Home page for this emulator : https://snowemu.com/

@bmonkey325

Thanks for posting my web page to this site. I just signed up to post here now and in the future. I posted the companion page to the WarGames Terminal Fonts:

WarGames Title Fonts https://twostopbits.com/item?id=6236

Cheers, - Michael Walden

I'd say that a correct aspect ratio is part of the baseline for authenticity - nothing 'super' about it. But we clearly live in a world where most people don't see a dang thing wrong with 4:3 content smeared all the way across their widescreen TVs, so admittedly I'm the odd man out. :)

A better approach would be to derive the ratio from known signal timings, and from comparisons to actual monitor output (or photos of such) where applicable, rather than subjective judgment calls about how particular games look... but any attention being paid to this stuff at all is a good thing.

What more people need to be aware of is how to properly aspect-correct their retro gaming video footage for uploading and streaming...

VRML was everywhere in 1995. At least, everywhere in the media. Any time a TV show had to mention the Internet they would show some 3D avatars moving around a virtual world. Made for much more interesting footage than the grey Mosaic browser background.

Nice to see OG 68k AmigaOS still getting a little love. I'm one of those who used Amigas daily from 1985 to 1995 and loved the platform. I still love it as a venerable retro platform because it was the most unique and interesting of the retro-era computer platforms.

Sadly, I've never been able to muster much interest in the subsequent post-Commodore Power PC or retargetable graphics-based Amiga derivatives. Relative to their post-1995 peer platforms none of those Amiga derivatives were compelling. They had all the downsides of being a low-adoption hobby platform with none of the unique upsides the OG Amiga offered vs its peers between 85 and 95 (better graphics, sound, color, multi-tasking). Post 1995-ish most peer platforms had approximately similar resolution, color depth, graphics speed and processing performance to anything derivative Amiga add-ons or upgrades were offering - and usually with more support and better prices. Worse, they didn't even offer much nostalgic appeal because new apps and OS were required - essentially making it little different than transitioning to an entirely new platform anyway.

As Commodore disappeared into bankruptcy, the era when unique platforms could carve out a market was ending and fundamentally nothing Commodore (or its successors) could do would have done more than delay the inevitable. Platforms like the Amiga had shown the way to the future but eventually the baseline tide was catching up. The age of CISC CPUs and 15khz displays was at an end. Commodore didn't survive long enough to take a solid swing at a RISC machine with >31khz graphics and none of its descendants had anywhere near the resources to even make a serious attempt at anything which might have been uniquely better than current peers. Frankly, even Commodore didn't have the resources to spin a truly competitive new hardware platform with a bespoke OS ready to exploit it.

Even Intel and Microsoft combined barely managed to eventually make the transition. Maintaining x86 ISA compatibility with microcode translation on top of RISC was an ugly and risky hack that almost didn't work (requiring heroic effort to salvage). After trying to do essentially the same with the 68060, Motorola gave up (perhaps wisely as they didn't even have Intel's process fabrication savvy to help hide the inevitable performance gap of emulating a CISC ISA on a RISC CPU). And on the OS side, it took Microsoft 8 years of iteration to eventually improve Windows to the point where it was really usable as a multi-tasking GUI OS.

There was simply no way a vertically integrated computer company like a Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, etc could compete against a platform made by separate companies each specializing on one aspect: the CPU & chipset, OS, graphics or sound and then assembled by a manufacturing integrator. Leading edge desktop computers had grown incredibly complex and the 90s was peak Moore's Law acceleration, enabling immense gains for those able to move fast enough. No single company could compete. Keeping up required an ecosystem of companies. And if Commodore (or successors) had shifted to outsourcing all the components, they'd just be yet another low margin integrator like an Acer, Dell, Gateway, etc. And to be fair to Commodore, no one else made the transition either. Even giants like IBM, DEC, HP, SGI, Sun, Next all either gave up on desktop PCs or became low margin integrators (usually as a loss leader for their higher end hardware). Apple barely survived (and wouldn't have without acquiring a new OS from Next, Steve Jobs returning, a last minute $400M lifeline loan from Microsoft and quite a bit of luck).

Everyone knows about Captain Zilog, right?

https://www.zilog.com/captain_zilog/

To the teenage me, the Amiga 1000 looked gorgeous, but was an impossible dream due to its entry price. The Atari ST520 was affordable and still looked very nice.

Glad to hear it - the tags were getting pretty unwieldy.

Great work! Love that the admin will have the ability to merge tags.

You have to wonder, what would modern CPUs look like if Thompson and Ritchie had implemented unix on a PDP-10 and that had become the 'normal' for CPUs...

The SparcStations I used in grad school were so much more powerful than anything had access to at work. Sun and the others totally blew it, just like the minicomputer companies had when the Unix workstations arrived.

:-)

Thanks for being part of it. It's the users that make it what it is. I'm just keeping an eye on the server and the code!

It's amazing some obsessive retro enthusiast has gone to the effort to assemble such a huge archive of old legal documents. So... nice job.

Having been deeply involved in the Amiga community from 1985 to 1995 and knowing lots of people at Commodore as well as many of the largest Amiga developers and even attending most of the Amiga trade shows around the world starting with the first Amiga Expo in NY - it's safe to say I really liked the Amiga and still revere it's historical legacy. It was an incredible platform that was ahead of its time. I have so many fond memories of good times with good people.

However, having said that. I have to add that it's beyond bizarre grown adults are still squabbling in court over legal rights to the Amiga IP and trademarks more than 30 years after the Amiga died. I guess one could argue that maybe the Amiga IP and trademarks still had some potential value that could have been extracted before the year 2000, but certainly after 2000 none of it has any serious value. To be clear, I'm a business person with decades of experience as a senior executive in the non-Amiga technology industry, including at Fortune 500 tech companies whose products most people reading this probably use every week. So when I say "no serious value", I mean the maximum value of all these rights combined - when rounded to the nearest million dollars - is zero. And that includes my best guess of the combined value of all future revenue, from Amiga Forever, to accelerator cards, to FPGA emulators, to nostalgia-ware T-shirts. At best, all of it doesn't add up to more than a garage Etsy or EBay-sized part-time business. And year by year, it's getting even smaller.

What are these people even thinking? They are wasting time and money paying lawyers to fight over essentially worthless scraps. It's insane. I acknowledge that maybe it's just one crazy person (or group) causing all this pointless bickering but, eventually, even the sane people bear some responsibility for continuing to respond to it. Yes, the Amiga was great. Yes, it would be nice to support the retro community and open source the code for posterity. But, at some point, you need to concede it's just not possible, give up and move on to do things more useful than fighting with crazy people. It's sad but life is short. You tried. Thanks. Now save yourself from any more of this silliness.

That’s a great example of “the Commodore keeping up with you”!

Very nice PDP-8, -11, -10 kits here for some folks, might be too late for 2024, though.

https://obsolescence.dev/pidp10.html

It's my homepage.

Thank you so much. :)

First stop in the morning and the last stop before I log out. Thank you for creating a space where nostalgia meets technology and for all the fascinating links and comments.

Wishing Two Stop Bits many more years.

Dear Mr Kurtz.

I suspect many here, as I did, encountered your BASIC as a means to make their micro play games or build a program to unlock the power of their new fangled computer. Graphs, tables of numbers or even juvenile electronic vandalism in Sears, Radio Shack, or other shops that sold micros in the 70s and 80s. Your language was a gateway that allowed me to begin my journey into computing. Simple enough that I could learn at computer camp but powerful enough to simulate a nuclear reactor (SCRAM). Some even built an empire using your creation.

Thank you.

As an owner of a ZX81 at the time it's difficult to explain what it was 3d Monster Maze at the time, first it was rare/unusual to have a computer at home, 2nd what they did with the game as simple as it looks today , graphics, gameplay etc .. was incredible.

Don't be fooled by the word “trial” and general shareware aesthetic. Free serials are here: http://www.file-ex.com/freereg.html

A lovely little machine, it would've been nice to see how things had proceeded, had this been successful enough to warrant a few more revisions. Certainly, it had relevance to the music-making computer users of the period. I wonder if its MIDI was ever used for productive purposes ..

Dude. The article from your site. “ The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development” was awesome.

I really appreciate it when tech companies make an effort to preserve history and share it.

However, it's important to also share Nintendo has recently launched a major campaign of unprecedented legal attacks on the historical preservation, retro emulation and fan creation communities. While Nintendo has always been protective of its IP rights, this was largely limited to stopping piracy of current titles and protecting their trademarks from commercial infringement, both of which are appropriate and understandable.

However, the greatly expanded and all-encompassing scope of their recent legal actions now threatens aspects of non-profit historical preservation and adjacent fan activities unrelated to Nintendo's present day commercial interests. Previously, Nintendo's lawyers made at least some effort to distinguish between non-profit or fan hobby activities and piracy or commercial trademark abuse. Their senior management also seemed to appreciate the retro community is some their most active current customers and brand fans. Over the last year that restraint has vanished, making it all the more ironic Nintendo is now funding a new museum to celebrate its past while funding lawyers to threaten the non-profit historical preservation and non-commercial fan communities passionately keeping Nintendo's storied past alive for future generations.

While I'll always love Nintendo's rich historical legacy, until they again exercise reasonable restraint in their now-abusive legal tactics, I can no longer in good conscience support the company or its products.

The most important preventative measure in my experience: don't lay CDs upside-down in the name of “““protecting””” them! I know it's counter-intuitive, because I used to do it myself, but take a look at a cross-section of a CD and you'll see why it's the worst possible thing you can inadvertently do. The data layer is directly under the label, and the bottom of the disc is relatively well-protected in comparison: https://www.clir.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/fig2-3.jpg

This is also the reason why all-over-print CDs are better survivors than discs whose obverse design integrates the raw silver. Note that this is specific to CDs — DVDs and BDs have polycarbonate on both sides!

I remember seeing these very computers, and even using some of them, in the Living Computer Museum only a few years ago. How sad to see this collection and the history it represents being auctioned off piecemeal to individual rich guys. Such a loss.

This was a thing with the Amiga 500 computer too. I worked at a company which had a corporate field deployment of over a thousand Amiga 500 systems and some of these computers would start crashing intermittently due to the A500's "Fat Agnus" becoming unseated in its square socket, especially during shipping and thermal expansion/contraction. The chip got its nickname because it was a square packaged upgrade version of the earlier rectangular Agnus chip in the Amiga 1000.

These 1,000+ Amiga 500s were leased as complete systems including a 13" monochrome composite video monitor and an Okidata 182 dot matrix printer. All these Amigas only ever ran a single, highly complex and extremely valuable custom software application which auto-booted from the internal 880k floppy, was never publicly released and has remained unknown to this day.

This program was protected from being pirated with hardware in the form of a custom-designed and manufactured 1MB RAM + Real-Time Clock expansion board pre-installed in the A500's "trap door" slot on the bottom. This unique board added the same functionality as the standard Commodore A501 board but was customized by swapping the real-time clock data lines around, which the software checked to confirm it was running on an officially leased A500. The software application was written in C by myself and two other devs and we also doubled as the support, service, training, installation and shipping staff for this fleet.

Since we shipped them to each field location and they tended to be in locations which weren't well thermally controlled after hours, we got a fair number of these errors. Since the vast majority of our users were older female office workers who'd never touched a computer before, any error would trigger a support call. It wasn't easy to convince these nice ladies on the phone to lift the computer 6 inches and then drop it! But it did always fix the problem. We called it a "technical drop" :-)

As a very early Amiga 1000 owner and enthusiast, I'm the one who primarily convinced this small company that the newly announced A500 was the best low-cost option to run field deployments of their niche application and, aside from this occasional error problem, the huge fleet of Amigas performed admirably for many years. Especially considering the machines were individually shipped to each field location and these tended to be pretty hostile environments like temporary mobile offices, sometimes powered only by gasoline-powered generators subject to constant surges and brown-outs (think construction trailers).

I'm proud my unorthodox recommendation ended up working out so well since, despite my obvious bias, the A500 really was the perfect fit for this unique application in early 1987. The software app itself was related to real estate financing, so it had to have a 10-key and the entire system had to fit on a small side desk used by constantly rotating staff in a crowded temporary office. It had to be self-booting, self-maintaining and dirt simple, since almost none of the users had ever touched any computer before. It also had to be reliable because they frequently got moved around in the field between desks and buildings entirely by these novice users. So being all-in-one really helped since every extra wire and component was another thing to lose and/or break. I learned the hard way that talking to a nice lady on the phone who'd never seen a computer in person through reconnecting this "newfangled contraption" which someone else had disconnected, moved and left on the floor in a random pile the day before, was a rapid education on how to communicate physical instructions clearly! I always just pictured them as my sweet elderly aunt which helped keep my cool :-). Finally, the system had to be super cheap because they got stolen fairly often (no security after hours in these isolated remote offices).

Although entirely unknown at the time or after (since there was no reason for this small company serving a narrow niche market to do any PR) this was, as far as I know, the largest ever corporate deployment of Amiga computers.

One interesting note: the application was written to only use the keyboard, mostly just the arrow and Enter keys plus a few function keys we labeled with custom color-coded stickers for navigation such as Go, Back, Menu and Print. Usually we never even supplied the Amiga mouse with the systems, however I was optimistic we could show the users how to operate the mouse so they could run other apps if they wanted to. I conceded defeat after trying to teach the first half dozen users I did installs for how to use the "Bonus Mouse". I thought some would eventually get it but the necessary eye-hand coordination completely eluded these nice ladies circa 1987.

It's funny seeing "Learn how to use a mouse". I had to help some parolees recently who now have to do "criminal thinking" classes after they get out. These are done on a PC with a bunch of multiple choice questions (You see a man drop his wallet in the street. Do you... a) keep the wallet..).

The problem is, some of these guys had been locked up since pretty much the invention of the mouse and had never seen one except in a movie, so you have to start at the beginning...!

I'm sure if the tapes they found contained some form of evidence against the founders of SciHub or Anna's Archive, they would have found a way to play it back /s

If you want to hear about Xbox hacking. I can’t recommend enough the two part series on the dark net diaries podcast.

XBOX UNDERGROUND (Part 1) https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/45/

XBOX UNDERGROUND (PART 2) https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/46/

While I love the idea, e-waste is too good for these infernal machines. I expect them to rot for all eternity in the pits of the far reaches of hell, but enjoying life far more than the executives who came up with ink subscriptions.