Vintage Computing

I’ve spent about 3 years looking for it as part of the Prodigy Preservation Project, and I have found a substantial amount of archived corporate email and documentation surrounding the development of the service. Not even close to the volume they have here, though! If you’re interested to read about it, I have been working on reverse engineering Prodigy. More detail at the following two links… https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2921/reverse-engin… https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/3064/reverse-engin…

If you follow some links in the OP you can end up at a source article[1] that has some comments on the actual chemical processes occurring for both the discolouration and reversal (Ctrl-F "bromine"). TL;DR: Over time the bromine based flame retardants in retro-era plastics degrade (hence the yellow/brown colour) and H2O2 plus some energy (UV light/heat) can be used to reverse the process. [1] http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/189

There's a great interview with Jerry here: http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/545 This guy was truly a pioneer and seemed to be at every pivotal moment in the early days of console gaming. It's a must read if you appreciate those old pieces of hardware.

I owe alot to the Pre-computer 1000 : http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/324 As a 7 year old I just loved the feeling of making the computer do what I want. The instant feed back of print/ input/ run cycle also played a big part in it. After playing with C++, Pascal and learning Java I didn't get the same feeling until I started learning Python - Really captured that moment again :) I've enjoyed learning Clojure too - the LISP syntax is so different to what I've learnt that it brings the same feeling :) Great article!

Yeap, pretty much. It doesn't recreate the difficult-to-move "thunk" of TVs without remotes with separate VHF (2-14) and UHF (15-36,38-69) controls. - Married with Children - The Simpsons - Fresh Prince of Bel Air - SNL - Airwolf - Knight Rider - The A-Team It doesn't recreate standing and pointing in just right pose adjusting rabbit ears. They were impossible to tune them because touching them changes their parameters greatly. Some people put aluminum foil balls on the ends. Many older TVs supported NTSC UHF (OTA) channels up to 83 and beyond, but the maximum channel was 69 because 70–83 were reallocated in 1983. To hookup a Nintendo or Atari (NTSC) to an older TV, a box like this would be needed to switch between the console and the OTA antenna.[0] Some of them included an additional switch to select either channels 2 or 3. In the transition to coax, sometimes they would have or need a push on matching transformer to work with newer TVs. Nintendo released (included?) a coax-only auto switch. 0. https://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/tvswitch_2_large.jpg

Still waiting on a Prodigy online emulator, but in the meantime at least somebody recreated MadMaze! https://www.vintagecomputing.com/madmaze

I 'member scouring flea markets for one of these back in the 2000s by bringing a non-adapter copy of Gyromite with me and weighing them by hand until I found one that was ~25% heavier: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/23/how-to-tell-if-… > NES and Famicom cartridges They are Game Paks and cassettes, respectively. Of course it's obvious what the author is referring to, but I really enjoy seeing the term “cassette” used for something that doesn't contain magnetic tape, so please pardon my pedantry :) Peep the Famicom system manual where the cartridge connector is straight-up labeled in English as 「ＣＡＳＳＥＴＴＥ ＣＯＮＮＥＣＴＯＲ」with katakana furigana (カセット / kasetto): https://ia601903.us.archive.org/17/items/Family_Computer_1986_Nintendo…

This character was code 0x01 in the original IBM PC code page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437), and hence in DOS. It was displayed single-width and monochrome just like any other 8-bit character, never causing any rendering issues, unlike emojis today. It was added to Unicode for round-trip compatibility with that code page. More background about how the smiley ended up in the IBM code page: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/790/the-ibm-smiley…

> “The original Apple II did not support lowercase letters which is kind of surprising to most people,” Hertzfeld tells Inverse, laughing. “But the designer, Wozniak, made a trade-off that blinking characters were more important than lowercase letters.” Herzfeld is mistaken: Wozniak himself says the lack of lowercase had a completely different reason: So, in the end, the basic reason for no lowercase on the Apple I and Apple II was my own lack of money. Zero checking. Zero savings. https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why-the-apple…

Interesting to me that the Apple II+ was the only one in the comparison matrix that supported only upper case letters. That lead me to this: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why-the-apple…

486's were way past when that became practical. I remember using Prodigy on a 286. Screenshots are rare, since you can't fire it up in an emulator unless you have a modem that can make phone calls to the 1980's. Also, machines from back then didn't really have room to store screenshots: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063 Their service used vector art to render interactive pages like that over <= 2400 baud modems. Other than it being proprietary and stuff, I'm guessing the web would be a much cooler place if HTML hadn't eaten their lunch. SVG is a decent consolation prize, I guess.

Because they didn't implement the entire ASCII set? Case in point would be Apple integer BASIC. https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why-the-apple…

CD caddies existed for a brief time. I think early drives were much more sensitive to dust and scratches. https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/842/retro-scan-of-…

This is an interesting example, because back then when I learned BASIC (around age 7 on a Vtech Precomputer 1000 [1]), I couldn't understand why the for loop was called "for". Why am I doing this "for i"? How does "i" benefit from this? I didn't know the mathematical idiom "blabla for a value of i equals 10". I was also strangely afraid of the word INTEGER, which I read as INTER-EGER. "Integer" has no meaning to a kid, it's just called a number (as opposed to a dot-number or a fraction). On the other hand, I never had problems with the fact that is was using text. [1]: http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/324/324

How about this one? http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/apple_adam…

Ironically, one day later there's a post in HN that links to old copy protection schemes. And there's a pic of the manual of course: http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/copyprotection/simci…

Yep. I very much agree. I'll attempt to make a prediction: gesture based and other natural computer interactions will become common-place by 2020, primarily in living room and personal robotics applications. And right now, it is at the stage slightly ahead of the time when touch screens were first introduced: http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/hp150_larg…

Famicom cartridges (sold in Japan) were much smaller. Here's a size comparison where the orange one is a Famicom cartridge. [1] [1] http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/smb3j_label/nesfam_2…

In the 6th grade. I had Giardiasis ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giardiasis ) and ended up spending a couple of weeks at home with nothing to do. I taught myself BASIC on the Vtech Precomputer 1000 (http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/324)

Two words, young folk: "Cover painting" http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/169

"When you buy Super Famicom games in used game shops, the gray plastic is very often stained deep, ugly yellow from existing in houses packed to bursting with cigarette smoke. Sometimes, the consoles themselves are so yellow." That's actually due to the plastic used, it's not from smoke. http://vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/189

RAM was very expensive then and 16 bit CPUs weren't that much faster to justify the cost if you were aiming for the home market. Both true, which makes this an even more baffling choice -- why pick the more expensive, state of the art 16-bit CPU* that you're getting little or no benefit from + 16K of extremely slow-to-access combined video and system RAM? You could have used a cheaper 8-bit CPU and maybe for the same budget have fit 4K or 8K of system RAM on the bus + some amount of dedicated video RAM for the VDP. This would have been faster and more useful in nearly all real world applications, make for a much cleaner board design, easier development, and probably cheaper. That's what everyone else did. Then again, what was this machine's target market? Home computing, so yeah. http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/ti_cosby_l… * The reason is probably that TI wanted to show off their state-of-the-art CPU tech and be able to point to the spec sheet and say "look, it's 16 bit! All our competitors are only 8 bits -- that's half as many bits!"

I agree, reverse engineering some of this stuff is hard. I had been studying economics & systems design and put lots of interacting feedback loops into SRE so it's sometimes hard to tease out the individual effects. I've put some notes up here for anyone who wants to clone it http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Design.html For a quick “where are they now”: - Barren Realms Elite --> Mehul (my brother) moved from BBS games to web games, with Earth 2025 and then Utopia, and then a web portal Swirve.com, and then he got out of the games business and ran a coffee shop, Dominican Joe in downtown Austin (but it was just sold) - Legend of the Red Dragon --> Seth Robinson (who I finally met this year) moved on to PC games, then mobile games, and now runs a successful MMO called Growtopia (but it was just sold) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Technologies - Solar Realms Elite --> I got out of the BBS door world and went to grad school, interested in teaching. I now write interactive tutorials at redblobgames.com, starting with game development but I want to expand into math and computer science. SRE's wikipedia page got wiped by the deletionists http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/922 but was preserved by http://breakintochat.com/

The article didn't include any pictures of Famicom carts, but basically, they're about half as tall as NES cartridges. I haven't popped open any NES games, but I'd have to guess most, if not all NES games just used a Famicom sized board to simplify manufacturing. Here's a comparison shot of the NES and Famicom versions of Super Mario Bros. 3: http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/smb3j_label/nesfam_2… While most later systems featured mostly standardized cartridge designs, Famicom carts wildly vary in color and design from publisher to publisher. They're quite pleasing to look at: http://famicomblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/aesthetics-of-famicom-cart.htm… Another piece of trivia: The Famicom had a 60 pin cartridge port, while the NES had a 72 pin cartridge port (iirc they removed a few pins, relocated a few from the Famicom's bottom port, and added pins for the lockout chips). A few early games literally consisted of a Famicom game board plugged into an internal 60-to-72 pin adapter. So, for a while, the cheapest way to get a Famicom converter was to rip apart a cheap game like Gyromite and hope it was part of a certain run. You can see the converter clearly here: http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/gyro/gyro7_big.jpg As for technical details, you're mostly on the dot, but most later games also featured mapper circuitry to allow the NES to address more memory. Some boards used simple 7400 series, while others used customs ICs, some of which were…

Linking to illegal derivative works probably violates the rules of that forum but fortunately linking isn't a crime. The below links may be patches and not the ROM itself. The ROM itself can be found on your local torrent site, probably in a pack that includes every SNES or NES ROM! Brutal Mario: http://www.smwcentral.net/?p=showhack&id=1012 Extra Mario Bros: http://www.derok.net/nes-roms/super-mario-bros/extra Sonic 2 Long Edition: http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=11648&st=0 (try PMing people in this thread or going on their IRC channel) Zelda Parallel Worlds: http://zeldaparallelworlds.googlepages.com/ The Second Reality Project: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/41/ Sonic Megamix 3.5 (4.0 isn't out yet): http://info.sonicretro.org/images/3/3f/S1MMU.rar Super Metroid Redesign: http://drewseph.zophar.net/ Mario Adventure: http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/63