Recent content by jkheiser

I’ve been using this machine a lot recently to play Ray Dunakin’s “A Mess o’ Trouble” and I was wrong: its ticking is just as frequent as yours, but I really have to prick up my ears because my brain has learned to tune it out.

My Plus does the exact same thing as soon as it’s done with its memory-testing routines, which take forever because it has four megabytes of RAM. I will say that the ticking on mine isn’t quite as frequent as yours, but it’s been going on for so many years that I’ve become inured to it. This...

The original Mac had great sound, but at great cost: using all four voices of the original sound driver devoured half of the cycles on a 68K. https://folklore.org/Sound_By_Monday.html You can see the toll incurred by increasing the number of voices in Space Quest II’s prologue. A spaceship...

Sadly, no. This project has stalled indefinitely.

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...