a2_4am

mcc, 15 days ago to random

Hard to imagine a signal that a website is a rugpull more intense than banning users for trying to delete their own posts

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt

Like just incredible "burning the future to power the present" energy here

a2_4am, 4 months ago to random

Me at 20: Why would that famous tech luminary retire early to go make art? Tech is great, I love programming, I can't believe I get paid for it.

Me at 50: Oh.

a2_4am, 1 year ago to random

Thinking, as I often do, about Stephen Hawking's voice, which began as a hardware synthesizer card connected to an Apple II and ended up as a software emulated version of that same card because he rebuffed all well-intentioned upgrades for 30 years because it was his voice.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Valley-quest-to-preserve-Stephen-12759775.php

a2_4am, 6 months ago to random

I made the world's worst word search (the word to find is COCOON)

a2_4am, 7 months ago to random

Siri, show me an example of burying the lede.

a2_4am, 10 months ago to animals

This beagle would like you to know that he is helping. (He is not helping.)

#DogsOfMastodon

a2_4am, 3 months ago to animals

Zara, who did nothing wrong, was just wondering if she could have a treat, on account of her being cute and having done nothing wrong.

#DogsOfMastodon

a2_4am, 1 year ago to random

"Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego?" was released for Macintosh on August 4, 1989. It had on-disk protection to deter copying.

Luckily for Broderbund, Europe was pretty stable for the rest of 1989 no just kidding the Berlin wall fell 3 months later.

They released a v1.1 update in April 1990, to reference Germany and Berlin instead of East Germany and East Berlin. They also migrated from on-disk protection to a documentation lookup scheme after you finish your first case.

I found version 1.0.

a2_4am, 11 months ago to random

Nothing but respect for MY Apple Vision

a2_4am, 10 months ago to animals

I hope this beagle finds you well.

#DogsOfMastodon

a2_4am, 9 months ago to retrocomputing

Fun(*) fact: some of the time that The Print Shop spends "thinking" is actually spent checksumming the copy protection routine in memory to ensure it has not been tampered with since the last time it checked.

(*) not guaranteed, actual fun may vary

#AppleII #retrocomputing

thinking/printing animation from The Print Shop on Apple II

a2_4am, 8 months ago to random

Mail's here.

a2_4am, 7 months ago to retrocomputing

I acquired a new, possibly unpreserved Apple II program called "The Cube," so I went to the usual places online to see if other copies or versions exist. I found a compilation disk that had a program on it named CUBE, which seemed promising. (Programs were frequently reduced to single files to save space.) I downloaded the disk image and fired up an emulator and booted the disk image and ran CUBE and got trolled by a prankster from 1986.

Well played, sir. Well played.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

a2_4am, 4 months ago to retrocomputing

Editor: You get those drawings of the lizard for our adventure game?
Illustrator: Sure did boss, real fuckin sexy just like you asked.
Editor: what

#AppleII #retrocomputing

a2_4am, 6 months ago to retrocomputing

Total Replay v5.0.1 is out. It features 484 Apple II games (182 new since v4), all playable from a single bootable 32MB hard disk image.

https://archive.org/details/TotalReplay

Code & changelog: https://github.com/a2-4am/4cade/releases/tag/v5.0.1

Thanks to @a2_qkumba, @txgx42, @helix_nrg, Andrew Roughan, Frank M., Kris Kennaway, @ladyailuros, and everyone else who contributed to this project in the past four years.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

a2_4am, 6 months ago to retrocomputing

I regret to inform you that I am extremely back on my bullshit.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

a2_4am, 1 year ago to random

Pitch Dark is a frontend for exploring and playing Infocom text adventures on an 8-bit Apple II.

Revision 5, released today, fixes bugs viewing certain hint files and playing certain versions of Bureaucracy. Thanks to @a2_qkumba for his tireless efforts in reverse engineering a decade of undocumented changes to Infocom's parsers.

https://archive.org/details/PitchDark

#AppleII #retrocomputing #infocom

a2_4am, 8 months ago to retrocomputing

Reminder NOT to buy anything from apple-2-online-store in eBay, who just listed a large number of "original" disks. I have caught them red-handed in the past selling cracked copies as originals. I have no way of confirming if these new disks are original or not.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

a2_4am, 8 months ago to animals

This beagle would like you to know that it is dinnertime. (It is not dinnertime.)

#DogsOfMastodon

a2_4am, 4 months ago to retrocomputing

I have ported the first 7 Scott Adams graphical adventures to ProDOS: Adventureland, Pirate Adventure, Mission Impossible, Voodoo Island, The Count, Strange Odyssey, and Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle. Each port includes patches for a better text input routine, an increased number of game save slots which read/write from external ProDOS files, auto-uppercase of input and auto-lowercase of output, quit to ProDOS, and of course no copy protection.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

title screenshot from "Pirate Adventure" by Adventure International
title screenshot from "Mission Impossible" by Adventure International
title screenshot from "Voodoo Castle" by Adventure International

a2_4am, 11 months ago to animals

This beagle would like you to know that it is dinnertime. (It is not dinnertime.)

#DogsOfMastodon

a2_4am, 2 months ago to retrocomputing

As there is some interest in the game itself, here are some screenshots from "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension" for Apple II, ©1985 Adventure International. The company had many successful releases on a number of platforms and had moved heavily into licensing deals with major films including Marvel. They went bankrupt the next year.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

gameplay screenshot from "Buckaroo Banzai" showing Yoyodyne building and a corner gas station
gameplay screenshot from "Buckaroo Banzai" showing Buckaroo's cool jet car
death screenshot from "Buckaroo Banzai" showing a dead buckaroo after wandering too long and getting lost and an atomic bomb blowing up and destroying the world

mcc, 2 months ago to random

If UNICEF is so great then when are we going to get MULTICEF

a2_4am, 1 day ago to animals

Zara senses shenanigans (someone sneezed)

#DogsOfMastodon

Photo of brindle French bulldog sitting on the deck, looking towards camera

a2_4am, 1 month ago to random

loading screenshot from "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" showing a mysterious figure in a trench coat