Search results

Watch this video.

Those are the same four folio editions I have! What a coincidence. My copy of Zork I is from 1985. The only notable thing about it is this bitchin’ StartupScreen. I don’t think Infocom did this for many other titles. Now we’re really digressing! Apologies.

@Crutch Combing through 4am’s work and my own collection of Infocom games from this era, the earliest creation date I’ve found is from June 1984. A couple other 1984 titles are dated August and October. Their “Get Info” dialogs in the Finder say either “Mac ZIP” or “Macintosh ZIP” and they all...

We’re digressing quite nicely here, so I’d like to point out another thing about the Mac 512k Blog’s latest post: the guest comment about Infocom’s earliest Mac offerings. According to the Digital Antiquarian, Infocom opted to write their own window manager. These versions appear to be...

For about 12 hours I was unable to reach it from home network on CenturyLink DSL or my cloud box on DigitalOcean. Also, isitdownorjust.me said it was not available. But now I can reach it from my home connection. Still down from my cloud box. Oh well! Is this a new blog post? It is dated...

Now the entire MacGUI site is down. I hope it’s just a temporary problem. A recent blog post from David said he was dealing with an aggressive scraper/crawler.

Paul’s personal site at gryphel.net went dark in the last 30 days. It was hosted with Lightlink, which has been winding down since its operator, Homer Wilson Smith, died last December. Mini vMac’s site at www.gryphel.com, however, is hosted at DigitalOcean, which supports auto-pay via PayPal...

Here-here, aye-aye on all of this. The Mac 512k Blog is scholarly and valuable. Curiously, downloads from the MacGUI Vault are available again.

Springtime is here and so are its homeowning chores, so this project continues to languish. It was nice to hunker down and make progress when the weather was cold and snowy. Oh well. Tonight I blew the cobwebs off my code and made sure I didn’t leave anything undocumented. Already I’m...

@Crutch You hit on one of MAME’s weak spots for me: I find the mouse to be really squirrelly with the 128k, 512k, and Plus. From what you’re telling me, it’s actually worse on later models?! That’s terrible. Maybe the ADB emulation is shaky. Sorry, I don’t have any tips for you here. MAME’s...

Progress on MacKaboom has slowed because our house is getting renovated and my day job is draining. Also, the thing I’m trying to do right now—data structures and routines for the game sprites—has been tough to figure out. And I’ve been fussing over the artwork. My first pass on the “mad...

Hang on while I send you my standard NDA. ;) Kidding! The attached disk image has the 128k ROM Sound Driver baked into MacKaboom’s resource fork. Have a look, help yourself, &cetera.

@Crutch: Most of the time I am using Mini vMac for its conveniences; all those Gryphel Project tools are indispensible. For debugging, TMON is usually good enough. But sometimes (often) my code breaks TMON! That’s when I turn to MAME. It has “god-tier debugging”, according to 4am, who has been...

Funny you should ask! I just “connected the dots” myself when posting that screenshot of ConCode a few days ago. The dots tell you what addressing modes are supported by the operand based on its memory size. For instance, BCHG supports waaaaay more addressing modes if the destination operand is...

Hey, glad you like them! A good chunk of my adolescence was spent doodling in FatBits, making StartupScreens, customizing icons, vandalizing PICT resources, and drawing art for my World Builder game. 1-bit pixel artists like Mark Stephen Pierce, Trici Venola, Robyn Miller, and Mike Saenz were my...

100% true. The Resource Manager was a stroke of brilliance, and a gateway for my younger self to explore the Macintosh visually and modularly. Before them—and on other computers—I just stared incomprehensibly at lakes of hexadecimal soup. Spelunking with ResEdit was exciting, dangerous...

I just tried it on the original 128k Macintosh. It works, but there’s room for only one sound to play. Granted, many of the sounds right now are luxurious in length because all development is being done on a 4-megabyte Mac Plus. An alternate slate of abbreviated sound effects will be necessary...

Yes! I should have mentioned that it was tested on a Fat Mac. The only dependencies are the same global variables that are in the 64K ROM.

A light bulb went off in my head tonight: why not use the better Sound Driver that’s in the 128K ROM? So I copied its bytes and pasted them into a DRVR resource inside MacKaboom. There’s no way this crazy idea will work, right?! HAHAHAHA IT DID! Seriously, I cackled. What a great feeling...

And there it is: a Device Manager Error when you quit the application. There is some housekeeping in the Device Manager that is not getting done correctly after the contents of the I/O queue are tampered with directly. Fortunately there are toolbox routines for managing this queue. MacKaboom’s...