Great discussion about the how and why this was created.

https://damien.zone/introducing-mac-themes-garden/

It's a really neat project. Sounds like he's planning to release the PCB and BOM, I think that'd be lovely in a blinkenlights case!

I found a reimagined adventure for IOS called Pixa. Lost an afternoon playing

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/pixa/id826977016

TIL, There was a sequell for the Atari 5200 called Adventure II.

Also available for the Atari 8-bit: https://store.atariage.com/products/adventure-ii-xe-atari-40...

I remember the big thing about Zmodem was it gave a transfer status that was relatable and updated frequently. I remember that Ymodem-G being technically faster (before the Moby Turbo update), but because it didn't update on the screen as often it felt as if I was watching paint dry.

TL;DW -machine was a technical innovation; commercial failure

My mother purchased “Winning Racer” for my birthday when I was a kid. Wore that watch every day for many years until I regretfully cracked the LCD screen.

Looking at that page took me back to the days of MODEMing to BBSes (and later running a BBS). The release of the ZModem protocol by Chuck Forsberg in 1986 was one of those rare leaps that instantly improved the daily experience of so many people doing so many different things.

Going this deep in pursuit of such esoteric exacting precision for a purely hobby project is pretty remarkable.

casio heli-fighter was the one i had. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK0pbTxdwVk

it wasn't great as to fire you had to press both buttons at same time.

So, I think we originally added the year to indicate the year of publication of the linked article and not the era. People have been using tags for the era.

as a side note : this comes up where the publish date/year is one but it references a historical time . I am not sure which I should put into the year tag. 2025 publication or 1986 the era in which the article harkens back to ?

I have to confess that I wrote something like "DDDFG" on every micro computer I ever saw unattended in a store. I love the writing on the tyvek sleave. Totally did all these things.

There's also some early Mac support in the compiler (there's a "MacFlag" that modifies details of the code generation). It's definitely good to have the sources and also a nice example of a compiler for my students.

> seems to be an empty ZIP file

Same here. But the converted files are ok.

> some stuff seems to be unimplemented

As far as I understand, the provided files don't represent the latest compiler version. So maybe a later version had a better optimizer. But it's good to have the sources anyway, so I can use it to clarify language issues for my forthcoming Lisa Pascal compiler/transpiler.

Not really surprised. Depending on what phase in the compilation process things called it may have been decided that an optimizer wasn’t worth the effort or too ambitious for the time budget.

Interesting... I found one (negligible) problem: The "Compiler sources and objects exported files in Lisa TEXT format from dc42 disk images made with AppleSauce" file (http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/lisa/Lisa%20Pascal%20sou...) seems to be an empty ZIP file (download size is 22 bytes).

Also, some stuff seems to be unimplemented in the compiler, e.g. the GlobalOptimize function, which is called from some locations in pas-MISC.TEXT.txt, does nothing:

  PROCEDURE GlobalOptimize(VAR fstmt: pstmt; thisprocpn:pn);

    BEGIN {GlobalOptimize}
    END; {GlobalOptimize}

Lots of emulation of games and little programs. Even if you don’t click on anything it’s like a retro art gallery

reminded me of the song someone made from cosmos footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

I wonder if there's some low hanging fruit of changing a few of the most unreadable characters to 3x8 instead.

The BeFS book mentioned referenced in the article is still a terrific read.

Wild to see places I've been having things like this in their possession. Shame I don't live up there anymore.

Hopefully the r360 they found in Britain can be restored. Or at least used as a template for a retro build

The amount of custom hardware for this thing is amazing. And considering how few units of this beast must have been manufactured.

I love coin-ops. When I win the lottery, there will be signs. And by signs, I mean a large aircraft hangar filled with absurd coin-ops.

I'm very partial to these giant arcade monstrosities every since I tried out the R360 in ~1990 in London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R360

It’s a caret indicator, also known as a ‘meter indicator’ or ‘meter movement’, used in navigation devices and on slide rules to indicate two states - a ‘value’ and a ‘register’, where the register state is indicated inside the box, and the value by whatever the arrow edge is pointing to. In a slide rule application, two independently movable bars are contained within the area of the symbol, with the pointer side used to select values on a scale, and the register ‘box’ side showing the results according to slide bar positioning.

It is also commonly used in compass devices to indicate a direction/bearing set by the user as a waypoint, and in digital navigation systems common at the time, would often be used in combination with the filled-in version to indicate course accuracy - when filled, the navigator is on-course, when emptied, a correction must be made.

There are also archaic physical versions of this symbol in the form of paper clips which can slide along the edge of a form, indicating the next step of a form for a department or staff member to be working on.

It was also used to indicate end of line positions in IBM typewriters, as mentioned by others in this thread.

So, a general purpose cursor/caret indicator…

Reading this vicariously, I am reminded of this quote:

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." -- Carl Sagan

I hope there is more to come from this author. The discussion is pretty approachable and with 6502 being a small instruction set and register file, its not that hard to pick up if you are even the slightest bit curious. It's not dry like some texts and tutorials on 6502 can be.

Note this is somewhat different in that its cross compling on some sort of unix instead of doing things natively. Not that this is bad - it was a technique in days of yore. However, if you do decide to move onto another text because this isn't finished, you will still learn a lot I think from the 4 peices presented.

This is a fascinating issue. Easy to read Raymond Chen or Casey Muratori level of depth.

I think it would be swell if we could avoid fascist-adjacent slogans for retrocomputing projects.

Define Linux? Kernel. Userland. ?

Kernel has really only gotten bigger for security, scheduler, file system and network.

Command line, server only installs on raspberry pi are surprisingly light on disk and ram consumption. We expect ipv6, a good file system that doesn’t blow over in a power outage. I don’t think twice about pulling USBC power when things go sideways. 486 Pc era. No chance. That was a moment to reacquaint myself with a diety.

Userland wants more. Some standards are followed. Some code is shared (good and bad). I want 4K hidpi and fonts and colours on a raspberry freaking pi. That convenience costs in terms of storage, compute, and ram. Compare to Mac or windows and Linux looks anorexic.