Notices by vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe)

til the DEC VT100, VT220 and VT320 terminals all had built-in pixel doubling circuitry that stretched compressed fonts into their proper size in realtime. this exceptionally well written post describes the mechanism and shows the various forms of output:

https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2019/dec-crt-typography

#retroComputing #dec

@prettygood similar, definitely not the same thing

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2025/01/16/hershey-canada-stopping-production-of-cherry-blossom-candy/

😭

you bastards. way to ruin 2025 for everyone

#canada

til almost all of the most beautiful artwork attached to the nine inch nails album covers, dvd menus and website images were the creation of visual designer david carson

downloaded at 56k back in 99, this 5.5mb video @320x200 somehow captures the hopeful exhilaration of the millennium.

https://www.davidcarsondesign.com/t/clients/nine-inch-nails/

@Infoseepage wow, not many people built VRML models in those days! cool :D

urgh. after a week of very interesting research and digging, i've located the source code for a very popular 3d rendering/modelling program from the 90s and 2000s: Caligari trueSpace

does anyone in the digital preservation world know someone at the Microsoft Open Source Programs (OSPO) office?
i'd love for this to be officially sanctioned as an OSS project.

#digitpres #softwarePreservation #windows98

someone local to me is selling this 5-foot tall 700 CD-ROM scsi pioneer disc changer

with storage like this i could finally have the --=490GB 24/7 oNLiNe 14.4/28.8/33.6k=-- bbs i've been dreaming about for 30 years 😎
#bbs #retroComputing

macOS users who have large photo libraries: do you have a recommendation for a photo deduplication program that will run on Monterey/12.x? i've got a collection of 40k+ photos that needs massive deduplication, and I cannot upgrade this production machine to a newer version of macos (which has dedupe built-in to Photos)

#macos

merry christmas to all of us surviving a night with the inlaws 😅

insanely deep and scientifically rational explanation for the decline in flavour of exported Kenyan coffee beans.

i've never learned so much about coffee production in a single, well-written and researched article

https://christopherferan.com/2021/12/25/kenya-and-the-decline-of-the-worlds-greatest-coffee/

#coffee

@ThreeOhFour 😭 i know what a terrible mistake

when life calls you to drive 3 hours to pick up 50 computing newspapers from the 90s you do not question

when i was a kid, you could build a simple game or application by dragging and dropping a few UI controls, and gluing them together with a few dozen lines of BASIC or Pascal. it might take 15 minutes, at most, to get your little character walking around on the screen. this is how we ended up with a lot of hilariously good and cheap shareware you could share on BBSes in the 90s.

for the past year i've been quietly working on building a software thingie that doesn't exist anymore. i've been building a software toolkit that's kinda like Visual Basic and Borland Delphi, designed for making tile-based 2d games.

i've been using it to build my own little goofy games, and improving on the drag'n'drop IDE as i figuring things out. it's not done yet, and has a long ways to go before it's ready for other people to start making their own little applications and games. think PICO-8 or ZZT if they had grown up on a steady diet of Windows 3.1 and GeoWorks Ensemble instead.

i'm really, really bad about polishing turds to infinity and never releasing them. to break that habit, i've built a mini-website for the IDE/Shareware Creation Kit. it's called Exigy, named like a bad 80s metal hair band or richard garriott game.

https://exigy.org

i'll be posting weekly blog/devlog updates there, so i don't irritate anyone with them on this account. there is an rss feed button at the top right if you hate my demonic php and css.

#shareware #ultima #php #blog #smolweb #zzt #indiedev

@tomjennings i still remember the IMG tag as being one of the most hotly debated HTML spec additions in the early 90s

xmas protip: if you string your lights on the ground, future snowfalls -> procedural volumetric lighting shader for free

#canada #christmas

huge thanks to @talin for uploading his Faery Tale Adventure (amiga) source to github

several users are already hard at work digesting the source tree and getting things working. one of the best is Xarklabs' ongoing SDL2 port, located here:

https://github.com/XarkLabs/faery-tale-amiga/tree/macos

talin's original source here:
https://github.com/viridia/faery-tale-amiga

#gamePreservation #retroGaming #amiga

filmmakers/vfx coders - i came across a *very* subtle dissolve effect in a game that i've very rarely seen used in games, and i can't figure out what it is, and how it's done.

the first 5 seconds show the game's dissolve effect.

the second 5 seconds shows a dissolve to black using a standard cross-dissolve algorithm that any film editing program would use

look at them very closely, frame by frame. they dissolve *very* differently. the game seems to dissolve the thinnest parts of the font first, and dissolves only the thickest parts toward the end.

the standard cross-dissolve dissolves all pixels simultaneously, which doesn't look very interesting.

update: thank you demosceners and film nerds! you nailed it - it's a "film dissolve" - and it is produced by dissolving in linear RGB color space with gamma 1.0

can anyone recognize the algorithm or industry name for the effect used in the first one?

TIL La Abadia Del Crimen got a 256 colour remake several years ago under the name "The Abbey of Crime Extensum", and the animation and pixel art is *gorgeous*

the controls have been modernized a bit, and it's a joy to explore.

free download and/or steam link here:
https://www.abadiadelcrimenextensum.com/en/the-game-2/

#retroGaming

my wife had to go into work today so i got put in charge of pumpkin carving

i'm sure you'll agree that halloween is an important day to scare children by rattling the bones of our dead culture

suspect next year she'll decide to stay home instead.

#halloween #retroComputing

@lunarloony I can think of only one film that pulls it off in a convincing manner and yet is absolutely mysterious about the mechanism. it was a little indie film called Primer by shane carruth