Since I missed last week’s column, I decided to fold some of those links into this week’s edition. So there may be a few older newsbits, but at least they’re still interesting.

Recent News

• 2300 Console Games Now Playable on Internet Archive

  ‘Ole pal Jason Scott writes about the sudden influx of games playable on the Internet Archive website

  For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with a range of volunteers on a massive expansion of what we call the Console Living Room at the Internet Archive. Previously weighing in at about 800 game cartridges from seven console systems, the new collection is roughly 2300 cartridges and a total of 21 different consoles.

• George R. R. Martin Writes Using WordStar 4.0 in MS-DOS

  I’m not surprised. To avoid distractions, I sometimes write using Word 6.0 for DOS on a Compaq Aero 4/25 laptop.

  The ‘Game of Thrones’ author confessed to late-night talk-show host Conan O’Brien that he prefers to write his popular books on a DOS word processor instead of the latest laptop.

  ‘I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don’t want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.’

• Nintendo Forces Takedown of GBA Emulator for iOS

  From the not-very-surprising department

  In order to play titles like Super Mario and Zelda on your iPhone, then, you have to look at unofficial alternatives. GBA4iOS was one of the most popular — but after its creators received a DMCA notice from Nintendo this week, it is no more.

• Analogue Interactive’s $499 NES Clone Up for Pre-Order

  TinyCartridge reports on this fancy console with a healthy grain of salt mixed in. (Memories of Generation NEX still make me shudder.)

  Analogue has opened pre-orders for its Nt, the Famicom/NES device with RGB output, four controller ports, and purported ‘unparallelled'” compatibility with American and Japanese games and accessories.

• New Book About How Sega Nearly Won the Console Wars

  Chris Kohler provides an overview of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle That Defined a Generation.

  If a few small things had changed, might we be gaming on a Sega PlayStation right now? That’s the picture Blake Harris paints in his new book Console Wars. It is a narrative history of the brief time period in the lifespan of the videogame publisher Sega when it was on top of the world.

• Midway Planned HD Remakes of Mortal Kombat Games

  I would have really loved to see this

  With the [ Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection], Midway’s initial plan was to release HD remakes of the original games with new actors, and even though that’s not what happened in the end, these images with Liu Kang, Sonya, Shao Kahn and the others show that the remakes would have been quite faithful to the original

Cool Links

• The Last Survivors of Meridian 59

  A rare examination of obscure Internet game culture from a mainstream publication (The New Yorker)

  Today, almost eighteen years after Meridian 59’s launch, Barloque’s streets are quiet and vacant, its cobblestones buffed and rounded by little more than a digital breeze. They are rarely visited by more than twenty people in the world at any one time.

• The Great Works of Software

  Paul Ford muses about a software canon

  Is it possible to propose a software canon? To enumerate great works of software that are deeply influential—that changed the nature of the code that followed?

• How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch

  Woz himself writes for Gizmodo, re: BASIC 50th anniversary

  The problem was that I had no knowledge of BASIC, just a bare memory that it had line numbers from that 3-day high-school experience. So I picked up a BASIC manual late one night at HP and started reading it and making notes about the commands of this language. Mind that I had never taken a course in compiler (or interpreter) writing in my life.

• How Sega is Rejuvinating its Classic Games in 3D

  I’m not sure if “rejuvenating” is the right word here, but I welcome Sega dipping into the past

  Few games have had as much attention lavished upon them as the Sega 3D Classics series. The first wave of titles was released between November and December of last year, in pairs over four successive weeks.

• Super Mario Bros. Level Belt (Etsy)

  Incredible artistry — an entire Super Mario Bros. level crafted into a leather belt

  The images are of a belt that I crafted for my brother, who is a big Super Mario fan, and depicts the last level of Super Mario brothers where Mario finally rescues the princess.

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Recent News

• See Atari’s Buried Treasure: E.T. Among 30 Retro Games Unearthed In The Desert
  I never thought I’d live to see the day

  “The legend was true, but that’s not all. Atari buried a lot of stuff back in 1983–and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

• Andy Warhol’s Amiga Computer Art Found 30 Years Later
  Always felt Amiga + Warhol was one of the more bizarre partnerships in computer history

  “The Andy Warhol Museum has recovered a set of images, doodles, and photos created by the seminal pop artist on a Commodore Amiga home computer. The artworks, made by Warhol as part of a collaboration with Commodore Amiga, had been stranded on Amiga floppy disks for almost twenty years after the artist saved them in the mid-1980s.

• ICHEG Preserves Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collection
  It gives me great mental relief to know someone is doing this so well and so thoroughly

  “ICHEG has acquired a massive collection of materials chronicling the history of Atari’s pioneering video arcade and pinball machine divisions from 1972 to 1999. The collection represents the largest and most comprehensive assemblage of archival records and other documentary items related to Atari’s coin-operated games anywhere in the world.

• Bob Hoskins, Actor Who Played Mario, Dead at 71
  Now both live-action Marios are gone

  “Bob Hoskins, the pugnacious British actor known for playing gangsters, tough guys and working-class gentlemen in such films as ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit,’ ‘The Long Good Friday’ and ‘Mermaids,’ has died, publicist Clair Dobbs said Wednesday.

• Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal
  Harry McCracken’s epic study of BASIC on its 50th

  “Once upon a time, knowing how to use a computer was virtually synonymous with knowing how to program one. And the thing that made it possible was a programming language called BASIC.

• A Short History of BASIC, as Told in Animated GIFs
  An animated supplement to McCracken’s BASIC story above

  “I used a neat program called Camtasia and some post-processing in Photoshop to create animated GIFs capturing what I saw as I loaded some significant BASIC programs, listed the code and then ran it.

• Sony Quietly Removes Ability to Download PSP/PS One Games Unlocked a Few Days Ago on PS Vita
  An update to last week’s Vita story

  “A few days ago we reported about Sony suddenly unlocking a large amount of PSP games and PlayStation Classics for download and play on the PS Vita. Unfortunately its time to mourn, as that ability was quietly removed this morning. None of those games is available for download anymore.

• Atari Landfill Tweet from Scott Weinberg

  “My generation buried those E.T. Atari cartridges for a reason. You’re awakening something not even Lovecraft could imagine.

Cool Links

• Jim and Charlie Gerrie’s Basic Game Programs and Other Software for the TRS-80 MC-10
  The underrated MC-10 gets some programming love
• “Drunk Hunt” NES Cartridge Flask

  “We wanted our product to look and feel exactly like the game cartridges we grew up with, and then BAM SUPRISE! it holds your favorite real-life health potion. Amiright? Amiright?

• A Game Boy That Looks Like It Could Survive Ten Thousand Years
  Kotaku’s Plunkett examines a neat Game Boy mod

  “Vadu Amka’s ‘Brick’ work turns an old Game Boy into a brick wall from the Zelda series.

• L.E.D. Zeppelin Photo
  Amusing promotional tweet from Atmel

  “And for their next hit, L.E.D. Zeppelin presents ‘DI’Yer Maker!’

• BBEdit on System 6 on a Galaxy Note 3
  Twitter user @bergmayer hooked up an original Mac mouse and keyboard too

Submit News

If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line.

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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If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line.

There are too many good links this week. I honestly don’t know what happened. Maybe I’m getting better at this.

Recent News

• Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 2.0
  The AHCS does it again

  “The Atlanta Historical Computer Society and the Computer Museum of America are pleased to announce the second annual Vintage Computer Festival Southeast. We have selected the dates of the 3rd and 4th of May to make it easy for people to attend both VCF East and VCF Southeast this year.

• Nintendo Launches Game Boy Advance on Wii U Virtual Console
  Another painfully slow trickle of games from Nintendo, but the emulation is very well done.

  “From April 3 through April 24, select Game Boy Advance titles will launch in the Nintendo eShop on Wii U each week. In addition to off-TV play, these games feature Restore Points that save progress during game play, and Miiverse functionality.

• Microsoft Ends Support for Windows XP
  Spoiler: It’s not really dead

  “Windows XP, Microsoft Corp.’s beloved seventh major operating system and arguably the company’s most successful, was left to perish on Tuesday at its creators’ hands. It was 12 years, seven months old.

• Fifty Years of IBM System/360
  The most successful computer platform that the least number of people know about

  “50 years ago today, IBM unveiled the System/360 mainframe, a groundbreaking computer that allowed new levels of compatibility between systems and helped NASA send astronauts to the Moon.

• Gmail 10th Anniversary
  A great piece by Harry McCracken I missed last week

  “If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.

• Raspberri Pi Announces New “Compute Module”
  A new variety of this vertsatile, hackable machine

  “The compute module contains the guts of a Raspberry Pi (the BCM2835 processor and 512Mbyte of RAM) as well as a 4Gbyte eMMC Flash device (which is the equivalent of the SD card in the Pi). This is all integrated on to a small 67.6x30mm board which fits into a standard DDR2 SODIMM connector (the same type of connector as used for laptop memory*).

Cool Links

• Story of the Windows XP Bliss Desktop Image
  Hachman hits it out of the park with this research piece

  “It’s not too far-fetched to believe that a billion people have viewed the “Bliss” image that defines the desktop view of Windows XP, the seminal OS that Microsoft is retiring Tuesday. But you’d barely notice the real-world “Bliss” scene if you stepped out of your car and gazed at it today.

• A Custom Portable N64 Console
  Kotaku drools all over a Bacman forum post

  “We’ve seen portable retro consoles before, but this N64 mod is beautiful. It uses a 3.5” screen, internal memory and Rumble Pak, an Expansion Pak, a GameCube analog stick and 4 hour battery life.

• Kevin Mitnick Befriends a Former Foe on Facebook
  …an old hacking target of decades past

  “You gotta love the old friends you meet on Facebook.

• Looking at the Web with Internet Explorer 6, One Last Time
  Lee Hutchinson explores the modern web with IE 6 in all its splintered glory

  “Windows XP wasn’t the only thing to be shuffled into unsupported purgatory yesterday. Also included in the group of applications to be dumped down the memory hole is the browser that everyone loves to hate: Internet Explorer 6.

• 1988 Inside Edition Story on Nintendo
  Retroist digs up a vintage scare piece

  “In 1988 parents were still baffled by the spell that video games had cast over their children. This segment from Inside Edition tries to get to to the bottom of it all.

Echo Box

A place for products, creative works, and upcoming projects seeking support. No endorsement from VC&G is implied.

• Project: MEGAFOOT
  An indie sci-fi action film seeking funding on IndieGoGo. One of the rewards ($150 level) is a limited edition Megafoot NES cartridge.

Submit News

If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line.

Hi, Benj here. People send me stuff all the time hoping I’ll post something about it on VC&G, but each item alone rarely warrants its own post. There is a solution: a regular compressed news and links column. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for, well, almost 9 years now.

So I finally got around to it. (Just in time for blogs to become thoroughly obsolete, natch.) Newsbits could become a weekly thing, or I’ll just post them as news collects. I’ll feel it out as I go along.

News & Links

• Vintage Computer Festival East 9.1
  April 4-6, 2014, InfoAge Science Center, Wall, New Jersey

  “Vintage Computer Festival East is a hands-on, family-friendly celebration of computer history. Activities include a book sale, classes, consignment sale, exhibit hall, food, lectures, museum tours, prizes, vendors, workshops, and more. (Why “9.1”? We skipped 9.0 in 2013 due to damage from Hurricane Sandy.)

• Second Edition of “Atari, Inc.” Possible
  Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel are working on a second, revised edition of the epic Atari history book they released in 2012. More info as it comes along.
• Surfing Modern Web With Ancient Browsers
  Awesome technique renders pages as image-mapped GIFs.

  “Webrender.py came to life. It’s a cgi-bin application that resides on a machine in the middle. It renders a gif image and spits it out to the browser together with a simple web page, containing a URL and search input boxes plus the gif and image map.

• The Temple Operating System
  The demo video for this Judeo-Christian-inspired homemade operating system will blow your mind. (via Antoni Sawicki)

  “TempleOS is an x86_64, multi-tasking, multi-cored, public domain, open source, ring-0-only, single-address-map (identity mapped), non-networked, PC operating system for recreational programming. I capped the lines of code at 100,000, so it will never be an ugly monstrosity. Currently, it is 81,489. Since God’s temple must be perfect and we have 1,000 years in mind, I do not promise that anything is future-proof.

Echo Box

Here are some products, creative works, and upcoming projects seeking support. No endorsement from VC&G is implied.

• Nova Phase
  A downloadable comic book with NES-style pixel art graphics.
• donkulous DONKEYS (iTunes Link)
  “We’ve just released a new free iOS game, donkulous DONKEYS. It’s an unapologetically hard but insanely addictive retro arcade game, inspired by Bill Gates’ first one-and-only DOS game.
• Armiga Project on Indiegogo
  “Wouldn’t it be great to be able to use all those aging Amiga disks again? Maybe the original Amiga is a bit big and video quality not so good… A smaller version, with modern connections would be awesome, isn’t it? That’s what we’ve done: take modern technology and make it work with good old floppies.

Submit News

If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line. My email filter will route it directly into my brain.

Yes, I’m new to blogging. That is, writing and running a blog. It took me a long time to warm up to the idea because I thought blogs were a load of hyper-bunk. Of course, part of me still thinks this, but I have also finally begun to realize the potential of blogs in general. It allows schmucks like me to blather on about our opinions easily on the web. Yay. Power to the loudmouths. I am fully aware, however, that one man’s opinion is another man’s BS. So don’t think I’m ever trying to lay down the final word on anything.

Now, let’s see. Why a new blog? Because I wanted to chronicle my meager collecting/playing/restoring exploits in the world of electronic and computing entertainment. ‘Electronic and computing entertainment,’ to me, means anything that entertains me that uses electronics, or anything that computes. The only non-electronic things I might talk about here are old mechanical calculators and typewriters. Why mechanical calculators? Because they are the forerunners to electronic computers. Why typewriters? Because their interface became the standard upon which computer interfaces for the last 40 years have been based (Teletypes, keyboards, terminals, etc.). So they are related to the computing end of things here. It should be noted that I have a huge bias toward consumer microcomputers — I’ve never been much for the esoteric elitism that permeates the “big iron” computer collecting community. Then there’s the gaming end of things. I’m interested in really any video game systems ever produced, but tend to focus on ‘vintage’ ones, which are usually at least five years old, or already out of production. This includes restoring, modifying, collecting, and playing games, systems, accessories, and emulators.

Now a little background on me. I have been collecting computers and video game systems for 12 years, since I was 12 years old. I am currently 24. Thus, my interest predates the current “retro” craze by a sizable margin. When I started collecting, it seemed that nobody could understand why I would want to save obsolete and seemingly useless computers and game systems. But I had a historical mindset even as a twelve year old, and figured if everybody was throwing out their old computers thinking they’re worthless, that eventually history would hurt for it. I didn’t want history to be lost. I believe we are in the middle of the most important and exciting transition in human history, where humans fully embrace and integrate computers into their lives, changing the way we live, work, and play forever. So it will be important in the future to be able to look back and see how we got there. And I, in my own small way, want to contribute to that effort.

As far as video games go, I was always buying last-generation’s games at rock-bottom prices, scouring the clearance isle at Toys ‘R’ Us and Wal-Mart for $5 NES Advantages and controllers, $10 sealed NES games, $1 official cleaning kits, miscellaneous accessories, $20 new Virtual Boys, $30 new Sega 32x’s, $10 Tiger Game.coms. The list is endless. The clearance aisle is where it’s at, as long as you have the patience to wait, and the tenacity to keep checking until stuff shows up there. I also frequented used game stores, flea markets, ham fests, yard sales, Goodwill and thrift stores, always looking for cheap games (and computers). As a result, I’ve never really been on the cutting edge of video gaming, but then again, I never really had the money to do so either. Why not wait another year until the system you want is $100 cheaper? Or five years when it’s $200 or more cheaper? That brings me to another issue which I will post about in another entry soon, about electronic devices rapidly losing monetary value.

And here’s some other relevant history. I have been using electronic communication all my life. First, and most obviously, I used a telephone. Then I used telephone lines to call BBSes for over 7 years (I also ran a successful 24-hour BBS for over five years, 1992-1998). I also dabbled in Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve (my favorite, on there for 8 years). Then, around 1993 or 94 I called up a local university’s free dial-up line for the first time and discovered the then-primitive Internet (compared to what we have today, anyway). The World-Wide-Web (does anybody call it that anymore?) to us then was manifested in Lynx, the popular text-only web browser, and seemed pretty worthless. ‘Gopher’ from U. Minnesota was all the rage instead. My BBSing friend and I then discovered the world of MUSHes and MUDs in 1994, and completely abused the free dial-up lines, tying them up all hours of the day, staying on up to 15 hours at a time coding, talking, playing, and just having a great time. I started running my own MUSH rather late (in 2000) and it still runs to this day. Then came ISPs: Nandonet in late 94 or early 95 — a local ISP run by a newspaper, later bought by Mindspring. But my family and some friends jumped ship to a smaller ISP called Ipass instead. Then the graphical WWW showed up, which was incredible, but incredibly hard to configure with Mosaic 1.0 and Winsock crap on Windows 3.1. Also, on Compuserve I got started with a new graphical multi-user chat environment called WorldsAway in 1995 (Beta tested it for the web in 97, then finally quit in 2001). Then came my first website in 1995, complete with my first paid web hosting experience at Hurricane Electric (I think they’re still around). Back then I actually had a site that was popular in the fledgling Yahoo directory just because it had a few pictures and some cool links to other sites. Ah, what heady days. Then came Ultima Online in 1997, which I only recently quit this year. I also was on Active Worlds for over five years, a buildable online multi-user 3D chat world. And so and and so forth. I really am also interested in the history of computer telecommunications and virtual communities, so I might make a page on that too before long.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough for now. I hope you’ll stick around, Invisible Reader, read some exploits, and post some comments. I can’t promise incredibly regular updates, but when I do, they’ll probably be good.

Bye for now,
RedWolf