Programmer, gamer, collector of retro computers and video games, making 8-bit Youtube videos, games with @P1XLgames, nerd music with @BedfordLvlExp
Joined April 2016
- Tweets 15,893
- Following 4,229
- Followers 9,142
- Likes 31,319
3,351 Photos and videos
Doing some unrelated research and found this 1971 newsclipping about The Consumers Association of Thunder Bay. Back when you had to put on your best hat or fix your hair to go complain about things, instead of lying around at home in your pyjamas.
1
3
193
Just found this photo of my Commodore 64 from the '80s. I've brightened it enough to figure out what was on the monitor: Monty Plays Scrabble. Must have been a particularly epic score for Dad and he tried taking a pic with the flash on. Oops.
4
2
22
1,205
Robin @ 8-Bit Show And Tell retweeted
May 15
Everyone’s seen the 205.5 maze 1-liner. But I just noticed that in the lowercase/uppercase character set you also get a kind of maze, with teensy tiny paths, if you use 222.5. Hopefully you can see it in the photos. #C64
5
9
117
3,415
ADAM - an early (1985) auto repair shop management system is one of the most contrived acronyms I've run into: "the" AutomateD repAir service Managment system.
That's even worse than HAL 9000 supposedly standing for "Heuristic ALgorithmic".
3
7
655
I'm also a fan of the use of quotes around "The". And no, this has nothing to do with Coleco's ADAM. It's a multi-terminal system.
1
216
Robin @ 8-Bit Show And Tell retweeted
May 6
I'm genuinely surprised that Elon hasn't made a Grok device that fits inside a HAL 9000 replica. This is one of my favorite things on my shelf, and you can easily fit an ESP32 with a speaker and microphone in it. HAL/Grok would be SOOO much cooler than Alexa.
5
4
42
1,107
I'm noticing that obituaries frequently have off-by-one errors. They'll say someone died, for example, "in their 93rd year", which means aged 92, when they were actually 93. Or even if the obituary is correct, it will then get interpreted as being aged 93 by a reader.
5
3
464
In case it's not clear, if an obituary says someone died (tragically) in their "1st year" then that means they were age 0. In their "2nd year" they are aged 1. It's always off by one.
1
174
Yesterday Chad was telling me that the Commodore 64 doesn't have a 66-key keyboard (it does!), and today it's misidentifying countries. For my purposes, it's pretty much always wrong, at least at first, until I ask "are you sure?".
1
12
811
There it goes again, correct answer on the second try. But I have no idea why it thinks my definition is "66 pressable keys" as I said no such thing.
2
5
270
New video about whether the Commodore 64's SID is capable of playing microtonal music, such as the bassline from Angine de Poitrine's song "Sarniezz". Music theory and BASIC POKEing abound!
youtu.be/5bZKlIbSB_c
2
1
14
457
Robin @ 8-Bit Show And Tell retweeted
Apr 9
For no particular reason, during lunch, I did a 10PRINT on the @SwissMicros R47. It's from the bottom up, but I think it captures the 10PRINT spirit.
4
3
43
3,283
Robin @ 8-Bit Show And Tell retweeted
Mar 31
I let a Commodore 64 run for three and a half days straight. 87 billion instructions, 303 billion clock cycles, 5.9 million candidate settings tested. It cracked an Enigma message in German without knowing a single character of the plaintext.
🧵1/2
52
193
1,945
277,133
Robin @ 8-Bit Show And Tell retweeted
Who remembers being surprised to see "Directory Art" after you typed:
LOAD "$", 8
LIST
Instead of a boring list of filenames and block counts, the entire directory screen transformed into a beautiful piece of directory art (dir art / d/art). The surprise hit hard the first time you saw it on a cracked game disk; I was like, "What just happened?!"
The drive's "directory" isn't a normal file — when you ask for "$" (the special filename meaning "show directory"), the drive generates a fake BASIC program on the fly.
The first two bytes are the load address (like any PRG file), then it spits out tokenized BASIC lines: line numbers (those 18, 40, etc.), the block counts as "PRINT" statements, filenames in quotes, file types like PRG or DEL, and finally "107 BLOCKS FREE." and "READY." as the last "lines."
Normally this just looks like a messy program listing when you LIST it.
But clever sceners realized: "Hey, we can overwrite those 'lines' with PETSCII block characters (like the diamond borders, checker patterns, hearts, etc.) while keeping the structure intact so the drive still thinks it's a valid directory."
They used deleted files (type DEL) or carefully placed dummy entries to draw in the 16-column filename area, turning the directory into ASCII/PETSCII art.
When this popped up on your C64, it was amazing. Who remembers seeing directory art on their Commodore 64?
9
18
191
11,901
Boa is an Apple II exclusive from 1983. They don't make box art like this anymore.
4
3
23
609
I finally got my own box of ultra-rare 3.17cm diskettes! Thanks to @canadianretrot1 for lending me his earlier.
2
5
48
1,492
VIRUS WARNING: on the cover of the manual for Menace for the Commodore 64!
2
3
27
793
New video about shiru8bit's fantastic "Back to the PET" demo, and how to make it endlessly loop for display at the upcoming Indy Classic computer and video game show.
youtu.be/IXoZoogMsXA
8
26
1,454