Mad Crow Disease

The Mother of all Emulators for the Granddaddy of all Computers

2006-05-25T08:26:00.000-04:00

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

2006-05-23T09:55:00.000-04:00

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

2006-05-22T08:41:00.000-04:00

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

2006-05-18T07:21:00.000-04:00

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...

2006-05-17T09:50:00.000-04:00

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

2006-05-15T09:47:00.000-04:00

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

2006-05-14T14:07:00.000-04:00

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.

Reading material...

2006-05-13T19:35:00.000-04:00

Issue 29 of Game Over(view) is out... For those of you who don't know, GO(V) is a monthly diskmag for the Commodore 64 that comes from the wilds of Australia. It doesn't exactly use the world's most polite language (actually it's crudeness can be considered one of it's charms) but underneath the cussing and self-deprecation lie some of the best C64 game reviews I've ever seen. If you have a burning desire to find out about all the crappy little games I don't even bother to talk about, this is the place to go. Now, I'm off to reading.
Download Link

Amiga!!!!!!!!!!!

2006-05-11T14:04:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I became the proud owner of an Amiga 500 computer, along with several hundred disks of PD software, a copy of Lemmings and a copy of Beyond Zork. While everything works quite well (including the 1080 monitor, which has just about the most options and connectors of any computer monitor I've ever seen) , there are a few problems...

1. I didn't get a copy of the OS boot disk. While most Amiga games booted by themselves, the hundreds of freeware disks AI got can't do that and neither can Beyond Zork... That means that my new computer is almost useless with the software I currently have.

2. I didn't get a mouse either... This kind of makes Lemmings unplayable, thus rendering my new machine TOTALLY useless at the moment.

Still, the missing bit will be coming and it was pretty cool to set everything up and here the noises the drives make and see the famous "Insert Workbench Disk" screen. I think I'll be quite happy for quite some time once all the missing bits come together.

Cool new game... for the C64

2006-05-10T11:24:00.000-04:00

24 years after it was first released, the Commodore 64 still manages to attract several new games a year. While most, not to put too fine a point on it, stink to high heaven, a few are actually quite good. Thankfully, the latest C64 game release, Zoo Mania, falls in to the second category.

It may not be much orginality-wise (it's just Tetris Attack with animals), but it's well presented with cute, clolorful graphics and some nice SID music in the background. As with all good puzzlers, it's quite addictive, so be sure you have somne time to spend before you start playing. Also remember to always play with the high score saver turned on, as the game falls victim to some strange bugs otherwise.

Download Link: http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/index.php?id=33799

DOS Take 2

2006-05-09T15:16:00.000-04:00

For a long time now, a bunch a retro-oriented hackers have been working at coding an opensource version of DOS for people to run on their old computers (FreeDOS) . Now it looks like somebody's finally gone and combined this kernel with a bunch of other important tools to create an all in one package that has everything you'd need to get started. It's called, GNU/DOS and I for one, think it's quite cool.

Yet another blog...

2006-05-09T14:10:00.000-04:00

Every day, thousands of new blogs get created and hundres of thousands of existing blogs get ignored. Hopefully, this blog will be a little different, as I'll strive to actually keep my posts interesting. This is no set emo-whiner rants about how high school sucks and wanting to cut myself, etc. Instead, this is all about the wonderful world of old-school games and computers. I'll talk about interesting software, wierd hardware or anything else related to the topic that I feel like. I promise NOT to talk about stuff like my personal, non-digital life or politics more than once every couple of weeks at the most. Nobody want to hear the groanings of a 20 year old man any more than they want to hear the whining of a 13 year old Myspace kiddie and frankly I'd rather not provide them either...

One thing I DO want is comments on my posts. If I get something wrong, LET ME KNOW. If you like something let me know. If you have a memory or two about something I've posted about, I'd love to hear it. Heck, I've even bought some asbestos suits so you can flame me from time to time...

That is all for now.