The Mother of all Emulators for the Granddaddy of all Computers

Back in 1975 a small company called MITS released what was the first commercially sucessful personal computers. Based on an Intel 8080 CPU and shipping with only 256 BYTES of RAM (but luckily lots of room to expand) and programmed through either the myriad switches on the front panel and paper punchtape (you could also connect a dumb terminal to give you a nicer environment with a keyboard and either a screen or at least hardcopy printer) the Altair was a pretty limited machine, but it was the first computer that was both available to the general public and sold at a price that the public could afford.

I've recently come across an emulator for this legendary computer that seems to be quite good. Known as Altair32, it emulates a wide variety of different peripherals that were available including tape drives, disk drives, hard disks and even the first video card ever built. In addition it comes with a boatload of old software, so if you have acess to Windoze at all, you should check it out.

Web Link

Real Life and Other News

Well, I've gotten myself a job for the summer, so I won't have quite as much time play around with retro stuff. On the other hand, this job will mean MONEY which will let me get more retro stuff since I'll be able to actually buy stuff rather than beg for it on Freecycle... Look for some cool item reviews coming up soon.

Anyway, the new part of this is this: A great new WIP release came out for the SNES emulator ZSNES. While that news is almost a wekk old, I figured people might want to know as many people don't seem to keep their emulators up-to-date. This release is unique in that it doesn't add lots of features (the main thing that happens in WIP releases) but instead fixes lots of big nasty bugs, brining compatability back towards the levels generally seen in the official point releases. Maybe that's a hint of stuff to come... Anyways, get it here.

Giana versus Mario

I got a few games with my Amiga and among them was a disk labeled "Super Mario Brothers". I was of course quite puzzled as it's common knowledge that Mario never left Nintendo except for a rather dire game for the CD-i... Well of course I booted the game and it turns out that it was a platformer called Great Giana Sisters and sure enough it was really similar to Mario. The enemies looked like horned Goombas and the level designs were suspiciously familiar too. Anyway, it was good fun, but I wasn't surprised by the revalation that Nintendo has sued to get the game off the shelves almost as soon as it came out. Turns out I've got a pretty rare game, I guess.

Amiga Again

Well, I've finally got the various missing bits for my Amiga, so I can officially say that it ROCKS. While I've played Amiga games on my PC for a while and know just how good a games machine the A500 is, I'm really suprised at just how much computing one can do using a machine with one meg of RAM and two floppy drives. Seriously, I got hundreds of disks of freeware and shareware along with the machine and I've found some pretty heavy duty stuff: The PERL programming language, LISP, PROLOG, K&R C, a massive VAX-originating spreadsheet called Analyticalc... When this machine came out in 1987, it really must have had the absolute best price-performance ratio ever seen. Seriously, this thing is nearly as good as some of the $10000+ Unix workstations of it's time and it really blows any Mac of the time period out of the water. While I don't think that it's possible to use an Amiga 500 as a primary computer system anymore (at least without a hard drive upgrade), it's certainly more than a games machine.

Good News...

I'm not sure how long this has been the case, but the famous abandonware website Home of the Underdogs seems to be back online, after a prolonged strech of downtime. Due the the shittiness of copyright laws, I can't share the URL here and would ask that you not divulge it in the comments, but I do use the site and encourage you to do the same. It's not not the fastest site in the world (in fact it's slow as heck) but you'll not find a better selection of old, no-longer-sold games anywhere.

Apogee games

As somebody who grew up with a PC, I have fond memories of the various titles put out by shareware publisher Apogee games. My days were filled with the likes of Commander Keen and Duke Nukem (before he got all 3D on us). Anyways, at some point Apogee changed their name to 3D Realms and are still at it (although they no longer do the shareware thing), making such great games as Max Payne. Anyways, while looking at 3D Realms' Website, I noticed a download link and there, I found that they've released a whole bunch of their old games from the Apogee era as FREEWARE and even for games that haven't been made freeware, the shareware versions are available. So go ahead and revisit your misspent youth here.

You may also want to get DOSBox, an excellent DOS PC emulator to actually play these games in. Now I'm off to have some fun.

Cool new search feature

I've added a search box to the sidebar. Normally, this wouldn't be too exciting but there's something about this that I tink makes it quite worthwhile: namely, if people use it, it will end up specially targeting results based on the kinds of things people click on when they serach for certain terms. This is sort of like a small-scale version of what Google does (actually, it's an new option provided to people seeking to add Google search to their pages). So use it and help create a lean, mean retro-digital oriented searching machine.