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#Retrocomputing

138 posts90 participants19 posts today
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Finally, it's done. Shoveled some games, demos, and tools onto it to showcase the PicoGUS in its various modes. Wavetable is working great, too. 🙂

Windows 95 runs particularly well on the system, despite "only" being a DX4-100. I guess 32 MB RAM, a rather fast hard disk supporting block mode, and a graphics chip with a blitter help quite a bit.

OK sheesh, THIS was a super-sweet spot in my (admittedly ancient) computing platform history: DESQView and QEMM.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

I mistakenly remembered it as OS/2, which I did run around that time (88, 89, 90) but no, it was desqview.

I'm fine without a mouse, it turns out. I've been writing a bunch of CP/M sofware and old workflows came back (hint: its barbaric, I don't fully recommend it).

Gonna put a web page up about the CP/M thing soon. Got my version 2 boards from JLCPCB, awaiting a delayed delivery from Digikey.

en.wikipedia.orgDESQview - Wikipedia

So, here's my actually-planned-for-this-year #MARCHintosh project. Attached is a photo of four very dusty containers full of floppy disks. These are the actual disks from my childhood IIfx!

Most of these disks aren't original. The originals lived at Dad's workplace. He would periodically bring home software from work, make a copy of the disks, and return the originals to work. These were, I'm told, the "off-site backups", in case there was a fire at the workplace or something like that. But we also had all this software installed on the family IIfx so Dad could read any files that he brought home from work with him.

Of course, we also bought our own software for the home, and those are mixed in with these disks as well. And that stack of CD-ROMs in the top left are my MacAddict cover disks - those are already archived.

Anyway, because these are just consumer-grade diskettes, they degrade quicker than the professionally-manufactured original ones. I've already lost a few, so I want to get these archived! And of course, anything that doesn't already exist on the Garden will be uploaded there and shared on #GlobalTalk as well.

(expect this to be a long-ass foone-style thread with lots of updates over several days)

Doing some preliminary brainstorming for resurrecting Rowan, my C64 game.

I want to use the REU for its DMA engine, to handle animations. I might as well make it a disk game, and have it load everything into REU extended memory for speed.

The best C compiler for C64 is currently Calypsi, so I'll use that. Might as well rewrite the core engine entirely if I'm going to make it use the REU.

I'm happy with the tileset I paid for, so that's taken care of. I just need to pay someone to make player and enemy sprites, and someone else to make SID music.

I definitely want to reuse as much code as I can. Don't reinvent any wheels. But I do need DMA-enabled versions of memset() and memcpy().