- A good way to assuage your worries is ask yourself if it's the middle of the night in Europe. If it is then I'm probably asleep and not fixing the site!
- Here is an article by the author of the reverse-engineering about his work: https://blog.asie.pl/2020/08/reconstructing-zzt/
Check out this one, too: https://museumofzzt.com/article/view/468/a-month-of-reconstr.../
- The source code of the last version of ZZT has been reverse-engineered : https://github.com/asiekierka/reconstruction-of-zzt
The resulting program, when compiled with Turbo Pascal 5.5, produces a ZZT.EXE executable byte-for byte identical to the original.
- The article fails to mention this Windows 3-era clone of it.
https://archive.org/details/win3_COLUMNS
12-ish-year-old me spent countless hours playing this version. It has a bug where a certain pattern in two bottommost rows will be incorrectly detected as a vertical match of three and the game will crash. I learned to play in a way which avoided this glitch. Thank you for the nostalgia trip.
- Interesting; I just noticed that also versions of the GEM source code are available (see e.g. http://www.deltasoft.com/downloads.htm).
- I'd heard about similar experiments before but didn't realize anyone managed to get the Pentium Overdrive slowed down to 8 MHz! Mark me down as impressed.
- The HN code and the open source one are very different. The class names and tag IDs are often different and they are simply not compatible.
- A lot more information on Copland, including installation guides (it runs on early PPC Macs, e.g. the 6100/7100/8100 series), can be found at https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Apple_Copland
- Great design and selection of articles. Why not adding a rss feed?
- My mother possesed one of these and always told me how much time she would sink into this product. It's nice to read more about it, as she sadly lost hers.
- I wrote about the history of WordStar: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/arrogant-difficult-powerful
- 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.
- 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.
- > 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.
- 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
- Coin op is always fascinating to me. How custom and bespoke the boards are for audio and video and IO. The amount of hardware in this gaming experience is insane. I would have loved to play any of these versions.
- I love seeing these kind of "can it be done?" experiments, limitations be damned. But I also have to admit it appears absolutely unreadable :) The 40 column mode looks nice, though.
- I call BS on this claim:
> But if your program tried to write to ROM and did it often enough, you stressed both the CPU and ROM chip and could cause one or the other to overheat and fail.
I was very much into the C64 scene back in the early 90s and while I heard claims similar to that one (code that destroys chips or other components by overheating/stressing them) there was never any legitimate source of that. It was all just urban legends
- Wow. Doing a print magazine for C64 is so oddly unexpected that I think I'll buy a copy even though I've never really been into C64 (my 8-bit was a 6809-based Radio Shack Coco before my first Amiga).
- Now that's a lovely detailled deep-dive. The good kind of rabbit hole!
- My suggestion: it's the "mode change" code/character found in various IBM punchcard encodings, punch 11-8-7, represented by an upper-case delta.
Rendering this slightly differently from the regular Greek letter, would make sense, I guess. This may also explain the varying representations in the manuals: some would represent this like in common EBCDIC charts, as a delta, while others would refer to it as represented in the actual on-screen character set.
(There is also the rather common problem with special characters in manuals, where the font used for the chart doesn't comprehend the particular glyph, giving rise to alternative, often more abstract representations, as these symbols were drawn in later.)
- I was surprised to read this part: "For now, FreeDOS 1.4 can't run Windows for Workgroups in enhanced mode, but can run Windows 3.1 in standard mode."
I know very little about the project but I'd have guessed that ~100% DOS compatibility would've been achieved early on. There's just not very much to DOS! I'm sure there are reasons, of course, would be interested if anyone knows.
- The Psion 3 series used 8086 processors, so they could have released a standalone version of SIBO for IBM-PCs with relative ease.
In fact, Psion did release a SIBO "emulator"* for DOS which seems to be basically a PC port. It's intended for developers, and hews to replicating the mobile devices rather than taking advantage of the PC hardware, but you can imagine polishing it a step further.
- > I would only add that the iPod is what saved Apple
Yes, I agree. I just didn't want to get into a lot of detail in what was basically an aside to address that Apple's Mac platform did (sort of) survive. But as you observed, it was on very shaky ground and hardly a resounding success. Even today, the Mac business isn't as significant to Apple as iOS or services.
- Everyone knows about Captain Zilog, right?
- In 1985 Windows 3.x was still far in the future. The closest thing to ST/Amiga in the PC world was GEM - until Apple sued DRI and made them cripple it.
- I too was an Amiga fan, moving from an 8-bit Radio Shack Color Computer to the Amiga 1000 in late 85. The price of the Amiga was significantly beyond my early 20s budget so I was only able to finagle one by finding someone who needed some software written on the Amiga and getting them to buy me one in exchange for writing what they needed. But such was the siren song appeal of Amiga's promise in mid-85. I spent months poring over every page, image and word in the "Launch" issue of AmigaWorld Magazine, which was in reality a cleverly disguised extended sales brochure that came out months before the computer itself was available for retail purchase.
No teenager ever inhaled every inch of a Penthouse magazine in the detail I memorized that issue of AmigaWorld. It was truly computer porn in every sense, an airbrushed fantasy which significantly surpassed the reality of the computer that actually shipped for at least its first year on the market. There wasn't much you could do with a $2000 Amiga 1000 system in the first months other than run Boing, RoboCity and other demos ($2000 including the "optional" chip RAM upgrade (which was in reality required), RGB monitor and external 2nd floppy drive).
The early launch applications like Graphicraft and Musicraft weren't quite complete enough to be useful for much real production work, largely because when the Amiga 1000 first shipped the paint was still quite wet on the operating system itself. Worse, Addison Wesley the publisher of the official developer docs for the Amiga took their sweet time actually printing and shipping the damn books, despite the fact it was only a re-layout of the docs Amiga supplied in Xeroxed form to early developers. Unable to wait any longer as my Amiga-purchasing benefactor needed their software, I drove three hours away late at night to the house of a developer who had the original Amiga docs and took them to an all-night Kinko's and spent the hours between midnight and dawn copying every page by hand (at night because the developer needed the docs by day because he was late on his own application for his employer). But... strangely, we loved the early Amiga 1000 anyway. We thought we were buying a Penthouse Pet but what showed up was an infant that did little other than cry all night and need its diapers changed :-). Thankfully, a year or so later the OS had matured enough and sort-of real tooling, apps, docs and source code examples (in the form of Fish Disks) started appearing enough that the Amiga's fantasy potential slowly started to become real.
Dave's right that most Amiga-centric people from back in the day may still simply be incapable of assessing the Atari ST in a completely fair and balanced way. That's probably because we didn't assess the early Amiga in a fair and balanced way either (but in the other direction). So, he did a great job setting aside his own ingrained worldview to put the ST in it's rightfully deserved historical place.
The ST really was a hell of a deal, and in all honesty, I could never have afforded an Amiga 1000 if I'd actually had to pay cash for it instead of labor. While the early ST certainly didn't deliver on its own promise either (due to its own serious teething pains), it did hold the promise of being the super cute, fun girl next door who could become your best friend and, if you were lucky, actually marry. It paled only when compared to the Penthouse Pet-fantasy promise of the Amiga, which the early Amiga certainly didn't live up to (and by a much larger margin than the ST), but which, somehow... eventually, the Amiga mostly managed to do - although largely in the form of the later A500 and A2000.
- The Jupiter Ace was a massive fumble. What a shame. I bought one from a charity shop for a quid in about 1988, but I couldn't figure out the Forth syntax :(
- Well worth diving into the entire site. Lots 6502 and Atari-2600-adjacent tools. Great spacewar emu and discussion posted here before: https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/index.html
- More
Like much of foundational computer graphics, Ivan Sutherland et al were searching for solutions to problems few others had yet realized would be problems.