Notices by vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe), page 3

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.

#marchintosh #macintosh #vintageApple

@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 🤣

#macintosh #vintageApple

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/

#startrek #tng #japan #toys

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. ❤️

#msdos #demoscene #bbs

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.

#macintosh #vintageApple

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 🙏

https://www.dosgameclub.com

try to avoid posting self-congratulatory stuff here but jesus, this needs to be said somewhere:

it took me 13 years - no joke - to prune my Safari Reading List, by reading stuff, deleting stuff, and moving important stuff into bookmarks. there were 3000+ entries at its worst point a few years ago.

4 hours of insomnia just rewarded me with nirvana

i have a bit of a particular request for help from fellow classic macintosh enthusiasts: i am looking for truetype/opentype conversions of macintosh system 6 (or 7) japanese kanji fonts. these would be the fonts that shipped with "KanjiTalk 6" which was the japanese translation of the entire system 6 OS

has anyone ever come across these? i've checked the usual places like macgui already.

#macintosh #vintageapple

til: Keita Takahashi (katamari damacy) made a playdate game that looks *hilarious* 😆

https://uvula.jp/crankin

#playdate

#adventuregame players: recommend some #canadian adventure game developers - either studios or individuals i should follow.

boosts appreciated.

@HauntedOwlbear shocked by the vision return. i really didn't expect that to happen - i figured she had retinal damage given her ability to only see contrast

👏 wonderful news

open question for #dosgaming folks:

has there ever been an adventure game with flight simulator gameplay, or a flight simulator with point'n'click adventuring?

my morning #coffee studying the cartographic history of #Ultima for a little art project 🤓

thanks @dabbling_duck for the inspiration!

progress on the #ultima cartography art project :D

now to turn this into a plotter-friendly set of pen commands

today’s pickup is a Palm Tungsten E2. really excited about this one because it has a built-in SD card slot and bluetooth, making for super easy program/file transfers

appears to never have been used, and the battery still holds a strong charge!

this is going to become my bedtime #infocom and #interactivefiction game machine

@ThreeOhFour it doessss 😎
https://palmdb.net/app/frobnitz

@ThreeOhFour it works surprisingly well on the device too - text is readable

i just need to figure out a keyboard for it