Old Vintage Computing Research

Yes, here at Old VCR we live in the past, when RISC Unix workstations still ruled the earth like large boxy tentaculous Cthulhus. Oh, sure, if you wanted a modern equivalent you could just buy a Raptor POWER9 like the one I'm typing on now. But around here even PowerPC is too pedestrian of an architecture. We need something unique. That's more like it! A keyboard, mouse, a NIC, VGA output, 16MB of RAM and a whole gig (you wish) of read-only optical drive space with a 200MHz Hitachi SuperH SH-4 CPU faulting its paltry 8K of I-cache and 16K of D-cache non-stop. Now freshly refurbished, its cooling fan runs louder than my Power Mac Quad G5 at idle and the drive makes more disk seeking noise than when I can't find a lost floppy. And since the buzzword with Linux distros today is immutability, what could be more immutable than an ephemeral, desperately undersized RAM disk overlaid on a live CD?

Remember when consoles weren't glorified PCs? The 1999 Sega Dreamcast remembers. Sega's final console and introduced on "9/9/99 for $199" before the Sony PlayStation 2 hype machine overwhelmed it, it came on the heels of the Saturn, which had sophisticated hardware but was difficult to program and Sega lost millions on manufacturing them. In some ways the Dreamcast is the Saturn done right: the same SuperH architecture, just way faster (instead of dual SH-2s at 28.6MHz, one big SH-4 at 200MHz), a more conventional GPU (rather than the odd 3D VDP of the Saturn which used quads instead of triangles), and a straightforward uniprocessor design instead of the Saturn's sometimes rickety dual CPU bus. It was also much cheaper to manufacture even considering its use of the Yamaha GD-ROM format; nothing else supported it, but it stored up to a gigabyte and was backwards compatible with CDs.

However, the Dreamcast was also not very future-proofed as it was the only fifth-generation console not to use DVD format (even the "mini" discs of the GameCube stored more), and Sega's attempt to outrun Sony and Nintendo's new offerings with deep discounts only served to make the console unprofitable faster. Sega announced the discontinuation of the Dreamcast on March 31, 2001, and slashed the cost to $99. I'd heard good things about it, I'd played Crazy Taxi in the arcades, and there it was at Fry's (rest in peace) at a price I could afford as a starving student, so I picked one up. Games turned up in quantity at lower prices and I even managed to land a Broadband Adapter and a keyboard and a light gun and a mouse and the Seaman microphone and even the fishing reel controller. There's also an SD card reader plugged into the back expansion port I can play disk images off.

Although I've picked up a couple other Dreamcast and Dreamcast-adjacent systems since, I still have the original one in my office. Its internal battery used for storing settings had long since worn out, requiring me to enter the date and time every time I wanted to play a game, but then it wouldn't read any discs other than SoulCaliber. I mean, I like SoulCaliber, but this was ridiculous. No Crazy Taxi? It's time for ... a Refurb Weekend!

... after we play a game of SoulCaliber.

Pop quiz: what classic brand of laptop is this?

I'll give you another hint.

Bright-red TrackPoint and mouse button trim, classic keyboard font, IBM logo on the top. It's a ThinkPad ... right?

Well, obviously someone on IBM's design team wanted you to think so. But turn it on and it itself announces it's not a ThinkPad:

Say hello to the RISC ThinkPad that's not a ThinkPad, the IBM WorkPad z50.