[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.
