Vintage computing and retrogaming news small enough to eat.

Recent News

• The New Age: Leaving Behind Everything, Or Nothing At All
  A piece about digital legacies from NPR

  “Perhaps in your attic or basement there is a box of papers — letters, photographs, cards, maybe even journals — inherited from a grandparent or other relative who’s passed on. But what if that box isn’t a box at all? What if it’s an ancient laptop? And if we are starting to leave behind an increasingly digital inheritance, will it die as soon as the hard drive does?

• Nintendo Embraces NES History in its Twitter Marketing
  I like this trend

  “Its time for #SpringCleaning! Did you find any forgotten gems while organizing your Nintendo gaming collection?

• This 1981 Computer Magazine Cover Explains Why Were So Bad at Tech Predictions
  This piece from Harry McCracken at TIME gives a hat tip to the greatest magazine illustrator of all time

  “If you were passionate about personal computers between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, the odds were high that you were a reader of Byte magazine. And if you read Byte, you were surely a fan of Robert Tinney, the artist whose cover paintings were one of the magazine’s signature features for years.

• Solid Snake Pixel Art Graffiti
  Whoever did this is free to vandalize my office wall

  “Solid snake graff piece. I like the dude in the box. Nice touch…

• Make Your Very Own “Game Boy Macro”
  Got a broken DS lying around? Chop off the top and you’ll have a new system.

  “i personally first saw it on kotaku made by Maarten, from the Bureau voor Gamers. so i decided i would make a couple of my own because i had some brokens DS’s laying around. decided to go with Macro, since its like a GB micro but huge.

• Five Unemulated Computer Experiences
  Jason Scott makes a point about emulation nitpickers

  “While I and many others work to turn the experience of emulation into one as smooth and ubiquitous as possible, inevitably the corners and back alleys of discussions about this process present people claiming that there are unemulated aspects and therefore the entire project is doomed. I thought I would stoke that sad little fire by giving you five examples of entirely unemulated but perfectly valid vintage computer experiences.

Cool Links

• The Lost Ancestors of ASCII Art
  Awesome piece I missed from January — by Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic

  “The history of ASCII art goes deeper, and much of it is told only in Geocities blog postings, abandoned websites, Google Books, and scattered PDFs across the web This post traces a fascinating and mostly lost strand of that history: The way thousands and thousands of people made typewriter art, from amateurs to avant gardists.

• PabloDraw: A Modern ANSI Art Editor
  We don’t need no steenkin’ TheDraw. (link via @blakespot)

  “PabloDraw is an Ansi/Ascii text and RIPscrip vector graphic art editor/viewer with multi-user capabilities.

• An Early English-Language Image Diplay from a Computer, 1957
  Dynamic text display on a CRT in 1957? Not bad.

  “The screen of the picture tube shown will present as many as 10,000 characters per second. Each character is formed by an array of bright spots, a selection from a rectangular array of a total of 35 spots, five wide and seven deep. For a capital letter T, for example, the selection is five spots across the top and six more spots down through the middle…

• Pinterest Gallery of Ugly Computers
  One of Blake Patterson’s amazing Pinterest boards

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Tags: Alexis Madrigal, ANSI, ASCII, Blake Patterson, Game Boy, Harry McCracken, Jason Scott, NES, News, Newsbits, Nintendo, NPR, preservation

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2014 at 12:16 pm and is filed under News & Current Events, Newsbits, Regular Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.