Posts by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
(DIR) Post #B4KI83WLRCpJB1ExZQ by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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every once in a while the thrifting gods take pity upon me 😻i’ve never actually played a Build engine game, nevermind one of its best ones. $10 later i can finally find out what it’s like. #dosGaming #dosbox #msdos #retrogaming #bigboxgames
(DIR) Post #B4ZiNn4zqSkozx0jRo by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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i put a reading chair in the library corner of the living room. it took henry 10 whole minutes to permaclaim it. #cats #CatsOfMastodon
(DIR) Post #B4elQyFS32v29tuOjg by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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how brother-sister kittywars start in this house:1. kiki decides it’s time for a nap on the perch2. henry decides it’s time to get nutsy3. gentle pat-pat#CatsOfMastodon #cats
(DIR) Post #B4tJO9WnlpfcvcI6DI by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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@dosnostalgic nice scan! thanks for posting.
(DIR) Post #B5CQLKJhaogdCd0AwS by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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does anyone else remember 1970s Federal hot coffee and/or hot chocolate vending machines in north america?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zfTxd7gZzofor some reason these were ubiquitous at airports and bus stations for decades here, and then quietly disappearedi cannot explain why, but i so badly miss hitting a button and watching that paper cup drop, and then fill with boiling hot water and substandard hot chocolate 😋 #canada
(DIR) Post #B5P8JHsGQlRovbWbHU by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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@dosnostalgic that installer immediately brought me back - especially the diskette number.when i was a kid, i had a summer job in this computer retail/repair store. we only had a handful of games (the Dune sandworm cd-rom box among them!), because my boss didn't think games would sell. instead, we had dozens of high-end software packages like Micrografx Designer, Corel Draw 4, Visual Basic 4, and Borland Delphi.i had the keys to the office, so after everyone was gone after 10pm, i'd let myself in, grab a box off the retail shelves and start copying diskettes like a madman. (delphi is up on the shelf in the pic, circa 1997 - it's a panorama of our retail area)copying Delphi was a marathon. i'd steal a gateway 2000 driver disk (we had hundreds from customer installs), format a:, and then diskcopy a: a:it felt like an eternity. i think it was 15+ diskettes.and when i got home to install it, the entire install ate 1/2 of my hard drive. but man, it was insanely cool - like VB on steroids.
(DIR) Post #B5fRSb6LJyUypAccHw by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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today’s thrifting find 😎my heart warms at its sight after 35+ years. my best friends got this gem with their family 386 DX25 when I was a kid.i wrote several stories about this exact card in my memoir about the 90s ms-dos era: Mages & Modems. thank you to wonderful folks who have read it and told me stories of your own SBAITSO.EXE exploits. 😅for those who have yet to read it:https://tomotama.com/booksi can’t wait to get it home and try it out. it’s a CT1350B for all you fellow OPL2 synth nerds. #msdos #dosgaming #books #retrogaming
(DIR) Post #B5lowGctTV3zu6iup6 by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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anyone else obsessively play The Incredible Machine growing up?when i was a teenager, it was pretty rare to have games that ran in VGA/EGA hi-res modes. so whenever i came across one, it was a rare treat.TIM runs in 640x440 using non-square pixels. that's already a fairly uncommon graphics mode in its time.even weirder: the original diskette for it reads "256 color" on it. except..... the game isn't 256 colours! not even close. it is a *16 colour game*. it uses the standard EGA palette colours with one tweak: it replaces screaming pink magenta with a warm gold.it manages pull off the 256-colour-like look through dithering. zoom in to the screenshots to see how the artist creates really beautiful texture and colour ramps using just 2-3 colours. (e.g. the gold plating in the first pic)#sierra #dynamix #dosGaming #retrogaming #msdos
(DIR) Post #B63RHuRfiuSxQXXYGG by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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@dosnostalgic Panasonic KX-P series and Epson LQ series still have strong support from ribbon suppliers, and the machines themselves are extremely resilient for heavy duty work.the real challenge is finding affordable tractor feed paper.
(DIR) Post #B647Ts4sY2h3dMGVLk by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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this is some pretty obscure history for Ultima fans, but i thought i'd share it here in case it brings back some memories for someone else too.back in the mid-90s, finding any information about upcoming Ultima games was a worldwide treasure hunt. Origin Systems/EA hadn't figured out the internet as a marketing tool yet, so fans would root around through every gaming magazine for a morsel of info on Ultima IX.a single blurry, low-resolution screenshot appeared one day - I first saw it on Usenet. someone claimed it was a screenshot from Ultima IX, found in a german magazine. it was a knight in a suit of armour, standing on a staircase near a bookshelf in some kind of castle. the render was stunningly realistic (given the 3d capabilities at the time)some believed it, many did not. people got *excited*, whether they were dubious or believers. i was among the many who wanted to believe. a few years later, real Ultima IX screenshots started to appear, and that old screenshot was largely forgotten. i thought about that screenshot for decades afterward, because i never really knew if it was real or a hoax. one weekend, i sat down to figure it out.it took many hours of trolling through Usenet archives from the mid-90s, and digging through many false leads, but i found it. people had said in 1996 that it came from a German magazine called GameStar.they were partly correct. it was a german magazine, but it was another one called PowerPlay. It was an extensive interview with Richard Garriott at his peak, rich with EA dollars and living like a pirate.in between the interview columns were hi-res screenshots of Ultima IX as it existed in 1996. this was not (yet) the isometric engine that people fell in love with, but what appear to be renders in what i presume to be 3DS Max.so here they are - 30 years later. i suspect these were mockups made to promote the game, rather than anything playable.i've uploaded archival copies to IA here:https://archive.org/details/ultima_ix_powerplay_screenshotsand if you read German, you can read the extended interview here (pp. 172-178):https://archive.org/details/powerplaymagazine-1996-02#digiPres #ultima #retroGaming #win95
(DIR) Post #B66e80NOhNghnw1nrk by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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okay so i found something pretty awesomethe 3d scenes in Myst were all built using a mac modeller/renderer called Strata Vision 3D. i bought a boxed copy of this program with the intention of trying to recreate a model or two in the game, using the original renderer.the box came with an extra disc - a library of shapes and textures. i noticed on the inside flap of the cd that it apparently included textures from Myst!unfortunately, it turns out the disc was a demo. you browsed through the library until you found something you wanted, and then called a 1-800# to buy a serial number. you could enter the serial number and instantly have access to that texture.unfortunately, no one has ever figured out how to crack Strata Clip 3D, and i couldn't figure it out today either.fortunately, some creative digging turned up the Myst textures. they've been hiding on a Warez cd from 1996 for the past 30 years. i just managed to load the program into system 7 and it's all there. these are the original textures used to render some areas of Myst. i still need to install Strata Vision to test them out, but afaik this is the first time these original textures have been seen since.#macintosh #vintageApple #myst #retroGaming #win31
(DIR) Post #B6AkP5Q8ZfeUjFg4cy by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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this is not well known, so i thought i'd share this -way back in 2020, ars released a short interview with rand miller about myst and the challenges of the cd-rom format. it's mildly interesting, but obviously cut from a much larger tapestry.they eventually released the full, 2h interview with rand, but very few people saw it. in the extended version, he talks about the very early days of working with HyperCard, from the Manhole to Cosmic Osmo to Spelunx. he goes into obscene amounts of detail with the constraints of working with HC and 80s/90s macs, writing custom XCMD and XFCNs, building in 3d with StrataVision, and using Debabelizer to build palettes.he does an amazing job of explaining what the constraints were for computing in that era. for anyone curious about what it was like making games in the 80s/90s, i can think of few other interviews that express the realities and joys of working in confined space so well:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qxg0ykOcgM#retrocomputing #macintosh #vintageApple #hypercard #myst #riven
(DIR) Post #B6CON5SBffRRZpCK48 by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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good night Infinisys.co.jp, and thank you for your 35+ years of selling the official After Dark screen savers and modules. 🫡 here are a few snapshots of their After Dark pages over the past 30 years.#macintosh #vintageApple #japan #retroComputing #win95
(DIR) Post #B6IyZt57kA5UGiZZBY by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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@jibsaram this one is a "it's not you, it's the game" problem unfortunately 😆 Last Crusade has some absolutely terrible puzzles. in this game's case, the only suggestion i have is to *not* think of logical solutions to problems. if a door is stuck because it's rusty - don't put oil on the hinge. buy a bottle of coke from the restaurant, and immerse the hinge in coke until the hinge disintegrates and the door falls off. LucasArts liked designing these "lateral thinking" puzzles - but honestly, i've never found them enjoyable.
(DIR) Post #B6JMoMXLQNXmZnCwYC by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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@jibsaram ohh well, if you're not too tied to playing that particular game, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is about a billion times better :D
(DIR) Post #B6JdM2inCbxGETe1B2 by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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@jibsaram afaik, the grail diary is only necessary at the end of the game to solve one puzzle.FoA is so much more enjoyable in almost every way. while I do like Last Crusade's setting, design-wise, it's one of the worst lucasarts adventures.
(DIR) Post #B6WSsgtgnB8Rf3aMWu by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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here’s an obscure bit of software preservation that has been completely forgotten:i learned recently that back in the late 90s in North America, Kellogg’s partnered with MS to cross promote cereal and educational software. it was a ridiculously good deal: inside any box of cereal was a coupon for a $5 CD-ROM for the *full* version of a MS educational or reference program. these were some of their flagship educational programs like Dinosaurs, Oceans, Explorapedia, Dangerous Creatures and Entertainment Pack 3. considering that these were $50-$60 at a couple of years earlier, it was a ridiculously good price. i wonder how many kids unknowingly grew up with a Kellogg’s CD version of these, because their parents ordered copies from the cereal box?#cdrom #multimedia #digiPres #softwarePreservation #win95 #macintosh #vintageApple
(DIR) Post #B6vw50rYcTYc2nZ52u by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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after years of digging and research, i finally found the toolkit that was used to make MS multimedia software Encarta, Dinosaurs and Dangerous Creatures.when i fell in love with these programs, i imagined they were built with a rich multimedia authoring environment/IDE like Macromedia Director. e.g. dragging and dropping images, sounds, text and video onto a stage, animating it with keyframes, and then scripting it for interaction.the toolkit used was, as it turns out, a very roughly hewn collection of individual programs. there was no IDE. all of the content was written in RTF files, which were then compiled with links to external resources like wavs and avi's.i cannot imagine what a nightmare this was for the MS Home teams to work with. there is no drag and drop of any kind, no object linking and embedding (OLÉ!), nor animation editor. this is a dog's breakfast of individual programs written by different people.i'm frankly amazed that the MS Homes teams put together such well-designed programs *despite* how painful this toolkit is to usethe one thing i can say in its favour is that it has one badass tetricube logo for cover art :Dhuge thank you to @philpem for archiving this extremely obscure piece of softwarehttps://archive.org/details/microsoft-multimedia-viewer-2.0-rips-20210921-1.7z#multimedia #cdrom #retrocomputing #win31
(DIR) Post #B88GZ324YwJ7BdQZ84 by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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@dosnostalgic you're welcome.
(DIR) Post #BAa1w7n6EvOKglTFKa by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
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@vwestlife our arcade machine coinmechs very specifically rejected US quarters, which i always found fascinating