Spindley Q Frog @SpindleyQ@mastodon.social

ohhh noooo I am definitely going to write a 16-bit x86 Forth as a scripting language for my game, this is happeniiiiing

Oh no help I downloaded Turbo C and I think I might start writing a DOS game aaaah https://mastodon.social/media/s3HaS-EB22oUvhgGdhc https://mastodon.social/media/e10RH5rx_zT5f_GoR1A https://mastodon.social/media/1uDvzJ1N3C7WmpoJhcU

If you want to mess with it, you _will_ need a Glorious Trainwrecks account. Browser-based telnet client potentially in the works.

MarMOTS is back up and running, and for the first time in 11 years, the source is now available too! It's a collaborative ANSI art drawing tool that runs over telnet, with dreams of someday becoming a ZZT MMO.

http://marmots.glorioustrainwrecks.com/
https://bitbucket.org/SpindleyQ/marmots

I'm messing around with this stuff because I have spent the day resurrecting MarMOTS: http://marmots.glorioustrainwrecks.com/

not quite back online yet, but hopefully soon!

Netrunner is a nice SyncTerm-like with some nice ANSI upscaling features, but it appears to be distributed as a binary only?

I wanted to not have to deal with building it from source but I also just spent like an hour debugging my ANSI escape codes and having source access would have been kinda nice

qodem seems to work pretty well for running in the terminal, and actually has a package on my distro! Also supports direct serial connections which is a nice feature for talking to actual DOS machines; I've been suffering with running Telix under DOSBox for that.

Does anyone have any opinions on the best option for connecting to telnet BBSes from Linux? (With ANSI / codepage 437 support specifically) #retrocomputing

I used to use SyncTerm on Windows but it looks kind of... still using CVS in 2020

hey, btw, if you are a white dude following me for retro nerd shit and you think the police are basically OK, can you please google "prison abolition" and spend, like, 15 minutes seriously engaging with what you find before you run your fucking racist fool mouth on fedi where I can see it

after _hours_ of research I have managed to write a three-line LispMe program on my Palm that can communicate over IR to my 200LX

I'm gonna turn my Palm into a monochrome Cintiq for my new tiny DOS machine and no one can stop meeee

why must every model of palm pda have a different connector, oh my god

I have like 8 different Palms and at least 3 cradles and like one working pair

I've spent the past year and a half writing DOS games on my desktop, and one thing that was consistently an annoyance is that I had no way to look at my code while my game was running. I've got a full interpreted interactive scripting language with a REPL, but I have to quit to make changes. This thing has a full text editor that I can task-switch to with a single keypress and takes up ~30kb of RAM! This could completely change my entire workflow!

And then there's a ton of stuff which is kind of above and beyond - spreadsheets (Quicken), finanical software (1-2-3), scientific graphing calculator, full customizable database, full serial terminal & laplink with modem support, _scheduled tasks_! You can write cronjobs that run batch files, and it will run in the middle of the night because the thing is always on and uses no power! This is a far better, more useful DOS machine than my desktop!

The thing I didn't quite realize until I had the thing in my hands is that it is a _very_ full-featured PDA, with a _ton_ of useful software built into ROM, and a multitasking shell with convenient app-switching hotkeys. Everything you'd expect on a modern smartphone is there - calendar, alarms / reminders, TODO list, contact management, stopwatch...

This is a fully functional 7MHz 80186 DOS machine, running MSDOS 5.0, with full CGA graphics support. It runs off of two AA batteries. Apparently for weeks. While constantly powering a RAM disk. I have been using this thing fairly heavily since Wednesday, including large serial file transfers that took well over an hour of constant, sustained use. Battery is still at 7/8 full.

Got a sweet MSDOS palmtop in the mail from @ajroach42 the other day and after some small hardware fix ups I am settling in with it. This thing is an _astonishing_ device. I can hardly believe it’s real.

Nostalgically clicking around old defunct 2001-era webcomics this morning and discovered Boxjam's Doodle started posting comics again _two weeks ago_ for the first time in 8 years?? It's exactly the same slightly-skewed slice-of-domestic-life as it was in 1999 except now he's making covid-19 jokes. It is so deeply weird to be clicking around dead websites and suddenly come across one that's suddenly come back to life despite absolutely no one looking but you.

http://www.boxjamsdoodle.com/d/20200513.html

in case the woman creating music by DANCING IN A BARCODE DRESS is not incredible enough for you, the sound being made by the people touching the CRTs in the background is the electromagnetic feedback of the image being displayed sent from the person's skin through a guitar amp
https://www.electronicosfantasticos.com/works/crt-tv-gamlan/

saw a short clip on birdsite of people using modified barcode scanners as a musical instrument and thought it was neat. looked into it more, and came across this performance, which may be the coolest fucking thing I've ever seen in my life https://youtu.be/iSq3y1WzfK0?t=143

I don't know why working in Clojure makes my brain want to Make Self-Contained Frameworks For Solving Every Problem instead of just Solving One Problem, And Then Maybe Another

But it's bad!! It's a bad way to work. I get real anxious and exhausted and stop making progress.