The mid-'90s began May 1993. Science doesn't care what you think.

Collecting never ends. First you try to get all the Atarisoft C64 cartridges, loose. Then you try to get them all boxed. Then you find out there are one-line and two-line Ms. Pac-Man box title variations!

Doing some unrelated research and found this 1971 newsclipping about The Consumers Association of Thunder Bay. Back when you had to put on your best hat or fix your hair to go complain about things, instead of lying around at home in your pyjamas.

Just found this photo of my Commodore 64 from the '80s. I've brightened it enough to figure out what was on the monitor: Monty Plays Scrabble. Must have been a particularly epic score for Dad and he tried taking a pic with the flash on. Oops.

Everyone’s seen the 205.5 maze 1-liner. But I just noticed that in the lowercase/uppercase character set you also get a kind of maze, with teensy tiny paths, if you use 222.5. Hopefully you can see it in the photos. #C64

I'm genuinely surprised that Elon hasn't made a Grok device that fits inside a HAL 9000 replica. This is one of my favorite things on my shelf, and you can easily fit an ESP32 with a speaker and microphone in it. HAL/Grok would be SOOO much cooler than Alexa.

New video about whether the Commodore 64's SID is capable of playing microtonal music, such as the bassline from Angine de Poitrine's song "Sarniezz". Music theory and BASIC POKEing abound! piped.video/5bZKlIbSB_c

For no particular reason, during lunch, I did a 10PRINT on the @SwissMicros R47. It's from the bottom up, but I think it captures the 10PRINT spirit.

It's an @8BitShowAndTell kinda morning.

I let a Commodore 64 run for three and a half days straight. 87 billion instructions, 303 billion clock cycles, 5.9 million candidate settings tested. It cracked an Enigma message in German without knowing a single character of the plaintext. 🧵1/2

Who remembers being surprised to see "Directory Art" after you typed: LOAD "$", 8 LIST Instead of a boring list of filenames and block counts, the entire directory screen transformed into a beautiful piece of directory art (dir art / d/art). The surprise hit hard the first time you saw it on a cracked game disk; I was like, "What just happened?!" The drive's "directory" isn't a normal file — when you ask for "$" (the special filename meaning "show directory"), the drive generates a fake BASIC program on the fly. The first two bytes are the load address (like any PRG file), then it spits out tokenized BASIC lines: line numbers (those 18, 40, etc.), the block counts as "PRINT" statements, filenames in quotes, file types like PRG or DEL, and finally "107 BLOCKS FREE." and "READY." as the last "lines." Normally this just looks like a messy program listing when you LIST it. But clever sceners realized: "Hey, we can overwrite those 'lines' with PETSCII block characters (like the diamond borders, checker patterns, hearts, etc.) while keeping the structure intact so the drive still thinks it's a valid directory." They used deleted files (type DEL) or carefully placed dummy entries to draw in the 16-column filename area, turning the directory into ASCII/PETSCII art. When this popped up on your C64, it was amazing. Who remembers seeing directory art on their Commodore 64?

Boa is an Apple II exclusive from 1983. They don't make box art like this anymore.