Victor 9000 / S1 'Practical Usage'

[1302L]

Hi,

I am not sure how many Victor users we have here, but I would be very interested what you are doing with your machines.

- Are you using them 'just for fun' or are you doing 'serious business' with them

As I have now got a working (@djg 's) emulation board in my HDD Model and tested a few applications, such as SuperCalc / WordPerfect and some Games like Snake, Chess and of course the SpaceWar and StarTrek games.

- Do you have any software recommendations or favorites?

Many thanks in advance,

Martin.

 

[Gary C]

We have one on display (or will again in 2 hours !) and Talking Startrek is always a winner as people just dont expect a machine of that era to talk (especially with such good quality), spacewars too is worth putting on. We have it sat next to an original IBM PC 5150 to highlight the difference.

The fractal program is good for showing its graphics capability too.

But 'serious' work, no. Just lots and lots of time keeping it working !

 

[1302L]

Thanks Gary!
This is what I learned at first, it is quite an effort to keep one machine working, I cannot imagine what gigantic task it must be, having museum of these treasures around! I am traveling to the UK a few times a year on business purpose and will definitely visit the Northwest Computer Museum when I am in proximity.

The fractal program is good for showing its graphics capability too.

I did not try this one, gets on my bucket list, but I did not find it in @pdevine 's archive.

BTW: I bought another non-working Victor a few weeks ago, rather for spares than getting it to work, so, if you're in need of anything, maybe I can help. It is a double DD-floppy machine. Interestingly equipped with the Audio Kit (for Audio input) Screen works.
Best,
Martin.

 

[pdevine]

I recently downloaded the ANSI version of Bad Apple and played it on my Victor just to see if it would work. It did, was kinda slow but displayed correctly. I got a chuckle out of that. It's the BADAPPLE.ANS file in the upper-right corner of the page. You have to load the ansi.exe driver from a DOS disk in order for it to work.

This probably is more developer geeky than you're looking for but I've been playing with understanding the hardware better. In part due to your struggle with the hard drive I've been working to get an SD card reader working on the parallel port. I'm ~85% of the way with getting a device driver in DOS working against the parallel port so you could mount an SD card as an extra drive. I plan on writing that up and publishing a how-to doc when I get finished.

I've also been meaning to download The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor to see if the MS-DOS version would be playable. The docs indicate it should work on any DOS machine. To me that's a never ending pursuit to see if I can get more software to work on it.

 

[1302L]

recently downloaded the ANSI version of Bad Apple and played it on my Victor

That sounds fantastic! I'll have to try that, how do I load the .ans file?

In part due to your struggle with the hard drive I've been working to get an SD card reader working on the parallel port.

This is even more better, going back to our initial (Software) discussion I saw something very Victor - Unfamiliar on one or two of the pictures you're posted. Has this had been prototypes?
I would be very interested in this solution!

I've also been meaning to download The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor

Does this mean that certain DOS applications ment to be for other machines (i.e. IBM) could be made functional on the Victor?

Best,

Martin.

 

[pdevine]

That sounds fantastic! I'll have to try that, how do I load the .ans file?

You have to load the ansi driver. It's on several of the DOS disks as ansi.exe. You execute that and it's a program that stays around after it's run. Then you simply run

type BADAPPLE.ANS

I would be very interested in this solution!

I'll keep you posted. I'm using standard hardware so it's easy to put together.

Does this mean that certain DOS applications ment to be for other machines (i.e. IBM) could be made functional on the Victor?

Applications that stick to the standard DOS API will work across all DOS machines. Very few pieces of software do that, as the API for writing to the screen are quite slow. Most software assumes IBM specific hardware and assumes IBM BIOS calls that don't exist on the Victor. There's a program emibm that's on this disk, which will redirect a subset of the BIOS calls to the IBM hardware and turn them into Victor calls. It won't support software that writes directly to the hardware. From my experience it will run a bunch of programs for the IBM but many will still not work. It's not 100% but it's still quite helpful. There's another emulator somewhere in the disks that does a similar thing but I'm not finding it right now.

From the docs:

EMIBM is an IBM PC emulator for the Victor 9000 computer. EMIBM emulates all
ROM BIOS interuppts of the IBM PC as well as providing many (but currently not
all) of the key combinations available to a PC user. Many IBM programs will
run using EMIBM. A furthur discussion of what will and won't run is given later
in this document.