The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Retrocomputing’ Category

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Karateka IBM PC Model 5150 Longplay – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/28

Karateka (which appeared way before the even more famous Prince of Persia which appeared 5 years later) memories of the past, for which I totally agree with the conclusion: the game on Apple ][ was way better:

[Wayback/Archive] 𝔸𝕟𝕒𝕥𝕠𝕝𝕪 𝕊𝕙𝕒𝕤𝕙𝕜𝕚𝕟💾 on Twitter: “@textfiles Jordan’s opinion on the IBM version”

JULY 31, 1986 Just looked at the JULY 31, 1986
Just looked at the “final” version of PC Karateka. It seemed OK, I guessed, except for overall sluggishness, frequent disk accesses, and a few minor graphics glitches. Then I booted up the Apple version to compare… and it was so smooth, it made me want to cry.
The PC version is maybe 50% of what it should be. I can’t even tell these guys s what to fix… it’s a million little things, and they’re just not up to the hassle. That kind of attention to detail is why the Apple version took me two years. This version is probably the best I’ll ever get out of them.

You can play the PC version online at [Wayback/Archive] Karateka IBM Version 1986-01-30 (1986-02-04) (ID 0873) : Jordan Mechner : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Internal Alpha version (1986-01-30) of the IBM port of Karateka by Jordan Mechner.

It was ported to many platforms, and there was a great documentary too. So there are more YouTube links below than [Wayback/Archive] Karateka IBM PC Model 5150 Longplay – YouTube which has this great description:

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Posted in 6502, 8086, 8088, C64, Commodore, History, IBM PC Model 5150, Power User, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

More Apple ][*, //* II* and classic Macintosh hardware upgrades

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/14

The mini micro classic Apple emulators related post last week became way too big, so here is the classic Apple 2/Macintosh hardware upgrade part follow-up I announced in Some notes on mini/micro Apple //e emulators.

Last week, I mentioned [Wayback/Archive] ARC Javmaster – YouTube. Let’s continue from there for an even bigger post (:

Javmaster actually has a shop at [Wayback/Archive] Welcome to the 8-bit stuff store – 8 bit stuff cool retro computer 3D gadgets and geekery with a lot of interesting (mainly Apple ][ era related) retro things like:

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Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, Classic Macintosh, History, Macintosh SE/30, Power User, Retrocomputing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

ASCII Art Archive, my own ASCII signature, plus many FIGlet and TOIlet ASCII font art links

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/11

Earlier this year I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] ASCII Art Archive

This brought back instant memories about ASCII art, so in the future expect af few unfinished blog-posts that were in my “if I ever get to it archive” about it.

Let me start with my very limited ASCII art I used in late 1980s and early 1990s newsgroup and LISTSERV mailing list signature I reconstructed from a comp.virus post¹ having some very old contact data²:

    o  _   _  _   _   _            voice: +31-2522-20908 (18:00-24:00 UTC)
   /  (_' |  (_) (_' | |           snail: P.S.O.
__/                                       attn. Jeroen W. Pluimers
                                          P.O. Box 266
jeroenp@rulfc1.LeidenUniv.nl              2170 AG Sassenheim
jeroen_pluimers@f521.n281.z2.fidonet.org  The Netherlands

Shortly after that, my main source of income moved from the command-line to GUI based tools, so I temporarily kind of lost interest in command-line tools and customs. In that period FIGlet (see below) got created, which I totally missed (though I vaguely remember the 1.0 version being named newban).

The link at the start of this blog post not only pointed me to FIGlet, but also has a lot of examples (like some [Wayback/Archive] ASCII Art Logos – asciiart.eu) of which many by ASCII artist Joan Stark, and also links to JavaScript based tools:

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Posted in ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Encoding, Fun, History, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Retrocomputing, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – geerlingguy/retro-computers: Retro Computers – Info and status for all my retro Macs, PCs, gaming systems…

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/24

Interesting, especially the early classic Macintosh and Apple II machinery: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – geerlingguy/retro-computers: Retro Computers – Info and status for all my retro Macs, PCs, gaming systems…

Via: [Wayback/Archive] Saving my Aunt’s 1991 Mac Classic: Tear it apart, don’t turn it on! – YouTube

--jeroen

Posted in Power User, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

Reminder to self: find back if non-archived early GMAIL (alias for GOLD MAIL on VAX/VMS) can be found back

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/08

Blog posts I should check:

In the meantime:

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Posted in History, Power User, Retrocomputing | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

“Everybody should have an obsession with Lisp-like language at least once in their life” @KevlinHenney

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/27

The tweet [WaybackSave/Archive] Jakub Kočí on X: “”Everybody should have an obsession with Lisp-like language at least once in their life” @KevlinHenney I’m glad that I had one with Clojure.” mentioned a great talk:

[Wayback/Archive] The Past, Present & Future of Programming Languages • Kevlin Henney • GOTO 2024 – YouTube

The quote brought instant memories to my early computing days that I had almost forgotten: the muMATH (the muMATH-80 version on Apple II) computer algebra system which was based on muLISP (the German muLISP page has more detailed information), a LISP dialect.

In retrospect, I was way too young to really grasp LISP which was way harder than just using the muMATH wrapper. But it was also my first encounter to reasoning systems, or what we now collectively would call AI systems as back in the 70s there was a strong LISP connection to artificial intelligence . Do not confuse muMath with MuMath-Code however, that is a different LLM beast: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – youweihao-tal/MuMath-Code

So hopefully I will have a chance to revisit LISP with a LISP-like language one day, maybe even using the discontinued muMATH-83 on MS-DOS (also named “Microsoft LISP“), maybe even the (also discontinued) Derive 6.1 for Windows which is also based on muLISP, or even Clojure itself.

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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, History, LISP, LLM, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “@_ObomheseR Since JavaScript is in the group of curly based programming languages influenced by the B programming language, integer constants starting with zero are tried first in octal base. 017 octal is 15 decimal 018 octal is not possible, so becomes 18.”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/20

With the constant influx of JavaScript programmers, it keeps worth repeating that you should always run JavaScript in strict mode via "use strict"; (like in the past Visual Basic 6 developers should use option strict and option explicit) to forget risky JavaScript syntax like implicit ocal constants (which were removed from the documentation in the 2009 ECMAScript 5 specification for JavaScript), and every codeline should have a test code covering it, especially for comparisons involving non-strict behaviour like the use of leading zeros.

As of the succeeding 2015 standard (ECMAScript 6), octal numbers in JavaScript start with 0o or 0O followed by a series of octal digits.

Oh, and the history of octal in computing of course has to do with 6-bit systems and also lead to 6-six bit character codes including BCD character encoding..

My tweet back earlier this year: [WaybackSave/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “@_ObomheseR Since JavaScript is in the group of curly based programming languages influenced by the B programming language, integer constants starting with zero are tried first in octal base. 017 octal is 15 decimal 018 octal is not possible, so becomes 18.”

Inhteritence:

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Posted in B, BASIC, C, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, MarkDown, Retrocomputing, Scripting, Software Development, VB6, Visual BASIC | Leave a Comment »

10 years ago, Toru Iwatani showed his original drafts for Pac-Man : gaming

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/12

I missed this back then, so here is a reminder: [Wayback/Archive] Toru Iwatani shows his original drafts for Pac-Man : gaming

Of course these had a big red stamp on them marking them classified. The detailed game experience and sprite transformations in just a few pages really shows how great Toru Iwatani was.

Images were posted first on [Wayback/Archive] Toru Iwatani shows his original drafts for Pac-Man – Imgur:

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Posted in History, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – PascalCorpsman/FPC_DOOM: FPC Port of DOOM

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/03

Indeed: DOOM in Pascal. Not Delphi: Free Pascal.

Repository: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – PascalCorpsman/FPC_DOOM: FPC Port of DOOM

It is based on [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – fabiangreffrath/crispy-doom: Crispy Doom is a limit-removing enhanced-resolution Doom source port based on Chocolate Doom..

Hopefully, this summer I can play around with it a bit.

Via [Wayback/Archive] International Pascal Congress on X: “DOOM in Pascal!! 😍👏👏 Do you want to play or compile it? 😉 #Pascal #ObjectPascal …”.

--jeroen

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, FreePascal, Pascal, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – PiSCSI/piscsi: PiSCSI allows a Raspberry Pi to function as emulated SCSI devices (hard disk, CD-ROM, and others) for vintage SCSI-based computers and devices. This is a fork of the RaSCSI project by GIMONS.

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/08

Cool (and available both for regular Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Zero):

[Wayback/Archive] GitHub – PiSCSI/piscsi: PiSCSI allows a Raspberry Pi to function as emulated SCSI devices (hard disk, CD-ROM, and others) for vintage SCSI-based computers and devices. This is a fork of the RaSCSI project by GIMONS.

I wonder how it compares feature wise and performance wise to [Wayback/Archive] BlueSCSI (which is Raspberry Pi Pico based, see [Wayback/Archive] index – BlueSCSI v2 Documentation, and now has a [Wayback/Archive] BlueSCSI Wi-Fi Desk Accessory – joshua stein which is open source at [Wayback/Archive] jcs/wifi_da – BlueSCSI Wi-Fi Desk Accessory for classic Mac OS – AmendHub and important to for instance [Wayback/Archive] Adding Wi-Fi to the Macintosh Portable – joshua stein).

Via [Wayback/Archive] The RaSCSI is MAGIC for Old Macs (and Much More!) – YouTube

More links:

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Posted in Apple, Classic Macintosh, Development, Hardware Development, Hardware Interfacing, Macintosh SE/30, Power User, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Pico, Retrocomputing, RP2040, SCSI, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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