RetroRetrospective

RetroRetrospective – Fun today with yesterday’s gear……..
Posts Tagged ‘Musings’

  Yes, you read that correctly – AppleWin for the Mac.  Well, not quite.  It is the same current release of AppleWin for Windows users, what I’ve done is use WineBottler to package up the download into a self contained app that uses Wine to provide the Windows API support. If you don’t want to compile Wine yourself, there are pre-compiled Wine installers on the WineBottler download page. So, why would I want to do this on my MacPro? That’s a very good question.  Most of the time I use Virtual ][ to emulate an Apple][, but when rebuilding my development environment to the MacPro I could find my license key, and as I was doing clean installs of my software that became a bit of a problem, so I’ve emailed and asked if it would be possible to retrieve my license keys (fingers crossed that comes through), but back to this story.

September 12th, 2013

Apple LaserWriter 16/600

81 Comments, Printing, by Michael.

In a blog post at the RetroMacCast,  I mentioned I’d picked up up an Apple LaserWriter 16/600 back in Nov’09, and  getting it on my network New Years Eve 2009.  As I said the printer came with an ethernet adaptor, so no problems putting it on the network, but without a control panel on the printer, how was I to set it up on my network so that my modern Mac and Linux PCs could find it, and print to it.

There is a new podcast coming from the Retrobits family by Earl Evans for all us  ‘ancient’ programmers.  Called “?NEXT WITHOUT FOR” it aims to discuss retro programming languages and systems, as well as new tools for current systems for creating programs to run on the old iron. This got me thinking and remembering, that back in the 80’s and 90’s I used a mainframe document generation system called DCF (Document Composition Facility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRIPT_(markup)) and as well as a GML (Generalised Markup Language) extension it had quite a powerful scripting language itself. One inadequacy that I encountered early on using DCF, was that there was very little loop control/processing available, so I created my own FOR/NEXT command, and to celebrate Earl’s new  “?NEXT WITHOUT FOR” podcast, I’ve decided to post the code for my FOR and NEXT commands.

I was tidying up my desk and found my copy of “Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer” by Tim Hartnell, I’d recently purchased off AbeBooks, and the little voice in the back of my head said, “This is it.  This is the Macrosoft project you’ve been looking for.”

November 21st, 2012

Classic Arcade Machines

6 Comments, Random Thoughts, by Michael.

Remember those days in the 80’s going to TimeZone, dropping in all those coins (or tokens), to play the latest machines, or playing Space Invaders down at the local shops.  Well, here is the podcast to bring those memories back, as well as find out the history of those games, and trivia about them that you just won’t know how you survived without.

October 2nd, 2012

How Old is Retro?

8 Comments, Random Thoughts, by Michael.

Thinking about the issues I had with setting up my KryoFlux USB FDD controller on my venerable Power Mac QuickSilver 2002, got me cogitating over the “How old is Retro?” argument. Many say the rule-of-thumb is 10 years.  On that basis, my QS2002 qualifies as the QS2002 range was released January 2002 as an update to the previous QuickSilver Power Macs, and ended July 2002, and then replaced by the “Mirror Door” series. but . . . . . .