[light jazz music]
- Greetings, and welcome to an LGR thing
in the middle of the night, or at least it is for me
as I record this, 'cause I couldn't sleep
and uh, I don't know, I had PCjrs on the mind.
Specifically this interesting PCjr
that came from the Computer Reset Warehouse
in Dallas, Texas, I did a video on that a little while back.
And it's an interesting thing
because, well, it not only has
this Legacy branded hard disk add-on in there,
which I think is a 20 meg drive,
connected to the side here, it's just like an open board
with a cable sticking to the side there.
But yeah, what makes this most interesting
is because of where it came from.
This was the address label on the box we found it in.
Yeah, that is Sierra On-Line
when they were in Oakhurst, California
with a Coarsegold mailing address.
Yeah, it was in a box with some interesting paperwork.
There was a work order here filled out by Robert Fischer,
and turns out this thing was used
in the quality assurance department.
Oh yeah, and check out what's on the bottom here, too.
QA Equipment Room, Sierra On-Line Incorporated,
asset number SOL 30602.
Hopefully I won't be S.O.L. when trying to get this working.
This actually said here to uh,
it was dated February 28th, 1990.
"Floppy drive repair or replace,"
"hard disk repair or replace,"
"keyboard port repair or replace, general checkup."
And yeah, it was sent to Computer Reset for repairs,
and who knows if it actually was.
We found it in an area where a lot of things,
like, were repaired, and were just never picked up.
The state of this, I'm not entirely sure,
but what I have done so far,
I wasn't recording voiceover when I did it,
but I did check over everything on the inside of it
and just give it a quick once-over
and see if anything looked weird or out-of-place, or--
No, not really, so I plugged it in and powered on.
The main system unit was perfectly fine.
Everything started running as it should, it sounded like,
and then I went ahead and tried
to power on the Legacy hard disk thing here,
the add-on just separately, and yeah, that powered on too.
Nothing blew up, no magic smoke being let out, so who knows?
But it is at least to the point here
where I've got it all set up,
and I do have it set up with a monitor
that doesn't go with it, this is the IBM 5154
an EGA display, but it'll work.
I actually have an adapter
that I got also at Computer Reset.
It allows me to plug this into any standard TTL display
instead of having to use the PCjr's, like,
weird proprietary connection, so yeah.
I've got it plugged in here with a cable
because who knows if the I/R port's working or not,
but anyway, let's get this thing turned on.
I just wanna see what's on here.
I genuinely have not seen what's on here [laughs]
so let's do that.
All right, so I've got power to the things.
Let's turn them on, I guess one by one, I don't know.
Genuinely don't know how this works exactly.
I've never used a hard disk with a PCjr before.
Typically it boots from the floppy drive down there,
but I'm assuming we won't need to do that with a hard drive.
I don't know, honestly.
Wow, okay, so it's going up to what, 640K now?
It did not with just the regular PCjr.
I'm assuming there's a RAM expansion in the Legacy unit.
Okay, is it doing anything, it's flashing. [chuckles]
Those old drives, man. [computer beeps]
Okay, that's something: hard disk initialization error.
Indeed, I'm not sure if it's spinning or not.
Doesn't really sound like it.
Doing all the flashy lights again,
but it is pretty quiet, so, yeah.
Well, I'm gonna look into this and see what I can find out.
All right, so I got the cover off
of just the hard disk unit here,
and this is kind of what I saw when I first found it.
It was just moving around like this,
and there's actually a piece of metal
that's bent over pretty good there.
That was like a bracket that connects
to hold the drive in place,
so I don't know what it went through.
In fact, it looks like there may have only been
just one screw put back at all.
Yeah, these MFM drives.
So obviously it was booting to the controller itself
because it knew that there was a hard drive to fail,
so that's something.
It's definitely not spinning up at all, hm.
Yeah, the noise you're hearing there
is just the PCjr itself, yeah, now that I look at it,
there's definitely a lot of RAM installed in there.
There's like two boards just populated.
There it is again, 1701 hard disk error.
So looking up the 1701 error,
and it's one of the most generic ones
that a PC XT-class machine could make.
It could be the cables, it could be the jumper,
could be the power, could just be the dead drive.
It just, [laughs ruefully] it's a lot of possible things.
Amusingly, though, it seems that that legacy hard disk unit
is a lot more rare or odd [laughs] than I thought it was.
Here on the Mike's IBM PCjr Page,
which is like the source for PCjr stuff,
in the years he's been collecting and researching,
he's only come across two examples
and he doesn't know anybody else who has one,
and he also mentions that there was a 512 K version planned
but was never delivered.
Mine's definitely adding 512K.
Well, it does say that it has its own built-in stuff
to make sure that it boots without any kind of disk needed,
so that's good, but I mean, that's what I assumed.
It was seeing that there was a hard disk unit there
that was failing, so anyway, let's dive into it
and just, I don't know, poke around
and plug in some other things, who knows what.
[motor chirps] It started making noise.
I was messing with the stepper motor.
[drive motor continues odd noises]
That makes me think it's seized up.
[powers off] [motor buzzing fades]
[powers back on, no drive motor]
And it doesn't do it every time.
So yeah, what I'm doing here,
in case you haven't messed with one of these drives before
is I'm just messing with this.
It's a little wheel on this one.
Sometimes it's just a rod, I mean,
there is still a rod there,
but that is connecting to the stepper motor,
and sometimes they just kind of get seized up, really.
It's moving pretty freely at the moment,
but that's probably 'cause I've been messing with it.
I was actually just putting in just a little bit
of, like, bearing oil.
There's a video by Adrian Black on YouTube
I was referencing for doing this.
I remember seeing it a while back,
so thanks for posting that in the past, sir,
but anyway, I'll keep doing this, see if it does anything.
Out of curiosity here, I know that's not a good sound,
but still, let's just see.
[computer beeps]
[drive motor noise]
[motor chirping noisily]
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Whoa, whoa, whoa!
Okay, I wasn't expecting to get this far yet.
[grunts with glee]
I am surprised I am getting any of this.
That's "Codename: ICEMAN," interesting.
What is any of this?
Okay, I've gotta get some floppy disks.
Oh, I hope I can get the files off of here.
Maybe this is not a working disk.
I'll try another disk!
Okay, well that was something.
[exasperated moan]
Let's just try, well, I don't even know what's on here,
so I am gonna copy over everything I can
while this drive is sort of somehow working.
[sped-up keyboard and disk sounds]
Ah, my heart is still racing. [laughs]
Maybe the drive will keep working,
even though it sounds like death, but oh, this is nuts!
Whole new box of disks.
So this looks just like "Codename: ICEMAN"
but [laughs] nobody wants that,
but I'm gonna copy it anyway.
Yeah, that's just like the whole game.
On the other hand, it does look
like there's some QA stuff in there, QA.BAT.
Okay, so I'm gonna spend a while
just copying all this over. [laughs]
And as soon as I turned the camera off, that happened.
Filter cap, magic smoke. [blows onto PSU]
Okay, well, not the end of the world.
That can hopefully be fixed.
I turned it off pretty quickly there.
Well, either I get that taken out of there and replaced
or maybe switch the drive over to another machine
or something, I don't know, man.
Either way, we are getting somewhere.
I wanna get those QA files off.
Ah, those filter capacitors, man, every time.
What a weirdly put-together, like, dense power supply!
[chuckles]
Well, there's that guy.
Yeah, I can see it's like missing half of the outside of it.
It's all bulged and exploded.
Yeah, it seems like it's a pretty popular power supply
in a variety of different things,
radios and drum machines or something.
And, like, several places mentioning these RIFA caps
constantly exploding on them, so yeah.
I mean, that's not surprising, those things suck.
But anyway, good grief, what time is it?
Oh my goodness, 4:22?
Whelp, I am going to bed, [laughs] gonna try to anyway,
and come back whenever I've got something else to do.
[Burgertime PC speaker music]
Okay, out of curiosity, I did try it in the IBM AT here
and it didn't work.
Now I'm playing BurgerTime, but no, seriously,
I did try it multiple ways,
like it's got this board on the bottom,
and I tried it, of course, without that
and just the normal, the drive connected directly to it.
Set was the right type in the BIOS
with the setup program and everything,
and nope, didn't work, tried several different types.
Tried different cords.
Just didn't wanna recognize it.
Anyway, okay, been about a week,
and I got a package of this [laughs]
which was new at one point.
You can see it says "new" on June 26th, 1990, perhaps,
but anyway, on a quick note here about these things,
you can actually use these power supplies
without that RIFA cap, you know, just yank it out of there
and use it anyway, and I've tried that before.
Sometimes it works, [laughs] sometimes it doesn't,
and if you get like dirty power being sent
to the other components, then that could be an issue
as it was for one of my TRS-80s once,
but I just wanna make sure that I'm not, like,
ruining something else in here
before I get all the files off there.
Just an extra precaution for my own peace of mind.
It's not exactly the same, actually.
I mean, you can see that it's just slightly updated.
It's got like a different grille on top
and maybe that means they put some better capacitors
and stuff in there, who knows?
Seller said this was working.
[chuckles] It'll probably blow up, too,
but as long as it holds together
long enough to get this project going, I don't really care.
Of course now I've gotta put it all back together
because I was trying to get the drive working
on other systems, I mean, I'm still kind of working on that.
I don't know why it wasn't working on the IBM AT,
but anyway, get this put back real quick
and see if it works with this.
So when I got it, I noticed that the cables looked
a little bit shorter, and they are,
so couldn't get it in here,
and one of them will definitely connect
to the hard drive itself,
but you also need a power going to this front part
of the panel here, to power the cards.
This doesn't do that, so...
I either gotta find an extension
or just put it over here temporarily, man.
Okay, this'll work for now, [laughing] so let's see here.
Let's turn on, see what happens.
[fan whirring]
Fan power, drive power, no explosions.
Hard drive is not spinning once again, but I kind of expected that.
All right, that's something.
Okay, [laughs] messing with the stepper motor
seems to do it, so. [thunder rolls]
That was thunder outside.
Power everything on, see what we get.
Yay, drive still works.
All right, just gonna continue getting the files
onto these disks, 'cause yeah, in the meantime,
I was actually able to confirm with Ken Williams himself,
saying that he did remember Robert Fischer
and was just like, "Yeah, this was indeed my Junior,"
so [laughing] that's super cool.
Thank you to those of you who have written in,
trying to help me figure this stuff out,
but yeah, I'm gonna continue copying now,
so turning off the camera.
Okay, since I've got everything all backed up now
on a bunch of floppy disks,
I'm gonna transfer them over to something more modern
and maybe try them on DOSBox, but for now,
since the computer's still working, I figure,
why not let's, I dunno, just take a look
and see what some of the other things are on here.
I recognize some of these files,
like from some of the other folders,
like EXISTS and LEGACY and SPACE.
Like SPACE, for instance, just tells you,
like, the space on something. [laughs]
The LEGACY thing, like, crashes the computer.
I think that's probably for the hard disk.
That doesn't seem to do anything.
A lot of these, I don't know.
It's like there's a lot of incomplete data on here.
FASTBACK, that right there is just a backup program.
It's, I don't think, anything interesting really,
about this particular version,
but I'm assuming that Sierra used this
to make some backups, which, you know, that's good.
Curious what happened to those backups. [laughs]
This MUSIC folder was interesting, too.
So yeah, it's got these music programs on here,
which just seem to play back MIDI files
on a variety of different computer sound hardware options.
Well, although [laughing] this is not gonna work
because there's no speaker in this monitor.
The speaker on a PCjr is in the monitor.
There is like a little RCA out on there.
Maybe I can get that to work, but yeah, check it out,
you can choose from all these different things
to play back MIDI files on.
I don't know if this is a Sierra thing or not,
but these are pretty much
the most popular Sierra sound chips and hardware options
of the time, so if we go to PCJr,
you can enter a song file name,
which I've forgot what's even on here.
So for now, let's just go over to that Sierra folder
and see what's in there, because yeah,
there's a whole lot of, like, QA-related things,
like there's a BATCH folder here
that was kind of interesting to go through the other night.
For instance, check all these out.
There's like this EASYEDIT program, QA.BAT,
different batch files, a whole lot of these actually.
For instance, if you run GETLOGS,
this is a log file collector by Randy MacNeill,
and it will then ask for different logs
for different things.
Or like running this QA batch file.
Yeah, I'm sure there's something that can be done here,
but I have not figured out what that is yet.
I'll be putting up an archive of all this
for you to download and peruse yourself.
I'm sure somebody will figure it out, but yeah.
In the Sierra folder here,
we can just open "Codename: ICEMAN," it looks like,
[laughs] which is interesting because I don't think
there was a PCjr version of this,
or at least my box doesn't say that it works on PCjr.
It works on, like, Tandy in monochrome mode or something,
and like otherwise, it's made for EGA and MCGA, I believe,
so oh, okay, I got a cursor.
"Enter drive letter and your name."
[laughs]
It's -- I can already report bugs!
Yeah, check that out.
Again, no sound, 'cause I don't have a speaker plugged in,
but man, it just, it does absolutely take forever.
I'm cutting out a whole lot of this loading,
'cause yeah, PCjr, this game came out, what,
'88, '89 or something?
So that was definitely beyond the PCjr's, like,
shelf life for games, but holy crap, this looks really good.
Okay, oh well.
Well, that seems to be the standard game otherwise.
Oh wait, that's different, what in the world?
Okay, what else is in here?
All right.
The credits are all the same, it seems.
Version 1.009. [laughs]
I don't know what the retail release was,
but yeah, this was immediately looking different.
Aw man, check that out, okay.
Wow, so it's just got like shortcuts
for the normal debug stuff.
Now, typically, you have like Shift + Shift + Minus
to do debug, like debug options
on these early SCI games, I believe,
and then this on the other hand is just totally different.
Like, what in the world?
Just get to the game, I don't wanna.
Well it did say teleport, was that an option?
[laughing] Teleport, teleport to, I don't know, like...
I don't think that did anything. [laughs]
Okay, there's the version of SCI engine, 0.000.660.
I'm assuming it's looking for like a number or something,
so I totally just crashed it.
Oh, I gotta fill out a bug report!
You can't teleport to hell. [laughs]
Let me go back, get right into the folder itself.
I was gonna show this earlier
but then decided to load the program.
Yeah, so there's some different files in here for sure,
that I had never seen in "Codename: ICEMAN,"
like for instance, all these ICEMANSG files.
I'm assuming those are the graphics, maybe,
for this version of the game, then there's also, like,
it did create me a log file, look at that.
C and LGR, I don't know if you saw that,
but it, [chuckling] I'm now an official QA tester
for "Codename: ICEMAN," oh dear.
This is so cool! [laughs]
Oh, I'm so glad this thing works,
and also, I mean, just again,
thank you to those of y'all that have reached out
to some of the Sierra folks to try to figure out
the legitimacy of this thing,
and maybe what it would've been used for back in the day.
I mean, obviously it was used for QA and bug testing,
but also, like, that's just like running
some kind of versions of PCjr software here
that yeah, like if you have a pimped-out Junior,
then it works.
All right, so Show Memory, Alt + F.
Alt + G, Alt + V, hm.
Let's just try the teleport again.
I don't know, I was curious. What if it's like a number?
But maybe it's looking for screen numbers or something?
Hm, well, I at least skipped the intro,
and it looks frigging gorgeous, but man, is it slow.
Like, it's unplayable slow.
Okay, it took me into the water.
Okay, well, I guess I did teleport somewhere, then,
and another loading for, like, 15 to 30 seconds.
Well, it runs on the PCjr, but just barely!
Oh my goodness, I'm gonna hop over to DOSBox really quick
and just screw around.
I couldn't even get, like, the debug shortcuts
to open anymore, it's just like it's running too slow.
Oh, and because one of my patrons asked to make sure here,
yeah, there is no drive D partition, unfortunately,
or any others that I've been able to find on this drive.
It is just C.
Okay, I moved over to DOSBox, and I've got the contents
of the PCjr drive moved on over,
so if we go over to that music thing again,
we should be able to try one of these.
Okay, we've got Cancan. [chuckles]
Let's try that, so PCJr.
["Galop Infernal" by Jacques Offenbach]
[laughing] Perfect.
So that's what that does, that's pretty fantastic, actually.
[laughs] I don't know the history of this program at all,
but that's got some nice options there,
so let's move on back over to the ICEMAN folder.
And yeah, this was made before I created my own QA files
on accident, so [laughing] let's just load it up again.
Oh yeah, loading way quicker now, so.
Mm-hm, "Nature of bug," well.
That's a really important bug right there.
All right.
[intense PCjr music] Ooh.
That's an interesting sound.
Oh, here we go.
[chiptune island-y music]
Yeah, view that PCjr version of the music,
it sounds pretty good.
All right, let's skip on ahead,
since we can actually load things now. [laughs]
All right, yeah, this is the actual beginning of the game.
So yeah, if we bring up the, okay,
I'm so turning off that music.
Sorry, it's kind of interesting, but nope.
So yeah, let's see what we can try here, so we Alt + F.
There's our memory, mm.
Teleport to, let's see if teleporting to four
actually does put me out in the water again,
that was, okay, I'm on a beach. [incredulous chuckling]
I'm just sitting there, [laughing] on a beach!
[laughs]
Oh no, well, oh well.
[laughing] I don't think that's supposed to happen.
Okay, so okay, screen two, maybe?
All right, so here's this, screen three.
Yeah, again, I can just teleport all over the place.
There we go, so let's see, a global variable.
Priority map, oh, that's cool.
Yeah, so this very much does look like the other debug modes
that I've seen on other SCI Sierra games,
but it's just different in the way that you open it
just by pressing F4 here to get the,
well, like a reference for it,
and you don't have to enable it necessarily, so.
Control map, uh-huh, okay.
So there's things that can be, you know,
stuff happens, you interact with it.
Now teleport, yes, make note.
You just make a note at any time.
There we go, really important log entries I'm making here.
I hope it helps improve the game.
And the alt room number, okay.
Oh, so there's the teleportation number.
Debug on, debug off.
Oh, this is always interesting,
opening up the cast menu here,
so there's a closeup view of me,
bikini3Lady, [laughs] ego, shirt,
hutDoor, wave, another wave.
Look at all these little wave pixels.
Bikini lady, paperView, so.
I'm gonna get my shirt.
Yeah, cheats, effectively. [chuckles]
No more pixel hunting, right,
so let me just see if the regular debug menu will, it does!
Interesting, huh.
So yeah, it has two different types of debug menus.
Well, I'm gonna go ahead and leave this here,
because like I said,
I'm gonna put an archive of this online.
Feel free to mess around with it yourself
and let me know what you can do.
Okay, well, I'm going to go and continue
putting this back together and, I don't know,
cleaning it up, and of course I have an extension for that
that I need to install so that I can put that back in there
in its proper position, but yeah, otherwise,
[laughing] just super happy I was able to get everything
off of here and just the fact that it worked at all,
the PCjr was also working.
I mean, I had another one of these in case this wasn't,
but this stuff, this is the kind of thing
that I was really worried about.
Not only are these drives just old, cranky beasts
at this point, and they are often just dead,
but you know, kind of coax them to life
like I've been doing with the stepper motor,
really just needs a little bit of oiling
just to be knocked loose, but yeah,
that's not a permanent solution, either.
So it's just one of these things
where you can kind of get it working sometimes,
and I really thought the deck
would've been stacked against me with this,
but I guess not, so thank goodness,
because that was really exciting
to look and see that Ken Williams just popped up on there,
and then hear through some different people
that were able to get in touch with him
and have it verified in some, you know, remote,
[laughing] third party kind of way, it's, I don't know.
Combined with all the paperwork and everything else,
I don't doubt that this was a Sierra thing.
Who knows if it was actually on Ken Williams's desk
or anything, but if anything,
yeah, Robert Fischer was involved,
that was verified, and makes sense.
This is indeed a Sierra thing.
Real piece of history and I'm just very happy
that this got saved, and didn't somehow ended up
getting thrown away or who knows what over the years.
[laughing] Oh, this is neat.
I wanna make like a museum piece out of this,
or something, I don't know, I could.
Well, never really done anything like that before,
but anyway, thanks to everyone who's helped me out,
[chuckling] you know, the folks at Computer Reset
for letting me in, the people for getting in touch
with the Sierra people,
and Rob for tracking it down upstairs in the first place,
and just man, it all came together,
and I hope that you've enjoyed seeing this come together,
as much as I can at the moment,
with the limited amount of time
I've been able to put into it so far.
But yeah, I'm gonna fix it up and get it looking good.
Nice display piece with a proper monitor and everything,
so this is so cool.
Hope you enjoyed, and thank you very much for watching.