Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

After setting up a series of TRS-80 emulators on my “Linux portable” and compiling an Apple II emulator there as well, my thoughts turned to Mini vMac. I’ve used that particular program for some years; perhaps the thought of trying out one more way to get it running was more enticing than a different thought that “if I wind up moving to Linux, this will maintain one connection to at least the Macintosh in days of yore...”
( Software evolutions )

One motivation in the mix that got me installing Linux on another of my old computers was to take one more crack at getting a particular emulator running. To begin with, I had compiled “Virtual T” on macOS. As I poked away at it, though, I found its emulation of the floppy disk drive that could be interfaced with the TRS-80 Model 100 didn’t quite work. This wasn’t the only way to get programs and files into and out of the emulated portable. However, after I’d found the disk drive did work with the Windows version of the emulator (running via Wine, but an earlier version lacking a few features), curiosity had me trying to see just what the situation was with Linux.
( Curious byways )

“There were computers from other companies than Radio Shack?” seems just amusing enough a realisation for me to use it in explanations of how I got to delving into “old computers,” but I do wonder about it oversimplifying things. In any case, there have been things about the particular computer I was using when I came to the realisation just mentioned that I learned well after the fact. It doesn’t seem that many years ago that I was looking at the list of software on a Color Computer archive and really picked up on a program named “TW-80” to the point of wondering about its name. From reading old issues of The Rainbow magazine I’d known about a word processor for the “CoCo” called Telewriter. When The Rainbow’s editorial content had still been dot matrix printout, full-page, typeset ads for Telewriter had promised to transcend a text display that might seem unpromising for word processing (with sixteen lines of thirty-two characters each and no lowercase, just capital letters in “reverse video” boxes to indicate them) by drawing characters on the highest resolution graphics screen. I’d known how the program had become Telewriter-64 as the Color Computer reached the 8-bit memory limit and then transformed into Telewriter-128 on the Color Computer 3, which had a much improved text display. The not quite in-between number, not mentioned in a Rainbow article on word processors that had shaped my awareness of the options there at the end of the 1980s, tickled my fancy enough to load TW-80 in an emulator. I sorted out it pressed the equally improved graphics of the “CoCo 3” into service.
( Listing included )

Looking again at the Wikipedia articles promoted as recently improved, I glanced at one about “sports fans,” got a bit more specific by looking up “fantasy sports,” and then turned to the description of an IBM computer applied to that pastime early on. Heading on to how that computer was constructed from “cards” combining what would now seem simple electronic components, I then looked at the similar system of the Digital Equipment Corporation. That had me thinking back to the AltaVista search engine, and then I looked forward to Kagi, which I still haven’t sampled yet to see if I want to start paying for its service. An offsite link did appear critical of it, though, so I took a look at it and noticed the piece offered some faint praise of a small search engine I hadn’t quite heard of before. Once I’d managed to find Marginalia Search through a different search engine, my first impulse was to type in “MSTings,” and that managed to list part of my home page first. As gratifying as that was, I did then remember that the very first time I’d connected to the Internet (somewhat in advance of even AltaVista) I’d been thinking about the Infocom adventure games that hadn’t had a hint book in their economy collection (even if the first such collection’s hint book, in not being able to use the special ink and developer pen of the original “InvisiClues,” pretty much gave me the solution to everything any time I tried to find the subtlest starter hint). I didn’t have quite as much success now just turning up results with my first effort, but a bit of prompt refinement did work a bit better.

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 )

Keeping up with a sort of digest of “Color Computer news” (it was where I’d learned about the regional antique computer exposition I went to last year), I saw a pointer to a video promising a detailed look at a game ported to computers including the “CoCo 3,” Rescue on Fractalus. The game (an early work from Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts) was a sort of science fiction flight simulator where you flew down valleys and over mountains generated via what was just becoming a buzzword, “fractals,” shooting alien gun turrets off the ridges and landing to rescue crashed pilots. While my recollections have my family only buying the game during the final closeout sales at Radio Shack on Color Computer software, by which the state of the art for people who’d bought more expensive computers had become Wing Commander, I’d played Rescue on Fractalus enough to take some interest in the video.
( Returning to the rescue )

With extra time on my hands, I’ve been getting some reading done. When my thoughts turned to the more purely ebook-focused lending program my city’s library makes available, I browsed through the categories I’d set it to focus on some time ago and had one title catch my eye. Once I’d looked a little further into Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, I was further intrigued by recognising it was by Keith Houston, mentioned in the cover image to be the author of Shady Characters. I’d found a copy of that book in the remaindered and reduced-priced section of a bookstore years ago and been amused by its histories of punctuation marks notable and not so notable; if this newer history of pocket calculators was as interesting it would seem worth reading.
( Summing things up )

As with other unusual interests, “old computers” have been the subject of get-togethers of various type. For some time, though, whenever I saw notices of conventions and expositions on that topic they’ve been far enough away going to them seemed too big a deal for me.
( A change at last )

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.

On some level I’ve always been a bit distanced from most computer and video games. This stretches all the way from the low-resolution TRS-80 and four-colour Color Computer knockoffs of games for other platforms to the modern complaints that Apple never does enough to get developers putting games on its (conventional) computers. In these recent days of getting my hands on Apple Silicon myself, though, I did start thinking about certain claims about a program I’ve used for less demanding things (including running a particular Color Computer 3 emulator, if not so much to “play games” for it these days...)

Once I’d installed the Steam client at last in CrossOver, I turned to some games I hadn’t been able to play since (or hadn’t got around to playing until) “32-bit support” was taken out of the Macintosh operating system. The first one I took a chance on was Portal, which I had finished and replayed before, but may remain the latest “now that’s a real game running on real computers” game I’ve taken on. That it worked at all was something. There were occasional unfortunate moments where the program would freeze as a fragment of sound looped endlessly (the most unfortunate after managing at last a string of “place new portals with seconds to spare”), but I was able to get my computer to where I could “force quit” the game. In the end, too, I got to the closing credits of the game, still a little conscious of my computer’s cooling fan having to speed up to where I could hear it. I’m not sure how many more Steam games I might be able to get running the same way. At the same time, I’m aware of having faced “not playing a lot of computer games” through frittering my time away in different ways.