underneath on the left side.

so the machines I have received include an enormous pile of WICAT machines.

These were the first 68000-based machines ever made.

They run an in-house developed OS that feels very much like VMS had a love child with MS-DOS. (More details soon).

(1/4)

@ciaby Yes!

@libc @matt @bhtooefr @hirojin not that I'm aware of?

@yomimono https://archive.org/details/qnx1989 might be this!

@yomimono will do, but it's probably this:

https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/1989-demo

@libc BZZZZZT 😉 🐽

Shipment slightly delayed...so I decided to desolder some surface mount ICs (20-pin SOT).

These used to take me ~45 mins each, so I figured I'd get half of them done before the delivery showed up.

I just did all 4 in under an hour. I'm *definitely* getting better at this. Only lifted one pad, and it's NC, so who cares.

My tools: handheld hot air/desoldering gun, stainless steel wire, tweezers. Clean-up: desoldering copper braid, flux pen, cotton bud, isopropyl alcohol.

✅