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Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

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Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#21

Post by xattt »

toast0 wrote: post #19
xattt wrote: post #8

> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written. What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed. SCSI peripherals came with a prem…

Incidentally, the early parallel port ZIP drives were really SCSI drives that had a parallel port to scsi converter on the board. Not that you could do anything cool with them, but pricing them lower than one with a SCSI interface is understanding the marketplace rather than anything else. The SCSI drives had two extra switches on the back, but used the same db25 connectors as the parallel port drives. People with Ma…

You just unlocked a memory of the dual-personality PP/SCSI Zip drive that apparently sucked at both.

It’s amazing how much these problems went away when high speed USB came along.

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#22

Post by wyantb »

jedbrooke wrote: post #14
wyantb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Dolphin? From what I understand it's the best in class emulator on that front.

Dolphin only supports Wii games, not Wii U. This is part of the reason the Wii U flopped is that people thought it was just a peripheral for the original Wii and not a separate new console. Dolphin is indeed fantastic for Wii/gamecube games though

...I totally forgot about that intermediary console, you're right. Bolsters your original point entirely, hah.

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#23

Post by ramgine »

kalleboo wrote: post #7
everyone wrote: post #2

I used zip disks quite a bit (as an architect) and never heard the click of death. Before usb sticks, zip disk was the only way to move medium to large files, other than burn a cd.

I used my paper route money to add storage to my Mac 660AV. My options were a SCSI hard disk, SyQuest or a Zip drive. I went with the latter. Since it was SCSI it wasn't appreciably slower than the internal HDD so I had a disk with MS Office installed, disk with all my games, etc that I'd swap out for what I was doing. I was happy with my choice a year later when SyQuest had gone out of business and I had 4x as much…

Wow that’s a crazy hack. I never heard of it.

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#24

Post by oasisbob »

everyone wrote: post #2

I used zip disks quite a bit (as an architect) and never heard the click of death. Before usb sticks, zip disk was the only way to move medium to large files, other than burn a cd.

Magneto Optical discs were also somewhat popular in this era.

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#25

Post by wincy »

xattt wrote: post #8

> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written. What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed. SCSI peripherals came with a prem…

I remember what a big deal the Western Digital Raptor drives were since they were 10,000RPM on SATA instead of SCSI. All my teenage friends and I wanted a SCSI drive or a Raptor in the early 2000s (I had very nerdy friends). It was a huge boost for an early 2000s gaming PC until SSDs came along and absolutely obliterated them.

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#26

Post by kmeisthax »

jervant wrote: post #15
xattt wrote: post #8

> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written. What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed. SCSI peripherals came with a prem…

And yet practically every Mac after 1986 had SCSI onboard. Why the PC industry didn't embrace it to avoid having to wait until USB is beyond me...

SCSI cost too much for the extremely cost-conscious PC market of the early 90s. They'd already consolidated down all the IBM PC legacy buses (e.g. parallel, serial, AT keyboard interface etc) into a single chip that cost peanuts.

USB started off as a way to replace the legacy buses with something even cheaper, so naturally the PC industry bit. It wasn't really even supposed to do SCSI things; that was Firewire's job. We didn't get equivalent performance out of USB up until version 3.0 which isn't even the same bus as USB 2.0.

The underlying tension is that there are two different kinds of computers that want to do different things with their I/O:

1. The "SCSI philosophy" is to make peripherals that feel like extensions of the high-end computer you just bought.

2. The "USB philosophy" is to give you the cheapest connection you can get to a thing that works.

A good example of this philosophical divide is daisy-chaining. SCSI, Firewire, and Thunderbolt all supported it because it's the premium way of doing things. USB makes you buy a hub separately if you want more connectivity. Or, alternatively, you can look at this as SCSI and it's successors forcing you to buy a hub with every device you plug into them.

You might think that USB won out, but really, this debate still rages on, because Thunderbolt wound up being rolled up into USB-C and USB4. So now USB has to be both a cheap and premium bus - hell, Thunderbolt even used daisy-chaining instead of hubs on USB! This is why USB-C cables and devices are a mess; they designed USB-C specifically so you could flood the market with cheap 2.0-only cables that are only ever going to be used for power; and super-premium USB4/DP cables for plugging your laptop into a $200 laptop dock just to get back the ports you should have had anyway.

And, I must stress this enough, most of those fancy USB-C altmodes never made it to desktop anyway. I think you can buy Thunderbolt cards that will mux DisplayPort but you have to use a wrap-around cable to go from your GPU to your TB card like we're back in the 3dfx Voodoo2 era or something. Most of USB-C's single cable functionality is super-premium stuff that required a level of internal integration that desktop never committed to. Which is, again, very SCSI-brained, except now the cheap consumer stuff has it and the expensive modular desktops don't.

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#27

Post by zerocrates »

xattt wrote: post #8

> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written. What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed. SCSI peripherals came with a prem…

I remember the gradual shift in Linux both due to internal changes and changes to what machines generally had, from IDE/ATAPI/ATA to Serial ATA, meaning things switched over to the SCSI subsystem and your old familiar hda drive was now at sda, and maybe you needed to use sdparm instead of hdparm, that kind of thing. And I think even if you still had an old ATA system that eventually got pulled under the SCSI umbrella internally as well.

Though now there's separation again with NVME being its own separate system.

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#28

Post by bitwize »

jervant wrote: post #15
xattt wrote: post #8

> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written. What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed. SCSI peripherals came with a prem…

And yet practically every Mac after 1986 had SCSI onboard. Why the PC industry didn't embrace it to avoid having to wait until USB is beyond me...

Because the peecee was cobbled-together cheap crap, that's why.

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#29

Post by doubled112 »

xattt wrote: post #21
toast0 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, the early parallel port ZIP drives were really SCSI drives that had a parallel port to scsi converter on the board. Not that you could do anything cool with them, but pricing them lower than one with a SCSI interface is understanding the marketplace rather than anything else. The SCSI drives had two extra switches on the back, but used the same db25 connectors as the parallel port drives. People with Ma…

You just unlocked a memory of the dual-personality PP/SCSI Zip drive that apparently sucked at both. It’s amazing how much these problems went away when high speed USB came along.

And then UASP (USB attached SCSI protocol) brought them back.

Or has the situation improved lately?

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#30

Post by jakedata »

Minor nitpick - the Bernoulli 90 MB removable disk was released in 1991. The Bernoulli 44 MB was late 80s. I liked them a lot better than the SyQuest drives with their hard platters which seemed much more failure prone. I still have a stack of 90 and 150 MB disks and a couple 150 MB drives. They were considerably faster than the internal 20 MB ESDI drives in the IBM PS/2 systems I backed up. I saved a stack of the classic IBM keyboards when we decommissioned all that stuff. Still using them too.
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