I write about the past, present, and future of technology across three sites. imapenguin.com explores retro computing and programming fundamentals, milkcrunch.com covers modern software development and engineering culture, and evadot.com examines commercial spaceflight and the new space movement.
Posts
- Diving into Atari 8 Bit: Horizontal movement is pretty straightforward. Vertical is a little more tricky. Using an ML program and calling it via USR() makes it MUCH faster. Still having fun(ish). #octari
- Two weeks with a Coco 2 in September · imapenguin
- Two of my favorite distraction free productivity tools
- This chip is still on my desk. Even though I’m one of the people who has the thermal printer it goes in. The mystery was cooler than the reality. #commodore
- Diving into Atari 8 Bit: XIO is completely new to me. Combined with joystick inputs to draw a "road". Pretty fun. #octari
- Diving into Atari 8 Bit: More graphics learning and using TRAP which is very nice. Pretty impressed at how well graphics work even in BASIC. #octari
- Diving into Atari 8 Bit: I'm actually off today, but always 5 minutes to learn something. Quick color and plotting. Atari BASIC makes this stuff really easy. #octari
- Diving into Atari 8 Bit: Getting a handle on CTIA chip capabilities. Shading is a pretty cool feature #octari
- Diving into Atari 8 Bit: Reading joysticks is really easy, and Atari BASIC is good enough to make joystick movements smooth in BASIC. Neato #octari
- A little lunchtime fun: revisiting this old maze listing to see if we can get it to be just a little more random. Atari BASIC sure is slow #octari
- The 3.10a Firmware update for the Ultimate II+ seems to have resolved my long time C128 disk access errors on this particular machine. Neato. #commodore
- This perfectly sums up what my study focus for October will be.
- Test fitting the instrument panel trays. I may have found an actual use for TheC64 Mini. #commodore
- Floppy emulator arrived today for the Apple II. Plug it in, turn it on. Works. Too easy.
- In today’s episode of “stupid races between old computery things”: Apple IIe (128k RAM) vs unexpanded VIC-20 with a boring version of the 100 doors problem. Almost identical performance since they have the same processor running a very similar clock speeds. #commodore #apple
- Here’s what the Apple II external power supply installation looks like. It’s dramatically cooler inside the case now and no Rifa caps to explode. Even still works
- Spent most of the afternoon chopping wood. Time to move to figuring out how to get this Gotek floppy emulator into my Osborne 1.
- Mead I start today will be ready in April. Always plan ahead.
- A bunch of people have asked about my future proofing of the Apple IIe. The core of my strategy is this externally power supply that replaces the troublesome internal unit completely. Not “authentic” but it will keep a ton of heat away from the rest of the machine
- Always loved a green phosphor monitor for the PET. Took a risk of tearing apart the universe by putting my MiniPET on an Apple monitor. Seems like we’re all still here so far. #apple #commodore #10Print