September 8, 2023

University of Maine: Vincent Weaver ‘demakes’ video games to teach about computer systems

University of Maine: Vincent Weaver ‘demakes’ video games to teach about computer systems. “Vincent Weaver, a University of Maine associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has a quirky hobby: ‘de-making’ video games, or reformatting classic games onto even simpler systems than the ones they were launched on as a programming challenge. Weaver has not only amassed an online fan base for his demakes — he has also found ways to incorporate them into his curriculum for UMaine students.”

Other Things I Think Are Cool 0
July 16, 2023

Video Game History Foundation: The Game Availability Study, Explained

Video Game History Foundation: The Game Availability Study, Explained. “Today, the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network published a major new study which shows that 87 percent of classic games released in the United States are out of print. The results are striking, and it proves that we need to rethink the commercial marketplace’s role in game preservation. It’s a big study, and to help you digest it, we wrote this guide explaining the main points: Why we did it, how we did it, what we found, and why it matters.”

Research & Opinion 0
July 12, 2023

Ars Technica: Windows 95, 98, and other decrepit versions can grab online updates again

Ars Technia: Windows 95, 98, and other decrepit versions can grab online updates again. “If you have any interest in retro-computing, you know it can be difficult to round up the last official bug fixes and updates available for early Internet-era versions of Windows like 95, 98, and NT 4.0. A new independent project called ‘Windows Update Restored’ is aiming to fix that, hosting lightly modified versions of old Windows Update sites and the update files themselves so that fresh installs of these old operating systems can grab years’ worth of fixes that aren’t present on old install CDs and disks.”

New Resources 0
February 27, 2023

Hackaday: Emulating All The TRS-80 Software

New-to-me, from Hackaday: Emulating All The TRS-80 Software. “There are 15,873 pieces of software on the site, although some of them are duplicates or multiple versions of a single program. You can download them in a format that is useful for some emulators or, in some cases, the original files. But here’s the kicker. You can also click to launch a virtual TRS-80 in your browser and start the program.”

New Resources 0
February 6, 2023

Hackaday: Reliving A Bitmapped Past With A Veritable Hoard Of Bitmap Fonts

New-to-me, from Hackaday: Reliving A Bitmapped Past With A Veritable Hoard Of Bitmap Fonts. “The fonts seen with old computer systems such as those from Apple and Commodore, as well as Microsoft Windows 3.1 and older, form an integral part of our interaction with these systems. These days such bitmap fonts are a rarity, with scalable vector-based fonts having taken their place on modern-day systems. This unfortunately also means that these fonts are at major risk of being lost to the sands of time. This is where [Rob Hagemans] seeks to maintain an archive of such bitmap fonts, ranging from Acorn to MSX to Windows.”

New Resources 0
December 4, 2022

Quanta Magazine: Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence

Quanta Magazine: Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence. “Developed by the Dutch particle physicist Jos Vermaseren, FORM is a key part of the infrastructure of particle physics, necessary for the hardest calculations. However, as with surprisingly many essential pieces of digital infrastructure, FORM’s maintenance rests largely on one person: Vermaseren himself. And at 73, Vermaseren has begun to step back from FORM development. Due to the incentive structure of academia, which prizes published papers, not software tools, no successor has emerged. If the situation does not change, particle physics may be forced to slow down dramatically.”

Research & Opinion 0
December 2, 2022

EIN News: Computer History Museum Makes Adobe PostScript’s Source Code Available to the Public as a Part of Its Art of Code Series (PRESS RELEASE)

EIN News: Computer History Museum Makes Adobe PostScript’s Source Code Available to the Public as a Part of Its Art of Code Series (PRESS RELEASE). “The Computer History Museum (CHM), the leading museum exploring the history of computing and its impact on the human experience, today announced the public release and long-term preservation of Adobe’s PostScript source code as part of its Art of Code series.”

New Resources 0
November 27, 2022

The Verge: The Internet Archive just put 565 Palm Pilot apps in your web browser

The Verge: The Internet Archive just put 565 Palm Pilot apps in your web browser. “Yes, I am playing Dope Wars on a Palm Pilot inside my iPhone. It’s thanks to The Internet Archive, which is once again launching a giant collection of software you can instantly play on any web browser, up to and including your touchscreen-equipped phone. There are currently 565 classic Palm apps in all, including games, widgets, and even free trials from both the greyscale and color eras.”

New Resources 0
October 20, 2022

Motherboard: New Tool Lets You Search Tons of Old CDs and Floppy Disks for Lost Media

Motherboard: New Tool Lets You Search Tons of Old CDs and Floppy Disks for Lost Media. “DiscMaster is a new website that is sifting through the CDs and floppy disks in the Internet Archive and making it all into a searchable database. Even more incredibly, it’s taking all of the old file formats and making them viewable in a browser. As of this writing, the archive represents more than 7,000 CDs and 11 million files.”

New Resources 0
September 16, 2022

WIRED: What Modern Humans Can Learn From Ancient Software

WIRED: What Modern Humans Can Learn From Ancient Software. “Emulation reminds me to ask myself whether the computing experience is always getting better. I’m writing this in Google Docs so my editor’s little round avatar head can peek in and make sure I don’t miss my deadline for once, but I’d prefer to write it in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which was the greatest word processor ever—a blank screen illuminated with only letters and numbers, offering just enough bold and italics to keep things interesting. I remember WP51 the way a non-nerd might remember a vintage Mustang. You could just take that thing out and go, man.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0

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