- 450 pounds, or about 200 kg
- These machines didn’t ask to be built this way. It’s their greedy ink overlords that did this. Mechano rights now! :-)
As I said elsewhere the shenanigans with ink didn’t start until recently. That era of printer is probably ok. It’s all in the choice you make. I just bought a brother Lp for my mother in law. Printer and 1 toner was c$370/U$. Will last rest of her life. With about 3500 pages of capacity. However the software world will surely change but when I take possession of it again I hope this solution still works so I can make use of it …
- Some games indeed. But I've also done art (graphics and music) and programming on Win 3.x with some of it being in proprietary file formats that can't be loaded by modern software. I could export music to MIDI and load that in modern software like Sibelius or Musescore, but I'd lose much of the notation. So instead I use the old software to have it on-screen or print it, then transcribe it.
- Sierra's AGI and SCI and Lucasfilm/LucasArts' SCUMM were strokes of genius and have been a major factor in these companies' success. It allowed them to not just churn out games at a far greater pace than if every game's tech had to be built from the ground up, but also made porting to other platforms much easier. In that sense they are the predecessors of Unity and Godot and all the other game engines we have today.
- I remember back in 1995 when the German magazine c't published an in-depth analysis showing that SoftRAM did not work at all.
That was way before Mark did the analysis for DrDobbs. However I guess since it was in German, the rest of the world didn't really notice...
- Ha! Love that the website swaps out the mouse cursor with that little dinosaur dude. It's been so long since I've seen that cursor!
- A production of nearly 50 years is honestly astounding. I assume this is for the full line of Z80 cpus
- There was a clone by Timex, the T/S 1500, which was a ZX81 (with 16 kB RAM!) in a Spectrum-like case with rubber/chicklet keys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair
You can build your own ZX81 replica, there are several projects available and all components are still available since the replicas replace the Sinclair ULA with a bunch of regular 74-series TTL ICs. We used the ZX81plus38 for a soldering course with our students, this works very well:
https://github.com/mahjongg2/ZX81plus38
There's also a Sinclair Spectrum clone, the Harlequin, which is also quite simple to build.
- Works like a charm – also with a Spectrum clone, but you have to invert the order of the cables at one of the connectors IIRC. I had a number of the PCBs manufactured (but I used different keycaps) and use them with inexpensive keychron switches.
- This game became Zarch and when converted to other platforms was named Virus.
- Wild!
- I have one of these. Great little computers!
Back in the 80's, I wanted one of these computers to write and carry around manufacturing related programs. Was too much money, so I settled on the PC-6. Pocket computer with 2K RAM, just enough!
I would have done more with the Model 100!
There is a 64 character driver floating around that I have lost track of. If you find it, it makes the display more dense, better.
- They aren't putting him back on the current leaderboard they're just putting him back where he was on legacy boards.
- windows me has a bad rep from a lot of people. i only had it on 1 computer but it never gave me trouble. it was in a rural location and the 56k modem struggled to get past 26k on bad phone lines.
when it got infected win9x and it's ilk could be beaten into removing all the virus whereas when it was replaced with win2000 and xp it required a full reinstall.
had to bring all the updates out on cd-rs but it worked great with that limitation. was so good to get that location onto broadband a few years later.
- Happy holidays! Thanks for this terrific site, I read it daily. Can't get enough of this retro goodness!
- Thenks to you for such a great resource, which was missing in this space.
- From the excellent Commodore books by Brian Bagnall:
While the engineers were showing off the new PET models, John Feagans noticed Bill Gates step up to one of the demo computers. “He was looking over his shoulder,” recalls Seiler.
“Gates walked up to our machine and played around with it.” What Feagans saw amazed him. Gates typed a simple command and the screen displayed the word MICROSOFT.
“If you put WAIT 6502 and then a number, it would print MICROSOFT that many times,” says Seiler. Gates cleared the screen and walked away, unaware Feagans had observed his deed.
Feagans soon realized Gates had snuck an Easter egg into Commodore BASIC. “There was another guy who did the first work on BASIC but Gates was working on it near the end. That’s how small the company was,” says Seiler.
Gates used the hidden code to fingerprint this particular version of BASIC. “He put in something in the PET because he was real suspicious of people like me stealing his BASIC on paper tape,” says Seiler. If someone attempted to incorporate BASIC into a machine using Gates’ code, it would be easy to check if the code originated with Micro-Soft.
Feagans felt perturbed because he had previously scanned through the code searching for hidden messages and found no discernable words. “It wasn’t in ASCII where you could see it. Gates had fiddled with a couple of bits with the ASCII character set, so it didn’t show up when you just looked at a raw binary dump,” says Seiler.
Feagans vowed to hunt down the hidden message and remove it from Commodore’s code. “He was just so perturbed that he had put that in there,” says Seiler. “Feagans is kind of a perfectionist like that.”
- What could have been. The system boot up with the “have you played your Atari today” jingle always made me smile. Burned a lot of hours between builds on Tempest 2000
- I always remember the 2.4 releases as 'multimedia' bound. Xawtv/Alevt and TVTime, XMMS with MP3 support thru PLF/packman or 'non-free' repos, Xine vs MPlayer battles, Wine being able to run Max Payne and Deus Ex at native speeds...
- I think FreeDOS should ship a complete build of GEM with all the tools as a suggested desktop. By far it's the most complete and usable one.
- More updates are still being planned for this - if anyone can help source bitmap font data from more relevant machines/video hardware (scope: IBM PC compatibles), it could fit right in. I already have some more in the pipeline.
- I will do my best to popularize the site but it's definitely the community that'll make it work. I am incredibly grateful and humbled to see all the people who have created accounts, posted stories, and commented here. It's incredible.
I personally love retro computing and have wanted something like this for a while. I hope we can build this up into a positive, fun community who love retro computing and gaming. And I appreciate everyone's efforts so far.
I've just made the source code available (see https://twostopbits.com/item?id=251) so that people can contribute directly the site. But the best contributions will be stories, votes and comments!
Thank you and best wishes.
- Absolutely don't miss the companion documentation site¹, which describes the game in detail, along with background information about the hardware and the people who made the game.
- Keep going. With the state of the world we need this site more than you know
- Author here. Thanks for sharing this. I was intending to make a more formal announcement of the new blog here and on HN after it had a bit more meat on it, but I hope it is of interest to people, nonetheless.
- Yeah, THAT made me feel old.
- "Romkey" sounds like a hardware feature. Turns out it's a person!
- This is incredible. How does it work?
EDIT: ok, here is some description: https://lisagui.com/info.html Apparently it's a re-implementation in JS, not using the original Lisa source code. Impressive in any case.
- Good to know. i'm ok if its a sigle article. It scared me for a minute.
This is my "third place" between home and work. I try my best to keep the site growing and vibrant with new submissions and commentary. I always assume that when I am here, I am sitting in your living room as a guest for Sunday cake and coffee.
- Now that you have a fully restored 128K, you should try TIRATOK by deMarche, a demo from 2019 that I'm still in disbelief that it's possible on real hardware (I know it is, but it's too damn impressive):
Also worth trying on real hardware is "Aliens: Neoplasma", also from 2019. That and "SkyNet: Road to 1984" from last year. These two games really show how alive the Spectrum scene is, and they are honestly good games.* https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=83538 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGLa1qqMnhE* https://sinc-lair.itch.io/aliens-neoplasma * https://hicksretro.itch.io/skynet-road-to-1984 - More