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My book *Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet* is now available in audiobook form in North America, narrated by me. (It was already available in paperback and ebook form in most of the world.)

To celebrate, I've published an excerpt from Chapter 10, DOOM, on my newly-minted blog. https://sharewareheroes.com/doomed.html
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Winning a hand of "Fortune's Foundation" in the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection will give you a fortune based on the last Major Arcana card that got sent to the piles.

This particular one comes at a time when I've been seriously thinking about taking a long vacation to Do Nothing. Y'know... it has a point.

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it took me 4 years to find this video again, and add it to my #ultima history archive. πŸ˜“

buried deep in the unsearchable bowels of youtube, is former Origin lead designer (of Crusader: No Remorse fame) Mark Vittek's hour-long video of the last day of Origin Systems as we knew it.

the first half hour is a drunken and disorderly house party at starr long's...

... it is proceeded (@36m00s) by an exceedingly rare look at the OSI offices, the day its new in-development projects like UO2 were all cancelled by EA.

while the studio would exist as a servicing body for #UltimaOnline expansion until 2004, Richard Garriott and the entire creative staff would go elsewhere after the cancellations

#RetroGaming #history

youtube.com/watch?v=duD6-h6LLb

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I feel like every person born before 1980 has a baby photo of them being bathed in a kitchen sink and I have a theory that most of it stopped when people got dishwashers and realized it was a much more convenient way to clean their children.

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RT @jellyscare
Found in the @Team17 archives today; renders for an unused Alien Breed table in 1998’s Addiction Pinball. The final version had Worms and World Rally Fever tables, but I don’t believe this one has ever been seen before. A really cool find.

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*describing a piano* well see; it's a mechanical keyboard that uses non-clicky, linear switches, but it's got this really unique row-staggered key arrangement where the upper row omits a bunch of keys

the layout takes a lot of getting used to; VERY different from Qwerty, but at the same time also different from Colemak; technically it's a distinct kind of chording system, probably most similar to a steno?

anyway I'm going to try running it as my daily driver for a day or two next week to put it thru the paces since it sounds like a lot of people really like it; will let you know how that goes!

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Here's a quick post about the practice of media archaeology and a piece of the history of a prominent #BBS.

The @mediaarchaeologylab has a box that was donated that used to be the controller for a BBS called The Thing. It ran DOS and had a physical telephone line adapter called an IPAD (not to be confused with the Apple device) that allowed up to 16 people at a time to dial in to the BBS, which was running a commercial BBS software called TBBS.

This BBS was and still remains an important piece of the history of BBSes, because it was mainly populated by artists based in New York in the late 90s. There is still a website (thing.net/) though it looks like it hasn't been updated in a while.

I've been trying to get this box online for a while - since the Before Times - but the hard drive (a whopping 425MB) has been...uncooperative. I've previously tried to use a number of IDE interface tools to mount the drive or image it, but the platters seem not to like it very much.

Well, yesterday I brought in a device that I've owned for years but never used. It's called a Logicube Forensic MD5. It's a standalone device designed to create forensically-valid clones of hard drives and their files for law enforcement investigators that they can use to demonstrate chain of custody. This model was designed for IDE/ATA hard drives, the generation this DOS box used. I've had it in a storage closet for going on 20 years and decided to bust it out.

And you know what? This thing WORKS GREAT. It made a drive image using onboard dd which I was able to mount in other tools. It did this in minutes. From what it looks like, the entire filesystem is intact. Not only was it loaded with an unreleased beta version of the IPAD software, it seems to have a lot of BBS files stored on it that bear scrutiny. The system seems to have last booted up in 1998, so many of these files haven't seen the light of day in nearly a quarter century.

And now...the real work begins on looking through those files to see what we can learn about this important piece of history.

#mediaarchaeology #forensics #DFIR #Logicube #eSoft

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Be careful what you wish for. You may be targeted with ads for similar items.

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my wife's company is trying to convince people to return to the office because one of their executives thinks its embarrassing when clients come by and the offices are empty, anyways, theatre students always need some pocket money and if someone wants to join my exciting new "potemkin village as a service" startup

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A thinking man's shoot-em-up, Gun Fury was a late #Amiga release due from Binary Emotions in 1997. A fun and good looking puzzler that disappeared without a trace.

More in our new post on the game: gamesthatwerent.com/2023/03/gu

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