Just a quick post here to spread the word regarding a new blog I’ve started in the past month. Called NMSspot, the new site will cover my adventures travelling within the universe of the procedurally infinite space exploration / adventure game, No Man’s Sky.
The new blog will mark the end of my admittedly “off-topic” posts about No Man’s Sky to this website, likely to the joy of my regular, vintage computing-oriented readers. (I have copied the NMS-related blog posts I’ve written here over the past three and a half years to the new website.) It is also my third plate in the air, so to speak, in the blogging arena, the other blog (aside from the one you’re presently reading) being a Virginia history blog, of sorts: Nostalgic Virginian.
Just a quick post here to point out my new BBSing Resource Page which I’ve posted to serve as a basic resource for readers wanting to give BBSing, a frequent topic here of late, a try. On the page, I list a few of my regular go-to boards, along with several modern devices that make it a pretty easy process to get going, and a couple of other resources as well. I set it up as a page in the sidebar to the left, rather than a blog post in the timeline, in order to keep it findable, hence this little “heads up” post.
Have a look if you’re interested and I’ll see you on the boards!
The new year has begun and the holidays are pretty much behind us, but before undecking the halls I wanted to share my contribution to the “Holiday Music Week VII” competition over at r/Retrobattlestations that ran until the 31st.
For this one, I fired up the Amiga 1000 and loaded a Christmas demo called the “Gallery of Christmas Images and Sounds,” which was created by Ken Costello, produced by the International Professional Association, and released in 1986. I discovered this demo thanks to a YouTube video of the disk running under emulation. The uploader, Jeremy Trim, provided me with the disk image, which I moved over the network to my Amiga 2000 and wrote out to a physical floppy for use on the Amiga 1000, a system for which I have stronger Christmas memories than the 2000. On closer inspection, I found that the demo was made with Electronic Arts’ Deluxe Video (by Mike Posehn), arguably the first consumer desktop video program. In order to avoid a few text glitches I was seeing, I had to boot back to Kickstart 1.1 (from 1986, basically ROM loaded from a floppy) to run the demo properly.
I have placed the ADF disk image of the demo online [download], if anyone is interested. Making this video was a fun little holiday exercise. Continue reading →
‘Tis the season, and that means it’s time to push out the ninth annual Byte Cellar vintage computer Holiday demo roundup so everyone can feel that warm, fuzzy, pixellated holiday glow. With scanlines. Enjoy!
I’ve been a computer geek for a long time now, but I’ve been enjoying The Holidays even longer…
I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A, on Christmas morning in 1982. I was 10 years old and from that Christmas on, it was nothing but games and computer hardware that I wanted Santa to leave me under the tree. On through my teenage years, part of my ritual for getting into the Holiday spirit was downloading and watching Christmas demos on whatever system I had at the time. And, apparently I wasn’t alone in this, as Benj Edwards explains in his piece, “The Oddball, Nostalgia-Inducing Christmas Tech Art Of The 1980s And 1990s.”
Enjoying these demos is a personal tradition that I had, sadly, long left behind until 2010 (the year before I began writing these posts) when I was inspired to seek out the demo I remember best, Audio Light’s 1985 musical slideshow for the Atari ST. With the help of an emulator, I captured it to share online with readers. A year later, I fired it up again and watched it run through it’s 16-color, pixellated images and 3-voice musical holiday greetings. As I watched, it occurred to me that it might be nice to gather a few of the other demos I remember from the good ole’ days and present them here, in order to try to share some of the holiday cheer that they used to inspire within me.
The following list of demos ranges across a variety of platforms of olde and is sure to bring the warmth of the season to the hearts of any and all retrocomputing enthusiasts who behold it. Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoy the shows!
I was recently listening to the celebratory 200th episode of my favorite vintage computing podcast, the Retro Computing Roundtable, which has been running for nine years. Marking the occasion, the early hosts of the show were in attendance and much reminiscence did ensue. Among the things discussed was the topic of how everyone’s relationship with the retro computing endeavor had changed over the past decade. In the discussion, the hosts touched on how it is that they got started in the hobby, and when. I’ve never really written specifically about that on this blog, as far as my own history, but the RCR folks have inspired me to do so presently.
Looking back, while I had an Atari VCS since 1979 or 80, I received my first proper computer on Christmas day, 1982: a TI-99/4A “home computer.” I expanded the system and enjoyed it well, but the platform wasn’t doing so hot around that time, so after a while, I sold it and moved to an Apple //c. It was great, and I really loved that machine, but I spent more and more time with the Macintosh at the local computer dealer and reading MacWorld magazines, so I eventually sold the //c and got a Macintosh 128K. When I went to a (different) store to buy some floppies for it, I encountered a Commodore Amiga in person for the first time. Blown away, I turned right around, returned the Mac after only a week, and got the Amiga 1000. And, so it would continue, on and on, one machine sold for the next, for quite a few years. It wasn’t until 1999, though, that I began “doubling up” and acquiring what I would call “vintage computers.”
At the time, I had been recalling some of the fun I had with my original Apple IIgs back in 1988 or so. One day I looked around eBay and found a few clean, complete systems. I bid and won one. Setting it up and running old programs on it turned out to be a whole lot of fun. I was quite glad I had gone ahead and acquired one of my favorite machines from days gone by (and so, it began…). It was around that time that I read online that there was a guy working out of a storage unit in nearby Frederick, MD, selling refurbished NeXT machines. I called him up to inquire, it sounded like a good proposition, so I drove up from my Arlington office on my lunch break and picked up a NeXTstation Turbo Color system including a 21-inch NeXT color display and a CD-ROM drive, all for $250. (I well recall that carrying that massive CRT up the tiny spiral staircase to the computer room in our first Northern Virginia home almost did me in.) And that’s when I decided it would be nice to have an Amiga again…
Early in the year I posted A Few Words from a “No Man’s Sky” Time Traveler, detailing my decision to put my 1,600-hour No Man’s Sky journey on hold and jump back-in-time to late 2016 and the Foundation (v1.1) release of the game. (My help page provides assistance to those wanting to do the same.) In that post I explained my motivations for so doing and I won’t restate them here other than to say, in brief, I missed the wilder nature of the early games’ (pre-NEXT) worlds and that greater sense of the unexpected, waiting around every corner. That was over half a year ago and it seems a good time for an update. (And to the bulk of my readers who came to read about vintage computing adventures rather than those taking place in a boundless, procedural universe: thank you for your patience with another off-topic post!)
As I wrote the aforementioned blog post, I was 25-hours in on a new Normal-mode game started in the Foundation release (version 1.13 specifically), having archived my mainline progress to resume later. I ended up playing in Foundation for 10 straight weeks before archiving that save and going back to the then-current release (Visions v1.77) in order to get back into the active swing of things in preparation for the impending release of No Man’s Sky Beyond.
Beyond promised to bring VR gameplay, far deeper multiplayer, and a large bag of various quality-of-life improvements to enhance the overall experience. Shortly before it was released, I purchased an Oculus Rift S VR setup in order to immerse myself as fully as possible in the game. No Man’s Sky Beyond (v2.0) arrived on August 14 and it did, indeed, deliver on its promises. No Man’s Sky in VR is pretty amazing; I’ve spent hours in the game just slowly wandering about, examining prairie flowers blooming inches from my eyes, marveling at clusters of desert cacti towering above me, and running my fingers through blades of grass carpeting valleys that stretch off into the distance. And, what’s more, I’m liking the deeper online play mechanics introduced through the Nexus in the updated Space Anomaly (a sort of hub where players can easily find each other, explore together, visit each others’ bases). I didn’t expect to find particular fondness with expanded online play, but it feels like a nice addition.
I recently saw a Reddit post where someone was demonstrating an SGI O2 running the FSN (“Fusion”) File System Navigator, a 3D rendering of the IRIX filesystem that was famously featured in the movie Jurassic Park — “It’s a UNIX system…I know this!” It got me thinking about the O2, which is the one SGI machine that I happen to own. I did some googling, just for fun, and ran across a video that SGI put out in the mid-’90s (on VHS tape) demonstrating the O2, and I thought I would share.
It was quite a machine, for the time. At my last job I had my O2 in the office on the desk and enjoyed messing around with it when time permitted. I find it sad that the once bold innovator that was SGI is no longer among us.
On Monday Apple held its September Apple Special Event at company headquarters to announce a variety of new products, among which are the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro. The new models brings notable camera upgrades, and one of the related new features exclusive to these models is something Apple is calling “QuickTake.”
Wait…QuickTake ??
While QuickTake isa new iPhone 11 feature that allows a user in photo mode to take a video by simply holding down the photo button (like in Instagram, Snapchat, etc.), its also a digital camera released by Apple 25 years ago. A line of digital cameras, actually — one of the first to hit the consumer market, back in 1994. The QuickTake 100 and 150 are Apple-branded versions of Kodak’s DC40 camera (the first digital camera I ever used) while the QuickTake 200 is a rebranded Fuji DS-7. The QuickTake line was one of the products eliminated (in 1997) by Steve Jobs upon his return to Apple, in the name of streamlining the company’s product lineup.
During the Apple event, a number of us old Apple folk were tweeting back and forth about the company’s reuse of the term “QuickTake.” Among these, I replied to @jeffcarlson (above), mentioning that I believe I have uploaded more QuickTake photos to the Flickr image network than any other person, linking to my gallery of around 200 photos taken with my QuickTake 200.
In 1989 I wrote a letter (envelope, stamp, and all) to game publisher California Dreams asking a technical question about the game Tunnels of Armageddon for the Apple IIgs. But, they never wrote back.
I was thinking back on this recently, with some sadness, and that set me about doing a bit of internet sleuthing. And I’m quite glad that it did. I am happy to report that here, 30 years later, I finally have an answer, and not from the publishing house, but from the mouth of the game’s original developer, from across the world in Poland.
Of all the computer system in my past, the Apple IIgs (which we purchased in the autumn of 1986) is one of my very favorites. But, given my fickle tendency to jump from one platform to the next, I left the IIgs behind a year or two later, about the same time that several close friends acquired their own IIgs systems.
Fridays after school, a couple of friends and I would gather at one of our houses, watch movies, eat pizza, and show off this or that new game or demo we had for our respective systems. One day in 1989, I was over at my IIgs-owning friend’s house (I had an Amiga at the time) and he showed me this game that I found to be truly impressive, which was saying something (I had an Amiga at the time…). The game was Tunnels of Armageddon. It’s a futuristic 3D racing game of sorts, in which you must successfully and rapidly navigate a series of tunnels discovered under Antarctica, carved out by an alien race as a test of humanity’s intelligence. Success will grant mankind knowledge of hyperspace travel, while failure will lead to the extinction of humanity.
The thing about Tunnels of Armageddon is its sense of speed. The tunnels you must race through are rendered as a series of rectangular wall or border sections that zoom towards you. There are obstacles and power-ups here and there, as well as many branches, some leading to dead ends. Looking with today’s eyes, it’s a rather simplistic affair, but gameplay feels extremely fast and very smooth, which is a real achievement on the Apple IIgs, which is rather limited as a high-speed gaming platform as compared to the Amiga and Atari ST, which were it’s closest equivalents.
This friend of mine had also gotten into Apple IIgs assembly language programming and had the associated Apple hardware reference texts (which are currently sitting on my shelves) on hand. Flipping through them, I had learned of the “Fill Mode” of the IIgs graphics chip, which was basically the one trick it was capable of using to help unburden the CPU during screen drawing. In a nutshell, with Fill Mode activated, only the outline need be drawn in order to render a solid, filled shape; the graphics chip would do the rest. It was a standard feature of more advanced “Blitter” chips on other platforms of the day, like the Amiga and Atari ST, but it was the IIgs’ one graphics boon. I was intrigued by this hardware capability and assumed that Tunnels of Armageddon utilized it, but I wasn’t certain, and so I wrote to the publisher to ask that question. And, I never got an answer.
‘Tis the season, and that means it’s time to push out the ninth annual Byte Cellar vintage computer Holiday demo roundup so everyone can feel that warm, fuzzy, pixellated holiday glow. With scanlines. Enjoy!
I was recently listening to the celebratory 
In 1989 I wrote a letter (envelope, stamp, and all) to game publisher California Dreams asking a technical question about the game Tunnels of Armageddon for the Apple IIgs. But, they never wrote back. 