4 ms·

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

99 points by zdw 4mo ago

everyone 4mo 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 4mo 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.
- toast0 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
    Wow that’s a crazy hack. I never heard of it.
- smilespray 4mo 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 4mo ago
  Magneto Optical discs were also somewhat popular in this era.
stuxnet79 4mo 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.
- wyantb 4mo ago
  Have you tried Dolphin? From what I understand it's the best in class emulator on that front.
  - jedbrooke 4mo 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
    - wyantb 4mo ago
      ...I totally forgot about that intermediary console, you're right. Bolsters your original point entirely, hah.
- HerbManic 4mo 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.
xattt 4mo 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.
- bombcar 4mo 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 4mo 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.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - deltarholamda 4mo 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!
jakedata 4mo 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 4mo ago
Lots more fun stuff on the rest of the channel https://www.youtube.com/@will_it_work https://www.youtube.com/@will_it_work Hacks, on hacker news. I love it.
tubetime 4mo 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 4mo 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.

99 points by zdw 4mo 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 4mo 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.
toast0 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
  Wow that’s a crazy hack. I never heard of it.
smilespray 4mo 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 4mo ago
Magneto Optical discs were also somewhat popular in this era.

stuxnet79 4mo 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.

wyantb 4mo ago
Have you tried Dolphin? From what I understand it's the best in class emulator on that front.
- jedbrooke 4mo 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
  - wyantb 4mo ago
    ...I totally forgot about that intermediary console, you're right. Bolsters your original point entirely, hah.
HerbManic 4mo 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.

xattt 4mo 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.

bombcar 4mo 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 4mo 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.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- deltarholamda 4mo 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!

jakedata 4mo 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 4mo ago

Lots more fun stuff on the rest of the channel https://www.youtube.com/@will_it_work https://www.youtube.com/@will_it_work Hacks, on hacker news. I love it.

tubetime 4mo 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 4mo 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.