vga256 5d ago • 100%
@matt@proud.social interesting. its late appearance is probably why i missed it - by 95 i was on the internet instead of BBSing (where I found most of my shareware)
vga256 5d ago • 100%
@matt@proud.social i'm fascinated that i somehow missed an Apogee shareware game over all the years. surprisingly beautiful and bizarre. thank you!
vga256 5d ago • 100%
@foone@digipres.club 😆 good idea
vga256 6d ago • 100%
@arcadetoken@autistics.life it is indeed. not very many high-res dithered 16-colour games out there.
doing some visual design research on isometric tile-based games and came across this incredible screenshot from Celtic Tales: Balor of the Evil Eye that entire screenshot was drawn with just *sixteen colours* #gameArt #retroGaming
in celebration of ward christensen's life and contributions to the BBS, i've uploaded the raw, uncut, extended three-hour interview @textfiles conducted with him in 2002 for the BBS Documentary warning: the files are 15gb each just as they came off of the camera tapes without further recompression. <https://pixeldrain.com/l/cFtC5YE4> these are the same interviews included in the BBS Documentary archive.org collection - unfortunately IA is still down at the moment. #bbs #history #retroComputing
vga256 3w ago • 100%
@britown@mastodon.gamedev.place 😆 that's the one i was most excited about too. i've had a GH FFIX for ages that i've been dying to replace
vga256 3w ago • 100%
@GuyDudeman@beige.party no idea what kinds of games you like to play. FF7 was my first.
i haven’t found good PS1 games in the wild in nearly 20 years today i scored for $3 each! #retrogaming #playstation #psx
i am in love with the cover art on al sweigart's python game programming book it was switched out with some more corporate art a year later. #programming
vga256 3w ago • 0%
herb and the heart breakers
edit: how did i know
HOW did i know
"Herbert Schildt is an American computing author, programmer and musician... He was also a founding member of the progressive rock band Starcastle."
vga256 4w ago • 100%
two weeks ago i posed what i thought would be a rather straightforward historical research question, which went unanswered. i wondered: what did the people of the middle ages (peasants, villagers, blacksmiths, monks, abbots, knights, etc) think of technological change in their time? was it seen as a boon for replacing manual labour? a threat to everyday craftspeople and craftsmanship? a new evil at odds with moral duty to god?
just cobbling together a reading list to begin answering the question was itself a week's worth of work. finally, today i began finding direct answers to the question in Frances and Joseph Gies' "Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages."
while everyday people like serfs and peasants beliefs are not covered due to a lack of historical records, its early chapters provide some insight from the medieval monastic orders. the answer? the various churches were openly ambivalent, but *not* openly opposed to technological change and invention.
Why did the churches not openly embrace technologies?
... for many years monastic orders like the Benedictines and Cistercians saw manual labour as critical for self-sufficiency and spiritual development. When technologies that allowed for reduced manual labour became available, monastic orders began questioning their potential value in relation to their relation to God.
Why did monastic theologians not openly reject technologies that would relieve them of physical burdens?
... because most of these orders retained an old Greek suspicion and distaste for what Aristotle called "banaustic arts" (or utilitarian arts like crafting and manual labour. These were seen as important for living, but a distraction from intellectual life. Technology's promise was that it could relieve a monk from the banaustic realities of carpentry and millwork and stonemasonry, and let them practice prayer and writing and intellectual pursuits without time/energy-consuming distractions.
A picture of the middle ages is beginning to emerge that is not unlike our own in modernity: technology was seen in relation to its potential for reducing labour. what is different between then and now is that a person's relationship with God was at stake in the middle ages. few today believe that manual labour "keeps us honest".
in other words: technology in the middle ages was understood as both spiritual and instrumental
in 25+ years of retro gaming and sierra, i've never once seen someone mention Hoyle's Book of Games despite its small stature, it was one of the most financially lucrative sierra titles, and spawned an entire series of games. what makes it special is that opponents are (for the most part) characters from sierra titles, each playing in a style expressive of the character's personality. graham and rosella are friendly and not overly competitive, larry is silly and aggressive with his cards. the dog? the dog is a real shithead. #sierraOnline #retroGaming
although i've finished Conquests of Camelot several times, i've never thought to sit through the credits to the end. i find a few things fascinating about this. first off, the game never prompts you with sound effects showing that you've received points for solving a puzzle or winning a battle, contrary to almost every other sierra adventure title. second, unlike sierra adventures that lump all points together into a single score, this one has been stratified into three categories. third - and this is more in comparison to RPGs where playable characters are created for at the beginning of the game, this title inverts the process. "your" king arthur is really the outcome of the choices you made over the course of the game: my particular playthrough seems to have valued soul over skill or wisdom. #adventureGames #retroGaming #sierra
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
@timixretroplays@digipres.club 😂
did i just drive 300 km one way in the middle of the night to pick up fifteen big box games. yes. yes i did. #bigboxgames #retrogaming
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
@kwramm@mastodon.gamedev.place totally agree!
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
@billgoats@bitbang.social i fear that most of the civilized world has forgotten too. i found them dirt cheap at thrift shops. i doubt they're still in print, but thankfully they are dirt cheap from used book sellers
re: my last post - if you didn't already know, Stephen Biesty has the most beautifully animated and hilariously voiced multimedia version of Incredible Cross-Sections, called: Stowaway! <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9jKE6Y7vJQ> #retroGaming #windows311
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
how could i forget these two absolutely hilarious and informative illustrated texts on medieval and 18th century life.
i’ve had them sitting on the shelves for years, and realized they make a compelling visual reference
#bookstodon #illustration #books
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
adding two incredible finds to this medieval technology reading/research bibliography: Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel by Frances and Joseph Gies. The bookseller immediately recognized it and exclaimed “I appreciate a writer with the common touch!”
The second book - Tavistock Abbey: A Study in the Social and Economic History of Devon by HPR Finberg was an accidental find. While it does not speak to technological change in the late middle ages, it speaks to the social and cultural life of an abbey and its surrounding village.
#books #bookstodon
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
adding to the aforementioned bibliography of books concerning the intersection of the 15th-19th centuries and technological change. found them at a local used bookstore.
web searches for broad topics like this are often fruitless. a good library or academic bookstore already has this presorted by topic.
#bookstodon #books
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
@pixel@social.pixels.pizza now that i look at it, it kinda makes sense. almost all of the boards are running TBBS or wildcat or something else that is built for multi-node. i bet the only reason these mega-boards got a lot of votes is because they had a ton of readers/users.
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
@foone@digipres.club i'm fascinated that the Pleasure Dome shares the same name as an austrian hacker board which was famous as well https://demozoo.org/bbs/2949/
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
@mjgardner@social.sdf.org 😎
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
@ve3qbz@mastodon.radio it's a very different kind of game, but boy does it feel great - it really nails the experience of creating a transportation network
wondrous Boardwatch BBS magazine "top 100" boards in the united states from 1994. this was based on a reader's choice vote-in. the first two boards are (respectively) the homes of Apogee software and Epic MegaGames shareware publishers. now just guess how many of the remaining 98 are porn boards! credit: @fearfair on /r/bbs: <https://i.redd.it/5pb1m577m9pd1.jpeg> #shareware #bbs #retroGaming
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
@ve3qbz@mastodon.radio :\ frustrating. same thing happened with chris sawyer's Transport Tycoon series.
vga256 1mo ago • 100%
@ve3qbz@mastodon.radio 2 was a travesty. iirc, it was developed by a third party company. most of the game was completing "missions" and it completely lost the joy of just building on the landscape
you... you included regina, but edmonton didn't make the cut? 😭 #RetroGaming #canada #yeg ![A sticker on the front of the box reads: Includes Major Canadian Cities: Vancouver, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and more.](https://lemm.ee/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdialup.cafe%2Fsystem%2Fmedia_attachments%2Ffiles%2F113%2F148%2F510%2F070%2F002%2F689%2Foriginal%2Fb9003b8eef6121f2.png)
academic researchers/readers of mastodon: is there a solid historical book (books?) that documents and explores the transition from the mechanical age to the age of “modern” technology *as someone like heidegger understands the term technology*? i’m imagining a book that interprets the social and cultural transformations between the late medieval and victorian periods, from older conceptions of morality and mechanism to newer ideas about individualism and automation? eg. documenting not only demographic changes, but also the ways of thinking about people that were preconditions for modern technological thought. i realize this is a rather nebulous request covering a huge time span, but my background is in the philosophy of science and not british history literature. #academicmastodon #history
i can't believe it took me 10 years to find out that Transport Tycoon got a full live jazz orchestral remaster of its midi soundtrack 🤯 and it sounds GREAT. john broomhall and his "TT band" knock every piece out of the park <https://archive.org/details/Transport-Tycoon-2014-OST> #retroGaming #music #ost
if you grew up in canada in the 90s and 2000s, you probably visited a Playdium arcade at one point or another. if you didn't, playdium was a canadian national mega-arcade that had over a dozen locations at its peak. it grew in the late 90s and early 2000s when arcades had already withered away in most malls. they imported a ton of interesting massive arcade units, like Dance Dance Revolution, monster truck simulators and ride-racing sims the playdium archive is an online mini-museum of playdium history. the edmonton-based archivist has done an incredible job of digitizing old footage. my personal favourite are these reloadable Playcards that you'd use instead of cash in the arcade cabs. i wish i had hung on to mine. #canada #history #arcade #yeg
oh boy. i just found my academic records published on my old CS department's server 🤣 back in 1997 when i was a snot nosed first year university student, i was planning on becoming a CS student. the first requirement of the degree was CMPUT 114: Introduction to Computer Science. the course was pretty straightforward: learn how to code and solve problems with Turbo Pascal 7 in a lab, while learning about data structures and bubble search and encapsulation in class. unfortunately, that same semester, Ultima Online launched. 12 of my 14 hours a day were spent playing UO, leaving a few minutes for completing assignments. i have circled the assignments i missed, and final exam which i did not study for because i was trying to GM my swordsman in UO 🤣 #ultima #uo #retroGaming
found a really cool document: the official developer/user documentation for the codec used to compress most of the Sega CD FMV games: Cinepak for Sega-CD [https://dn720003.ca.archive.org/0/items/sega-cinepak-users-guide/SEGA%20Cinepak%20Users%20Guide_text.pdf](https://dn720003.ca.archive.org/0/items/sega-cinepak-users-guide/SEGA%20Cinepak%20Users%20Guide_text.pdf) sadly, the software (macintosh) doesn't seem to be preserved anywhere. it had a really simple interface, and came with a driver for playback on the console #macintosh #gamePreservation #vintageApple #sega #retroGaming ![Extensions for Cinepak for Sega-CD that allow for error diffusion, no-dither and ordered-dither.](https://lemm.ee/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdialup.cafe%2Fsystem%2Fmedia_attachments%2Ffiles%2F113%2F075%2F079%2F808%2F997%2F871%2Foriginal%2Fe87fcc7e03dec551.png)
back in the early 90s, i only knew of four ways to get new computer games: - buying my own (i could afford a new one every 3-6 months at best) - trading with friends (only 3 kids in my school had computers at home) - buying shareware diskettes at the grocery store for a few bucks - downloading shareware from local BBSes of all of the above, only the last two were reliable sources of new games every week. i was one of the only kids in the school that had a modem, so i spent every evening sourcing out hot new shareware on my local boards. i'd wear out my credits and time limits downloading every single disk i could find at 2400 baud, usually taking about an hour of the dozens of games I downloaded, two of them proved to be mega-hits: Tank Wars and Crystal Caves. for over a year, my two best friends and i huddled around the computer playing hotseat tank wars, and took turns trying to finish CC levels. consider that, at the time, we owned AAA titles like Wing Commander II and Space Quest IV, and a sega genesis with a dozen games between us. and yet, crystal caves was the first thing we'd load up on sleepovers. it found the exact right balance of addictive, fun and friendly. a few years ago i started collecting old shareware distributor diskettes - the kind you'd find for $2 at a grocery store. and i absolutely treasure them. 🙏 #apogee #shareware #retroGaming #dosgaming
to date, the Worlds of Ultima games have generally been ignored in favour of the numbered series, and that's a real shame. they're some of the best games wearing the badge, especially with the influence of designer warren spector on the game systems. savage empire has crafting for instance - something noticeably absent in the other games. so glad to see a comprehensive review of Martian Dreams come out, including exploration of the box art and browsies. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDIIvODKWnQ> #ultima #retroGaming #dosGaming