Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 44 posts

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

#31

Post by ForOldHack »

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…

Pay the tax of - reliability problems, ever one came with a cable, where is the termination, each had power, need another power strip...etc, etc, etc.

as well, as Wide SCSI, so all your 50 pin stuff needed to get upgraded to 68pin...

Bernoulli... ultra reliable. Zip? Clock was ticking on the click of death. Bernoullis were not the fastest, but they were the quietest and most reliable.

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

#33

Post by HerbManic »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #4

The Wii U walked so that the Switch could run. I'm glad to see renewed interest in it. Now if we only had a decent emulator. I know Cemu exists but the compatibility of most games I want to play with it is atrocious.

When the Wii came out was also really close to when the Ouya released as well. It was funny to see that a tablet/phone processor (Tegra 3) had a more powerful CPU than the Wii U, it was only lacking in the GPU department. But you could easily see that gap closing quickly.

But it sort of became obvious, the Wii U gamepad was just waiting for powerful enough mobile technology so that it could break free of the console. And then the Switch happened and I was so glad that Nintendo didn't miss this opportunity.

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

#34

Post by firecall »

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…

SCSI my old friend!

Much of the black magic art of Mac support back in the 80s and 90s was getting SCSI chains sorted out!

Sorting out the device order, swapping out cables, that sort of thing.

I once spoke to a client who said they’d been happily running a single external SCSI drive hooked up to two Macs at the same time….

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

#35

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

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…

As far as I understand it in retrospect (having grown up in a strictly PC household and later investigating "retro" platforms where SCSI was standard), SCSI was not inherently expensive. It's more that for PC platforms, ATA provided a hack that was cheaper at the time, which led to a bifucation of the market. ATA roughly turned HDDs into a subset of the ISA bus, which in turn originated as a buffered version of the CPU bus. That led to SCSI being at a premium on PC platforms because the target market was limited to customers for whom ATA wasn't good enough (mainly because they wanted more drives or longer cables than the thin translations of ATA could support).

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

#36

Post by firecall »

ForOldHack wrote: post #31
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…

Pay the tax of - reliability problems, ever one came with a cable, where is the termination, each had power, need another power strip...etc, etc, etc. as well, as Wide SCSI, so all your 50 pin stuff needed to get upgraded to 68pin... Bernoulli... ultra reliable. Zip? Clock was ticking on the click of death. Bernoullis were not the fastest, but they were the quietest and most reliable.

The kids today will never know the horrors!

I used to have SCSI Terminators in my tech support bag. I still have some somewhere…

And the size and thickness of some of those SCSI cables!

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

#37

Post by scw »

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…

As a kid, my first machine was a 486 DX2 66. My dad mandated we buy on value, and I scoured the MicroTimes looking for the best possible deal, finally settling on a machine from a small independent shop off of South Bascom Ave in San Jose. The office smelt like burnt coffee and exhaust from burning-in PCs, but the machine was awesome: a PCI video card, and as we later found out, a built-in SCSI adapter which meant we needed to throw in another $240 for an Adaptec SCSI controller when we later upgraded to Pentium.

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

#38

Post by yial »

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 have fond memories of SCSI. I by chance had purchased a workstation, using almost all of the money I had saved at the time as a kid. While dated, and late in the SCSI days, the SCSI HDD and AGP video slot seemed mind blowing in their capabilities.

Though, I remember a lot of turmoil at times getting certain software to work on the processor configuration and the originally installed video card which was distinctly not meant for gaming despite huge amounts of memory. (Huge in context of the times..)

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

#39

Post by tubetime »

Interestingly enough, the YTer found and used my photo of the 8" Bernoulli cartridge.

These things are really hard to find nowadays! When they came out, most PCs did not even have a hard drive, and those that did typically only had a 5MB or 10MB unit. The Bernoulli cartridge stored 10MB (later 20MB) and you got two drives in a single enclosure! With the optional boot ROM installed on the host adapter card (an odd version SCSI that was closer to the predecessor, SASI) you could boot your OS off one drive and put data on the second disk. The biggest disadvantage was that it was slower than a regular hard drive.

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

#40

Post by drmpeg »

tubetime wrote: post #39

Interestingly enough, the YTer found and used my photo of the 8" Bernoulli cartridge. These things are really hard to find nowadays! When they came out, most PCs did not even have a hard drive, and those that did typically only had a 5MB or 10MB unit. The Bernoulli cartridge stored 10MB (later 20MB) and you got two drives in a single enclosure! With the optional boot ROM installed on the host adapter card (an odd ver…

I was the project engineer for the Air Force Space Command / NORAD DSP satellite ground network back in the 80's. The system used the 10MB 8" Bernoulli drive and cartridges to store the early warning message traffic. The system was installed in 1988 and was decommissioned around 2005.

I'm not sure if they used the 8" cartridges all the way to 2005, but I can find out. I'm still friends with the original system maintainer. I pivoted to video compression in 1993 and lost track of the program, but we found each other on Facebook in 2010.

Post reply on HN