vga256

indigenous canadian, recovering academic → writer, gamedev & interactive toolsmith with a penchant for modems, the 4o3 bbs scene, 1-bit art, classic macs, and 80s/90s gaming. curator of internet, canadian & gaming historical obscura.

→ kiki: a tiny homepage construction kit https://tomotama.com/kiki
→ exigy: a VB & Hypercard-like shareware game creation kit https://exigy.org
→ tomo: a decentralized NNTP discussion group network https://tomo.city

(profile: a 6¢ canada red fox stamp)

Public Key

npub1z8nqp6gnl9ed9u73wvgs8nu6qqlssazlemg6j3z4eepe2sj7qrcquuwt4u

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqspresqayfljukj70ghxygre7dqq0cgw30ua5dfg32uusu4gf0qpuqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsdrw7k6

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1z8nqp6gnl9ed9u73wvgs8nu6qqlssazlemg6j3z4eepe2sj7qrcquuwt4u

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Last Notes

2025-10-02 17:07:19 GMT

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in case anyone is curious about the underlying cause of it being impossible to migrate a mastodon server from one domain to another, this limitation is due to the activitypub protocol itself, which (simplifying for brevity) uses the equivalent of absolute/hardcoded URLs for posts
@silverpill wrote this fediverse enhancement proposal that would allow for relative domain names. given that it was written a year ago, and with the molasses-like development the protocol has, i sadly suspect it's unlikely to be integrated any time soon.
more here:
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/e3e9/fep-e3e9.md
#mastoAdmin #fediverse #activityPub

2025-10-01 20:12:57 GMT

Due to technical limitations with mastodon's architecture - which does not support domain name changes or data migration - dialup.cafe will be closing permanently in one month.
Dialup.cafe instance users: please see the server announcement and get thine affairs in order. 💀

2025-08-24 04:25:30 GMT

how did it never once occur to me to swear at the You Don't Know Jack parser
i absolutely love that they rewarded the player for this
#retroGaming #win95
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/081/835/682/215/240/original/a8506e1a2c026fca.mp4

2025-08-23 16:53:55 GMT

bbs enthusiasts might remember the name Telegard - a bbs server written based on wwiv's source code and hugely popular with the ibm pc/ms-dos crowd
telegard had a long and tumultuous history by its authors, and its own source was eventually leaked and was modded into many more popular (pirate-friendly) ms-dos boards like Renegade, Oblivion and Iniquity.
while i was doing research a few months ago on the history of those systems, i found out that telegard.net - the original home of tg - was taken over by a domain squatter in 2010, populated with ads for the past 15 years.
two months ago, i noticed that the squatter had not renewed the domain, and it went into the long grace/redemption/auction/expiry cycle. i checked on it every single morning, and to my absolute delight, it was released this morning for purchase. 💸
the domain will be used purely for historical preservation of telegard and its many descendants
#bbs #warez #softwarePreservation
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/079/115/177/250/856/original/3217b5a0a0c25daf.png

2025-08-22 18:38:36 GMT

TIL a toy company released a line of Independence Day toys in the late 90s; each toy included a different "mission disk" floppy with a multimedia program on it for windows 3.1
toy collector @eisnerguy1 managed to collect all 11 of the toys and uploaded disk images to IA 🙏
https://archive.org/details/iD4_Independence_Day_Mission_Disks
#retroComputing #softwarePreservation #win31 #toys
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/073/859/898/047/515/original/e11e5a31be7da106.jpg

2025-08-22 15:23:36 GMT

update: found Vellum for macOS, and it works great
https://vellum.pub
for those of you who have written book-length documents and converted them into epub/mobi/etc - what is your favoured tool?
please don't say calibre. reply with anything but calibre. 😭
context: i've got a 120,000 word book in ms word doc format, that i'd like to turn into an ebook - hopefully with stuff like the auto-generated table of contents intact
#ebooks #writing

2025-08-21 16:05:42 GMT

my gods. i had no idea this existed. after dark 10th anniversary edition came with a special module called Hall of Fame that had manga re-imaginings of the most popular AD characters.
Boris begs to have its own sega branded anime game. fish also gets a top dog award.
video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36Agdjw3x5U
#macintosh #vintageApple #win95
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/067/602/807/411/714/original/ca1ec0527e6ab71c.png
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/067/610/706/663/031/original/3487666ea34eba1c.png

2025-08-18 22:16:34 GMT

til about japan's Nifty-Serve online service, which was designed to be japan's answer to CompuServe.
while renown for its online forums, i was impressed to see that it was also a shareware distribution service. you could pay for and download registered versions of utilities and games, and the creators were paid directly by nifty.
while the service shut down in 2006, it was revived for one year as a museum of sorts for people to login and poke around. there was even an iOS app.
did anyone happen to archive a copy of the app?
https://web.archive.org/web/20110721053135/http://www.appbank.net/2011/07/20/iphone-application/278566.php
it originally was downloadable here - if that helps to track it down:
http://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/id447556735?mt=8
#japan #retroComputing #softwarePreservation #shareware
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/052/063/374/617/446/original/70aacece3f3a7139.jpg
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/052/063/461/959/612/original/99b571e3d6742ec4.jpg

2025-08-15 21:47:35 GMT

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i could be wrong, but this might be the only lucasarts joke in a sierra game
#sierra #lucasArts #adventureGames #dosgaming
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/034/973/364/777/191/original/bb3a7f62c61d506d.png

2025-08-13 04:04:50 GMT

i adore this. in 1996, the creator of the Ultizurk series uploaded an ad for his little ultima-like rpg to wuarchive.wustl.edu, hoping a publisher would pick it up
MADMANPX.PCX
"This is a beautiful mosaic of the upcomming game: MADMAN,
rendered in a full 800x600x256 PCX file.
Very colorful, and gives an excellent overview of a startling
new role-playing game. Enjoy! -Dr. Dungeon"
playable here:
https://archive.org/details/MADMANV1
fansite for Dr Dungeon games/Ultizurk
https://web.archive.org/web/20010422075335/http://www.eskimo.com/~shamus/bio.html
#shareware #dosGaming
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/019/462/019/607/190/original/d637ec0c6a212504.png

2025-08-13 03:50:22 GMT

does anyone else want to help rebuild the wuarchive.wustl.edu anonymous ftp 😢
my first ftp site. i will always remember you for your /pub/incoming/.warez/win95beta/ my dear friend.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110414181344/http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/
#worldWideWeb #retroComputing #oldInternet
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/019/407/470/779/765/original/2f5eacd19e8cae10.png

2025-08-12 20:56:24 GMT

i noticed that Sugru mouldable silicone glue was bought by Tesa, and suddenly there is no stock available anywhere in canada, and prices are insane
does anyone know of a comparable product for mouldable silicone glue? there must be a competitor by now - it's been around for over 10 years
#crafting #diy

2025-08-12 02:41:37 GMT

imagine wikipedia with a microsoft win3.x/9x interface
choose your lord
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/013/472/868/323/432/original/24642ccaa4c6a1ed.jpg
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/013/475/462/940/299/original/ba1a931c68f6b442.png
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/013/479/151/376/059/original/564e95a05d0dc3f5.jpg
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/013/481/548/647/286/original/291131e905e977e8.png

2025-08-11 16:55:59 GMT

old phone phreakers: can anyone tell me exactly what a Watts extender (number) is?
unbelievably, web searches provide near zero results. even usenet has next to nothing.
i saw it referred to *many* times over the years in hacker/phreaker books and articles, but never came across a technical description of how one worked.
by context, its purpose is to extend one's local calling range to long distance without paying for it, but i've never seen an explanation of how it worked.
#telecom #phreaking #hacking

2025-08-07 22:19:33 GMT

@nprofile…uhu3 I always wanted to ask - what forum software does dgc run for the website? The theme is fantastic, and it's perfectly integrated with the forum design.

2025-08-05 02:56:49 GMT

i normally don’t air my mental laundry out in public, but i thought this was important to talk about.
someone on here once wrote that they were raised to work hard, and the only time allowed off was when they became very sick (due to overwork, naturally).
that resonated with me when i read it a few weeks ago, and i gave it a dark chuckle. my wife complains daily that i never take time off, and my usual reply is “i’ll have plenty of time off when i’m dead!”
but after many months of neglecting myself, today i got that sick. so sick that i couldn’t do anything at all. so sick that i was no longer capable of looking after myself.
talking with my wife about it made me appreciate just how ingrained i am with the belief that redemption can only be found in work; that i am what i do for other people or the world outside of me.
i was raised to believe that my human value is in my creative product.
that system works well when you’re successful, because success serves to ratify the belief: i am a good person because people use or like or need the things i make.
but what happens when people don’t like the things you make, or can’t use them, or don’t see any value in them? what kind of person are you then?
this seems like a very obvious problem that can be rationally dealt with. “just stop believing that!” chimes the CBT bot and prescribes some mental exercises to deal with stress management.
the reality is that many creative folks find themselves burned out trying to live out impossible systems of belief, and there are no easy solutions.
if any of this resonates with you, it’s probably time to step back from the workbench and do some thinkin. hopefully before you get sick. 🤞

2025-07-31 05:06:47 GMT

inexplicably removed from youtube, this has just been recovered with wbm:
ibm hires kate mulgrew/captain janeway in 1994 to promote OS/2 Warp 3 after patrick stewart shits the bed on a paid appearance
it's painful.
#ibm #os2 #retroComputing #starTrek
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/946/095/578/566/842/original/21e174ea25074ed5.mp4

2025-07-30 15:29:30 GMT

now nearly 20 years after it was first published, rob o’hara’s Commodork remains to be the most faithful recollection of the bbs era. i’ve re-read it almost every year since it was printed, and i’m always struck by how accurate his memory for the warez and modeming scene is.
i’m amazed that we still do not have a comprehensive written history of BBSes to this day.
#bbs #retroComputing #warez #commodore #books
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/942/865/484/437/050/original/10f6c3f2f42abd79.jpeg

2025-07-29 21:32:54 GMT

it's kind of nuts that we'd pay a commercial voip service for a DID number and per-minute voice call charges just to run a BBS or dial-up service with modems
has anyone created a public (voip) PBX for modem-based retrocomputing? to be clear: i'm talking about something like a SIP Proxy which would allow for direct IP-to-IP connections between client/server.
#bbs #retrocomputing

2025-07-28 08:04:58 GMT

i just ftp'd into a public ftp server running in Ecuador, and discovered an absolutely critical piece of US Robotics ISP modem pool software that has been missing for 20 years
thank you from the bottom of my heart, rolando felix of Educational Unit 10 De Agosto, for leaving your departmental computer ftp wide open ❤️ you just preserved some insanely useful and important dial-up ISP history. (don't worry rolando - i didn't peek too deeply into your ms-dos games and music folders)
the story:
in the mid-90s i was a teenager who had a summer job at a dial-up isp. we had 32 incoming lines which were handled by 32 external USR Courier modems, which were fed into a super chonky Livingston Portmaster terminal server. all of the support hardware took up an entire rack - just to let 32 people call in for internet service at 28.8kbaud. it ate a ton of power, and made a lot of heat.
then, in 95-96, US Robotics delivered two insane appliances: the Total Control Modem Pool. these were *tiny* devices that offered 16 dial-up modems at 33.6kbaud. if you paid a bit more, you could buy the NetServer version, which gave you a terminal server too. an entire isp in a box the size of a network switch.
the modems had buggy firmware. so USR offered firmware updates via their ftp site. you could even upgrade some of the modems to "x2" 56k service with a firmware patch. they supported it for years, and when 3com bought USR, they kept the ftp site running for years. and then, 3com shut down their ftp site. and no one thought to mirror it.
after 3 hours of searching, i was able to track down a single filename thanks to WBM: mpv90an.zip. not a single site on the web had it - not even IA or discmaster. on a hunch, i plugged it into the Napalm FTP Indexer (https://www.searchftps.net) and... unbelievably, there it was, sitting on an ancient box in someone's university office in Quito, Ecuador.
the most amazing part was how slow the server was. at 250 ms pings, it was like digging through a public ftp on a 14.4k modem in 1994.
tomorrow i'll be uploading these files to IA. for now, sleep.
#digiPres #softwarePreservation #ISP
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/929/756/056/157/233/original/f61ff2d77b812928.png

2025-07-28 02:01:53 GMT

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/it-s-medieval-madness-in-rural-alberta-as-jousters-take-aim-at-glory-1.7595077
#alberta #canada #australia

2025-07-27 02:51:50 GMT

sadly lost to a domain squatter a decade ago, Smackerel interactive was a canadian multimedia design duo (dave groff and kevin steele). mac users might remember them as the creators of the Mackerel Stack - a goofy hypercard stack that equal parts interactive toy and business card
after the company closed, dave and kevin went on to write some online retrospectives about art & design during the peak 1990s multimedia era. their mini-essays are succinct, thoughtful, and inspiring. i posted the first essay about hypercard a few months ago here: https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/111896945530811821
this is the second of those essays, recovered from the wbm... Learning From Limitations: When Bevelled Edges Were Cool.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100127132753/http://smackerel.net/bevelledTitle.html
kevin's a super nice guy. wish he had joined mastodon.
#macintosh #design #multimedia #canada #hypercard
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/922/902/465/534/587/original/77179f30c534c3cf.png

2025-07-27 01:49:55 GMT

omfg. i was just thinking tonight about how it's too bad no one ever made modern versions of those terrible/awesome tiger electronics LCD games you could buy at radio shack
....... @itizso has done exactly that, and *perfectly* i might add 🤯
https://itizso.itch.io/retrofab
#indiegames
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/922/681/485/058/580/original/dd30472a40cf300e.png

2025-07-24 22:42:57 GMT

i have a really weird request for industrial musicophiles: i am beyond excited that i rediscovered a track that i've been missing from my music library for over 20 years.
the thing is, i can't figure out for the life of me where i first heard it. it was never once radio played here, nor is it something my friends were into. i can't seem to find any movies or tv series it was in.
was A Daisy Chain 4 Satan (Acid & Flowerz Mix) by My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult ever played in some well known film, tv show, or compilation cd?
or was this literally something i stumbled on it an open kazaa/gnutella/bearshare C:\ drive in 1999, or my local goth industrial club when i was an alcoholic?
thanks for the help 🙏
#industrial #music
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/910/622/635/424/228/original/c1043d256247a622.mp3

2025-07-24 03:37:13 GMT

some shitheel over at wikipedia deleted a very obscure and super interesting article about the LeechModem series of bbs protocols, that i learned about buried deep in a bbs documentary interview
what was (X/Y/Z)-Modem?
a thumbnail sketch of the original protocols: bbs file transfers using the X/Y/Z-modem file transfer protocols relied upon a similar structure. the entire file would be sent from modem to modem, one packet at a time. each packet was successfully sent (and the checksum verified), the receiver would sent an ACK (acknowledgement) that the packet was received. if the packet wasn't received, or failed the checksum, the receiver sent a NAK (negative-acknowledge) response. after 10 NAKs, the sender aborted the file transfer.
why did this matter for bbs's?
back in the day, (mostly pirate) BBSes relied on "credit" systems which limited the amount you could download before you had to do work like upload new files, or participate on the message boards. this was done to discourage "leechers" from tying up the board's phone line downloading dozens of files for hours at a time.
the BBS software only withdrew a download credit from your account when a file transfer *was successful*.....
... try to imagine how this could be exploited.
how did LeechModem work?
the creators of leechmodem realized that if the file transfer protocol sent 10 NAK responses on the very last byte of a file, the BBS would think it was a failed file transfer and abort the download. since aborted downloads didn't count against your download credits, it was like you had never downloaded the file. in reality, you already had the entire downloaded file on your computer.
it took a long time for sysops and BBS software authors to figure out how to defeat leechmodem in its many variants. one of my favourites was the second the BBS detected a user running a leechmodem protocol, it would immediately cancel the file transfer, and then withdraw *twice as much credit* from their account and send a LEECHER! message to their terminal 😆
the (now deleted) wikipedia article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220626210439/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeechModem
#bbs #history #retroComputing

2025-07-24 01:06:45 GMT

it took me 35 years to realize that Pipe Dream for the microsoft entertainment pack - something I played *a lot* as a kid - is Lucasfilm Games' Pipe Dream.
(fwiw, the entire screenshot is a palette of 10 colours. incredible expressiveness with the 3-colour handpainted logo)
#retroGaming #win31 #lucasArts
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/905/514/941/371/018/original/791007dbbe42f939.png

2025-07-21 15:16:19 GMT

https://youtu.be/M_c_vv1Eb04
not dosgaming, but jesus, it gets an A+ for commitment to the F1 aesthetic.
#fallout #dosGaming #doom

2025-07-21 00:03:54 GMT

there were dozens of bulletin board system software packages available in the 90s, but for a fourteen year old kid with warez scene aspirations, there were two that stood above the rest for wannabes like me:
oblivion/2 and iniquity
each grew out of the same software: Telegard (which itself inherited the WWIV source code)
aside from technical and QoL improvements, the most obvious differences for teenagers were the kinds of prepackaged ANSI art the boards came with. you could start an elite board overnight with a careful selection of menus and login screens.
here are two of the best from each bbs
#bbs #retroComputing #ansiArt
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/888/232/607/882/583/original/197772c1fb1d0199.png
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/888/273/082/023/059/original/90daf75f99f7d30f.png

2025-07-18 17:22:05 GMT

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@nprofile…zfuh i only knew about it because his friend and co-host stewart cheiffet mentioned it briefly in an interview on the retrobits podcast. he really struggled emotionally with the fallout from the MS deals.

2025-07-18 16:41:16 GMT

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@nprofile…zfuh thanks for this. i would have totally missed it otherwise. i was surprised and glad his kids chose to acknowledge his alcoholism. it’s not a pleasant subject, but was a major part of his life leading to his death.

2025-07-17 03:32:19 GMT

way back in 2017, jackson lango started writing a dev log about his passion project: an ascii/ansi adventure called Terminal Rain.
i was instantly in love with his lighting and animation. in an era overloaded with knockoff cyberpunk aesthetics, he had a keen eye for atmosphere and mood
it broke my heart when the blog went defunct a year later, and then disappeared entirely by 2020. waybackmachine sadly didn't archive any of his artwork.
these two images are the only surviving examples of his game as it existed back then.
#softwarePreservation #indiegames #cyberpunk
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/866/447/429/492/517/original/5f5503dd9a113031.mp4
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/866/452/042/671/118/original/7c555a2badb3f0e9.mp4

2025-07-15 03:22:26 GMT

if you were a kid in the 90s or early 2000s, you very likely goofed around with some of this educational software at school, or if your parents hated you sufficiently, at home.
a few months ago someone generously sent me an educational software catalog that their father - who was a teacher - had kept from the 90s. i finally got around to scanning it in, and now you too can goggle at the insane prices schools had to pay for multi-seat game licenses.
this is the catalog your teachers browsed in the summer, before unsuccessfully trying to convince the principal to lay down $495 for an Incredible Machine 3 lab pack.
(fwiw, does anyone really trust an edutainment company that can't spell brussels sprouts?)
pdf and original (400 dpi) scans here:
https://archive.org/details/software-plus-1996
#softwarePreservation #digiPres #retroComputing #retroGaming #edutainment
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/855/086/044/066/112/original/dc687a42905f5933.png
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/855/086/475/089/720/original/4d80c26962bd89ff.png
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/855/086/650/671/059/original/7c2d81f13a10ddd7.png

2025-07-07 16:32:03 GMT

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@nprofile…zfuh i thought it was pretty cool even after it turned into m-jpeg mashed potatoes

2025-07-01 14:40:34 GMT

sigh. fucking ebay.
it automatically opted users in to "using" (selling) their data for LLM training. go to Account Settings -> AI Training Preferences to disable it.
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/778/489/055/321/291/original/953d068b2db61bf1.png

2025-06-30 04:19:21 GMT

a short history of randomization rules for tetris blocks since 1985
til: later incarnations of tetris were recoded to reduce/prevent piece repetition and (long bar) "droughts"
https://simon.lc/the-history-of-tetris-randomizers
#retroGaming #nintendo #tetris

2025-06-28 20:34:19 GMT

TIL the software I trusted the least for data recovery - Disk Drill for macOS - turns out to be one of the best HFS+ partition recovery programs out there.
it not only discovered all files on an accidentally-reformatted HFS+ drive, but it completely rebuilt the filesystem *with* correct filenames and metadata.
#macOS

2025-06-22 15:29:27 GMT

#silentsunday
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/727/719/850/101/985/original/edde3fd3c6449e2a.jpeg

2025-06-20 03:25:39 GMT

while Apogee games have no Report Thy Feat screen, i am proud to announce that after 30+ years of trying, i just beat Crystal Caves shareware @nprofile…zsct 😆
#dosGaming #shareware
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/713/551/305/400/789/original/b4d21c6584d7618b.png

2025-06-18 14:10:22 GMT

really enjoyed @nprofile…rqqx's analysis of modern adventure game design - overall, it is dead on and provides important design insights for anyone building narrative games. while these two games are used as exemplars, i wholeheartedly agree that this is symptomatic of the adventure genre as a whole.
https://dosgame.club/@sqhistorian/114695589554143431
for me, the pain points hinge on the relationship between the player and the game. it's like the designer/creator is constantly lurking in the shadows, nervously gnawing on his lip, terrified the player might play the game "wrong", and waiting for his moment to spring into action and usher the clueless player along to the next plot beat.
as a player that is almost completely driven by exploration and experimentation - and honestly, screwing around for the sake of screwing around - these kinds of game designs vacuum the air out of the room. like having mom still pre-cut my steak for me so i don't choke on it, at 38 years old.
worse, the aspect i resent the most is the implication that i'm not playing the game properly, just-as-the-creator-intended-it. it's understandable from a programmer's perspective that story-driven games have to follow some kind of sensible narrative, but there's a certain fascination with "telling a story" here that i find exhausting.
let me break things. it's more fun that way.
#adventureGames #gamedesign #indiedev

2025-06-17 10:33:58 GMT

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@nprofile…zsct for some reason I had thought you were building games in AGS. how has PQ been to work with so far?

2025-06-16 04:27:27 GMT

sometimes, sierra on-line artists could be *really* on their game when it came to rendering 256 colour backgrounds in deluxepaint
this particular background from Police Quest 3 was likely hand painted on traditional media, scanned in, and then touched up in dpaint
i usually use this scene as an example of an interesting cinematic high-angle rarely seen in games, but today i thought i'd focus on the anti-aliasing. aliasing or "jaggies" occur when a high-res image is resampled to a much lower resolution - and only get worse as the resolution decreases. you can imagine how much resolution loss there was, going from a physical painting, to a 320x200 image. jaggies galore. it probably looked like a mess when it first came out of the scanner.
this is why the additional touch-up step in dpaint was so important. artists had the chance to iron out jaggies by blending neighbouring colours into more pleasant (smoother) patterns, so harsh lines wouldn't stand out so much
handcrafted AA became a lost art in the mid-90s, when photoshop made layers and transparency ubiquitous. today, you can blend an object into the background using opacity sliders, or using a blending tool.
but in 1992 when this game would have been painted, the palette was limited to 256 colours with *no* transparency or automatic blending available. artists had to build "ramps" or tiny incremental palettes of similar colours, and then use those to smooth out the hard lines.
i've zoomed in on the destroyed car so you can see the anti-aliasing approach this artist used. it's still jaggy, but jaggy in a pleasant, relaxing manner. compare it to the white car in the bottom right corner, which has had no AA drawn, and is harsh and unpleasant to look at, "popping" off of the background like a bad copy + paste job.
i love that game art of the early 90s was a mix of traditional colour-mixing knowledge, and intensely delicate pixel art. someone zoomed in to 800% to work on the back end of that car for an hour, just to provide you with a stronger sense of realism.
it is interesting to me that while you could try to replicate this scene using transparency today (and a 16M colour palette) - you'd end up with something far less pleasant, and less cohesive for the eye. using such a compressed palette of 256 colours forced colour coherence and holism into the process. if you only have 6 shades of white to work with, it can make things *easier* for the eye to read.
#adventureGames #pixelArt #sierraOnline
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2025-06-07 19:57:00 GMT

good long night bill. your software lives on with us.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/07/bill-atkinson-rip
#hypercard #vintageApple #macintosh

2025-06-01 03:01:01 GMT

one of my little hobbies is digging for buried treasure on WBM before bed.
today's find: the ultima online beta test application form has been rediscovered 28 years later
i remember filling this cgi-bin form out when i was a teenager. i had a 486 SX-33 with 4 megs of ram and 14.4k dialup modem at the time, and this put me well below the minimum requirements. i lied on the beta application because i was convinced i'd never get in without higher system specs. 😅
https://web.archive.org/web/19970330183403/http://www.origin.ea.com:80/english/ultima/uo/uo-apply.html
#ultima #ultimaOnline #gamePreservation
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2025-05-29 10:32:58 GMT

this one's ugly. plex, by default, opts you in to all kinds of sales of your user behaviour to 3rd parties. visit here to disable them:
https://www.plex.tv/vendors-us/
you'll need to disable your ad blocker to see the options. click "all no" to opt out.
#plex

2025-05-29 03:33:15 GMT

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@nprofile…59dk i am absolutely going to make reproductions for myself now that i finally have pictures of the labels

2025-05-29 03:27:49 GMT

🌶️ 🍖 ⚽
#zzt #retroGaming #dosGaming
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2025-05-29 03:02:25 GMT

@nprofile…ky2l
30 years ago deep in the bowels of Legend Entertainment...
"Jack, I know it's a lot to ask but: we need a new character. An alien. We ship tomorrow morning."
"No problem boss. I'm on it."
#adventuregame
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2025-05-28 04:20:21 GMT

today my wife spotted a Chukar Partridge on the sidewalk in the northeast. we've never seen these before - TIL they're a bird from the middle east, ex-escapees from local hunting preserves
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/how-a-bird-native-to-the-middle-east-landed-in-a-mill-woods-parking-lot-1.5474416
#yeg #birds #wildlife
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2025-05-26 18:17:27 GMT

happy to report that after some serious digging, i've unearthed the Mac OS X (intel, 32-bit) versions of the Eschalon RPG series. these sadly disappeared from the web due to linkrot over the past 15 years.
as always, thank you to the garden for being the world's best repository for classic mac software:
Escalon Book I: https://macintoshgarden.org/games/eschalon-book-i
Escalon Book II: https://macintoshgarden.org/games/eschalon-book-ii
Escalon Book III: https://macintoshgarden.org/games/eschalon-book-iii
#macintosh #vintageApple #retroGaming #rpg
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2025-05-26 02:25:54 GMT

after 25+ years of class-based OOP i'm learning to think in terms of prototype-based OOP. it's a subtle change, and wow does it ever loosen up my thought processes
instead of thinking top-down (and bottom up) about my game architecture and worrying about rational hierarchies, i'm learning how to think in terms of pure functionality and cloning and then extending objects.
it's a relief learning something new. i'm no longer forcing lua to be not-lua.
all of this is thanks to the smalltalk-80 reference book i picked up a few months ago, along with a great article on the history of smalltalk by alan kay
https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/
#lua #programming
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2025-05-21 04:45:58 GMT

one of my favourite in-game digital paintings, from Gateway II: Homeworld (DOS, 1993)
326x228 using only *24 colours*
#dosgaming #pixelArt
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2025-05-19 16:43:37 GMT

fat henry enjoying his fireplace on a cold, rainy morning.
#yeg #caturday #CatsOfMastodon
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2025-05-11 02:54:48 GMT

a very special caturday post today
i have this theory that truly great used bookstores all run out of space on the shelves, and end up piling books along the floors of every aisle.
i have this second theory that a bookstore cannot be truly great until it has a store cat.
today, i stopped in the Double Read Book Nook in Edson, alberta - on the trans-canada highway - and now have a third theory: that all great bookstore owners know how to write 6502 assembly language.
this bookstore has been around for about 70 years, hidden away in the basement of an old building on the highway through town.
when i last visited three years ago, the store cat - Max - was only 4 months old and a rambunctious nutsy kitty who chased me around the store for half an hour while the bookstore owner kept apologetically whispering "Max! Stop harassing our customers!" 😆
now, Max is a Big Boy™️ and has his own kittyharness. he follows his catdad around the store, begging for treats which he catches with both front paws, and sticks them straight into his mouth before they can hit the floor.
i got to spend an hour talking with max's dad - Bruce - the new owner of the store. it turns out that he learned 6502 assembly on an Apple ][ in high school, and went on to university-level programming on IBM mainframes before switching careers.
if you happen to find yourself driving to Jasper this summer, stop at the Book Nook. at the very least, you'll find a weird old book - and Max adores any attention he can get.
#books #bookstodon #canada #caturday #alberta #yeg
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2025-05-08 17:00:35 GMT

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@nprofile…59dk walnut creek?

2025-05-07 20:58:30 GMT

back when i first joined mastodon, one of the many surprising things i learned was that gopher had made a return to the public sphere after decades of obscurity.
i grew up with gopher and archie and veronica and many other www-alt protocols before getting hooked on the world wide web. they taught me how to hunt for things, in a time when web search didn't exist yet.
i've spent every day of the past week adding a new feature to kiki that i'm incredibly proud of, after hearing from several folks - namely @nprofile…xu2n and @nprofile…4xk9, who (like me) are hungry for an information-dense and cruft-free internet
this works by turning your kiki pages into gopherspace pages through some formatting magic and textmunging. so now, you can host your kiki instance on both the www and in gopherspace, simultaneously.
it will be released in an upcoming version of kiki, available soon here: https://tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki
#kiki #worldWideWeb #GopherProtocol #gopherspace #indieWeb #smolWeb
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2025-05-02 21:09:15 GMT

greek moral philosophy teaches us that given the choice between a right and a wrong, there can be only choice for a moral being.
today, i made that choice.
#retroComputing #win311
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2025-04-30 17:46:02 GMT

back in the early 90s my parents brought home an ibm ps/1 with an internal 2400 baud modem. i assumed it was only for sending/receiving faxes.
one day my computer teacher (thank you mr. mckinney!) explained that the modem made my computer capable of dialing out to *other computers* and exchanging data with them. he printed off a five page ream of tractor feed paper titled "The 403 BBS List" and sent me home with it.
i stayed up until 3am that night, dialing every single board on that list using Windows Terminal, creating accounts, and exploring what BBSes were capable of. by the wee hours, i had a new terminal program (Terminate!), knew how to use the z-modem protocol, and had
pirated my first game 😅
one of the little mysteries i came across that night was FILE_ID.DIZ files. every board had them. every zip file had them. they were tiny capsule descriptions of what a program/game was, constrained to 45 cols and 10 rows of ascii. they usually also included some kind of nod to the piracy group that "released" the program.
most BBS software would extract the .DIZ file from the zip, and use that as a file area description for the program, allowing users to understand what they were downloading.
to celebrate this weird little historical curio, today kiki got a FILE_ID.DIZ packed into the zip 😆
in version 1.10 onwards every copy of kiki will now include a FILE_ID.DIZ.
if you haven't heard of kiki yet, check out the project page:
https://tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki
and if you're new to the kiki community, please post to the #kiki hashtag so we can start building a little webring of kiki instances
#bbs #kiki #smolweb #smallweb #shareware
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2025-04-30 00:36:01 GMT

there are a pair of neighborhood crows nesting in my back yard. today, one of them found a dry old piece of bread somewhere down the alley and flew over to my lawn with it.
she looked around carefully and dropped it into the eavestrough drain, where some water pooled from an overnight shower.
she flew away for 5 minutes and just came back to eat once it was well soaked 😆
#urbanAnimals #birds #yeg
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2025-04-29 18:02:25 GMT

so after repairing that ps2 fat yesterday, i noticed that it wasn't playing back Ico properly. the disc would attempt to spin up for a half second, retry several times, then give up for good.
the disc was in perfect shape.
i noticed that it was a blue/purple bottomed disc, which made me curious. as it turns out, the blue discs are CD-ROMs. there are very few of them for the PS2, and then almost always cause read problems.
in the 00's teenagers figured out that if you put two pieces of masking tape on opposite sides of the spindle hole of a CD, the PS2 would read the game properly. i was perplexed by this, because i couldn't find any explanation of why the "tape trick" worked. was it shimming a gap between the disc and the tray?
as it turns out, a very young kid named Denzel explained it perfectly in his 16 year old 3gp cell phone video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaaRs_H5Fjc
the problem is caused by a weak magnet used in the tray that hovers over the spindle. seen below, this white piece of plastic clamps down on top of the CD's "clamping area" (the perimeter of the donut hole). it is meant to both hold the disc level, *and* prevent the disc from slipping on the spindle.
since putting downforce weight/pressure on the spindle is a Bad Idea (motors don't love this), engineers embedded a magnet in the white plastic: when the plastic came close to the metal spindle, the magnetic forces sandwich CD between the spindle and white plastic. with enough magnetic grip, the CD wouldn't slip at all.
it works great for DVDs that spin at 4x.
unfortunately the PS2 engineers did not consider at least three things:
- playstation CD-ROMs are much heavier and more difficult to spin than DVDs, requiring more friction from the spindle.
- the CD-ROM in the ps2 spins at 24x. the motor goes into jet engine mode when it detects a CD. it needs *much* more sticky friction to keep that CD from slipping when the motor is sending your disc off into orbit.
- the cheapass fridge magnet inside of the plastic disc would lose their magnetism over time - due to various factors (EM fields, shock, heat). even a tiny percent change was enough to let a CD disc slip.
the solution? i stole a tiny strong button magnet from one of my fridge magnet toys. it very easily centered on the existing magnet, without needing glue.
this is information now buried in hundreds of shitty youtube videos and reddidiots *still* telling people to stick tape on their CDs.
#repair #playstation #retroGaming
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2025-04-25 18:57:31 GMT

i love that pierre berton - a canadian historian who wrote over 50 books on canadian history - wrote this one just before he died
#canada #cats #history #books #bookstodon
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2025-04-25 01:36:42 GMT

it has been one week since #kiki was released, and i just want to thank everyone for being such good sports with reporting bugs and asking great questions and requesting features.
this past week has been the most fun i've had in 25 years of software development. i can't wait to show you all what's coming up in the next major kiki update. 😻
new features, and new community oriented goofing off!

2025-04-24 15:46:31 GMT

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@nprofile…59dk my sc55 is bigger than your sc55

2025-04-24 02:02:25 GMT

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@nprofile…59dk i guess it would depend upon your familiarity with the source music.
this one is egregious to me, but it's probably not noticeable to non-U8 players
around 01:20 you'll hear the violins start smearing together instead of bleeding off slowly.
then around 01:50 you'll hear a.... wildly inaccurate accompaniment that just pitch oscillates like a cursed theremin
you'll hear the same broken instrument at 18:55 flinging itself off into space.
those are the easiest ones to notice because they're all pitch oriented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMTdnhuKtss

2025-04-24 01:02:48 GMT

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@nprofile…59dk i believe there are some GS-specific commands it uses for some tracks - they’re not all GM tracks.

2025-04-24 00:52:29 GMT

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@nprofile…59dk now that’s a glass half full. he could just change his playlist title!
of course, the tracks sound pretty hilariously bad. panpipes instead of drums, at the wrong tempo and pitch 😅

2025-04-23 23:49:31 GMT

i have a friend who put so much work into recording 100+ Roland SoundCanvas game soundtracks and uploading them to his youtube channel over several years, and i don't have the heart to tell him that all of the soundtracks are borked because his SC-88 was not in SC-55 compatibility mode 💀
he's never heard a real SC-55 so he doesn't even know the instrumentation is wonky

2025-04-22 19:04:06 GMT

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@nprofile…3ws4 i am so glad that unscharfe translates to exactly what i suspected in english 😆

2025-04-21 20:58:28 GMT

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@nprofile…6r7t my personal recommendation would be brian bagnall's On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. it's not Amiga-specific, but it does cover commodore's amiga era.

2025-04-21 16:39:37 GMT

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@nprofile…59dk celeron jesus who can afford that
K6-2 300 for the rest of us
WITH 3dNow! for the three games that support it

2025-04-20 17:09:06 GMT

thank you @nprofile…7klc for this great writeup on #shareware
I had no idea that the file_id.diz standard was a creation of the ASP (association of shareware professionals). i always just assumed it was a file format created by one of the many #bbs programs of the 90s
https://tedium.co/2016/10/27/shareware-history-legacy/
more here on the file format:
http://artscene.textfiles.com/information/faq-file_id.html

2025-04-20 12:38:46 GMT

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@nprofile…zfuh I am fascinated that so many of us have come to similar conclusions via totally different paths. When I found @nprofile…xu2n's http://www.wabiteksabi.com, it was like reading something i wanted to/should have written myself!

2025-04-19 21:30:39 GMT

i found this buried in the dvd section at a thrift shop today and i am so excited to read it. published almost 140 years ago, the book is an extremely detailed account of the interiors and exteriors of japanese homes of the 19th century.
every aspect of craftsmanship is covered - from ceiling and roof wood braces, to the proper folding of sheets, lunch bentos, and sitting za-zen. the woodcut-style line art is to die for.
i'm glad to see IA has a scanned copy of the book too https://archive.org/details/japanesehomesthe00morsuoft/
#books #bookstodon #japan
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2025-04-19 01:49:57 GMT

til: the imagemap <map> tag is still valid in html 30 years later.
💀 back when i was young imagemaps had to be run as server-side cgi-bins!

2025-04-18 22:33:18 GMT

i have to give #php serious credit - I did not specifically write #kiki to be platform-independent, and lazily used unixy backslashes everywhere
and it runs just fine in windows! the php authors put some serious work into automatic platform-independent sanity checks.

2025-04-18 02:35:08 GMT

for the past few years, i'm sure many of you have read my many lamentations about the death of the old, small web many of us grew up with.
there are tons of static site generators out there, but none of them did what i wanted: something that could build an entire site without futzing with javascript and library dependencies. i wanted something that we would have had in 2005, but didn't have in 2025.
in january, i decided to do something about it instead of whining. i started gluing together a few php scripts i had been using to build blogs, rss feeds and mini homepages. i even wrote a new mini markup language.
i thought it would take me a week. it took >3 months. 😅
it ran for the past month as globaltalk.network's interactive site, and many of you asked if i'd ever let other people spin up an instance. i can finally say: yes!
today, kiki is officially finished and released for public use. named after my little black house demon, it's small, fast, and sometimes well behaved. and, it's all written in php without a single external dependency. just unzip and go.
it's released as shareware - in the oldest, finest, jankiest meaning of the word: you're free to goof around with and share the unregistered version. build your own little kiki instance, and customize the heck out of it until it feels like your own little home in the world wide web:
http://tomodashi.com/kiki
#kiki #homepage #worldWideWeb #smolWeb #smallWeb #php
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2025-04-16 14:15:38 GMT

every now and then i mourn the disappearance of dorling kindersley's exceptional 1990s multimedia CD-ROM titles like Incredible Cross-Sections: Stowaway! and The Way Things Work
today at the thrift store, i stumbled upon this 2010 edition of Prehistoric Life: The Definitive Visual History of Life on Earth by DK.
the naturalist museum-style photography and incredibly dense and informative text was a reminder that although we lost some of the interactivity, the presentation is still as rich as ever.
the web of the late 2000s, contrary to common belief that wikipedia-answers-all, is a dead knowledge landscape compared to this single volume.
it presents a single, coherent, and consistent scientific view of the origins and development of organisms on earth. this is the kind of book that I would have hauled out as a kid, and pored over every single page.
#dinosaurs #science #bookstodon
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2025-04-12 15:27:10 GMT

PPC/OS X users: has anyone come across successful builds of *recent* love2d (sdl2) binaries for PPC?
i'm fascinated by the possibility that exigy could be backported to the iMac G4/G5 and OS X 10.4 if i could just figure out a good way of distributing binaries.
#ppc #vintageApple #macintosh #exigy

2025-04-11 17:10:24 GMT

how did i only learn now that Uncharted Waters 2 had a DOS port? 🤯
the dithering style is unusual and beautiful - almost like woodcuts with the very intentional horizontal spacing between vertical lines
#dosgaming #retroGaming #pixelArt
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2025-04-09 19:23:48 GMT

does anyone else have a vga crt monitor they dream about every so often?
mine is this 1990-era Goldstar 1450+. my best friends parents bought them this monitor, along with a 486 DX-33, in 1991.
i was taken by two things: i had never seen a monitor with an anti-glare diffusion finish before, and that little blue power button.
compared to my 13-inch amstrad monitor, this seemed so futuristic at the time 😅
i've spent decades trying to find one locally with no luck
post your #dreamtubes (don't reply to this thread)
#crt #retroComputing
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2025-04-08 02:35:32 GMT

haha so
back in 2013, blizzard re-released Blackthorne as freeware using dosbox on battle.net
it.... was strange. if you hadn't played the game before then, you might not have noticed a bunch of glaring bugs, like missing sound effects and missing music in several places, including the intro. over the years, no one was able to figure out the cause, and the standard reply became "just download the original from a dos gaming site and play that instead"
it always kind of pissed me off that blizzard released a truly *great* game in this state, so tonight i decided to figure out what was causing the missing audio.
the first step was ruling out some audio configuration problems - except, blizzard stripped out the dos installer program from their release. no prob - I'll just grab a copy from an abandonware site. and so, I downloaded a fresh preinstalled copy of blackthorne from myabandonware.com and made sure the audio was configured properly.
... and surprisingly, the game still played with missing music in the intro and on the first level, just like the blizzard version.
on a hunch, i grabbed two original diskette images, and installed the game from scratch. i ran the audio configuration, ran the game, and - lo and behold - the music all worked fine.
.. which made me realize: blizzard's team so was fucking lazy that they copied the buggy pre-installed version of the game from an abandonware site, and rebadged it with a blizzard logo. apparently no one on the team was familiar enough with the game to realize that the audio didn't work at all. 🙄 a multi-billion dollar company.
so folks, if you want to play Blackthorne and enjoy the gorgeous music - grab the *disk images* here instead: https://archive.org/details/003030-Blackthorne
#dosGaming
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2025-04-07 17:30:32 GMT

if you should die
before you wake
#toys
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2025-04-06 17:21:31 GMT

if you were bbsing in the 90s, you probably heard of Rusty n Edie's BBS. i used to run across nfo's and file_id.diz's advertising their (long distance for me) board all the time. if you came across porn gifs or PCXs in the 90s, it was almost always a scan from their board
how many boards could say they had 128 nodes? 😓
recently i looked up an old street view of the location in youngstown OH, and amazingly, the sign still mentioned the old BBS - decades after its closure
i loved their old logo, and managed to dig up their original bbs homepage - prior to their FBI raid:
https://web.archive.org/web/19981205104028/http://www.pixi.com/~irvdili/page-22.htm
they also ran a web-based bbs for a very short time:
https://web.archive.org/web/19961114032209/http://www.rne.com/
#bbs #retrocomputing
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2025-04-01 19:09:29 GMT

it’s hard to describe just how well told john carpenter’s The Thing is from a narrative perspective. i don’t enjoy horror movies personally, but this one has such truly great storytelling and character relationships that it sucks me in every time.
besides, the commentary track with kurt russell and carpenter is one of the funniest i’ve ever heard. it’s wonderful hearing old friends together.
#movies
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2025-03-31 18:47:51 GMT

sick days are henry’s favourite
#catstodon
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2025-03-30 15:58:08 GMT

as a teenager in the 90s, i grew up around a lot of tech people. it was an exciting, weird place full of exciting, weird people. the vast majority of them went on to become ISP owners, software engineers, game developers, IT managers, and made a lot of money doing it.
the sad part was that the vast majority (okay, 100%) of them became people whose only goal in life was making money and spending it on themselves. once the technical knowledge was stripped away, they were utterly boring people to be around, living out a 19th century stereotype of the american dream.
reading Doug Carlston's (of Brøderbund) Software People - a book about the early 1980s software developers - I came across a name I hadn't heard in a long time: Paul Lutus. While I've never met Paul personally, he sounds like the living contrast of the IT people I grew up around. He had been homeless (by choice) for a while, and worked on the Space Shuttle lighting system. After developing an insanely popular series of text editors for the Apple // called Apple Writer in a cabin he built himself in Oregon, he donated his land on 8 Dollar Mountain to the Nature Conservancy (+ a big cash donation), funded Planned Parenthood, and exited the software industry.
If we're going to reductively talk about the tech industry as being some kind of inherently evil thing, it's a disservice to folks like Paul. He did the hard work of making himself a value to society, and not because he wanted to be famous or rich.
He's my living prototype of how to live a good life, and not become a shithead while doing it.
A 1980s interview with Paul at his cabin in Oregon - showing off his Apple // setup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7iFA_TKyeQ
Two great photos of his setup in the cabin:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/q1iuz0/i_interviewed_apple_writer_creator_paul_lutus/
An AMA with paul from a decade ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/q9qzn/iama_former_nasa_space_shuttle_engineer_created/
paul's personal homepage:
https://arachnoid.com

2025-03-30 04:35:07 GMT

found buried on a making of messiah bonus disc, available only by mail order from interplay
#win95 #directx
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2025-03-29 21:15:53 GMT

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@nprofile…xu2n i spent several months modelling BWR style reactors and understanding their designs and limitations a few years ago. while i never came across the ML-1, it shocked me just how complex the designs were. truly fragile machines and totally reliant upon a massive array of secondary and tertiary systems (all of which requiring their own independent power source) just to keep the thing from scramming.
it gave me a real appreciation of the difficulty of the problems involved in making something boil water without blowing itself up, and worse - something that produces unbelievable amounts of still-radioactive waste while it does that.
the greenland thing doesn't surprise me at all. they had a small BWR in antarctica in the 60s that also proved totally unusable after a few years

2025-03-28 17:35:54 GMT

@nprofile…t33g I forgot to thank you for writing the VAX/Sweden article yesterday. it was a real joy to read your account of meeting your (ex) through MUD.
I’ve grown to appreciate that the vast majority of people (okay, 99.9999%) have never experienced the turbulence and joy of falling in love over a text interface, and they understandably find it weird that anyone could or would. Somehow the distance and terseness of the command line creates a sense of intimacy I have rarely seen elsewhere, except perhaps in handwritten letters. It is truly a special kind of experience.

2025-03-28 17:19:05 GMT

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@nprofile…6r7t this is the first i’ve heard of the project and it is incredibly impressive archival work. i can’t wait to start digging through it all

2025-03-27 19:35:24 GMT

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@nprofile…59dk "i bet he didnt even draw those anyway just outsourced them out to some japanese picturefarm"

2025-03-27 19:32:07 GMT

🤔
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2025-03-27 18:00:18 GMT

must. resist. $1. divorce.
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2025-03-27 02:05:45 GMT

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@nprofile…xcsy hey, at least we haven't had a june snowfall for a long time! 😸

2025-03-27 02:02:45 GMT

@nprofile…ky2l
fucking
finally.
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2025-03-27 02:01:27 GMT

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@nprofile…xcsy those false springs get us every time
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/231/926/010/310/483/original/78c0b998f793e279.mp4

2025-03-26 18:40:38 GMT

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@nprofile…zfuh could have easily been an official macOS desktop! 👏🏽

2025-03-26 11:51:00 GMT

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@nprofile…6r7t mine too! every week i look at it and think: my friend, in 45 years, you're the only truly great keyboard apple ever made
fwiw, i really do prefer my usb version to the BT version because i do use the usb ports on the top.

2025-03-26 01:54:17 GMT

back in 1997 when i was a first-year CS student, this was posted on the official departmental webpage 😅
i sure miss the days the university wasn't a life-sucking corporatocracy
#yeg
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2025-03-25 04:23:25 GMT

it took me 25 years, but i finally finished Little Big Adventure 2/Twinsen's Odyssey
he's right you know
#retroGaming #dosGaming
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2025-03-21 20:39:51 GMT

as a little #marchintosh gift to my LC 475, i just received an After Dark module i've lusted for since i was 13 years old: More After Dark
when i was in junior high school, the biggest losers of our grade - including myself - all packed into a tiny office in the school band room during our lunch hour
the "band office" had a Macintosh LC II on the desk, which was *supposed* to be for students learning how to use Band-in-a-Box MIDI software. in the six years i spent in that school, i never once saw a student use it
what we were after was, instead, Lunatic Fringe: a thoughtful riff on Continuum (or perhaps, Sinistar) that would load randomly using the After Dark randomizer module.
it took 30+ years for me to figure out that Lunatic Fringe wasn't a standard AD module and came in its own pack with 24 other awesome modules.
it finally arrived today 😻
#BigBoxGames #macintosh #vintageApple
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