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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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 »

Happy 50th birthday Microsoft!

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/04

Some beautiful old Microsoft logo material posted on their Twitter profile in 2021 on its 46 birthday and a few of their tweets:

B&W logo

B&W logo

Colour logo

Colour logo

Looking at the Wayback Machine Archivals of the banner logo, I saw two things:

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

ASCII art generator: GitHub – cmatsuoka/figlet: Claudio’s FIGlet tree

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/27

Just in case I ever need ASCII art in a document again:

[Wayback/Archive] GitHub – cmatsuoka/figlet: Claudio’s FIGlet tree

Via:

--jeroen

Posted in ASCII, ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Encoding, Fun, History, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Embedding a Floppy Emu in a standard APPLE II Floppy Disk Drive – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/25

Interesting modification: [Wayback/Archive] Embedding a Floppy Emu in a standard APPLE II Floppy Disk Drive – YouTube

STL: [Wayback/Archive] FermuAssembly.STL – Google Drive [Wayback] FermuAssembly.STL

Buttons: [Wayback/Archive] 3/4/5-Bit Independent Button Module MCU External Button Module Micro Switch Button Board Bluetooth-compatible Power Amplifier – AliExpress 502

--jeroen

Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, Development, Hardware Interfacing, History, Power User, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

Cleaning PlexWriters – Gammitin (Ben) 💾 on X: “@jpluimers Usually the trays are a little sticky on these: I take them apart, grease up the tray mechanism and any gears (use lithium grease), clean the laser with Isopropyl alcohol, clean all the connectors with WD40 contact cleaner, retro-bright the front – job done!”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/14

Back in the days, Plextor made a series of great PlexWriter CD and DVD/RW devices. This is how to get them working again:

[Wayback/Archive] Gammitin (Ben) 💾 on X: “@jpluimers Usually the trays are a little sticky on these: I take them apart, grease up the tray mechanism and any gears (use lithium grease), clean the laser with Isopropyl alcohol, clean all the connectors with WD40 contact cleaner, retro-bright the front – job done!” (retrobright thread further down this blog-post)

Via [Wayback/Archive] Gammitin (Ben) 💾 on X: “I’ve fully refurbished the Plextor PlexWriter on the bottom, inside and out, I need to get these other three sorted! 👍 💿📀📀📀”

[Wayback/Archive] GZEEApaXQAAB1Tz.jpg (1130×1200)

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Posted in Hardware, LifeHacker, Power User, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

The Search Engine for Vintage Computers: FrogFind!

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/12

[Wayback/Archive] FrogFind! (archived as “Server Error”, but working fine on my end) and [Wayback/Archive] FrogFind!

FrogFind!

a pixelated cartoon graphic of a fat, lazy, unamused frog with a keyboard in front of them, awaiting your search query

The Search Engine for Vintage Computers

 

Leap to:
Built by Action Retro on YouTube | Logo by Mac84 | Why build such a thing?Powered by DuckDuckGov1.2

More information at [Wayback/Archive] About FrogFind!

Based on [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – fivefilters/readability.php: PHP port of Mozilla’s Readability.js and DuckDuckGo.

--jeroen

Posted in Development, LifeHacker, PHP, Power User, Retrocomputing, Scripting, SearchEngines, Software Development, Web Browsers | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

keirf/greaseweazle: Tools for accessing a floppy drive at the raw flux level

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/31

[Wayback/Archive] keirf/greaseweazle: Tools for accessing a floppy drive at the raw flux level

Interesting drive: [Wayback/Archive] BTC BCO 4816IA 48x 7-in-1 Card Reader CDRW/DVD Combo Drive ODD Computer Laufwerk

More on Greaseweazle:

Via this project allowing many kinds of media to be grabbed:

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Posted in Archiving, LifeHacker, Power User, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

Some notes on mini/micro Apple //e emulators

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/30

Retro computing is wildly popular, and with the rise of low cost single-board computers (SBCs for short), both Apple //e and ][+ emulators plus extension cards have proliferated,  based on Raspberry Pi (or even their RP2040 microcontroller based Pico), ESP32 or predecessor ESP8266 microcontrollers and others.

Some links for my archive:

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Posted in //e, Apple, Development, Emulators, ESP32, ESP8266, Hardware Development, Power User, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Pico, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

ELIZAGEN – ELIZA Reanimated: The Original 1965 Chatbot Restored On An Emulated IBM 7094 Running MIT’s CTSS

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/30

Wow, 60 years after her birth, the original ELIZA Chatbot got resurrected after a re-discovered paper version ¹ of the SLIP and MAD based source code was found in the Joseph Weizenbaum archives: [Wayback/Archive] ELIZAGEN – ELIZA Reanimated

Back in 1965, ELIZA ran on top of CTSS on an IBM 7094. Nowadays, few of that hardware is still running, but luckily there are emulators.

Back in the days, a large percentage people chatting with ELIZA thought she was a real person. With the dwindling language proficiency, the rise in believe in alternative facts, and THE RISE OF USE IN ALL CAPS, likely that percentage has increased.

Steps to get started with ELIZA are at [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – rupertl/eliza-ctss: The original ELIZA on an emulated CTSS environment, which carefully got assembled over the course of the last 2 months.

If you want to know about the process, be sure to read the

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

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