Chris Chapman @retrohistories@digipres.club

So......does anyone know where I can find Pyst: Special Edition? I don't see it online anywhere and the sampler it comes with includes the only thing released for Driven: The Sequel to Pyst before the company closed

Feeling a sense of dread that I've stumbled across a games preservation project and it will result in me buying this
https://www.mobygames.com/game/pyst-special-edition

EDIT: A reply has informed me that The X-Fools, also by Parroty Interactive, also has this Driven demo, and that has been preserved!

one of the lazy habits of the past 25 years has been fans trashing #ultima viii and ultima ix as the great disappointments of the series

one aspect of the games that is irrefutably divine and shadeproof are the soundtracks

gary oldziey's Stone Chamber is one such diamond in the rough... here is Vento Celta's sublime, relaxed, cover of the piece

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLJqGdj7InA

#RetroGaming #music

👏 to Matt Barton, who ran Matt Chat for the past 497 episodes. #498 will be his last.

matt has been interviewing #gamedevs of the 80s and 90s for several years. unbeatable primary source #RetroGaming #history

https://www.youtube.com/@MattBarton/videos

thank you for your service, sir. (he's sadly not on mastodon.. yet!)

for anyone who archived the entire show (to watch on plex) like i did, i've been slowwwly adding metadata for each episode here:
https://thetvdb.com/series/matt-chat

#retrocomputing

turning a page over on the calendar and booing the new month

Today I finished converting Elite to use sixels. As a result, Teletext Elite now does everything that the original does, just in teletext.

I’ve got to tie up some loose ends, but I hope to release it next weekend. Watch this space!

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #8bit #bbcmicro

Hello people of the Fediverse! Some of you may have heard that a new Mastodon client, Ivory,  is in development for iOS (and Mac!). This is true! Tapbots is going all in on Mastodon and we hope this place continues to grow and thrive. Tweetbot will continue to be developed alongside Ivory as a lot of code is shared. A new Mac version of Tweetbot and Ivory are also currently in development and we are working hard on getting those towards a public beta state.

Twenty-five years ago today, the very first in a series of open-world action-adventure games was released. A series that is critically acclaimed, always controversial and one of the best-selling franchises in gaming.

Happy 25th birthday, Grand Theft Auto!

1/ Today I'm happy to share the fascinating story behind "Murray and Me" and "Mom and Me" — two of the earliest entertainment offerings for the Atari ST.

Despite being profiled by the New York Times, London Times, and other big newspapers in 1985, the programs didn't sell well, and went mostly unarchived. Until today.

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2022/11/28/unearthed-kirschens-atari-st-projects/

#atarist #kirschen #retrocomputing #breakintochat #digipres #software

Liberating books! #librarygeeking

The Internet Archive has scanned thousands of books that have not gotten the date set via metadata matching, which means we dont know which are public domain... (1927 is coming up on Jan 1!)

so... now I have a command line to find candidate public domain books by grep'ing the full text for "Copyright 19XX" for xx between 00 and 27.

Now we have to QA, update, and liberate!

first results:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tIoFvqhWGl7Nry8DvVL9UYtZ3gSP-hU_ZCefksL4xJg/edit#gid=0

Mt. Rainier casting a shadow upwards across the sky.

For Time Extension I wrote a small history of Project M, an unlucky sci-fi RPG that should have saved SSI, but instead, ended up delivering a killing blow to the company from which it never really recovered.
https://www.timeextension.com/features/flashback-how-the-failure-of-cyberpunk-rpg-project-m-doomed-the-legendary-ssi

Some silly attempts at "proper" C64 displayable graphics rendered in Blender, including an attempt to create an illusion of having multiple colors using 8x8 tiles as variable intensity RGB "sub-elements".

I'm very happy to have made my first contribution to @internetarchive !

https://archive.org/details/shareware-universe-the-gold-collection

This shareware collection dating back to 1996 holds a great deal of nostalgia and sentimental value to me. It basically *was* my childhood. When my family got our first modern PC, a 120Mhz Pentium running Windows 95, this was one of the few sources of software I had. I can't tell you how many hours I spent exploring the contents (and mostly playing the games). I hope this will be of value to someone, if you want to share in my nostalgia please download the ISO and explore it! A lot of the content is MS-DOS based which should run just fine in DosBox, but there is also Windows 3.x and Windows 95 software on there, as well as plenty of music, demos, clip art and text files! #archive #shareware #RetroComputing

Here's some more behind-the-scenes stuff from over the years, at
https://www.jordanmechner.com/library/

A bunch of videos, PDFs, scripts from my past projects... and even the 1989 Apple II tech specs for Prince of Persia, if you're in the mood to do a port (though if you are, odds are you already have all that and are way ahead of me).

Also my 2005 screenplay draft for POP (if you've seen the movie, you can see it changed a bit along the way). Check it out at the #Library. I add stuff now & then.

Triangular USB connectors were soon abandoned after some users complained of needing to rotate them up to six times before successful insertion.

Happy #TillysGameversary 🎂 to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System! Released today in 1990.

I'm not going to shock you with how old it is, I'm just going to celebrate with my annual Nutella, mustard and jellybean sandwich. 🥪