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

Look what just dropped in my lap.

#AppleII #retrocomputing #inithello

Total Replay v6.0 is out. It features 519 Apple II games, all playable from a single bootable 32MB hard disk image.

https://archive.org/details/TotalReplay

Code & changelog: https://github.com/a2-4am/4cade/releases/tag/v6.0

No LLMs. We tested every game, we squashed every bug, we sweated every pixel, for 7 years.

Thanks to @a2_qkumba, @txgx42, @helix_nrg, @Roughana, Frank M, and everyone else who contributed.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

Your periodic reminder that you can (and should) visit @soffronoff's "Apple Boot Theater" page. It now includes Total Replay in screensaver mode alongside a never-ending stream of random Apple II boot videos. Feel free to leave it running at the Apple store or any publicly accessible kiosk.

https://esoffron.github.io/compatible-boot-theater/compatible_boot_theater_4cade.html

#AppleII #retrocomputing

@thomasfuchs why on God's green earth is there an iPhone gopher app

gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/a2.4am

Maintaining a Gopher site, as a bit

I am so fucking tired of seeing this warning

Milo does not like the cone of shame

#DogsOfMastodon

I wrote a "chaos monkey" script in MAME's Lua scripting engine that semi-randomly presses keystrokes to exercise every path in Copy II Reboot, and it helped me eventually nail down a combination of actions that can put a Superdrive in a permanently-busy broken state where the drive ROM freaks out and fast-fails every time you call it and manipulates the stack in a way that crashes the caller. So that's fun. (The bug also exists in Copy II Plus v8.4.)

#AppleII #retrocomputing

RE: https://mastodon.social/@a2_4am/116072144942640899

Meta-note: this is the GOOD STUFF. This took me HOURS to debug, and in those hours I developed a mental model of a complex operation AND learned something new about ProDOS internals AND tested and discarded several theories before finally discovering the root cause and it was ALL WORTH IT. I don't want to outsource that to Dr. Flattery the Always-Wrong Chat Box. Why would I want to skip this? This is the WHOLE THING.

If you don't want to write software then don't.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@MozillaAI/116279201448628866

All we wanted was a browser. All you had to do was build a browser. You had one job.

Milo, who has never been petted in his entire life, would like to be petted before you find what he did.

#DogsOfMastodon

@txgx42 by any chance do you need a power strip? (/cc @NanoRaptor background reading: <https://bitbang.social/@NanoRaptor/115805931979940208>)

As I mentioned last year, I acquired the source code to Copy ][ Plus v8.4 at @init_hello 2025 and proceeded to refactor the hell out of it, fix some 40-year-old bugs, and add some small quality-of-life updates. INIT HELLO is happening again this year <https://init-hello.org/2026/01/init-hello-v2-coming-this-summer/>, and I plan to release this project and (if accepted) give a presentation about it.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@a2_4am/115058454301438219

Update

#AppleII #retrocomputing

RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116025752963855521

One of these will push you into an oubliette of self-hatred and self-harm from which few people ever financially or emotionally recover, and the other is heroin.

This new Ship of Theseus joke sounds just like the old one

"I asked Grok" "I asked ChatGPT" well I asked Racter, your artificial insanity companion

#AppleII #retrocomputing

Current status.

#macintosh #retrocomputing

🌹 Roses are red,
🐝 Bees live in hives,