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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GZDOpV2OXk

by zdw • 1 month ago

99 42 1 month ago

youtube.com

everyone• 1 month ago

I used zip disks quite a bit (as an architect) and never heard the click of death.

Before usb sticks, zip disk was the only way to move medium to large files, other than burn a cd.

LocalH• 1 month ago

The only true "click of death" involved physically damaged disks. It was possible for a damaged disk to also damage any drive it was inserted in. Outside of that, the "click of death" was really just the drive retracting and reinserting the head on a read error.

toast02• 1 month ago

I experienced click of death using my zip disks at a school lab.

The disk breaks the drive, drive breaks the disk spiral made communal drives rapidly not an option. There was a utility available that I used to fix my disk, but then I only used my disks in my drive after that experience.

bluedino• 1 month ago

It was very common, or at least made out to be.

I never had it happen either, but I used SyQuest drives more, and then moved to CD-R (which was the real click of death for Zip disks)

kalleboo• 1 month ago

I used my paper route money to add storage to my Mac 660AV.

My options were a SCSI hard disk, SyQuest or a Zip drive. I went with the latter. Since it was SCSI it wasn't appreciably slower than the internal HDD so I had a disk with MS Office installed, disk with all my games, etc that I'd swap out for what I was doing.

I was happy with my choice a year later when SyQuest had gone out of business and I had 4x as much storage as I would have had with just buying a hard disk.

Three years later I suffered the click of death and I was less happy. I used some hack I read on Usenet about cutting off the outer 1mm rim of the disk with nail scissors which let me rescue my data.

ramgine• 1 month ago

Wow that’s a crazy hack. I never heard of it.

smilespray• 1 month ago

I used Zip disks extensively for audio and graphics work. Almost all the drives I encountered died after a while.

It was a design issue.

oasisbob• 1 month ago

Magneto Optical discs were also somewhat popular in this era.

stuxnet79• 1 month ago

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.

wyantb2• 1 month ago

Have you tried Dolphin? From what I understand it's the best in class emulator on that front.

jedbrooke• 1 month ago

Dolphin only supports Wii games, not Wii U. This is part of the reason the Wii U flopped is that people thought it was just a peripheral for the original Wii and not a separate new console.

Dolphin is indeed fantastic for Wii/gamecube games though

HerbManic• 1 month ago

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.

xattt2• 1 month ago

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 premium as well, so committing to SCSI meant consistently shelling out more with each upgrade.

For example, in the mid-1990s, parallel port ZIP drives were the cheapest option for external “large volume” storage. An ATAPI internal or external SCSI ZIP drive had price differences that were significant enough to make you think twice about the value of your purchase.

Edit: As an aside, the parallel port could act as dollar-store SCSI with daisy-chaining. We had the ZIP drive in line with a Pinnacle Studio 400, that terminated on an HP Deskjet 890Cxi (… for Windows) printer. It was a painful line-by-line experience trying to print, while doing a data transfer to/from the ZIP drive.

bombcar2• 1 month ago

SCSI was that thing your dad's workstation had at work, and the rich kid had on his Mac.

I remember finding some older Adaptec cards for an early Linux box and they were still worth some change, even 5+ years old.

Grazester• 1 month ago

When I was in highschool in the later 90's I had an acquaintance that did graphic arts. He of course had a Mac with scsi everything, zip drive,scanner and printer.

It was cool and fascinating to me that only knew of the newly released USB, serial and parallel ports for external devices.

deltarholamda• 29 days ago

Back in the day you had to go dig up an Adaptec 1542 or something similar if you wanted a CD-ROM on your Linux box. IDE CD-ROMs were essentially unsupported.

Best part of SCSI was the required sorcery. "No no, young padawan, you must put the terminator on the scanner, not on the hard drive, lest your device chain causes the computer to no longer boot."

I had a film scanner that would not work on any other SCSI ID that was not 4. Why? Because. Alacazam!

lysace• 1 month ago

I would read these beautifully designed computer mags made for Mac people in creative areas in like 1987-1989 (like the Swedish Macworld). They routinely reviewed peripherals like SCSI scanners, hard drives etc costing like $10-25k (not inflation adjusted, so 2x those numbers). Crazy.

Computing was insanely expensive back then.

jervant• 1 month ago

And yet practically every Mac after 1986 had SCSI onboard. Why the PC industry didn't embrace it to avoid having to wait until USB is beyond me...

TheCondor2• 1 month ago

You may not have ever had to deal with SCSI termination errors before. Earlier system had to have the device numbers manually assigned, if they were wrong, all sorts of weird things could happen (of just nothing would work)

I'm a SCSI fan, but it took a few revs to get it righted.

kmeisthax• 1 month ago

SCSI cost too much for the extremely cost-conscious PC market of the early 90s. They'd already consolidated down all the IBM PC legacy buses (e.g. parallel, serial, AT keyboard interface etc) into a single chip that cost peanuts.

USB started off as a way to replace the legacy buses with something even cheaper, so naturally the PC industry bit. It wasn't really even supposed to do SCSI things; that was Firewire's job. We didn't get equivalent performance out of USB up until version 3.0 which isn't even the same bus as USB 2.0.

The underlying tension is that there are two different kinds of computers that want to do different things with their I/O:

1. The "SCSI philosophy" is to make peripherals that feel like extensions of the high-end computer you just bought.

2. The "USB philosophy" is to give you the cheapest connection you can get to a thing that works.

A good example of this philosophical divide is daisy-chaining. SCSI, Firewire, and Thunderbolt all supported it because it's the premium way of doing things. USB makes you buy a hub separately if you want more connectivity. Or, alternatively, you can look at this as SCSI and it's successors forcing you to buy a hub with every device you plug into them.

You might think that USB won out, but really, this debate still rages on, because Thunderbolt wound up being rolled up into USB-C and USB4. So now USB has to be both a cheap and premium bus - hell, Thunderbolt even used daisy-chaining instead of hubs on USB! This is why USB-C cables and devices are a mess; they designed USB-C specifically so you could flood the market with cheap 2.0-only cables that are only ever going to be used for power; and super-premium USB4/DP cables for plugging your laptop into a $200 laptop dock just to get back the ports you should have had anyway.

And, I must stress this enough, most of those fancy USB-C altmodes never made it to desktop anyway. I think you can buy Thunderbolt cards that will mux DisplayPort but you have to use a wrap-around cable to go from your GPU to your TB card like we're back in the 3dfx Voodoo2 era or something. Most of USB-C's single cable functionality is super-premium stuff that required a level of internal integration that desktop never committed to. Which is, again, very SCSI-brained, except now the cheap consumer stuff has it and the expensive modular desktops don't.

bitwize• 1 month ago

Because the peecee was cobbled-together cheap crap, that's why.

EvanAnderson2• 1 month ago

I have a real soft spot in my heart for SCSI. I'm one of those crazy PC people who tried to use it, paid the "tax", and didn't necessarily come out ahead for it.

SCSI is a beautiful example of abstraction and standardization getting is Cool Stuff decades later. While there certainly are edge cases and it's not as 'tidy' as I'm making it out, it's really neat to me that a device like the BlueSCSI[0] can come along and bring a healthy dose of modernity to old platforms.

SCSI is at a sweet spot of general purpose capability and abstraction from the hardware (unlike, say, the Shugart floppy interface, or even ATAPI/IDE) that allows devices to be built to just plug-in and provide significant functionality to legacy platforms.

[0] https://bluescsi.com/

toast02• 1 month ago

Incidentally, the early parallel port ZIP drives were really SCSI drives that had a parallel port to scsi converter on the board. Not that you could do anything cool with them, but pricing them lower than one with a SCSI interface is understanding the marketplace rather than anything else. The SCSI drives had two extra switches on the back, but used the same db25 connectors as the parallel port drives. People with Macs and other SCSI users were used to paying more.

I know there was a later revision parallel port ZIP drive that wasn't internally SCSI and that might have been lower cost.

xattt2• 1 month ago

You just unlocked a memory of the dual-personality PP/SCSI Zip drive that apparently sucked at both.

It’s amazing how much these problems went away when high speed USB came along.

wincy• 1 month ago

I remember what a big deal the Western Digital Raptor drives were since they were 10,000RPM on SATA instead of SCSI. All my teenage friends and I wanted a SCSI drive or a Raptor in the early 2000s (I had very nerdy friends). It was a huge boost for an early 2000s gaming PC until SSDs came along and absolutely obliterated them.

zerocrates• 1 month ago

I remember the gradual shift in Linux both due to internal changes and changes to what machines generally had, from IDE/ATAPI/ATA to Serial ATA, meaning things switched over to the SCSI subsystem and your old familiar hda drive was now at sda, and maybe you needed to use sdparm instead of hdparm, that kind of thing. And I think even if you still had an old ATA system that eventually got pulled under the SCSI umbrella internally as well.

Though now there's separation again with NVME being its own separate system.

ForOldHack• 1 month ago

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.

firecall2• 1 month ago

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!

firecall2• 1 month ago

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….

0xcde4c3db• 1 month ago

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).

scw• 1 month ago

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.

yial• 30 days ago

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..)

wolvoleo• 30 days ago

Well it was standard on some computer systems. Macs as I remember, and most unix workstations. It was just not common in PCs but it was standard in more serious systems.

It spawned some higher speed versions like ultra wide scsi 3. And it's still used today in the form of serially attached scsi / SAS. And UASP over usb.

If anything the PC market was the odd one out. With first MFM/RLL and later IDE/ATA. Of course it didn't feel like that because that's what most of us had.

jakedata• 1 month ago

Minor nitpick - the Bernoulli 90 MB removable disk was released in 1991. The Bernoulli 44 MB was late 80s. I liked them a lot better than the SyQuest drives with their hard platters which seemed much more failure prone. I still have a stack of 90 and 150 MB disks and a couple 150 MB drives. They were considerably faster than the internal 20 MB ESDI drives in the IBM PS/2 systems I backed up. I saved a stack of the classic IBM keyboards when we decommissioned all that stuff. Still using them too.

PostOnce• 1 month ago

Lots more fun stuff on the rest of the channel https://www.youtube.com/@will_it_work

Hacks, on hacker news. I love it.

tubetime• 30 days ago

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.

drmpeg• 30 days ago

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.

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

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