(no subject)

[garote]

Gnahahaa!! So, I have, like, ten yards of serial cables in this plastic box. Wide cables, thin cables, grey ones, brown ones ... all kinds of little connecters on the ends. A few screwy null modems. Five gender-changers. I've lugged them from place to place, swearing that "I'll use them some day! Oh yes! Far in the future I'll desperately need a serial cable, and this box will save me! Wouldn't I feel like a cheesehead if I threw it away?"

Pbbtt. Well that day has come. I networked my Apple IIgs to my PC, through the wall, with a frankenstein assembly of parts. In a few hours I had a dozen disk-images on the PC, and had thrown TEN POUNDS of 5.25 media into the garbage can.

FREE AT LAST from the BAGGAGE OF OLD MEDIA. I think I'm going to toss the extra serial cables, too. On the way I recovered some real gems from the early 90's, my early days of programming. Here's the victory screen from a particularly sarcastic game my friend was working on:

And here's the victory screen from what appears to be a parody of every D&D-based game ever written for the Apple ][:

Well, the birthday dinner is over. I ate as much cake as I could, though I wasn't feeling my best. I was fatigued all day, and would have actually been happy just coming home and falling into bed. But hey, five people made a great Caesar Salad dinner for me! Couldn't snub them.

Got tickets for Lord of the Rings, 8pm, Wednesday. Sweeeeet.

Also opened the box for the third USB controller today. Had three people playing Gauntlet II. Total old-skool video game action. I'VE NOT SEEN SUCH BRAVERY.

Comments

Re: CABLES!!!

[(Anonymous)]

Back when we were kids, we once played with a simple program that we had written. All it did was take the contents of one computers' video memory and spew it out over the modem. The program on the other side would receive it, and spew it back to the screen. It sucked horribly. If one byte was corrupted or lost, the whole remainder of the picture was screwed. It was slow, inefficient, had no error correction or compression. But, it was an idea that we had, and we made it work. That was a lot of fun. It's not like I needed or even wanted the pictures- it would have been easier to put them on a disk and hand them to each other the next day at school. It was just fun because it was hacking. It proved to us that we understood how video memory, modems, data transfer, etc., worked, and it made us proud to see it working. We had no previous example or programming courses to tell us how it should be done; we just figured it out from reading the technical manuals and fooling around with it.

Anyway, I miss that. It accomplished nothing, and it wasn't made to impress anyone. It was just something fun for us to do.

Okay, I'll stop now. ;-)

-Android

Re: CABLES!!!

[garote]

Arrex and Beatings and I spent a couple days doing the modern version of this in Pasadena. Mr. Beatings broke out the Apple IIgs and wrote a sound-wave generator in BASIC, then we transferred them from Apple to Mac to PC to look at the spectral analysis. Arrex browsed Gnutella on his laptop and accumulated a pile of _terrible_ monkey themed songs, and booted into his GS emulator to find software for Mr. Beatings. I ran the PC's Apple IIgs emulator on the television set, and played Shadowgate for a while. We also recorded some of our dialogue. It's pretty geeky. :) "No, KIT-TY, these are MY CHEESY POOFS!"

So the geekiness remains :)