@Cykelero@Retcon i'm shilling retcon over at twitter since that's where most of my social graph is (https://twitter.com/__justplaying/status/1788293496501055922) but seriously this app is the singlemost bull case for GUI apps. i just refactored a super messy branch into something much better with retcon + a bit of sourcetree + some CLI into a beautiful, mostly atomic set of commits, as it should be
@Cykelero also another thing... retcon advertisers itself as fast but i literally got beachballs when showing some larger commits on my M1 Pro so i guess more work to be done there :)
a few years ago i was able to get my hands on one of the only surviving copies (in the world) of the interactive book Portal, for the Macintosh Plus.
no, not that Portal. the original one, from 1986, by novelist Rob Swigart.
thank the gods the ~40 year old diskettes were still viable, and I was able to image it on my Color Classic.
but, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get the damned thing to run properly. my CC hated it. mini vMac hated it. System 7 hated it. System 6 hated it. everything caused the game to lock up after a few seconds, or get hung playing random music.
that was until today. in a moment of utter insanity, i realized that the creators of Portal did something very special for the Macintosh Plus: they made the game a f'ing BOOTER. it was never meant to be run from within the OS. you just inserted the diskette, turned on your Plus. the entire game is an operating system of its own, executing instructions from the CPU and ROM. this isn't anything new for C64 or Apple // users, but for the Macintosh it was practically unheard of. they replicated the Macintosh System 2 gui perfectly, just for the game.
the Macintosh port is still gorgeous today: a mouse-driven point'n'click UI with high-res 1-bit icons, and high-res text. it feels good in a way that none of the other versions (C64, DOS, Amiga) do.
but what stands out to me, nearly 40 years after its release, is that this is a hypertext game through and through. the story unfolds as you click around, wandering from computer network to computer network, reading documents and piecing together how the Earth became abandoned hundreds of year ago.
as far as I know, Portal's creators (Rob Swigart and Brad Fregger) were never credited for producing a very early Hypertext game. Portal predates Hypercard by an entire year.
recorded some gameplay in mini vMac for posterity. as far as I know, this is the only footage of Portal for the Macintosh that has ever existed on the web.
i admit i have not used go in a while but what fresh hell is this. why does the function declaration have 3 sets of parens. the last one is the things it returns, the middle one is a parameter, the first one is... ???
i've just spent a few hours trying to understand what am i feeling.
it is a fever. (from vaccination)
by wearing an MSA 900 respirator everywhere i've reduced the amount of disease i get infected by so much that i've literally forgot what having a fever feels like.
@whitequark i had the privilege of having like a, idek, 5-7 year stretch of not having a fever at all and i had a similar experience when it happened again
