I finished all Infocom games during covid (and read all Digital Antiquarian articles since then). Despite being very interested in the games, I knew I wouldn't have energy to literally beat them. So I played with walkthroughs, stopping to examine things and enjoy the scenery, so to speak. There was no challenge, but I still had fun. Somewhat like visiting a museum.
I think they will still do it. Steam has a ton of games with local storage and modding is highly encouraged in many of them. Additionally, there's a growing interest in classic gaming, in particular NES/SNES, even from people who didn't live through the early generations. These games will remain eternally hackable.
Fairly often and I'm not from Chicago. If I could time travel, 1893 would be on my short list of destinations because of the Chicago world fair.
Another one would be 1851, the year of the first world fair in London. The old fairs would already be awesome for a modern visitor, but I can't imagine what the people living then must have felt, seeing things like electricity for the first time.
There isn't any good evidence of how many times Joplin played at the Midway. Most of the evidence is from interviews decades later. Similarly, we actually don't know what kind of music his band was playing. It could have been early rags, but if they were, they didn't make waves the way lots of other art and ideas that debuted at the fair did. Certainly, ragtime was not associated with the Fair in subsequent memory.
In next week's post I am actually going to discuss the way the fair is considered the beginning of certain ideas (in urban planning specificalyl) that already existed—but maybe need a big white puffy outfit to truly debut.
Since Maple Leaf Rag wasn't published until 1895 maybe they felt it wasn't ragtime until then? Although my understanding, which I thought was pretty conventionally agreed on, has always been that Joplin appearing at the fair was what helped make ragtime a national pop phenomenon of his time. But maybe I should reconsider that because ragtime didn't become big until after 96-97.
The Apple II+ was my first Apple. My second one was a Macbook Air M3!
The Apple II has a very interesting and quirky software collection. Quite a few weird little games made by bedroom coders, along many of the earliest titles of the big names.
I highly recommend anyone who's interested in "retro games" to explore the Apple II collection. Many are unplayable by modern standards, but you can use walkthroughs and save states to see what these games have to offer. Today "retro" is largely about consoles, but there are only so many times one can watch NES speedruns on Youtube!
I created a program like that back in the day. In my case, I recorded my voice through the "MIC" input and played it back through the TV. A few seconds of sampled audio required the entire available memory. While I fully understood what was going on, I thought it was magical that the Spectrum could "speak with my voice".
On ZX-Spectrum? There was no "MIC" input on ZX-Spectrum, not that I know of. I was in high school at the time with only a rough understanding of the hardware but it was kinda obvious to me that whatever I plugged into the casette input port was only read as "0" or "1" by the IN <port> (forgot which) instruction. So not really possible to record voice at the time (didn't even know of PCM anyway), but I tried to decode Morse transmissions from radio. Never got anywhere with the software but my ear got good enough at some point that I could decode them myself by hearing :)
With proper volume control, even one bit could probably sound voice-like enough to a person in the 1980s.
It may be feasible to retrieve a pcm for a very short clip by playing the same recording at different levels which then could be converted on the same machine to a sequence of opcodes playing a more realistic voice.
There was Z80 code to record from the MIC socket in one of the small books (Melbourne House maybe?) that came out in the early 1980s. I remember borrowing it from the library and it worked! Heavily quantized of course by the snapping to 2 or 0.
Also some games had sound samples, Activision’s Ghostbusters had a couple.
Nope. I did the same thing myself with my Spectrum. I guess I was 14. I didn't have a microphone so I tried it with my dad's stereo headphones. I got the idea to try it after looking at the Z80 machine code of cassette saving and loading routines. Maybe it was also after ETX came out, first game I remember with speech samples. (Terrible game). I forget the details now but it's all about the timing between turning the mic/speaker on or off.
The Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in some ways it's more important than the mighty C64.
It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually afford one. It was the VW Beetle of computers.
I was jealous of the speccy basic. The ms basic the c64 shipped was anemic, you had to have deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge to do anything with it. Custom characters and character gfx were the most accessible for kids. I pieced together switching out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.
It came with a very detailed book. And Commodore sold another even-more-detailed-yet-still-cheap book that was so complete that it even included a big fold-out schematic diagram of the motherboard.
Would I have preferred to be able to do DRAW CIRCLE 0, 1, 23 instead of a long series of POKEs? Sure, because I was a kid and wanted to do things the easy way.
But those POKEs taught you about bits vs. bytes, and how computer memory worked, and how bitmaps worked, and about raster, and optimizing for speed, and ML interrupts, and math, and concepts like XOR, and all the important parts of the computer.
I've wondered about whether modern computers should come with the comprehensive manuals of the era. The Raspberry Pi 400 attempted to do it. But the problem isn't as much that companies don't want to ship these big manuals, but it's that 1) Nobody would read them because of the Internet and, most importantly, 2) you can't create comprehensive documentation of a modern computer in a reasonably sized book.
The biggest change from the good old days is that one could truly hope to fully understand a machine. The C64 was a bit harder, but not impossible. But the Speccy was simple enough that a near-100% understanding was achievable. This feeling of full control is what we lost.
If they don't want to print and ship a manual, offer a PDF online for curious people to download. Problem solved.
Or, do what my car from 2014 did: The manual came on a USB stick.
The problem isn't distribution, it's laziness and greed. Documentation takes time and money. It's seen as a cost by people who don't understand the benefits.
I think a proper manual for a modern computer at the same detail level as the Commodore one would be much bigger than a car manual! It's not as much printing costs, but developing that documentation would cost a lot. I think that would make sense for big venders like Dell, Apple etc, but I wonder if anyone would actually read it. It's too much information...
And, of course, with the Speccy you had the Microdrive - an affordable middle ground between tape recorder and a disk drive. I still remember the excitement of not having to record/rewind/play (to verify). Good old times...
They had high market shares in countries with much smaller populations than the US, so in terms of number of countries (particularly in Europe and South America), it dominated in far more of them than the C64 did.
I had a ZX Spectrum, and at some point my dad got me a C128.
I was taken aback by how poor its BASIC was in C64 mode, but on the other hand, adding sprites that moved freely across the screen without being bound to the 32x24 character grid felt like magic to me.
A relative had a Mac running Racter back in the day. I was a child but I played with it quite a bit. I found it magical. I thought I was looking at ChatGPT, but obviously it was a trick. A few years later I realized that Racter wasn't that good, but I've always wanted a "Racter that actually works"... It was a long wait, but we got it for better or worse!
