my compaq 524 CDS came with the best modem suite of all time 😅
thank you Gekk for preserving this old software
#retrocomputing #windows95
my compaq 524 CDS came with the best modem suite of all time 😅
thank you Gekk for preserving this old software
#retrocomputing #windows95
okay so this is badass
one of my most cherished and irreplaceable retrocomputing devices is my peerless Roland SC-55.
while the MT-32 has been emulated quite well, the SC-55 always lagged behind in emulation - most attempts at it sounded pretty terrible, even using good soundfonts.
(and hauling around my SC-55 + midi & 3.5mm & usb cables just to play games in dosbox was painful)
in comes Nuked-SC55: it is a chip-level emulation project that just *nails* it.
it took about 30 seconds to build with cmake. i'm now going to try integrating it with dosbox, so i can finally play 90s DOS general midi games! (ultima viii pagan, here i come)
demo songs with the LCD screen (which is also accurately emulated!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Z5y2otJqY
nuked-sc55 source:
https://github.com/nukeykt/Nuked-SC55
fwiw to compile (requires cmake):
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
i'm finally opening up boxes of software from my archive that haven't seen the light of day in 15-20 years. today, i found a program that has never been archived or probably seen in over 40 years.
i absolutely adore this dungeon mastering program for the TRS-80 that was distributed in ziplock bags in 1982
i can find only one mention of it on the web - the august 1982 issue of TRS-80 Rainbow magazine that advertises it for $19.95 + S&H
happily, i found the cassette, which has never been archived anywhere AFAIK. i am scanning in the printed documentation, along with making a recording of the tape.
#gamePreservation #trs80 #tandy #retroComputing #retroGaming
@ThreeOhFour this is far less engimatic than the hive, but this location in ultima viii captured my imagination for a decade
in a cave near mythran's home, there is a set of massive, locked, double doors. i searched under every skeleton and behind every chest for months, trying to find a way to unlock them. my buddy at school and i talked for months about what we thought might be behind them.
we graduated, and never figured it out.
15 years later i found out that the doors could only be opened by summoning a golem, using a single pixel of dirt in the area. the golem pries the doors apart and it leads to....
... a big empty room 😆
this was supposed to be a teleport/transition area to the Lost Vale expansion, that never got used in the final game.
some things are best left to the imagination i guess.
what the hell is *that* Safari?
that's the most netscape 1.0 modal dialog i've seen in 15 years of using this browser
so for the past month i've been leaving old vhs movies on in the background while i work
i noticed that several tapes had faded audio that got worse over the course of the film, with a lot of humming in the background, to the point of being inaudible after a while. a few web searches suggested either a worn out vhs tape (which I feared), or a poorly tracked vcr (I adjusted the tracking, which didn't improve anything)
i did notice that my older JVC vcr never had the "stereo" light on when playing back movies, and had a suspicion:
so holy crap, til: most VHS tapes past a certain age have two audio tracks: an analog mono track, and a stereo hi-fi track
when the vcr can't track the stereo hi-fi track properly, it switches to the analog mono track on the edge of the tape.
my vcr was always downgrading to the analog track, which on several (ex-rental) tapes had degraded due to mishandling and abuse (being at the edge of the tape path)
i picked up a Sony SLV-778HF today for $20 just to see if switching VCRs would make a difference.
holy COW is this a huge improvement over my old 80s JVC vcr! not only did it pick up the stereo hi-fi track on all of the "bad" tapes perfectly, but it improved the video so much that it looks like a dvd.
@ramon_wilhelm that's a great point - i hadn't even considered that aspect. I have a bunch of VHS tapes that I should re-digitize! :)
@ramon_wilhelm 😆 i have a bunch from the 90s that we taped tv programs with, so there are some hilarious 1990s commercials on them.
edit: i can't believe i have to write this, but - i am not your technical support representative, and i'm not going to reply to your support requests 😖
so this is a bit wild
i've got an oldie iPad 2 running iOS 9.3.5. this has some expired root certificates which results in several apps not working properly. Plex will load, but it won't be able to negotiate with your plex server, for instance.
since apple doesn't offer new iOS updates for it (with refreshed certificates).. it seemed like i was kinda stuck.
as it turns out, and is documented nowhere aside from a post on reddit, you can manually download your own root certificate - and iOS lets you install it without complaint.
if you're on an ancient iOS device, just point its Safari browser to this url: https://letsencrypt.org/certs/isrgrootx1.der
tap Install when prompted - and you've got working certificates again!
this just breathed new life into a 10+ year old iPad, which will become a bedtime plex viewer.
this 200 gram bag of stamps from the 1960s was lovingly collected and curated by someone who loved international stamp art. i found it at a thrift store today, and will be turning it into physical pixel art in the coming weeks
little story for tonight.
while i was goofing around with #globalTalk, I ended up searching for some old Simpsons icons for my classic Macintosh (an LC 475), and stumbled upon an entry on the garden called Banned Simpsons Icons. (Who could resist downloading something with a title like that?)
They were called the "Banned Simpsons Icons" because Fox once sent the artist - Jeanette Foshee - a cease & desist letter for her uncannily perfect renderings of the copyrighted characters. they planned on suing her for every penny she made ($0.00) on them. this was back in 1995.
i thought - hell, what a wild story. why don't I get a hold of the artist - jeanette - and find out more about her banned icon set?
what i stumbled upon broke my heart, and i ended up spending a week digitally preserving what i could find.
read the rest of this diary entry here: https://www.dialup.cafe/~vga256/diary.htm
well that’s kinda embarrassing. after admiring all of the #globalTalk imagewriters I was sad that I didn’t have one to hook up to the LC
today I went into the archive to pull some Macintosh stuff out for repair, and there was a brand new IW2 sitting in an Apple // crate 😅
I’ve never used one of these in my life. It has a mini-DIN port on the back. any tips on finding the right cable? I noticed my localtalk cables don’t match the pin configuration.
@mac84tv LOL i was wondering if it was going to burn through your ink
omg LOL
my copy of Quark just detected @paulrickards copy running 5000 miles away on his mini vMac instance
this is due to us having “Program Linking” enabled over our global appletalk network 🤣
watching TNG the other day, and i became curious about those black pyramid things that sit on some tables in ten forward
they looked familiar. like something i had seen in a radio shack catalogue as a kid.
sure enough, they turn out to be a Bandai "Pair Match" game from the 80s!
source:
https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/tng-ten-forward-table-centerpiece.124641/
did some game preservation research today.
a few years ago i was able to get my hands on one of the only surviving copies (in the world) of the interactive book Portal, for the Macintosh Plus.
no, not that Portal. the original one, from 1986, by novelist Rob Swigart.
thank the gods the ~40 year old diskettes were still viable, and I was able to image it on my Color Classic.
but, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get the damned thing to run properly. my CC hated it. mini vMac hated it. System 7 hated it. System 6 hated it. everything caused the game to lock up after a few seconds, or get hung playing random music.
that was until today. in a moment of utter insanity, i realized that the creators of Portal did something very special for the Macintosh Plus: they made the game a f'ing BOOTER. it was never meant to be run from within the OS. you just inserted the diskette, turned on your Plus. the entire game is an operating system of its own, executing instructions from the CPU and ROM. this isn't anything new for C64 or Apple // users, but for the Macintosh it was practically unheard of. they replicated the Macintosh System 2 gui perfectly, just for the game.
the Macintosh port is still gorgeous today: a mouse-driven point'n'click UI with high-res 1-bit icons, and high-res text. it feels good in a way that none of the other versions (C64, DOS, Amiga) do.
but what stands out to me, nearly 40 years after its release, is that this is a *hypertext game* through and through. the story unfolds as you click around, wandering from computer network to computer network, reading documents and piecing together how the Earth became abandoned hundreds of year ago.
as far as I know, Portal's creators (Rob Swigart and Brad Fregger) were never credited for producing a *very* early Hypertext game. Portal predates Hypercard by an entire year.
recorded some gameplay in mini vMac for posterity. as far as I know, this is the only footage of Portal for the Macintosh that has ever existed on the web.
http://macintoshgarden.org/games/portal
#macintosh #gamePreservation #vintageApple #history #hyperText
ms-dos story time
so way back in 1990, my family still hadn't made the jump to a PC yet. all we had was a TRS-80 Color Computer, and a Mattel Intellivision.
but we had just moved to an acreage in another province, and i found out that one of the neighbours' dads had a computer: a Zenith AT/XT
my friend's dad would come home with random diskettes, probably copied from someone at his chemical engineering job. we'd pop them in and usually find something decent to play.
we played a lot of cga two-player SOPWITH.COM and a moon patrol clone that was honestly pretty good, even in eyeball-piercing magenta.
but one day he came home with a disk that just said 'JOLT' on it. we ran the exe, and i was instantly blown away. it was a jolt can, perfectly digitized in VGA, spinning around in circles faster and faster, until it was barely recognizable. i watched the animation a dozen times before my friends got bored and wanted to play something else.
the next day, i told my best friends at school about the animation. no one believed me, and the diskette "mysteriously" disappeared the next time i visited my buddy's house.
i was haunted by the jolt cola can animation for decades. that is, until a while ago i ended up finding it buried in an ms-dos demoscene site.
here it is, over 30 years later, with an original file date of February 22, 1990. ❤️
i normally don't post stuff like this, but ... the dude who runs macintoshrepository.org sure is a piece of shit
i had noticed several years ago that he was scraping macintoshgarden.org mercilessly, then reposting the same files on his own site. as a user, it was just mildly irritating.
last year i spent a day extracting and converting the PixelJerk icon set by hand, so it could be used in OS X and System 7/8/9 again. it was a lot of work.
https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/109854078857733955
I uploaded the packs to macintoshgarden.org. it's one of the best mac preservation communities there are.
today i found all of those files uploaded with identical filenames on macintoshrepository, and the kicker: he didn't even bother to credit anyone for the work: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/70538-pixeljerk-os-x-aqua-icon-collection
archival work is a time consuming and often thankless job. the very least we can do in this community is credit people for their unpaid labour.
there’s a real joy in attaching an iTrip FM transmitter to an old Mini.
the sony S2 boombox behind is of a similar vintage, and has a completely different yet complementary aesthetic. i sure miss the aspirational design of the early 2000s
every week someone inevitably boosts a toot complaining about how forums have all disappeared after the galaxy went into decline in 2007 which also coincided with their 19th birthday and their last good coldplay experience
this is a shout out to @dosgameclub who not only maintains an active set of forums, but does so with a gorgeous MS-DOS mode co80 theme last seen in dosshell
thank you for resisting the decline of trantor and keeping the old ways alive instead of complaining about it 🙏
indigenous canadian, recovering academic → game dev & interactive media artist with a penchant for dial-up modems, the 4o3 bbs scene, 1-bit art, trackers/mods, classic macs, and 80s and 90s gaming. curator of internet, canadian & gaming obscura.game development: tomodashi studiohttps://tomodashi.comcurrent major project: tomo, a decentralized discussion group network that's better than reddit https://tomo.city🇨🇦#nobot #nobots #noindex(profile pic: a 1988 red fox 6¢ canada stamp)
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