Posts by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
(DIR) Post #B1PiL17YWVgfmbxzHs by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2025-12-19T17:36:25Z
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@discatte does your clié have a jog dial on it? i’ve never had the pleasure of owning one. they came out just at the end of sony’s jog dial era (minidisc, phones) - and I was curious if that interface continued into their pdas
(DIR) Post #B1td4TQpbjqk6WpMIa by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-02T03:50:38Z
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it warms my heart to hear a 15-year-old say that he's tired of renting his media and wants a physical copy that he owns.https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/video/2025/12/31/vhs-making-a-comeback-in-edmonton/#yeg #vhs
(DIR) Post #B1vnWDGMhiV7vKiY1w by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-04T05:12:56Z
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@futurebird so this ends up being kind of a tricky and subtle psychology that i've gotten to practice firsthand i grew up playing a lot of DOS/PC games as a kid. i owned a dozen of them, all bought with summer jobs and allowance money from ages 12-17in my late teens, i got rid of a bunch of them. tossed some, sold others.in my late 20s, i became intensely sentimental about that dozen games i owned as a kid. i deeply regretted getting rid of them, and spent the next 10+ years tracking down copies of each game.now here's the interesting part: common sense is that these aren't really "my" games that i grew up with. they don't have my teacup stain on the cover, the same kidscrawl on the back of the manual, or the dozen of other details that made them "mine". and for a long time that was true - they were just anonymous copies of the same game that i bought from someone elseand then another ten years passed. i could no longer remember whether or not these were my "real" copies from when i was a kid, or ebay replacements i had bought decades later. as soon as they entered that grey zone, they suddenly became mine again. i've seen the same thing happen with books and cd's and old electronics. they don't possess souls or magic or spirits. they're ultimately things that become the foci of memories, but possess nothing inherently.sure, this has limits - some things can't have copies like a parent's ashes - but i suspect most people's memories are for surprisingly commonplace (and not-unique) things.
(DIR) Post #B26Kxt5nD2kAayUXZo by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-08T17:36:07Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
a few years ago i mentioned that i wrote a book about the exciting, awkward and embarrassing experiences of growing up with computers and video games in the 80s and 90s.i wanted to remember what it felt like being the only dorky computer kid at school. or what it was like to hear my first modem handshake sound. or starting the first flamewar on the school's national FirstClass BBS in the macintosh lab over the lunch-hourit was originally something i wrote only for my family and friends who were there at the time. and then i met all of you folks when i started my first masto instance 4 years ago. i had no idea there were so many hardcore retrocomputing and gaming nerds out there; unix and mac and ms-dos folks alike.so i mentioned it casually. i was surprised by the interest in the book. so i spent the better part of the past 3 years rewriting the book for *you* fellow mastodon dorkus malorkuses. the book is a celebration of all of the best (and worst) parts of a kid growing up in the digital age. we're all busy old tired stressed folks now. so every memory and cringetacular story is short enough to read on a 5 minute bus/metro/toilet ride. they're weaved together into an arc that starts at my family's first Tandy TRS-80 and ends at my school's Mac LC II and building my first Pentium 133.it's finally published, and i'm super proud of what it became thanks to everyone here nerding out for years.enjoy the book. i wrote it just for you. ❤️ paperback edition: https://mybook.to/EDuUfDRM-free ebook (EPUB format) and chapter samples here:https://tomotama.itch.io/mages-modems#books #indiePublisher #bookstodon #author #macintosh #vintageApple #vintageComputing #msdos #dosGaming #yeg #canada #alberta #bbs #smolWeb #indieWeb
(DIR) Post #B2DT5phtq69Y9VKpGa by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-12T17:51:28Z
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@asie when i was doing language research for my exigy game IDE, i came across wren and gave it a try.this is kind of the opposite of what you're asking for, since i went with lua instead.i really liked its Self-like syntax and structure, which reminded me of ActionScript. i liked that it was class-based and offered a straightforward path to object oriented work. by design, i found it much less prone to ambiguity than lua (e.g. functions and variables have different signatures and are treated differently).i really, really wanted to use it for those reasons.in the end, it did not really live up to its smalltalk/Self origins - and those were intentional choices by the author. i can understand the motivation for those choices, but i wanted something *different* than languages we've already got.the three biggest things that pushed me away from Wren were:- i needed the ability to execute new/novel code at runtime. wren won't do that by design (since it is compiled to bytecode). lua can.- it handles errors much like any other compiler-driven language: just stop and error-out (or use error-handlers). i wanted something much more flexible than that, and lua allows for that- the class-based design is good for creating certain kinds of software quickly, and a frustration for creating the kinds of games i wanted to make. i wanted prototypes and mixins. lua provides no built-in support for these either, but doesn't *prevent* me from making them.
(DIR) Post #B2GC6yhYlfPYaj13B2 by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-14T01:24:54Z
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@futurebird just for you. spotted in an A&W in an alberta mountain town’s local newspaper
(DIR) Post #B2Mos1WR3q8E9kQrVw by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-17T05:39:04Z
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@futurebird i'm not sure that any game had a more profound influence on me as a 12 year old than SimAnt. sometimes i think about how it's almost criminal how completely ignored in the Maxis catalogue (like SimLife) it is.#dosGaming #msdos #retroGaming
(DIR) Post #B2QAK2wC4ZbHAMZ1HM by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-18T19:55:49Z
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thanks to the dedicated bookworms here, Audrey's Books sold out of Mages & Modems after only 1 day on the shelves 😬 i honestly thought it would take weeks or months.I've started a new print run and I'll make sure the store gets new copies by the end of the week. thanks for being patient if your order has been put on a waitlist!https://tomotama.com/books#books #bookstodon
(DIR) Post #B2UaITVhP0fiB3TMHY by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-20T22:58:21Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
back in the early pandemic, with way more time spent in my apartment than was healthy, i decided to run a solo podcast about 90s gaming on the Macintosh, Windows 3.1, and MS-DOS. my aim was introducing a level of technical and historical detail not often found on general audience video game podcasts.each episode took 10-20 hours of research and writing to explore in depth. i tried to pick less popular games that hadn't been talked about much, were underrated, or fascinating from a programming perspective.in 2022 we moved, i began new programming projects, and the podcast went on the shelf. i always meant to get back to it, and received many e-mails about future episodes.today i'm relaunching the podcast.website link:https://podcast.vga256.comrss link:http://podcast.vga256.com/rss.xmlapple podcasts link:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/multimedia-hyperguide-windows-3-1-macintosh-and-ms/id1393890581feedburner link:http://feeds.feedburner.com/MultimediaHyperguidewhile i write the next episode, please enjoy some of the earlier episodes, including everyone's beloved SimAnt (episodes 14 and 15).here are some box and browsies shots of SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (Maxis, 1991) for 16-bit windows. i use the physical boxes and their documentation during research and writing. this has a 150+ page manual, which is 50% ant science!#dosGaming #msdos #ants #vintageApple #macintosh #shareware #podcast
(DIR) Post #B2Z2IozX6uNC9IDj96 by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-23T03:11:53Z
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so we already have LARPs and renaissance faires and war re-enactmentsthese all imply the existence of a COMDEX re-enactment society where a group of us agrees on a specific comdex show. each team then picks their classic microcomputer company, and spends the rest of the year designing a booth, stocked with period-specific original hardware and software. we meet for one weekend a year, in a large exhibition hall, swapping business cards and demoing our booths.example shown below, from Halt & Catch Fire: COMDEX Fall '90.#hacf
(DIR) Post #B2b3klvMb2Rp0y57rs by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-24T03:00:10Z
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ad for a fax spam list found in canada’s The Computer Paper (alberta edition) november 1993i had completely forgotten about the existence of fax spam in the 90s. even in the 2000s my gov office machine would randomly get 5-10 ads a day from local businesses. winfax pro support 😎#1990s #retroComputing #alberta #yeg #yyz
(DIR) Post #B2b4DHUYp1WT1p8gYC by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-24T03:06:25Z
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@mistfunk how did you guess. want a pic?
(DIR) Post #B2b9PYJmaWGISYliJE by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-24T04:02:27Z
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@mistfunk posted!
(DIR) Post #B2lCqR8nL9UWmMHkEC by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-28T23:37:29Z
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@tomjennings f'ing awesome. looks like it's livestreamed so chuds like me can actually attend!
(DIR) Post #B2lNKwUaL7tcF7f82S by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-28T22:13:50Z
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check out this gorgeous homepage tribute to the Cleveland Free-Net 😻 https://cfn.tangledhelix.com#digiPres #smallWeb #indieWeb #smolWeb #freenet
(DIR) Post #B2lNL1ESiUyCwZ9p6O by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-28T22:45:10Z
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more cleveland free-net history:"Originally Free-Net ran on an AT&T 3B2/400 computer with 4 megabytes of RAM and 72 MB of hard disk storage. The CPU was a WE 32100 chip with a 10 megahertz clock operating under AT&T’s Unix System V operating system. Software was written in C. AT&T donated $50,000 worth of computer equipment and software."source: https://web.archive.org/web/20120828035003/http://blog.case.edu/archives/2012/07/index#freeNet #history #digiPres
(DIR) Post #B2lNL1QryMtXZ2xjRQ by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-28T22:29:06Z
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software mystery: does anyone have an archived copy of Case Western University's "FreePort" Free-Net software?this is the collection of server daemons and scripts that, collected together, formed the backbone of most FreeNets. despite the tools being free, the collected package and scripts were not free, and were sold and licensed to freenet operators.(chebucto appeared a few years later as a free replacement (and it is still available for download) - but it's not the same software package as FreePort.)boosts very welcome.#digiPres #softwarepreservation
(DIR) Post #B2n0JW1nL4MxFJSyiu by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-29T21:21:23Z
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@tomjennings i never once considered how much effort has went into making quiet lighting devices in the past 100 years. i remember being able to hear nearby incandescents when i was a kid.amazing to hear a lamp that you would have to speak loudly overtop-of in a room.
(DIR) Post #B2n2wQowpgvkIY8qZM by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-29T21:50:48Z
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@tomjennings and, in an unbelievable coincidence, also used in filming Blade Runner as i recently found out in a documentary about its production.they used carbon arc lamps when filming the eye-scientist scene. the room was an industrial freezer, had a low ceiling, and absolutely zero venting. the shooting crew got sick from the fumes.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB_eSNvOz6U
(DIR) Post #B2nBIHLJYFdyuID2Rs by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
2026-01-29T23:22:16Z
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@tomjennings i imagine it must produce a quality of light not possible with other types of lighting. lighting designers who paint with light still blow my mind. their understanding of the artistic/expressive and technical properties of light are unparalleled.