Notices by vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe), page 2

what an exceptional soptware library on this mega darve

#sega #consoleGaming #retroGaming

@toxi 🤮 the best thing i did in the past 10 years, aside from leaving twitter, was getting rid of WP on my production server.

it literally meant writing a new CMS from scratch to replace it, and was worth every hour of my life spent doing it. 😆

does anyone else remember the exact POST sequence sounds for the first HDD they ever owned?

mine turned out to be - after an hour of research - a Western Digital WD-383 (aka. Tandon TM-383) RLL 30mb hdd, belonging to my family's first PC: a 1989 Amstrad PC2086/30 8Mhz XT.

the exact sequence of chitters, judders and beeps is burned into my brain. sadly, there are no recordings of that particular drive stored online. it's smaller cousin, the Tandon TM-252 has plenty of videos - unfortunately it has a slightly different self-test cycle.

awesome: Beastie/Leon McNeill just open sourced their Ultima III colour Macintosh port, all written in Think C!

This is the "Lairware" version that was sold at lairware.com, and received many updates over the years - eventually gaining OS X/Intel 32-bit support. The source appears to be an Xcode project with a mix of think C and cocoa.

great job, Leon!

https://github.com/beastie/ultima3

#openSource #foss #macintosh #vintageApple #retrogaming

today’s ridiculous retrojunk find: my childhood dream modem - a 56k USR Courier 😻
it did hard time as a Telus business admin modem in its previous life
#retroComputing

every time i feel guilty about buying a $50 half dead retrocomputer, i remind myself that i've got friends and family that think nothing of spending $10k on a new V8 engine block for their 1950s truck restoration. 😅

thanks to the videogame history foundation, we now have audio extracted from a DAT tape that was recorded during the production of Ultima VII: The Black Gate.

voiced by Bill Johnson, the tape contains one hour of The Guardian taunting the avatar. the first minute is the exact monologue used in the intro to the game.

source: https://archive.gamehistory.org/item/f08cd613-0509-488e-a5e7-160bcbe15117

#ultima #dosgaming

@captainarcee congrats! 👏

post your #WellLovedBook

back in 1997, my parents were going through a separation and i had freshly graduated high school. my mom took me on a road trip to the US to visit my father.

on our first day, we stopped in Drumheller AB to check out a little bookstore on main street. (long gone now). inside, i found a bright red box set of the Lord of the Rings books. i was broke, and my mom bought it for me. i knew nothing about the series aside from seeing the bakshi cartoon as a kid.

i spent the next week in the passenger seat absolutely riveted. and for the past 28 years have read the series every year without fail.

the first book is my favourite and has travelled with me from south america to alaska. i cherish all of the roadwear it has accumulated over the years - especially those yellowed curled pages.

thanks mom.

#books #bookstodon #WellLovedBook

TIL the original Interplay productions logo was supposed to spell IP

never once noticed that in 30 years

#retroComputing

two summers ago i rescued an hp laserjet 4V from an acreage barn.

the 4V is the hulking, supermax cousin of the 4M which many of you probably used in schools and offices decades ago

this printer handles up to 30.5cm / 12-inch wide paper, which - for the first time in my life - i need to use in order to print out a cribbage board carpentry template for my mom.

this is the first time the printer has been turned on in 20+ years. the "warming up" smell is reminiscent of high school macintosh labs and principal's offices.

today i finally learned where that office space joke came from.

#printers #retroComputing

bill atkinson's 25th anniversary of hypercard talk at the berkeley macintosh user's group does such a wonderful job of communicating how important it was to allow people to express themselves through software authoring, instead of leaving software development to programmers

"Some of the stacks I was most interested in were stacks that were really kind of ugly, but they did exactly what this person needed. There was no way in hell a programmer would have ever been interested. There was no market to write that for.

But this guy had something to do with his astronomy gear - something that helped him point his telescope. He knew what he needed; he wasn't a programmer, but he could make it.

Some of the stacks did not have a lot of aesthetic polish. I used to say: some of these stacks, only a mother could love, but those mothers loved them."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejdgTVj7ZG8

#hypercard #macintosh #vintageApple

enjoyed reading @jbcrawford's historical overview of residential networking - especially the coverage of farallon/apple PhoneNet

https://computer.rip/2025-02-02-residential-networking-over-telephone.html

#macintosh #vintageApple

if you're into the history of Ultima, Origin Systems and ebooks, andrea contato has released his Through the Moongate Part 1 (200 pages) for free for the next few days

i'll spare you a book review - but yes, it's worth reading. it got a poor quality translation from italian, but the stories are still enjoyable.

https://www.amazon.com/Through-Moongate-Richard-Garriott-Systems-ebook/dp/B07SKKTSNQ

#books #ultima #gamePreservation #history

so after working with css for over 20 years, today i actually learned that "em" units are relative to the container they're in.

how i never learned this along the way, is anyone's guess 😅

update: thanks to @juniper for tracking down this exceptional resource for getting your old mac back on the road. most importantly, has a nice local proxy to get you TLS 1.3 ("Legacy Mac Proxy")
https://jonathanalland.com/old-osx-projects.html

if you’ve got an old mac that has to remain on an older version of Mac OS X, you’ve probably noticed that all of its SSL based internet connections fail.

it’s due to expired root certificates, which you can update for free here:

https://docs.certifytheweb.com/docs/kb/kb-202109-letsencrypt/#macos-ios-etc

just put this 10 year old macbook air back to work as my couch coding machine. it is blazingly fast running 10.9.x (Mavericks) with only 4GB ram and a 1.4ghz i5. for VS Code work it is about as perfect as I could ask for

fwiw: it runs like absolute shit on mojave!

#macosx #permacomputing

thank you once again @sharewarewolf for your generosity in the vintage mac community

your PhoneNet five pack of adapters has arrived and will no doubt become part of some horrendous localtalk network in march

#marchintosh #vintageapple #macintosh

many of us are already into repairing what we have, not only to save money, but because we care about what we own.

many more people are interested in repairing what they have, but don't really know where to start.

i really enjoyed this mini-doc on repair in japan. it highlights many different kinds of tinkerers and artisans, from electronics to umbrellas to kintsugi:
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2032329/

if you're new to repairing things, there are an overwhelming number of places to start, and it will appear impossible on your first go. i've been taking apart things since i was 3 years old, and can safely say: you will break more than you fix, and eventually learn how to fix what you break! but the real joy is in the learning process of understanding how it all works.

#japan #nhk #repair #solarpunk

as a teenager in the 90s, i spent half of those years on irc. the server network i spent almost all of my time on was EFnet, short for "Eris FreeNet"... or so I've thought for the past 30 years

as it turns out, EFnet in fact stands for "Eris-Free Net" which has an entirely different meaning:

"Initially, most IRC servers formed a single IRC network, to which new servers could join without restriction, but this was soon abused by people who set up servers to sabotage other users, channels, or servers. Restriction grew and, in August 1990, eris.Berkeley.EDU was the last server indiscriminately allowing other servers to join it, Eris being the Greek goddess of strife and discord.

A group of operators, with the support of Jarkko Oikarinen, introduced a new "Q-line" into their server configurations, to "quarantine" themselves away from eris by disconnecting from any subset of the IRC network as soon as they saw eris there.

For a few days, the entire IRC network suffered frequent netsplits, but eventually the majority of servers added the Q-line and effectively created a new separate IRC net called EFnet (Eris-Free Network); the remaining servers which stayed connected to eris (and thus were no longer able to connect to EFnet servers) were called A-net (Anarchy Network). A-net soon vanished, leaving EFnet as the only IRC network."

🤣

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet

#irc

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