Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

In the final stages of preparing a post about some new-to-me Apple II emulators, I went back to the GitHub page for the “Mariani” emulator to retrieve its URL. While there, I happened to notice the number of “branches” to the code, and was curious enough to take a look at them. Spotting something called “delete-key-mapping” was sufficient to get me thinking I might keep delving into Mariani after my post was up.
( To correct your mistakes )

New programs (even if only “new to me”) help keep “old computers” from becoming the fixed entity the first part of that name might imply. New gadgets play their own role, but most often I try out the new programs with emulators, which can provide their own novelty. A little while ago I learned about a MAME “front end” called Ample. As if acknowledging how it ran on the modern Macintosh it focused altogether on Apple computers starting out, but within that bound it did make it easier to preload disk images, fill virtual expansion slots, and enable “CRT emulation” without adding command line arguments or scrolling back and forth through MAME’s own austere menus. Having already tried out the emulation MAME now offers of the early colour Macs, I was willing to try out Ample a bit.

A while after that, I went back to the program’s source code page and discovered some Tandy computers had been added without me noticing, focusing on the Color Computers. I had noticed the Atari ST listed in Ample’s list of machines before, and thought a bit about how it had also used a Motorola 68000 and had been greeted with proclamations that its low price would surely lead to software dominance, only to wind up supporting gadgets that let it run Macintosh programs. The new addition was just a bit more of an unusual juxtaposition. Much has been made of the Apple II and the original TRS-80 being introduced in the same year; something has been made of the cheaper, more widely available TRS-80 far outselling the Apple II in the 1970s (when Commodore partisans aren’t trying to make a similar point about the PET or at least talking up how it booted into BASIC and had lowercase as a standard). I am conscious even so that Radio Shack computer users seemed more conscious of Apple computers among “the competition” than Apple users were of Radio Shack computers. In any case, I downloaded the new version, aware of a comment or two insisting the dedicated Color Computer emulators that can be made to run on the Mac still have certain limitations. What I found straight off, though, was that the Color Computer 3 program I’d first emulated via MAME, the graphical word processor Max-10, still has a problem with its “keyclick” sound.

Moving to an “Apple Silicon”-powered computer, I made some small effort to look for updates to applications I use to bring them up to “running natively.” One image browser didn’t require that search, if because I’d compiled an update myself. That program, called Xee, had a few tricks to its interface and features that had suited my own case only to sort of spoil me for moving on to anything else when its “current” version stopped being updated. After a while I had managed to turn up code for a previous version with some updates applied, but there’d been no downloadable version available. However, despite knowing next to nothing about “Mac programming” myself beyond crossing my fingers and starting Xcode’s build progress, that had been enough to produce a working version again. Noticing a different “fork” of the code with different updates a while later, I had even managed to copy enough revisions out of the first repository to produce a version that now said it was “Universal.”
( An animated issue )

When I bought a new-to-me refurbished mini-iPhone I was offered trial periods for Apple’s subscription services. I’ve run through some of the trials and cancelled them before starting to be charged, but I did go ahead and pay for a month of “Apple TV+” to finish “Masters of the Air.”
( Some other things sampled )

When rumours circulating for a while gained solidity and Apple began another great processor transition, my iMac was about five years old and the edges of its screen had turned sort of pink. The impression its backlight was wearing out was enough, combined with positive reports about the new “Apple silicon” chips elaborated upon from those in the “iDevices,” to raise thoughts of joining in the migration, just as I’d once moved from the 68030 to PowerPC and from the G4 to Intel. However, the thought I just sort of wanted to see that new hardware in person before putting money down had to face the thought I should refrain from anything so frivolous for public health reasons. A year later, the iMac itself made the processor transition and was repackaged in multiple colours to boot, but I still thought it would be healthiest to keep limiting “going out” to absolute necessities. When at last I worked up the resolve, or threw caution to the wind, to the point of stepping into an Apple Store, the iMac in particular wasn’t quite new any more. I kept waiting to see what would happen next, even though my own iMac had passed the point where new versions of macOS could be installed on it and the edges of its screen might have looked that much more worn.
( New rumours circulating )

Happening on an “Apple news site” post a little while ago about how to emulate the original Apple I single-board computer using a system-specific program I’ve had installed for some time was a bit of a surprise. I did get to thinking, though, how having already tried out OpenEmulator’s emulation of that computer did add something to an awareness of certain dark comments about the survivors (who in this case haven’t played by “hacker rules” for years) having written the history books and the Apple I not being all that useful regardless of the lovable “Woz” having designed it. It could, I suppose, do a bit more than an Altair 8800 with no expansion cards (I gather the earlier computer in that unenhanced state couldn’t do much more than blink its panel lights and produce RFI interference capable of evoking musical static from nearby AM radios), but rather less than an Altair or other “S-100 bus” machine well equipped. When I got to the point where the article mentioned how to get an Apple I version of Wordle running, though, my interest picked up and I resolved to start up that particular option in OpenEmulator once more.
( A squashed-down game )

Following recommendations, I went back to the lube-and-tire shop where I’d just had my all-season tires installed on my car so that the wheel nuts could be re-torqued. As I was waiting for the technician to head out with his torque wrench, I looked in the windows of the cell phone repair shop in the same parking lot. Having had the battery in my iPhone replaced recently at a different shop, I might not have been expecting to see much. What I did notice got my attention.
( An old browned-beige computer )

It seemed a tiny accomplishment to manage to compile some lightly updated source code for an old image browser program called Xee and once more get a personal copy of a program that can both step and jump through through a folder of saved pictures and step forward and back through the frames of an animated GIF as the mood strikes. The tininess came from the feeling I didn’t actually understand how the Objective-C source code I’d come across worked, and couldn’t adjust it so that Xee opens pictures at the same size Preview does, doubling pixels to deal with a “Retina Display.” Keeping Xee locked in “low resolution mode” got a bit more complicated after a system software upgrade and reminded me “all programs are ephemeral.”

In the midst of wondering if I could learn not just Apple’s Objective-C successor Swift but how to create a proper Macintosh application with it, I did get around to experimenting with Xcode a bit more. Along the way, I began to wonder about an item in an Xee submenu called “Remember Zoom Level.” I managed to compile a different set of updates to Xee’s source code, but wound up with a program that crashed every time it tried to open a picture. I resorted to poring over the revisions made to the code that had worked and commenting out some particular commands, and all of a sudden I did have another working program that could remember to scale everything up to two hundred percent. Trying to shuffle every revision from two sets together did wind up breaking the program again, though, even if I got to the point of compiling something that says it’s ready to run on “Apple Silicon,” which I don’t have access to.

Keeping half an eye on the “1-bit video player for the compact Macintosh” MacFlim, I got to thinking it was time to “build” a new version of its video encoder and keep up with changes to the program. All I got out of Terminal, though, was error messages. Turning anyway to the updated player program supplied on a disk image, I discovered it couldn’t show my old encodings. Some not quite casual searching for the program’s joking name (which comes from a French movie) turned up a comment that someone else had had the same problem, but had managed to compile the encoder using Ubuntu.
( Multiple disk images later... )

Nudged by a mere indirect reference, I turned back to a particular “first-person shooter” from the mid-1990s. Although I’d played Bungie’s Marathon for quite a while, I know it’s been some time too since I last really dove into its action. Replacing both the “Aleph One” open-source engine now used with the old game files and the all-in-one bundles of the original games also available, I noticed the date stamps on the old programs were from before I’d got my current computer, and it’s been around for a while itself. I suppose that disconnection had to do with starting to use wireless keyboards without numeric keypads, which had provided me Marathon’s movement keys. Intent on at least trying “the way everyone says they’re playing these sorts of games these days,” I tried out the default setup of the game bundle, which moved ahead, backed up, and sidestepped with keys on the left-hand side of the keyboard and turned left and right and looked up and down with your “pointing device.” My trackpad, though, did seem a bit too sensitive that way.
( somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting )