vga256

vga256, 1 year ago to random

attn: MUD developers

last year, a grad school classmate of mine died at the age of 38. every student and professor who met Geoff Hollis learned that he was a brilliant scholar, a sharp thinker, and a superb university lecturer.

but only a handful of his friends knew that geoff was also one hell of a coder. he spent nights as a grad student building his own MUD engine in C - from scratch, with a built-in custom scripting language - just for the fun of it.

nakedMUD enjoyed several years of regular development and usage from mud designers, before jeff had to shelve it due to his teaching responsibilities.

when he died, his university server space was wiped without a backup, and all of his source code went with it. i've got the most recent version of nakedMUD (3.8.1), but i'd like to preserve v1.0 to v3.8 in his memory.

if you happen to have filenames in the format nakedmudv1.0.tar.tgz sitting around on old drives, i'd love to hear from you. i'm building a little source shrine for geoff, so nakedMUD can live on in memory of a kind, gentle soul.

vga256, 2 months ago to apple

so this is a bit wild

i've got an oldie iPad 2 running iOS 9.3.5. this has some expired root certificates which results in several apps not working properly. Plex will load, but it won't be able to negotiate with your plex server, for instance.

since apple doesn't offer new iOS updates for it (with refreshed certificates).. it seemed like i was kinda stuck.

as it turns out, and is documented nowhere aside from a post on reddit, you can manually download your own root certificate - and iOS lets you install it without complaint.

if you're on an ancient iOS device, just point its Safari browser to this url: https://letsencrypt.org/certs/isrgrootx1.der

tap Install when prompted - and you've got working certificates again!

this just breathed new life into a 10+ year old iPad, which will become a bedtime plex viewer.

#apple #vintageApple #iOS

vga256, 2 months ago to SmallWeb

little story for tonight.

while i was goofing around with #globalTalk, I ended up searching for some old Simpsons icons for my classic Macintosh (an LC 475), and stumbled upon an entry on the garden called Banned Simpsons Icons. (Who could resist downloading something with a title like that?)

They were called the "Banned Simpsons Icons" because Fox once sent the artist - Jeanette Foshee - a cease & desist letter for her uncannily perfect renderings of the copyrighted characters. they planned on suing her for every penny she made ($0.00) on them. this was back in 1995.

i thought - hell, what a wild story. why don't I get a hold of the artist - jeanette - and find out more about her banned icon set?

what i stumbled upon broke my heart, and i ended up spending a week digitally preserving what i could find.

read the rest of this diary entry here: https://www.dialup.cafe/~vga256/diary.htm

#smallWeb #homepage #worldwideweb #marchintosh #macintosh

vga256, 11 months ago to reddit

while i'm sad to see #reddit circling the toilet, it only reminded me of how urgent it is that we finally ditch centralized social media. reddit itself isn't the problem - it's a symptom of a much more generalized problem we've had since FB became a thing in the late 00's.

i've spent the past week re-purposing, patching, porting, and expanding a great piece of software based on the same #nntp protocol that #usenet uses, for creating discussion groups. i'm calling it "tomo" (友 - 'friend') bbs.

some time soon folks can spin up their own tomo shards, create discussion groups in a similar manner to reddit, decide whether they want to keep the group restricted to their shard, or share the group with other tomo shards in a public network of discussion groups called tomonet. completely decentralized private or public discussions without supercorporation bs.

best of all, since it is based on plain 'ol usenet-like nntp, you can read and post to discussion groups from a 1977 VAX mainframe, a 1984 IBM PCjr at 2400 baud, an Apple Newton, or a brand new phone.

i can't wait to bust out forté free agent for windows 3.11 and get posting this weekend. 😎

vga256, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to hamradio

this past year alone, my family has faced evacuation twice in the #canadian north due to #wildfire. during the current evac, thousands of northerners have zero communication with their families, emergency personnel or access to wildfire data.

this is entirely due to the collapse of NorthwesTel's fibre network infrastructure and zero secondary systems for comms. the sub/arctic is infamous for its fragile, ancient comms architecture.

i want to change that, and i'd like help thinking out loud about potential citizen-owned/operated technologies for long-distance emergency comms.

#hamradio and #packetradio enthusiasts - could you please recommend some research resources on the following:

• legal/frequency considerations for non-voice/packet transmission specific to #Canada
• recommended hardware & software for 1000km+ transmission, tcp/ip
• examples of amateur radio clubs that have undertaken this kind of role before

if possible, please respond with links to documentation, research and/or policy papers.

my entire family has worked wildfire management since the teletype days, and i hopefully can effect some actual useful change for northerners here.

vga256, 3 months ago to animals

discatte

#CatsOfMastodon

vga256, 11 months ago to random

whenever someone gets excited about an image or text produced by machine learning, i immediately think of this embarrassing moment from a hayao miyazaki documentary seven years ago

... seven years ago, it became a metaphor for where we are now.

A machine learning enthusiast demos an ML-produced animation of a zombie using its body to amble across the screen, to animator Hayao Miyazaki. The animator is mortified by the demonstration, and admonishes the enthusiast for producing something that is "an awful insult to life".

vga256, 6 months ago to random

if you're a metatools/KPT lover as much as i was, and you're into software UI/UX design... matthias müller-prove's 1999 visual history of kai krause's software is 👌

https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/

vga256, 3 months ago to history

did some game preservation research today.

a few years ago i was able to get my hands on one of the only surviving copies (in the world) of the interactive book Portal, for the Macintosh Plus.

no, not that Portal. the original one, from 1986, by novelist Rob Swigart.

thank the gods the ~40 year old diskettes were still viable, and I was able to image it on my Color Classic.

but, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get the damned thing to run properly. my CC hated it. mini vMac hated it. System 7 hated it. System 6 hated it. everything caused the game to lock up after a few seconds, or get hung playing random music.

that was until today. in a moment of utter insanity, i realized that the creators of Portal did something very special for the Macintosh Plus: they made the game a f'ing BOOTER. it was never meant to be run from within the OS. you just inserted the diskette, turned on your Plus. the entire game is an operating system of its own, executing instructions from the CPU and ROM. this isn't anything new for C64 or Apple // users, but for the Macintosh it was practically unheard of. they replicated the Macintosh System 2 gui perfectly, just for the game.

the Macintosh port is still gorgeous today: a mouse-driven point'n'click UI with high-res 1-bit icons, and high-res text. it feels good in a way that none of the other versions (C64, DOS, Amiga) do.

but what stands out to me, nearly 40 years after its release, is that this is a hypertext game through and through. the story unfolds as you click around, wandering from computer network to computer network, reading documents and piecing together how the Earth became abandoned hundreds of year ago.

as far as I know, Portal's creators (Rob Swigart and Brad Fregger) were never credited for producing a very early Hypertext game. Portal predates Hypercard by an entire year.

recorded some gameplay in mini vMac for posterity. as far as I know, this is the only footage of Portal for the Macintosh that has ever existed on the web.

http://macintoshgarden.org/games/portal

#macintosh #gamePreservation #vintageApple #history #hyperText

The user boots a copy of Portal (disk 1) on the mini vMac macintosh emulator. The game boots, showing a login screen. The user types in vga256 as his username, and the game loads black and white graphics. The splash screen for Portal shows, and credits the designers and writer. The player then begins playing the game. The game consists of a series of icons on the screen that can be clicked on, which yield text windows that tell the story. As the player clicks through text, certain desktop icons unlock which allow the player to progress through the storyline.

vga256, 2 months ago to retrocomputing

back when I read Masters of Doom over a decade ago, i was fascinated by the brief mention of carmack's "Adaptive Tile Refresh" technique used for Commander Keen, that allowed smooth scrolling on EGA cards

i never found a very satisfying technical (or conceptual) description of how it worked, and I just found out that @fabinou wrote up a fantastic post which did exactly that

https://fabiensanglard.net/ega/

#retroComputing #retroCoding #retroGaming #apogee

vga256, 9 months ago to Canada

🧵 [1/2] had some friends from down south asking what the drive from #Yellowknife f #nwt #canada is like, so I thought I'd share the comments here for public interest sake. vga256's unlicensed lonely planet guide to driving south from Yellowknife:

first, the route that 99% of northerners take. annotated stops below:
https://goo.gl/maps/gfHTRwoVCxzS9ZoSA

roads:

• it's a 15h one-way trip on a perfect day. it's more like 20-25h now, due to the gridlock on the highways due to smoke/wildfire crews/refueling lineups between YK and Fort Providence.
• it's a narrow two-lane highway with no median, sharp shoulders because it's raised many feet above the muskeg/marshes
• no cities in between, just hamlets, villages, small towns and a couple of large ones. the further south you go, the larger the community.

fuel:

• no fuel for the 300km between YK and the next stop in Fort Providence.
• the next fuel stop was normally 150km away at Enterprise, which sadly burned to the ground 5 days ago. so the next fuel stop is now Steen River (or Indian Cabins) 275km away, on the AB side of the border.
• regular unleaded is over $2 / L, and gets down to $1.35 / L as you get closer to Edmonton.

lodging:

• motel/hotel lodging along the way is almost completely booked up with evacuees. many chose to stay in northern AB to be closer to their homes, in case the evacuation order ends.
• most people are sleeping in their cars at major rest stops like the NWT->AB border.

vga256, 1 year ago to random

dear retrocomputing hoarders: if you happen to have an IBM 3.5" hdd with these exact tag specs, I'd love to buy it from you so i can attempt some data recovery from a 25 year old drive:

Model: H3256-A3
P/N: 66G4393
FRU P/N: 54G0163
MLC: D43146

The PCB model on the underside is F40G1450

vga256, 11 months ago to history

some #90s #worldwideweb #history for fellow old web nerds:

if you had a #macintosh in the early 90s, you probably played the multiplayer tank battle game, Bolo.

and if you played Bolo, you probably visited jolo's Bolo Home Page. it was the bolo resource on the web, and it began its life on the authors' Duke University Med School web space, before it moved to lgm.com where it lived for ten years.

lgm.com was cybersquatted in the late 2000s, and the bolo home page disappeared from the public consciousness.

the site has hundreds of individual pages, and exploring its pages truly feels like an exercise in hyperlinking.

i spent the last few days recovering the site from IA and rebuilt its absolute link structure. please enjoy the Bolo Home Page for the first time in 15 years :)

http://www.dialup.cafe/~jolo/bolo/

vga256, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

world’s first global Appletalk bolo game is ready and waiting for the first person to connect and blow my ass up

if you get your mac connected to the globaltalk network, let me know and you can add the dialup.cafe Zone!

(re: this)
https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/112034372521140177

#marchintosh #macintosh #vintageApple

vga256, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

every week someone inevitably boosts a toot complaining about how forums have all disappeared after the galaxy went into decline in 2007 which also coincided with their 19th birthday and their last good coldplay experience

this is a shout out to @dosgameclub who not only maintains an active set of forums, but does so with a gorgeous MS-DOS mode co80 theme last seen in dosshell

thank you for resisting the decline of trantor and keeping the old ways alive instead of complaining about it 🙏

https://www.dosgameclub.com

vga256, 1 year ago to random

github user @kneesnap documents the crazy frustrating and impressive efforts that went into recovering the world's only existing copy of Frogger 2's #PSX source code and development assets from a 50gb magnetic tape backup

https://github.com/Kneesnap/onstream-data-recovery/blob/main/info/INTRO.MD

vga256, 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago) to art

i waited for over 12 years for artist Lyndal Osborne’s handcrafted imaginary bio organisms to come back to the Alberta Gallery of Art, and they finally did. she taught at UofA, and her works always give expression to the oceanic palette of her childhood home in NSW, Aus.

this exhibit is composed of handmade seeds, blown up 10000x their size, as if through a microscope

if you happen to be in edmonton, drop by the AGA to see this piece - it is up on the third floor.

#art #yegdt #yeg #painting

vga256, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to opensource

as some of you know, i'm writing a decentralized #foss reddit-like, not- #usenet server/web client called #tomo.

i'm at the stage where i need to make some decisions about how discussion groups are organized on the network, and i'd like your thoughts.

an open question for #fidoNet, #usenet and #reddit users of yore:

1. do you prefer nntp's hierarchical tree-style format for groups, e.g. alt.binaries.warez.ibm.pc.old, or reddit's flat organization of /r/mysubreddit? how about fidonet-style?

2. what's a reasonable character limit on group names? e.g. reddit enforces a 21 character limit on subreddit titles.

vga256, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to SmallWeb

after watching doug block's Home Page (1999) documentary a half-dozen times over the past year, i realized how much i missed having a personal home page.

not an itch.io page. not a github repo. not an imgur album.

an actual personal home page full of links to interesting places and people, and a little blog area to write personal stuff in. i haven't had a personal blog since the early 2000s.

i wanted to have some fun, so I hauled my dusty ol' iMac G5 out of storage and installed Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks. i hadn't used any of them in almost 20 years.

i thought it might take me a week to build a home page...

... it took me a year 😅

so this is my little attempt at rebuilding what we lost in the 90s. let me know if you've got a little homepage i can link back to in my hyperlinks area.

http://www.dialup.cafe/~vga256

#smallWeb #worldWideWeb #homePage #indieWeb

vga256, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to edmonton

i've been sitting on this gem for 25 years. i think it's time.

so back in 1997, i was a first-year undergrad and dial-up was finally rolling out to the general public in most of canada.

with every new welcome package, u of a students received a 25 page manual on setting up smtp/pop for eudora lite, and a copy of netscape navigator.

the Computing and Network Services department decided that the best way to onramp students to the world wide web was via an interactive multimedia tutorial for win95 and macOS that they built themselves with macromedia director

last year an old buddy was cleaning out his basement, and he found his NetSurf '97 CD. couldn't resist capturing some of the 👌 performance by virtual paul

we all wish him well 🙏

#macromedia #multimedia #1990s #worldWideWeb #yeg

vga256, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

for the second time in 24 hours, a Macintosh LC in one country has sent a print job to a Mac LC in another country, thousands of miles away 🤣

thank you to @paulrickards and @billgoats for doing all of the heavy lifting and figuring out how Apple Internet Router worked, as well as designed some packet forwarding software!

now... to create a Localtalk Bolo match 😎

#marcintosh #liveLaughLocaltalk #vintageApple

vga256, 4 months ago to random

doing some hypercard research, and came across these two PICTs buried in a hypercard stack on a mac cd from 1994

wish i could give credit to the artists, but there was no metadata

#hypercard #vintageApple

vga256, 6 months ago to gaming

in celebration of space quest ii's 36th anniversary (november 14, 1987) i've recorded two of mark crowe's finest animated EGA/16-color backgrounds from the game in 1080p :)

#adventuregames #SierraOnline #art

A rocky mountainside with a gargoyle-like face, with a waterfall spilling out of its mouth. A second clip shows several waterfalls in a dark cave, all spilling into a central lake.

vga256, 9 months ago to random

just want to give a shoutout to @cabinradio who maintains a small but mighty presence on mastodon

they covered the #canadianwildfires in YK and HR days before the major networks decided it was “newsworthy”, and stayed up until 2am some nights posting info for evacuees and their families.

if you want the highest quality news about day to day life in northern canada, i know of no better source.
besides, they’re just plain ol friendly northerners. 🥰

vga256, 16 days ago to retrocomputing

i'm finally opening up boxes of software from my archive that haven't seen the light of day in 15-20 years. today, i found a program that has never been archived or probably seen in over 40 years.

i absolutely adore this dungeon mastering program for the TRS-80 that was distributed in ziplock bags in 1982

i can find only one mention of it on the web - the august 1982 issue of TRS-80 Rainbow magazine that advertises it for $19.95 + S&H

happily, i found the cassette, which has never been archived anywhere AFAIK. i am scanning in the printed documentation, along with making a recording of the tape.

#gamePreservation #trs80 #tandy #retroComputing #retroGaming

The rear page of the game's cover, printed on tan-coloured stock. It describes the different programs included with the software: Rooms I - "This displays 99 different rooms on the screen in hi-res graphics." Character Generation: With this your color computer will make the tedious job of rolling up new characters for players and non-players a breeze The Dungeon: A completely mapped and keyed two level dungeon designed for use with the ROOMS I program. Monster Generator: With just a touch of a key, a complete set of random monster characteristics The dice Bag: Simulate 36 different rolls of polyhedral dice instantly. It will make your old dice bag obsolete.
A hand-drawn map of a dungeon schematic (from the top-down), with a cave-like entrance, into a series of interlocked passageways and rooms. It has hatched shading marks to indicate dungeon walls.
There is obviously a great deal of interest in fantasy and included, with the numbers of the rooms supplicd. role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons™ That is. Module Two allows for the creation of both player and ‘one of the reasons we carry regular column on the sublect. non-player characters...