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LGR - Sierra On-Line's IBM PCjr (Patreon)

Published:
2019-07-20 18:36:59
Edited:
2019-07-21 08:32:22
Imported:
2021-03

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Content

If you saw my Computer Reset video earlier in the month then you'll probably recall that we found something pretty incredible: an IBM PCjr with a rare hard disk add-on, crammed into a box labeled Sierra On-Line!

And yeah, turns out it's legit. Sierra employee Robert Fischer worked for them back in the late 80s through the mid 90s as an all-around "tech guy," having his hands in everything from quality assurance to hardware maintenance. And this PCjr was one of the machines he was responsible for maintaining, which in this case meant sending it into Computer Reset for repairs in February of 1990.

However, it was never sent back for whatever reason. Not really uncommon at all considering the mountains of un-returned repair projects we dug up over there. So that's how it eventually ended up in my possession!

And man, despite the expected power supply and MFM hard disk woes, I'm happy to say that it all still functions! Enough to recover everything from the drive and play around with its contents, both on the original hardware and DOSBox. Which is what this video is about.

Oh! And this has also been confirmed by Ken Williams: Sierra co-founder, mustache aficionado, and all-around boat enthusiast. I've attached scans of the paperwork, a compilation of messages received from Mr. Williams, as well as an archive of the HDD contents. Ahh this is just awesome 😄

At this point, the question remains: what will I be doing with it? Well, beyond cleaning it up a bit and hopefully fixing a few loose ends and missing parts, I'm really not sure. Things like this feel like they should be in a museum or something, but I'd want it to be one that makes sense. I wish there was a Sierra On-Line Museum, or an Adventure Game Museum, or even just a PC Games Museum. Something more specific than like, The Strong Museum of Play or National Video Game Museum, as impressive as those are. Hrm.

Anyway, I'll be open to ideas for a good final resting place for it! For now though, I hope you enjoy this little video exploring the thing.

Files

Exploring the Sierra On-Line "Super-Junior" QA Computer!

Comments

Anonymous

Maybe donate it to the National Video Game Museum in Frisco TX. It's in the same region and I bet they'd love it!

Anonymous

I'm just happy that it is in good hands

Anonymous

Definitely with there was a more focused PC gaming museum, but if nothing else, there is always the National Video game Museum, not far from there you picked up this hardware. Or, you know, hold onto it until I get my computer/pc gaming museum opened up :)

Anonymous

God, this is fantastic. My first computer was a PCjr, and the first sierra game I played on it—maybe even the *first* game I ever played on the PCjr—was The Black Cauldron. So, man, to see something like this is incredible, a real piece of gamedev history. I would love to see more of what's on that harddrive.

LazyGameReviews
>>24929119

If you've got a version of DOSBox set up in PCjr mode, feel free to check out the archive attached to this post :)

Anonymous

Donate it to Jason (MJR) he already has a huge Sierra collection, and i know he will take care of it.

moosemaimer

This reminds me of yanking the drive out of a friend's failing old machine, hooking it up to a new box, and copying the files off as it groaned and protested... I was literally about to start a second pass to see if I had missed anything when it quit responding. That same sense of "hurry hurry hurry"

Anonymous

This is just awesome. Well done.

LazyGameReviews
>>24929275

True! But I mean, I've got a huge Sierra collection too :P My end goal is to get it out of a private collection and accessible to the public!

LazyGameReviews
>>24929098

Hey, if you or someone else opens up an awesome PC gaming museum, I'd love to hear about it :D

Anonymous

With all the exposition you have, I think this has a higher reach than a 'public' collection. Think about it this way: if you were to donate it to a museum (let's say the National Video Game Museum) folks like myself -as well as many others of your viewers- in different places of the globe would just not be able to admire such a piece of gaming history. I know it is ironic, but I think it's right where it belongs... So maybe a Tech Tales special about it? And if you do donate it, please include some kind of clause by which it can't never be sold or auctioned or anything like that. As always, thanks for the awesome content and the countless hours of entertainment.

LazyGameReviews
>>24929724

Heh, yeah that's one way to look at it! Thanks for the insight, hadn't really thought about it that way. And yeah I certainly want to make sure it isn't auctioned off in the future or anything. Unless it's for a really worthy cause.

evistre

NEEEEAT. thanks for sharing this. :)

Anonymous

The Strong Museum of Play would love this. And I'm not just saying that because I'm in Rochester and if they had it then I could go see it :-P

Anonymous

I was actually digging for something else (can’t remember what it was now) and was checking the contents of boxes as I moved them aside. This one was pretty well buried. At first I thought “oh another PCJr” since the place is littered with them, but I noticed the weird exposed expansion card. Then I saw the Sierra letterhead and thought it might be something special. I grabbed Clint because I knew he would do more with it than I could, and he has! As for its future: I don’t have any specific recommendations but be careful as there are a number of “museums” in the retro PC relm which are just private collections. One specific “museum” is BitHistory. This is just one guy who buys and resells, but claims to operate a museum for the purposes of soliciting donations. I know a few people who have fallen for it.

LazyGameReviews
>>24931570

Thanks again for pointing this out while we were there! Truly had no clue what to expect. So glad it didn't end up separated or gutted for its hard disk expansion, since apparently it is extremely valuable on its own. Haven't heard of BitHistory but dang, appreciate the heads-up there. Definitely want to make sure it goes to somewhere legit.

LazyGameReviews
>>24929051

Yeah I'm relieved that it didn't get scrapped or parted out before we found it! Could've easily gone to someone who didn't care for its history and just wanted to resell the hard disk unit.

LazyGameReviews
>>24929032

I think a couple folks from there were at Computer Reset shortly before I was, even! Wanted to go and visit the museum but ended up not having time.

Jason Wellband

Kinda wild seeing awk used on a DOS machine, especially by Sierra. Would be really neat to see more of their backend tools they used to build all their awesome games.

LazyGameReviews
>>24932097

It would indeed! Hoping that this brings some ex-Sierra folks outta the woodwork to share development/QA stories once it goes public.

Anonymous

Man, I've been digging through that early revision of Iceman and was hoping to find something gold buried in there. But so far the changes are pretty trivial to the released version. Most, if not all, the backgrounds are the same, and the changes that are there are minor. A couple of sprites have been tweaked slightly—one of the women on the beach gets a blue bikini instead of a pink one—and apparently at some point you could pick up and inspect a green fish that didn't make the cut to the final game. But most of the changes are in the text, a ton of proof-reading/editing fixes in there, so I would imagine this is a pretty late revision before going gold. One thing that is odd the RESOURCE.map file references a RESOURCE.010 file, but that doesn't appear in this archive, so maybe there was something more interesting in there that got deleted before they shipped it out for repairs. I'm also not sure what the ICEMANSG.* files are, they don't look like anything I've seen before and they aren't in the released version. So, those might be interesting to reverse engineer.

LazyGameReviews
>>24932470

Interesting stuff here, good to know! I'll double-check to make sure I didn't miss the *.010 file. Pretty sure I grabbed that off of there the other day, will check my backup disks when I get home and update the archive accordingly. Thanks!

Anonymous

Have you contacted Metal Jesus yet? He used to work for Sierra from 1993 according to a video of his he made a year or so ago.

Anonymous

Getting it into a museum is a rad idea, but even of the limited number of places I know in the US, it'd be hard to make a good choice. If anything, it certainly belongs inside one. A great companion piece indeed!

Anonymous

Lol funny enough, this place literally just opened today! https://computermuseumofamerica.org/ They say they plan to expand to the upstairs, and it looks like some of their exhibits include some rad arcade games. I nabbed a few pictures if you'd like to see them. But yeah, see if maybe these guys would like to display it with the other games/systems they have?

LazyGameReviews
>>24932903

Yep, he was one of the very first people I told when I got it last month 🤘 This was a little before his time though, so I ended up reaching out to older Sierra folks and eventually Mr. Williams. Luckily he's ashore right now since he's building a new boat, heh.

LazyGameReviews
>>24932968

Agreed, and I'm certainly happy to keep it in the meantime. Maybe I can take it to a convention or two.

LazyGameReviews
>>24933015

Was it you that sent some pics on Twitter? That place looks sweet, and it's not too far from me either!

Anonymous

Yeah, that was me! They are still pretty tiny, but they have quite the wishlist. I hope you can check it out sometime!

Anonymous

Were there any other partitions on the drive? Just noticed reference to d in one of the tools :)

Anonymous

also might be worth trying some kind of undelete/recovery sofware? i imagine this machine would have had a lot of stuff written to the disk. bummer you couldn't get it working on the other machine.

Anonymous

Maybe auction it off and donate the proceeds to the owners in the care home. If it is worth a lot of money like Ken Williams said, maybe it would go a long way in paying their bills. If anyone could generate the publicity and get excitement for an auction it would be you! Maybe Ken Williams would even sign it?

Anonymous

Clint, I live in Rochester NY where the Strong National Museum of Play is located. Me, my wife and kids are actually members and go to the place at least once a month. I can tell you for sure if they got their hands on this they do would do an amazing job turning this into an exhibit and displaying it. Every time I visit I seem to notice a new piece of notable video game history with an informative write up and top notch display. Sierra already has a notable presence with many of their adventure games and other notables like Phantasmagoria front and center in several displays and I bet they would anchor a display like that with something notable like this. Heck they even have the very first WOW server displayed along with so many other notable pieces of PC gaming history. What you do with it is totally up to you but I just wanted to let you know that the museum has a huge amount of space dedicated to PC games, in fact console games are not a primary focus and in my view and seem to take a back seat to arcade games and PC games.

Anonymous

Love the frantic, improvised first third of the video. Really captures the energy of the moment.

Joon Choi

Awesome stuff. Most of my earliest PC gaming memories are Sierra related so this kind of stuff is always a treat. I would second the suggestion to try an undelete / recovery software to see what else may have been on that drive, although if you find anything too interesting I figure you’d want to run it by Ken W first before posting about it. 😅

Anonymous

I'm just sitting there on the beach. Lmao.

LazyGameReviews
>>24938587

My heart was seriously pounding during all of that, it was like uncovering a hidden temple that could collapse at any moment!

LazyGameReviews
>>24940016

I love that teleport function, it says what it does and nothing more 😁 If you're sitting before teleporting, you're still sitting afterward haha.

Anonymous

Probably already mentioned but I imagine the reason ICEMAN is running so slow is due to it being a debug build. Debug builds of virtually anything tend to run quite a bit slower and is why dev machines are generally so much more kitted out with HW. Who knows though, it could really have been that slow at retail.

Anonymous

Just out of curiosity, whenever Iceman brought up that "report nature of bug" window what does the "prog" option stand for? I thought it might mean in-game progress, but I equally thought it might be implying that the program had begin inexplicably and psionically transmitting Gentle Giant to the viewers brain.

Anonymous
>>24941399

It might just be *that* bad on a PCjr/Tandy1000. The SCI0 engine I think really minimally targeted a 286, which even at the same clock speed as the 8088—the CPU that powered the PCjr—it could be almost twice as fast. Combine that with most people who did update to a 286 had a 10mhz/12mhz CPU vs a 8088 @ 4.77mhz, it was a pretty significant boost . Hardcore PCjr users, *might* have done a CPU swap to a NEC V20 that ran a bit faster for certain operations, but really nobody rocking that config back in the day. So, while I'm not shocked that the QA department attempting to run/test this on a PCjr, it wasn't their target platform anymore. It's pretty much why King's Quest 4 (1988) got released in both AGI/SCI0 forms, they were afraid that people hadn't upgraded yet to play the enhanced EGA version. But by late-1989 when Iceman was released, it wasn't looking good for the old PCjr.

Anonymous

So awesome. Fantastic piece of history.

Anonymous

MFM drives generally won't work except for the same model controller they were low level formatted on. It should be detected, but won't be accessible without using the original controller.

LazyGameReviews
>>24958368

Sounds like that may be the case since I haven't been able to get it working on any other machine yet. Must admit, I have relatively little experience with drives this old!

Anonymous

What a super cool video!!! I’m gonna have to show this to my dad too, because he saw the warehouse video and was really excited by all the old tech!

LazyGameReviews
>>24936360

Happy to hear that! I've never visited before, sounds like I gotta change this and give it a look in person.

Anonymous

Hey, Clint! Fantastic video on an amazing piece of history. I have a filming-related question: what aperture do you use to get everything more or less in focus when capturing yourself working on the computer? I find 2.8 gives me too shallow DOF but I don't want to crank up the ISO too much, either. Sadly I don't have extra lights other than ceiling LEDs, and I know that'll affect the exposure triangle somewhat. But a general idea of where to aim at in terms of aperture on a MFT body (G9) for those "sitting at the desk working on the computer" would be greatly appreciated!

Anonymous

This is great. A piece of PC gaming history ended up in the right pair of hands, got fixed and now we all have something to enjoy :) Never heard of the game before, let's see how subpar it gets.

Anonymous

Oh dude, I was on vacation on this came up and I only left a like. One of the first thing I do when I get home is whatch it and what freaking awesome thing. Some nice piece of history right there, and to share it, so people can mess with it, is even more awesome.

Anonymous

Well, it took a bit of futzing around with DOSBOX, but I'm happy to announce the ZZTOP.MID was the absolute worst rendition of "Sharp Dressed Man" I've ever heard.

Anonymous

O__O wow, that response from Ken Williams.

Anonymous
>>24935056

Seconded. Recovering deleted files off old hdds is satisfying as hell. Especially with a cmd line interface.