Notices by 4am ❧ (a2_4am@mastodon.social)

Zara, who did nothing wrong, would like you to know that this is her bone (it is not her bone), her tennis ball (also no), and her rubber fish thing (jury is still out)

#DogsOfMastodon

"ALL the REalLy SiGnIFiCANt tiTLEs HAve bEEN Long aGO CrAcKEd AnD CoPIeD"

anyway we found a completely unknown and unpreserved version of Wizardry... yesterday

#AppleII #retrocomputing

Ray Tracking v1.0 (unpreserved, cracked by Passport, RWTS requires extra nibbles and timing bits after the data prologue)

https://archive.org/details/RayTracing_v10_4amCrack

Thanks to @txgx42 for the disk!

#AppleII #retrocomputing

@mcc an article went around recently about "rewilding" the Internet that made the analogy to clear cutting an old growth forest. You get incredible wood, but you can only do it once.

it's leap day, post frog

#AppleII #retrocomputing

I have ported the first 7 Scott Adams graphical adventures to ProDOS: Adventureland, Pirate Adventure, Mission Impossible, Voodoo Island, The Count, Strange Odyssey, and Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle. Each port includes patches for a better text input routine, an increased number of game save slots which read/write from external ProDOS files, auto-uppercase of input and auto-lowercase of output, quit to ProDOS, and of course no copy protection.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

Me at 20: Why would that famous tech luminary retire early to go make art? Tech is great, I love programming, I can't believe I get paid for it.

Me at 50: Oh.

What's the name of this font? Wrong answers only.

I made the world's worst word search (the word to find is COCOON)

"Wizard Replay" is almost entirely the product of @a2_qkumba's genius. (He would deny this.) Wizardry was, perhaps infamously, written in a very early version of Apple Pascal. Wizard Replay is able to virtually mount and boot these unmodified Pascal disk images under ProDOS, including patching the p-code interpreter to seamlessly "swap" virtual disk images when the game expects you to switch from the program disk to the scenario disk.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

Wizard Replay lets you play "Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord," "Knight of Diamonds," and "Legacy of Llylgamyn," and several unauthorized third-party scenarios, all from the comfort of your ProDOS hard drive. It features integrated WizPlus for character editing, integrated scenario backup & restore, modern bug fixes from <https://www.zimlab.com/wizardry/proving-grounds-v3/>, and of course zero copy protection.

https://archive.org/details/WizardReplay

Thanks to @a2_qkumba for everything.

#AppleII

I acquired a new, possibly unpreserved Apple II program called "The Cube," so I went to the usual places online to see if other copies or versions exist. I found a compilation disk that had a program on it named CUBE, which seemed promising. (Programs were frequently reduced to single files to save space.) I downloaded the disk image and fired up an emulator and booted the disk image and ran CUBE and got trolled by a prankster from 1986.

Well played, sir. Well played.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

Siri, show me an example of burying the lede.

Reminder NOT to buy anything from apple-2-online-store in eBay, who just listed a large number of "original" disks. I have caught them red-handed in the past selling cracked copies as originals. I have no way of confirming if these new disks are original or not.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

@europlus That was my thought as well. If you were dumping your entire collection you would just do a single auction. Even if you didn't know the value of titles like Wizardry (he does), eBay will auto-suggest a base price from similar auctions.

Loading screen shows ©1994, and files are dated June 9, 1994, making this one of the last commercial Apple II titles released on 5.25-inch floppy disk.

For perspective, other notable software released in 1994 would include Bryce, Final Fantasy VI, HoTMetaL, and PHP.

Quilting Bee.woz

https://archive.org/details/wozaday_Quilting_Bee

#wozaday #AppleII #retrocomputing

@herrprofdr I assume so. School districts were always technology laggards, especially elementary schools. But Apple had already shipped 80 MHz PowerPC Macs in March 1994. It really boggles the mind how much overlap there was between technological generations.

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/specs/powermac_8100_80.html

@RonsCompVids @mac84tv

This beagle would like you to know that he is helping. (He is not helping.)

#DogsOfMastodon