Hardlimit Museum

[cobito]

We close this season of the museum with new magazines and CDROMs:

Computer & Video Games

It is the oldest gaming magazine we have (it started in 81). In its first editorial, they told this:

Try to think of something more exciting than a computer. What did you come up with: A trip up the Amazon, scoring a goal for England, landing on Mars or, maybe, beating the bank at Monte Carlo? A computer will give you the chance to do any of these in your own living room.

And if you came up with some more illicit excitement, then perhaps you should be put in touch with a businessman I met who sends his programs out in plain brown wrappers!

Surprised? Then COMPUTER & VIDEO GAMES is the magazine to tell you just what you're missing out on. If you have already discovered computers you will know that their only limitation is the programmer's imagination — COMPUTER & VIDEO GAMES is out to push your imagination to its limits.

The One

A magazine for 16-bit computer games (PCs, Atari ST and Amiga) was out from 88 to 96. They presented themselves like this:

Never have games players had it so good. While game concepts will never actually improve, the means to express them has certainly come a long way since the unreliable tape-based days of the ZX81. Over the last eight years, home computers have slowly but surely got bigger and better, with more colours, more memory, better sound and faster processors, allowing ideas to be put into practice which were previously impossible to express. The established 8-bit machines seem to be on the way out, making way for the new breed of games machines — and new magazines...

Super Juegos

A generalist gaming magazine that was out from 92 until well into the 21st century. As usual, the repertoire has been cut off to the year 2000. In its first editorial, this was read:

Currently, video games can be of interest to a population spectrum between 3 and 90 years old, without distinction of sexes or other issues and the possibilities are seen as infinite. We are addressing all these potential customers with communicative concerns and eager to expand their knowledge. SUPERJUEGOS aims to be a magazine accomplice with all of them and a vehicle in which they can find the novelties of the sector and that, at the same time, helps them to overcome the difficulties of each one of them and facilitates the choice between the proposal, increasingly wide and selective.

Hobby Consolas

This magazine needs no introduction. It started in 91 and in its presentation editorial, they said this:

With this first issue of HOBBY CONSOLAS we have only marked a starting point. Our first goal is to draw the attention of the thousands of children, young people and adults who have in their home a small artifact that, although it takes very diverse forms, responds to the generic name of video game console and in which are enclosed hours of full-on fun.

The Adventurer

It was a very specific gaming magazine dedicated to Lucas Art games (the publisher of the publication). It appeared in 90 and had a semi-annual circulation. It doesn't come with a first editorial, but by looking at the covers, you can clearly see what the issue is about.

Zero Magazine

It was a British publication that was born in 89. It deals with games on multiple personal computer platforms and consoles. The OCR that comes by default is quite regular, so it will be one of those that will be given a review in the next iteration.

CDROMs of PCActual

I have found some discs from the magazine. Many are missing (especially the oldest ones), but the collection is not bad. As usual, the discs compatible with DOS and Windows 3.x can be run in the browser.

Summary

The library is the part that has grown the most. In total, we have 360 floppy disks and CDROMs (most are compact discs) and 36 magazines with a total of 2800 copies adding up to around 400,000 pages.

I wanted to have implemented that the searched text was highlighted in the magazine search engine because now it only says the number and page where the term appears, but this one has to be searched by eye, which is sometimes quite complicated if the page is dense. After last week's server update, I expected PyMuPDF to have come with Debian 10, but it seems they froze the inclusion of new packages before this library for Python appeared. As this is the only way I can think of to do it and I want to stick to official packages, I will wait for Debian 11 which I will install sometime in the summer.

So, there are no planned new features although that doesn't mean that at some point of boredom I won't tinker with it.

[cobito]

Courtesy of the people at MSDOS Club, we have received the first issue of the magazine OK PC. It is the December 1993 issue. Here you have more information about this publication.

[cobito]

The game sheets for the 99 related to the analysis of the Armada 1750 (Pentium II) have been added the game sheets, which as usual, come with the raw videos of the tests on real hardware.

[cobito]

A chapter of The Computer Chronicles dedicated to next-generation laptops has been subtitled in Spanish. The program was broadcast in 89 and it is really interesting to see the cutting-edge technologies of that time. As it is something that requires a lot of time, more episodes will be made (and a section will be created in the museum) only if this has a minimum level of success. Here I leave the video:

[Sylver]

@cobito very interesting, quite a job. Thank you very much for the contribution, I am sure that many of us will appreciate this material a lot.

Best regards!

[cobito]

Thanks @Sylver. This episode seems to have had some audience so I'll keep looking for the next one.

[cobito]

New chapter: the hard drives of 1985. Very interesting the fear that existed at that time for these units due to their low reliability:

[cobito]

It is rumored that, in exchange for a handful of peanuts, a group of monkeys has been developing a file search engine for the museum from which you can search not only the name of the file but also the content of the files.

Rumors speak of an index that will contain hundreds of gigas distributed among millions of retro files and will be released sometime in February.

[cobito]

The retro file search beta is now available. The search engine not only searches for the file name, but also the content of the files. It also searches within containers and compressed files, including the content of said files recursively. In PE and COFF format binaries, the search is also carried out between the sections of the file. If the file contains any image or video, a thumbnail of the image/video will appear. In the advanced search you have all the available options. At the moment, the search is carried out between 979 GB spread across 5.5 million retro files. The search is slower than I would like, but we will work on that. If you find what you are looking for and it is on the CDROM or floppy disk of some magazine, you can download the disk to access the file. Remember that veterans can run the TDC games from the browser from the VIP area if what you are looking for is there. The indexing is taking longer than initially planned, so we are going to premiere a test version so that those who are interested can use it and suggest changes, report bugs and so on. For now you can search among all the CD-ROMs and floppy disks of PCManía and the games up to 1994 (inclusive) of the Total Dos Collection, which is practically all the DOS games that have existed up to that date. What interests me the most at the moment is that you make suggestions/critics about how the results are presented but if you see that the advanced search is messy or some kind of explanation is necessary, do not hesitate to comment on it. Of course, bugs and additional functionalities are also welcome. In short, any comment that makes the search engine more friendly and useful is appreciated. There is no link to the search engine from the museum's front page nor is the topic being moved by RRSS and such. For the moment, do not share links because the URL format could change. This is an exclusive version for forum readers. Every one or two weeks the index will be updated and I will put a message here with the update. You can access the search engine from [disabled] EDITED: As it seems that it is not being used much, I disable it to have more resources for the indexing. When the index is completely generated, the official launch will be made. In any case, if someone wants to test it, they can send me a pm to re-enable it.

[cobito]

This time, we go to 91 to delve into the exciting world of file compression, with options for all tastes. We can see Mr. PK showing off his PKZIP, hardware acceleration in file compression and digital video editing still in its infancy:

[Fassou]

I miss the ICE progress bars

[_Neptunno_]

@fassou I think I know what you mean but just in case... ICE progress bars?

Best regards!!

[Fassou]

@_neptunno_ A file compressor, which disappeared in favor of others that were more configurable and flexible like ARJ or LHA

Salu2!

[_Neptunno_]

@fassou thanks for the clarification, I didn't know that kind of compression format

ICE: Ergonomic Compression Interface.

Greetings!!

[cobito]

The "videoteca" section has been created in the museum's library, where the subtitled videos have been compiled along with an introduction.

As for the file search engine, it is almost finished with the TDC. After that, the CDROMs of all the magazines except PCManía will be left, and after that, the official launch will take place. For now, there are 2.1TB distributed in more than 9 million files.

[Fassou]

@cobito said in Museo Hardlimit:

For now, there are 2.1TB distributed in more than 9 million files.

9 million files...

[cobito]

I bring you another chapter, this time about artificial intelligence. In 1984 this technology was still in its infancy and the programs that came out were quite simple, but they were the first steps. It was based exclusively on logical tests and was very far from what is seen today. But that's where it all began. We see a couple of representative characters, like the creator of Lisp.

[cobito]

Well, I think the file search engine has reached a sufficiently mature level. In the end, it didn't turn out as I had imagined because of the enormous size it has reached.

It can be accessed from here.

Only the CD-ROMs of PCManía and Total DOS Collection have been indexed. I think it's an acceptable selection of programs, tools, drivers and games.

The search results are divided into these sections:
· Thumbnail: a thumbnail image of the file, if available.
· Location: places where the file was found. From here, you can navigate the directory tree using the museum's file explorer.
· Downloads: options to download the file. Normally, you will have to download a larger file (an iso, a zip, etc.) to get to the file you are looking for.
· Content: a snippet of the ascii content of the file. In binaries, you will often see meaningless content mixed with character strings.
· Other details: Size, MIME, date, specific details and an MD5 hash.

One thing to keep in mind is that the search time is quite high. It's a chore, but for now I can't do much to improve it.

If I see that the topic has moderate success, I will look for ways to expand the content and improve the speed.

[Sylver]

@cobito Many thanks for the piece of work, mayor

A question, the elevated search time ¿is it due to the storage medium used? ¿Or is it a more complex issue? To think of ideas that could help...

Best regards!

[cobito]

@sylver The main reason is that the server has been busier than usual for a few weeks now because of the video section.

The index is quite large and resides entirely in RAM. When there are no transcoders running, the wait time is acceptable, but when there are a couple of them, it becomes too slow. Looking at the behavior of the processes when there are one or the other, what I see is that there is a lack of bandwidth to memory.

I think this is one of the cases where DDR5 (despite its high latencies) would come in handy, but it will have to wait.