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)

tomotama software toys: https://tomotama.com
kiki: https://tomotama.com/kiki
exigy: https://exigy.org
my personal home page: http://www.dialup.cafe/~vga256

Public Key

npub1yqwma5z0g73y9gvf0smayl9gfzakj7et7ldhc8km89gjs6vsgczqayywz8

NIP-05 Address

vga256_at_dialup.cafe@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqszq8d76p850gjz5xyhcd7j0j5y3wmf0v4l0kmurmdnj5fgdxgyvpqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds0m2h8u

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1yqwma5z0g73y9gvf0smayl9gfzakj7et7ldhc8km89gjs6vsgczqayywz8

Show more details

Last Notes

2025-09-29 13:12:57 UTC

huh. https://apnews.com/article/ea-electronic-arts-video-game-silver-lake-pif-d17dc7dd3412a990d2c0a6758aaa6900
#ultima

2025-09-24 21:37:11 UTC

happy 28th birthday ultima online!
#uo #ultima #retroGaming #win95
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/261/425/964/905/933/original/a4547e264294aa82.mp4

2025-09-20 16:34:42 UTC

on the prairies of western canada it is harvest time for hops and apples
with the hot and dry autumn, we got a surprisingly bountiful harvest of both
#gardening #bloomscrolling #autumn #fruit
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/237/583/579/181/828/original/7b84f53aa2529c2e.jpeg
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/237/583/665/236/351/original/ce9dc62b79892552.jpeg
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/115/237/583/739/596/217/original/17248344f175395f.jpeg

2025-09-19 16:12:03 UTC

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those are really cool. someone gave me an old brownie years ago, and I’ve never tried to load it. looking forward to seeing what you do with yours

2025-09-17 16:22:01 UTC

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me too. i see very few pencil illustrations on mark’s site, and it gives me the feeling he was working entirely digitally in his amiga years. it would be fascinating to see his process in dpaint. no layers, figuring out the palette, and then (?) cutting the image up into slices/tiles that can be rendered isometrically.
the best part is that this was his first shipped game. (not counting one earlier game that he drew the title font for). top of his game, first game. none of his later work in daggerfall/morrowind/3d rpgs (imho) comes even close to the artistry
i see so much fantastic low res art these days, but the subtler job of turning a background/scene into reusable assets is not often shown

2025-08-25 14:24:42 UTC

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Haha wow! I love that they even offer a mail-in order.

2025-08-07 01:33:46 UTC

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yikes. i realize this is 12h later, but we’re getting DSL speeds in the northeast now 😅
i mean, it’s 1000x better than 2400 baud and at least 10x as good as dual isdn.

2025-05-02 21:09:15 UTC

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
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/440/263/248/794/822/original/8869c5a2ba2e5af1.png
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/440/278/505/654/748/original/adade4dcb979d466.jpg
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/440/280/500/393/217/original/4679cd6b18f04113.jpg

2025-05-02 20:37:45 UTC

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damn, you had my hopes up! 😆
okay that's perfect re: the attribute - it tells me exactly how it was implemented in the renderer.

2025-05-02 19:16:00 UTC

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oh that's very cool. can you tell me how you managed to set stroke widths to 1px at all resolutions in inkscape? that's something i'd love to implement in my rendering engine some day.
are the dithered backgrounds also capable of rendering at 1x1 px at all resolutions?

2025-05-02 17:04:12 UTC

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cash is always best for older folks, but younger folks really do appreciate tap using an ereader. recommend against e-transfers - they can take an hour or two to process during peak hours.
fwiw, always use tap-only - chip reads incur a much higher transaction cost.

2025-05-01 21:20:49 UTC

@npub1nyf…u6g0 i think it's been a month or two since we last spoke - was there any change in the segment of your class that was struggling to grasp basic programming and computing concepts?

2025-05-01 15:08:18 UTC

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aw man. i would have *loved* to play this.
i've been similarly screwed by clients pitching me on projects and then ghosting once I start asking about their planned budget. really lame to hear panic is no better.

2025-05-01 13:48:31 UTC

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also, that's a great site layout! what did you build it with?

2025-05-01 13:41:58 UTC

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holy cow. your dad's artwork is incredible - these pieces would have easily been shown in art galleries out here.

2025-04-30 17:46:02 UTC

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
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/428/108/423/767/030/original/bfa2dc5328c41521.png

2025-04-30 00:36:01 UTC

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
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/424/099/882/754/101/original/f9b5f3645ed68609.mp4

2025-04-29 18:11:37 UTC

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it’s still so visually impressive to me. i miss this era of not quite photorealism, which artists used creatively. it got pretty creepy and unpleasant to look at by the ps3 era

2025-04-29 18:04:06 UTC

re-assembled with a tiny magnet doing all the hard work like a champ
#playstation #ico
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/422/566/424/350/937/original/ee123bf10fab08ae.mp4

2025-04-28 21:16:41 UTC

today’s fun pickup was a $30 PS2 chubbo. the previous owner had given up on it because of a non-ejecting disc drive. i suspect a snapped drive belt, or perhaps a broken gear.
the seller also gave me a memory card, all of the cables, a controller and copy of Ico with it.
i’ll always be excited about getting a new console, young or old. there’s something very stylish about this unassuming design.
it’ll be fun to breathe some life into this old bitty and put it back to work for another couple decades.
#playstation #retrogaming
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/417/656/253/784/873/original/7ce9562413523299.jpeg

2025-04-16 14:15:38 UTC

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
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/348/010/440/470/642/original/6f6f83a08a9f8f84.jpeg
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/348/010/827/572/122/original/65054ad4eb1a1e18.jpeg
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/348/011/206/293/046/original/8cda27e91a9a948c.jpeg

2025-04-01 22:12:07 UTC

i am blown away by this german rpg (with full english translation) that has been around for decades, and i somehow never heard of it until now
Teudogar and the Alliance with Rome (2003) is as close to an Ultima VII followup as we'll ever see in my opinion.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/40423/teudogar-and-the-alliance-with-rome/
i was initially crushed when i saw that the developer closed their site, and did not allow any registrations/purchases of the game - and the demo was the only thing left available.
mercifully, some digging revealed that the developer *very* kindly provided a free download of the full version of the game in a secret area of their site:
http://www.teudogar.com/private/index.html
#ultima #win95 #retrogaming
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/264/982/559/994/614/original/68238ce1acedcad7.jpg

2025-04-01 15:15:40 UTC

The Dialup Café's marchintosh globaltalk node says goodnight for another year! thank you to all of the goofballs that dumped calling cards in the shared folder.
i sadly was able contribute very little to the festivities this year due to a chain of random illnesses. next year i am very much looking forward to having a lot more fun!
and of course, the globaltalk kiki at https://globaltalk.network will remain up permanently for your contributions. the editing password is marchintosh2025, and welcomes your new pages and macintosh knowledge.
#marchintosh #globaltalk #vintageApple

2025-04-01 03:34:47 UTC

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it's my first stop for any dos/95 drivers for sure, and alongside the forums, one of the best sources of information there is

2025-04-01 03:30:56 UTC

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that's great to hear. i hadn't realized that vogonsdrivers had 80gb of data 😆

2025-03-31 23:35:51 UTC

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poor thing. we call that "kitty trauma" here, and suspect henry might have been starved too.

2025-03-31 23:32:27 UTC

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🤣 hard not to love a fat kitty
henry tripled in size despite us feeding him the same as his sister. it took us a few months to realize he was sneaking into the closet and stealing food at night, as well as stealing his sister's food and running away with it when our backs were turned

2025-03-31 20:21:25 UTC

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that was my experience as well. just remembering how frightening math was to me as a kid (and failing it later in uni) was a good exercise in helping students program

2025-03-31 20:05:33 UTC

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those are good indicators. it's safe to assume that these folks either didn't pass high school algebra, or took it 20 years ago and can't remember a single thing about it. that's totally fine - it just requires a real about-face when it comes to dealing with programming.
thinking out loud:
with those folks i almost always switch to teaching with physical objects, because they're *usually* concrete thinkers. working with text (e.g. symbolism) might as well be asking them to walk into a lake of lava for fun. their anxiety goes through the roof the second they see Let A = 1.
it doesn't matter what i use - fruit or wood blocks or anything on the table - it's just easier for them to grip the concepts when it's in front of them. i do a few one-on-one lessons (it would totally work in a small group as well) showing how variables work with physical things. for example - the "how do you swap values between two variables?" problem (using a third variable) - is something you can demo physically.
once those demos sink in, i switch over to writing it all out by hand. the exact same operations using symbols instead of the physical objects. it is way less intimidating.
after that, they're a much more amenable to encountering symbolic text on a screen. once they begin to understand that the computer is a big shitty player piano with a roll of script, it's much less intimidating.

2025-03-31 19:24:09 UTC

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he started S and became XXL. his sister is still S!

2025-03-31 18:47:51 UTC

sick days are henry’s favourite
#catstodon
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/258/530/422/964/994/original/078f382f549ef4f4.jpeg

2025-03-31 17:54:11 UTC

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wow! it had a bank of analog modems in one of the expansion slots?

2025-03-28 01:13:10 UTC

today i was looking for a method to crack The Colonel's Bequest, so i don't have to do the ridiculous fingerprint copy protection every time i load the game
i stumbled upon chris's amazing analysis of an (in)famous one-byte crack for the game, that first appeared on BBSes in 1989. the one-byte hexedit tricks the game into forcing the first fingerprint option to be the correct one every time.
unfortunately... it has a brutal side effect: using this particular skip instruction on the engine, it destroys the randomized generation that makes Colonel's Bequest very special compared to most other adventure games.
it's a fab read if you're into emergent gameplay, byte code and design
https://www.benshoof.org/blog/case-cracked
#adventureGames #dosgaming

2025-03-27 22:55:07 UTC

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whoa! amazing. i was a huge AST admirer at the time (my aunt had an AST Advantage! 386 - the envy of my poor man's Amstrad XT). it's funny how thin the line between IT and computer game development was back then. i knew so many people who made that switch so abruptly back then!

2025-03-27 22:44:31 UTC

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that is wild! small world - brad mcquaid hung out with a lot of my irc friends, and ended up hiring several of them on EQ back then.

2025-03-27 22:40:30 UTC

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amazing. my lifelong friends came out of irc, but we all played various mmo's together (mid-90s). many of them were mudders as well.

2025-03-27 22:36:51 UTC

a (bartle's) MUD on a VAX dating story by @npub13ll…zf8m
love it.
https://janeishly.com/2025/03/20/when-is-a-coincidence-not-a-coincidence-or-how-i-came-to-live-in-sweden/
#retroComputing #uk

2025-03-27 22:31:34 UTC

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i love our flotilla of the damned

2025-03-27 19:53:40 UTC

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it gets even better
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/mcbarge-expo-vancouver-deep-ocean-discovery-centre
that is the best 90s illustration style ever

2025-03-27 19:50:12 UTC

you can't make this up
https://globalnews.ca/news/11099736/mcbarge-former-floating-mcdonalds-sinking/
#canada #bc

2025-03-27 19:40:40 UTC

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i'm not sure how it works in your country/customs system, but in Canada we have a request form for dealing with customs overcharges/errors. it's pretty straightforward (one form) to submit.
hopefully you've got access to something similar. this stuff is very annoying

2025-03-27 19:32:07 UTC

🤔
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/236/052/939/002/256/original/cebf00ca065bb7b4.png

2025-03-27 18:00:18 UTC

must. resist. $1. divorce.
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/235/694/840/340/062/original/dcd4d2756338550c.png

2025-03-26 11:51:00 UTC

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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 01:58:27 UTC

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omg. my first year CS computing lab, in the basement of assiniboia hall ca. 1997
those are 30 SUN SPARC IPC's with 12 megs of ram and a 200 meg hdd.
far off in a corner is a DECWriter III for printing
the lab ran on a SUN Enterprise-2 with 64 megs of ram, 6 gigs of hdd space, and an exabyte 8505 tape drive
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/226/243/899/842/239/original/1fa0dcac6caedf58.gif

2025-03-26 01:54:17 UTC

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
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/226/231/032/557/957/original/9fe5fc474e10d797.png

2025-03-23 23:49:59 UTC

@npub1eh5…yenk happy to see Crosscountry BC up! would you mind if i added it to the macgarden?

2025-03-23 12:53:09 UTC

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😆 yeah, i haven't modded my nginx server config for that yet. it's soooo easy to do in apache, and such a nightmare with nginx

2025-03-23 12:43:42 UTC

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😅 i haven't seen %20's in urls in 20 years

2025-03-23 12:37:35 UTC

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oof, look at that ugly url! 😆 you just made me realize i forgot to decode spaces into underscores for kiki urls. just pushed a patch to the server - should have much nicer urls for pages now:
https://globaltalk.network/index.php?page=The_GlobalTalk_Scavenger_Hunt_2025

2025-03-22 16:28:18 UTC

it's 2025. how have we not yet reverse-engineered the After Dark module engine?
#macintosh #vintageApple #win31
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/207/019/067/777/863/original/0b3a5943eb182e63.jpg

2025-03-22 16:18:04 UTC

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agreed. i've got three IBM AS/400's i'd love to get rid of at some point

2025-03-21 17:22:14 UTC

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not a single search engine shows anything for the A1034. i'll post these updates to macgarden as well

2025-03-21 17:18:34 UTC

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holy cow, that was absolutely gnarly to track down. ever since apple wiped out its support filebase, all references to this stuff disappeared from search engines.
eventually tracked it down from a url buried in the manual for the UFO:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060430060120/http://www.apple.com/airportextreme/
the file you're after is this one:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060725204946/http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airportextremefirmwareupdate57formacosx.html

2025-03-21 15:13:21 UTC

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fixed! forgot to update one file when i pushed changes yesterday. thanks for letting me know

2025-03-21 14:05:30 UTC

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if you manage to get this working, i'd love to add a quick tip to the globaltalk kiki. i had the same problem last year on my iMac G5!

2025-03-21 03:32:47 UTC

turning down a free DEC PDP-11 (with dec datasystem tape drives, etc) that would have filled my entire suv, made me realize that i don't like minicomputers despite their hulking coolfactor.
i love personal microcomputers specifically because they're mainframe and minicomputer gachapon. you get this amazing machine packed into something that can fit on a couple of books. i don't think a day goes by that i look at my tandy 1000 tl/2 and think: god damn that thing is a dream

2025-03-21 03:16:11 UTC

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that is surprisingly late-era for a pdp-11 - they must have really been milking everything they could from that poor thing! amazingly resilient machine.

2025-03-20 19:06:57 UTC

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👏 i'm always amazed at how ahead of the game uvic was with tech/IT, even back then.

2025-03-20 19:01:08 UTC

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oooooof! i don't know how you have the patience for it 😆
i can't stand my little scanner setup, which has an ADF that misfeeds 50% of the time. some day i'll get a fujitsu scansnap

2025-03-20 18:53:49 UTC

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faculty gold 🤩 same applications found on the UA diskettes, although they abandoned the shareware stuff by the time it was on CD. the weirdest one i found is HGopher - a freeware win 3.11 gopher client that i have only seen one other place

2025-03-20 17:37:17 UTC

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ooooo what an awesome site. i remember seeing more than a few cadvision domains login to irc way back when!

2025-03-20 17:32:05 UTC

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wow, freaky! OTA updates via dialup that far back. that must have saved them a lot of floppies 😆

2025-03-20 17:15:35 UTC

back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.
worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.
even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS
to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.
in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.
she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.
it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.
after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.
the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1
WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip
The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:
NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96
Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:
NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit
I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)
#softwarePreservation #webPreservation #win31 #worldWideWeb #yeg #bbs
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/195/832/304/942/764/original/c85cae7332089968.png

2025-03-20 15:23:57 UTC

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that's great. like i said - it's time intensive, and not really helpful when you've got to do hundreds of pages. but it's fantastic if just a few get damaged.

2025-03-20 15:05:44 UTC

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ah good. the ones i've been repairing were pretty wavy.
i've repaired pretty much every kind of magazine/cardboard game box/manual with the method. as long as you put a sheet of (clean white) paper on both sides, there's zero chance for damage.

2025-03-20 13:23:43 UTC

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oof, how annoying :(
fwiw, i've had a ton of success with ironing wrinkled/damp pages over the years. set my iron on medium with no steam, and place a sheet of paper over top of the wrinkled one and iron away. it usually takes a few passes, but i get about 99% success with it.
of course, it's super time consuming :\

2025-03-20 00:05:16 UTC

just found a treasure trove of extremely obscure BBS history stashed away on IA
thank you hard-working book scanners for preserving this rarity.
if you're familiar with BBSing in the 90s, you'll remember just how fast the vast majority of boards disappeared in 1995. it went from multinode 24/7 bbses to disconnected phone numbers in just a few months
this book accounts for the very small number of BBSes that made the transition from telco-only to "telBBS" or telnettable/web-accessible boards
3/4 of the book is a carefully curated list of 500 boards with screenshots of their homepages and bbs login/title screens. most importantly, the URLs of these boards is preserved so we have a chance to look them up on WBM some day.
#bbs #webHistory #smallweb
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/191/813/655/176/981/original/7f8686898727bf9a.jpg
https://dialup.cafe/system/media_attachments/files/114/191/824/839/741/776/original/ce50e8df0a51962a.png
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2025-03-19 17:04:41 UTC

13 years ago, my wife at the time and i were going through a rough period. we decided to hit the reset button on our marriage by driving south with no particular plan or destination. just two weeks away from home to get our bearings, and spend some time with each other.
along that two week drive, we stopped at every used bookstore we stumbled upon along our route through montana, idaho, washington, and arizona.
we ended up getting as far as Nogales, Mexico before turning around at the border crossing and heading home.
the best of the bookstores was found on our very last stop before crossing the US-Can border, in Butte, Montana.
Second Edition Books didn't look like much from the outside - a long brick and stucco building, painted over with a vile shade of pepto bismol. a little crate of old books propping open the door promised a treasure trove inside.
a treasure trove it was. you always know a bookstore is going to be great when they've run out of books on the shelves, and start piling them on the floors in the aisles.
it was the end of the trip - my wife was sick of me, she was eager to get home, anticipating the divorce that would come two weeks later
i spent two hours walking every aisle and shelf in that store, looking for the perfect memento mori.
i found it crammed in a barely-visited corner of the room, devoted to the history of California: a 1929 edition of The Gold Hunters by J.D. Borthwick.
a recounting of his years trying to pan for gold in the 1849 california gold rush, borthwick's memoir is part solo adventure, part cultural ethnography of the SF bay area.
i was overjoyed to find this book today, double-stacked behind a dozen others in my shelf. i hadn't read it since i bought it 13 years ago to the day.
if you ever find yourself in Montana, make the drive to Butte's uptown core to visit Second Edition Books. it won't disappoint you.
#books #bookstodon
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2025-03-17 17:05:55 UTC

what an exceptional soptware library on this mega darve
#sega #consoleGaming #retroGaming
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2025-03-17 13:36:28 UTC

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that is one crazy trick if it works 😆 i've never heard that before. but i do have that d-link BT dongle you're referring to, that's compatible with anything on the planet

2025-03-17 13:25:35 UTC

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ahhh too bad.

2025-03-17 13:13:19 UTC

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🤔 interesting question. check this one out - specifically designed for the iMac G4 by Chwang Yi.
https://lowendmac.com/2006/the-ball-wireless-trackball-meets-high-expectations/

2025-03-17 13:06:19 UTC

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thanks for reminding me about this post - adding a link to the history wiki!

2025-03-17 13:04:36 UTC

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oh wow! i didn't realize the caviar series went that far back. my first caviar was 500mb, and was *insanely* unreliable. all three of my caviar drives died in spectacular fashions with platter crashes

2025-03-17 03:27:06 UTC

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.
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.

2025-03-16 21:27:27 UTC

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i can only imagine how much heat those silicone covers trap inside of the bulb

2025-03-15 23:19:51 UTC

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oh slick - that's great news! 🤞 it lasts for more than a few hours

2025-03-15 20:40:34 UTC

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glad to hear it. it might even help to clean the pot itself with electrical contact cleaning spray - never know what happens when old gunk/oil heats up.

2025-03-15 20:37:40 UTC

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interesting. i'm guessing that the vhold values are drifting when the monitor heats up. always a tough one to diagnose!

2025-03-15 20:29:27 UTC

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that appears to be a vertical hold (vhold) symptom expressed by the CRT, not the video card. i'm unfortunately not familiar with the layout of the lisa's crt. is there a vhold adjustment on the internal monitor?

2025-03-15 09:34:42 UTC

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bizarre. i guess they must be more common in north america. i find them for about $10-$20 at thrift stores!

2025-03-14 19:45:14 UTC

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scenesters unite!

2025-03-14 19:34:52 UTC

caligari truespace 4.0 source for win9x
as released by the scene group Revolt in 1998
this is not my release - just my archival work. the source for truespace has been hiding in plain sight for 25+ years. having exhausted all my known avenues for finding an "official" seal of approval from the publisher, community-based preservation is the only possibility now.
the story: apparently someone from Revolt went to caligari's public FTP server in the late 90s, and found that an employee had left the full source for TrueSpace 4 in a /pub folder. it was released on BBSes and on IRC in the late 90s, and disappeared from the internet soon after.
doing some research on TrueSpace - truly the best piece of 3D modelling/rendering software aside from Bryce in the 90s - i stumbled upon a brief mention of the source code in an ancient usenet post. tracking down the release involved searching the *exceptional* scenelist.org NFO database, and trying to figure out the exact filename of the warez release.
SCiZE, the scenelist.org owner, did not have the files on his BBS. fortunately, he knew exactly where to find the release: it was buried in the massive 500GB "ibm-wgam-wbiz-collection" on IA. knowing the exact filename made it so much easier to track down in there!
so, have some fun with it. this doesn't belong on github or any publicly scrapable source site. just download it and let's see who can manage to compile it first :)
see the instructions in revolt.nfo for extra help on compiling
https://archive.org/details/ts4src
#warez #win95 #softwarePreservation
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2025-03-14 15:53:45 UTC

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4.2.x as stated in post.

2025-03-14 13:59:53 UTC

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my personal favourite for all retro machines that can do VGA is the Dell 2007FP. It scales 320x240/800x600 razor sharp without interpolation, to 1600x1200. It seems to handle any signal I've thrown at it.

2025-02-27 14:32:41 UTC

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i'm so envious you got to see it in winter - i was only there in late spring when it was 90% fog and rain every day. that ride out to bonavista is stunning!

2025-02-27 03:39:35 UTC

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hey cool, you made it out to nfld!

2025-02-26 20:33:33 UTC

TIL the original Interplay productions logo was supposed to spell IP
never once noticed that in 30 years
#retroComputing
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2025-02-26 20:16:43 UTC

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ahhh okay, i wondered if it had been stapled.
i've got some newspaper-sized mags to scan (The Computer Newspaper), and thankfully they've been stapled
i just don't have the heart to unbind any of my glued mags..... yet

2025-02-26 20:05:37 UTC

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i noticed that these are still bound at the spine. were you planning on pulling apart the spine to scan on the fujitsu?

2025-02-26 19:59:36 UTC

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there used to be a space, prior to AAA, where addictive and fun and art used to co-exist.
in the 80s we had a lot of 1-4 person development houses that took risks with gameplay, had 'addictive' gameplay in the positive sense of the word (the way most people describe Civilization 1), and were financially successful.
I'm thinking here of early Interplay or early Origin; Neuromancer and Wasteland and Ultima 1 through 4. they're all built with what amounts to fairly simple game mechanics but very artistically weaved together into a complete experience.
they didn't sell like pac-man, nor did they build their gameplay around addictions in the negative sense. pac-man was addictive, in the negative sense - i'm sure you remember the 'pac-man fever' song. how many games have had radio played songs?
maybe i'm thinking of the ultima series and interplay rpg's for a specific reason - they *were* built around the possibility of playing them forever. except, unlike roguelikes and pvp, the experience was expected to be fairly different each time despite the mechanics being the same.
i've thought for years that the missing piece of the industry are low-budget role-playing games like spiderweb software's stuff. they're unique, they take a couple of years to build, they're ugly, and they make jeff enough money to raise a big family.
i honestly think we've come to think of AAA as some industry goal for developers, when it's really just an abnormality. prior to the late 80s, there were no AAA development houses with $1M budgets for a single title.
in the early period there were just small teams, many indie and some publisher-owned, that only later blew up into giant development houses. both Origin and Interplay collapsed under their own weight eventually.
much of the "indie" movement of the late 00's tried to capitalize on a rejection of AAA style development, while ironically trying to turn themselves into industry rockstars for AAA-level profit.
i'm very strongly in favour of a different approach: rediscovering the shareware-sized company of the 80s. one where games are made on small budgets and a ton of creativity put into the parts that matter. i'm not even sure what to call that - but it's self-publishing without ego and rockstars, without design-for-populism mechanics, and a genuine love for the software you're creating.
i don't think pico8 can give us that, nor was it ever meant to.

2025-02-24 03:22:51 UTC

north americans: i need to sieve your collective memory.
in the mid-90s there was a kids' toy commercial - for boys iirc. i can't remember the type of toy, but it had one specific clip in it: a real dog... wearing sunglasses.. perhaps a german shepherd or golden retriever that yells "BRUTAL!" in man's voice
this has been killing me for 30 years. 🙏

2025-02-23 16:08:14 UTC

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😂 you and me and everyone else. the (2 or 3 people?) who work on it haven’t spoken a word about the behind the scenes. they ran out of money nearly 10 years ago and work on it as a hobby project.
i’m sure you’ve read the KS message area - it is one of the funniest vilest forum areas i’ve ever seen in 30 years on the net

2025-02-23 14:58:43 UTC

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i'm an original backer at an eye-watering $120 USD.
it's the project that should have been put out of its misery 10 years ago, and it's still meandering along like a zombified horse

2025-02-23 03:23:40 UTC

back before SimCity 2000 became the defining city builder, Maxis published A-Train... which was the (third) Artdink Japan "Take the A-Train" rail & city building simulation game.
unlike railroad tycoon which is almost entire construction-based, and simcity which is entirely urban management-based, A-Train blends both genres together. you build a railroad, and in so doing, build a city around your infrastructure.
i've always been quite taken by the UI, which I thought was much more interesting than SC.
today i found out there was a Sharp X68000 version, which has a *very* subtly different colour palette which relaxes the yellows into something very pleasant to look at.
left: A-Train (DOS)
right: A-Train (Sharp X68000)
#dosgaming #msdos #retroGaming
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2025-02-22 16:20:02 UTC

TIL prior to the establishment of standard time “zones” that encompass a huge geographic area, trains of the 1800s relied upon their own local time, which differed by minutes between station.
imagine trying to memorize time differences for every single village along your route 😅
#canada #trains
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2025-02-21 21:33:15 UTC

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spent the morning at a few local used bookstores and found some great source material for an Railroad Tycoon game based on the exciting world of preconfederation canadian history 🤩
#trains #books #canada
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2025-02-21 15:34:47 UTC

canadian (and international) railnerds: is there an accepted/respected book on the early history of canadian railways? i’m thinking very early - 1836 to 1875.
something highly technical would be great, if possible. even academic papers in canadian rail history - i do not know that literature.
the world needs Railroad Tycoon Canadian edition more than ever. sid: this is the campaign you should have built in the first place dammit
#canada #history #indiegamedev #trains #exigy
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2025-02-21 01:55:42 UTC

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wow! fat mac with an 80 meg drive!