The scourge of x86 emulation https://lobste.rs/s/iq6w6l #retrocomputing
https://fex-emu.com/Scourge-of-emulation/
retrocomputing
it took 25+ years of searches, but i finally struck paydirt this morning: a legit, retail copy of FirstClass BBS for the macintosh
the backstory: in 1995, my redneck farm school managed to get an entire lab of twenty Mac LC's, and one of the machines was tucked off in a corner to run "FirstClass" for the entire school using an external 14.4k Global Village Teleport modem.
i was already a bbs kid by this point, but i had never heard of FC. all of the boards i visited were PC/ANSI boards running software like Oblivion/2, Iniquity, PCBoard or Wildcat. i had never even *heard* of a macintosh bbs. our computer teacher managed to get a landline number for the modem, and encouraged me to call it from home.
when i connected from home, i was nonplussed - the board was black/white ASCII with some of the worst menus i had ever seen. i browsed a few of the conferences and logged out. a "lamer board" if i had ever seen one.
the next day, i made my opinion unswervingly clear to my computer teacher: "Your board sucks Mr. M!"
He chuckled, "What? First Class is great! It's you DOS guys that suck."
he motioned to a nearby LC and opened a program called FirstClass Client. it showed a login dialog; he hammered in his u/p and a few seconds later, he was logged in to the BBS over the LAN.
...... except, it was all graphical! the entire board was a rich mac OS gui. navigation between file areas and message conferences was by opening and closing windows, and clicking on buttons. no ascii/ANSI characters. downloading a file was just plain drag and drop from the server's folder to your desktop.
i had never seen anything like it: a bbs that functioned more like an operating system and windowing environment. it was a *decade* ahead of anything i had seen in ms-dos
that experience left a huge impression on me. i never found any bbs that felt as good as FC before or afterward, and spent years trying to find a legit copy of it. because it was insanely expensive ($800+) it was mostly sold to educational and corporate institutions, and very few copies ever showed up on ebay. until today. i can't wait to receive this in a few weeks, and begin documenting
and archiving the contents.
fwiw - i wrote a much longer version of this story, and many others about the 90s bbs era, in my book Mages & Modems: A Childhood Well-Wasted in the Golden Age of Personal Computers, Games, and Internet Piracy:
https://tomotama.com/books
How Dolphin deals with the anti-piracy of "The Smurfs Dance Party" https://lobste.rs/s/8w5p2p #video #games #retrocomputing #reversing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN2WdO4c_jM
Are We Legacy Computing Yet? via @lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/x1b4va #retrocomputing
https://arewelegacycomputingyet.com/
Jason Jones interview in "Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus" (1995) https://lobste.rs/s/gwarbx #games #mac #retrocomputing
https://marathon.bungie.org/story/jasonjonesTofTMPG.html
#lispyGopherClimate since 2022 Sunday-morning-in-Europe #lisp #live every 800UTC Sundays.
@dirtycommo I am here but I only *just* finished reading Borenstein's book and my brain has a lot of postprocessing to do. Slak and yduJ are in the MOO.
https://toobnix.org/w/ihF2z7TgiV5eBiquK2194Z
*Hopefully* vidak is about to give us all a demo of some technological-collapse-survivable what I call "magazine #basic" computing architecture.
#retrocomputing #lambdaMOO #VR #climate I feel like "collapse" would be too edgy
Edited 52d ago
Found a really insightful Reddit post about the #Commodore64Ultimate and why #retrocomputing has such an appeal to many.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Commodore/comments/1w0l8jj/comment/p6f8q1p/
#platformDecay #Commodore #C64 #C64U
Honestly I'd find it hard to imagine why anyone would want one.
To understand the appeal of something like the Ultimate, or TheC64, I think you actually have to live through this whole weird thing where almost inconcievably powerful computers gradually became so commonplace that people often have multiple tiny supercomputers kicking around in drawers in their house while the ability for the user to actually directly harness that power shrank to the point that they're just glorified pocket organisers.
In 1995 our home computer was an Acorn Archimedes and I'd have given anything to get a Windows 95 PC and I wouldn't have believed it if future me showed up trying to swap a Windows 10 laptop for that Archimedes, but man, I would do it if I could.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Commodore/comments/1w0l8jj/comment/p6f8q1p/
#platformDecay #Commodore #C64 #C64U
💾#RecoveryWhiskers 0.7.0 is out!
New in 0.7.0: A third flux parsing algorithm, It displays flux graphs in color and shows you sync marks and sector numbers it found. And a lot of smaller fixes.
Source: https://codeberg.org/JennyFluff/RecoveryWhiskers
On Crates.io install via cargo:
https://crates.io/crates/recovery-whiskers
Why are we reviving Medley Interlisp? What are the goals of the project? We shared our stories and motivations for making the system run again.
How I converted BBC Micro Elite into a two-player game via @fanf https://lobste.rs/s/el3fvf #retrocomputing
https://elite.bbcelite.com/hacks/two-player_elite/technical_information.html
NES dumping over audio https://lobste.rs/s/rlswbt #games #retrocomputing
https://mathstodon.xyz/@JordiGH/117209252363385093
See Windows CE Running On The N64 https://lobste.rs/s/dckubt #hardware #retrocomputing #windows
https://retrododo.com/see-windows-ce-running-on-the-n64/
If you need or enjoy clipart, I invite you to point your browser to art.txw.ca
It is a site I’ve put up which catalogues and preserves 20th century clipart and stock photography from abandonware on macintoshgarden.org
#clipart #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #vintageart
GEM for Linux provides a classic graphical desktop with windows, menus, dialogs & a 68K emulator via @lproven https://lobste.rs/s/5yga7r #osdev #retrocomputing
https://github.com/triglav-os/gem
Preparations are starting for decoding the Intel 80286 microcode, which we will hopefully have images of soon.
We can actually start figuring a few things out already, even without the bit extraction.
The 80286 has a 35-bit microcode word. This is straightforward to determine - there are 35 outputs coming out of the microcode ROM.
35 bits is a lot larger than the microcode word of the 286's little brother, the 186. The 80186 has a 21-bit microcode word, which is no bigger than the 8088.
It's much closer to the 80386, which has a 37-bit microcode word. Suspiciously close, in fact.
Hello (again), after a brief posting hiatus and a search for somewhere to migrate to, I am back on Mastodon! I've been on the fediverse since 2023 but grew tired of the mastodon.social experience and felt like it was time to spread my wings.
A bit about me: I'm a 30-something fellow living in midwestern USA who works two jobs and takes care of two pets at home. I love #retrocomputing #retrogaming #writing #webdesign #electronicmusic #nature and many more things I can't think to list at the moment.
I manage a community for PC gaming on 4:3 displays that has gained a significant following in recent times, you can check us out on #neocities here: https://doesit4by3.neocities.org/
Sometimes when I have free time and feel motivated (lol) I will write a few thousand words on tech and tech-adjacent subjects. You can read my work here: https://read-only.net/
All other relevant things I've shared on the web can be found on various parts of my website: https://rootcompute.neocities.org/
Glad to have found somewhere to land on my feet and I hope I'll be able to call c.im home on the fediverse for many years to come!
Edited 65d ago
Recording some wav files to tape for the MSX 1, as one does. No clue what's good on the MSX 1, so picked one game at random (Mad Mix) and one with purpose (Outrun).
I'd like to play some demos as well, but a quick search only turned up stuff that needs a disk drive, which I don't have on the Philips VG-8020.
The dog doesn't seem all that perturbed by all the high-pitched noises and digital screaming echoing around the room.
#RetroComputing #MSX
I'd like to play some demos as well, but a quick search only turned up stuff that needs a disk drive, which I don't have on the Philips VG-8020.
The dog doesn't seem all that perturbed by all the high-pitched noises and digital screaming echoing around the room.
#RetroComputing #MSX
As a junior high nerd I had the most ridiculously convoluted setup for listening to tracker music: I had a 286 machine, an OG SoundBlaster, and a Covox Speech Thing. I had player software that could output one channel to the SoundBlaster and one channel to the Covox, so I did that, with one speaker hooked to each, on either side of my bed.
It worked amazingly well, albeit with 8-bit, 11kHz mixing quality.
New video! There's another capacitor issue with the Amiga 3000T from factory!
YouTube: https://youtu.be/MKnBJ2qgXF0
PeerTube: https://makertube.net/w/ktv6ZnGPs8uCxbrns6NYaN
#Amiga #Amiga3000T #Amiga3000 #A3000T #Capacitor #VoltageRails #Commodore #Restoration #Schematics #Repair #Troubleshooting #VintageComputing #RetroComputing #RareCommodore
Edited 67d ago
Decoding the NEC V20 Microcode via @robey https://lobste.rs/s/dfby97 #retrocomputing #reversing
https://martypc.blogspot.com/2026/09/decoding-nec-v20-microcode.html
As a #retrocomputing or #vintagecomputing aficionado, I don't bother with exploring SCO UNIX because...