Pasta News Network - New Zealand

In 1981, Xerox released the Xerox 8010 Information System (codenamed “Dandelion” during development) and commonly referred to as the Star. The Star took what Xerox learned from the research and experimentation done with the Alto at Xerox PARC and attempted to build a commercial product from it. It was envisioned as center point of the office of the future, combining high-resolution graphics with the now-familiar mouse, Ethernet networking for sharing and collaborating, and Xerox’s Laser Printer technology for faithful “WYSIWYG” document reproduction. The Star’s operating system (called “Star” at the outset, though later renamed “Viewpoint”) introduced the Desktop Metaphor to the world. In combination with the Star’s unique keyboard it provided a flexible, intuitive environment for creating and collaborating on documents and mail in a networked office environment.

Something to be entertained by at a later point in time. Blessed are the emulator makers.

From 2017:

If you had looked at the state of Psygnosis in 1990 and tried to decide which of their outside developers would break the mold of beautiful-but-empty action games, you would have no reason to single out DMA Design over any of the others. Certainly Menace and Blood Money, the two games DMA had already created for Psygnosis, gave little sign that any visionaries lurked within their ranks. From their generic teenage-cool titles to their rote gameplay, both games were as typical of Psygnosis as anything else in their catalog.

And yet DMA Design — and particularly their leader, David Jones — did in fact have abilities as yet undreamt of. People have a way of surprising you sometimes. And isn’t that a wonderful thing?

From Deluxe Paint to millions of units shipped. For the most part, pretty wholesome unless you had a penchant for hitting the nuke button to see particle effects.

• 68000 emulation is finally fully cycle accurate, last missing part, interrupt level change detection timing, is now cycle accurate.
• Custom chipset interrupt timing is now cycle accurate.
• CIA emulation is now fully cycle accurate. Timers were accurate previously but now also interrupt timing, TOD counting, CPU/E-clock sync, and more, including undocumented side-effects are cycle accurate.

What a time to be alive and a win for preservation.

The amateur programming scene in Europe was thriving during the late 80s and early 90s. Coders from all over the continent would show off their skills by creating demos – a series of (usually) non-interactive special effects that drove their chosen hardware to the limit. Although there were demos created for all sorts of personal computers and gaming systems, the hacker community that sprang up around the Amiga was by far the largest and most enthusiastic. Hundreds packed into copy parties, demo expos, and conventions dedicated to the powerful Amiga, and it was in this environment that one of the most ambitious software teams ever to tackle the Genesis was born. That company was Zyrinx.

The people that brought you "Hardwired" on the Amiga and "Red Zone", "Sub-Terrania" on the Mega Drive.

They had with them nothing less than the machine that would soon be released as the next-generation Amiga: the Amiga 3000. From the moment they powered it up to display the familiar Workbench startup icon re-imagined as a three-dimensional ray-traced rendering, the crowd was in awe.

The new model sported a 68020 processor running at more than twice the clock speed of the old 68000, with a set of custom chips redesigned to match its throughput; graphics in 2 million colors instead of 4096, shown at non-interlaced — read, non-flickering — resolutions of 640 X 400 and beyond; an AmigaOS 2.0 Workbench that looked far more professional than the garish version 1.3 that was shipping with current Amigas.

The crowd was just getting warmed up when the team said they had to run. They did, after all, have a plane to catch.

"Only Amiga Makes it Possible"

Can two programmers who are accustomed to making games for modern computers with gigabytes of RAM and high-color HD displays port one of their games to MS-DOS? Neither of us had any experience developing on such old hardware, but since working within artificially limited systems is something of a Zachtronics game design specialty, we felt compelled to try!

The only reasonable choice of programming language for a machine of this age was C. We weren’t going to write the entire game in x86 assembly language! After considering various choices of tools, we settled on Borland C++ 3.1, published in 1992. Running on DOSBox, Borland C++ provided a convenient and accurate emulation of the target machine.

Good Times, doing a-lot with so little.

Last year, I decided that I was going to build a Commodore 64 from scratch. This is the blog documenting the project.

As for me, I wanted to build a Commodore 64 replica from scratch.

The requirements for this project were:

• Build a C64 to last. I wanted to use as many new components as possible, like transistors, resistors, inductors, capacitors, voltage regulators, connectors, and other parts.
• Make it easier to repair or modify in the future, using ICs sockets everywhere, for example.
• Replace some of the custom MOS chips with reverse-engineered modern alternatives for fun.
• Pimp up the final product, and make it beautiful and collectible.

Nice things. Lovely write-up, great set of pictures and a smattering of reference links.

Creating the PiRS232 and playing with the Pi over serial has been leading towards an idea - I wanted to create a small, battery powered device, a sidecar that I could carry with my Psion and use as portable Linux terminal. I also managed to turn it into an Internet gateway, leading to some interesting experiences.

The idea was straightforward: take a Pi Zero W, add an RS232 board that already handles the null modem side, add a Lipo battery, power management and charging, and print a case for it. It’s taken a few months from initial idea to final design, but I’m happy the result, it’s usable and practical, and you can build one too.

“What is dead may never die.” - House Greyjoy

I want to share some of my recent findings when having fun with a very old and not really known graphics mode from 80 called “HAM”. Everything started when I wanted to add HAM support in my bitmap converter tool that I use to create my oldskool demos.

Nowadays you don’t even notice when looking at photos in your web browser. But back in time, displaying a “realistic” image on screen was really a challenge. So let’s say you want to display this nice 16 million colors picture (24bits) on your old Amiga 500 computer.

"Leonard" of STNICCC 2000 fame.

"Only Amiga makes it possible."