Notices by Damien Guard (damieng@mastodon.social)

Some of my favourite things - early Apple, floppy drives, and low-level mastery - in a single article.

Be back in a bit...

https://thomasw.dev/post/mac-floppy-emu/

Bitmap font hunting in old machines is an interesting challenge.

Basically there's no file system and all you have is a memory dump. There's no magic markers, no signatures, so PixelWorld has a few different algorithms primarily aimed at the ZX Spectrum to try and hunt them down.

Let's run through them....

Got Star Trek: The Next Generation on in background while I work and I can help feeling that the response to about half the communicator calls is "This could have been an email."

They are not very async.

Perhaps @foone has some ideas?

Okay crowd.

What on earth is this machine?

It's not a KayPro 1/2/4, Northstar, TRS-80, Compaq, Osbourne, or Zenith.

Twin 5.25" full-height drives mounted either size of a small CRT. Almost portable form factor but not actually portable.

Some kind of forgotten S-100 clone from the early 80s? Closest seems to be an "Kaycomp II" prototype but still not 100%.

The image on the CRT is superimposed, almost certainly monochrome.

#kaypro #8bit #cpm

8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2023 Day 4

GEOS64

The GEOS desktop UI from Berkley Systems in 1986 is an incredible feat - achieving what took the Mac a 16-bit processor and over twice the memory.

The 64's resolution required carefully designed typography and "BSW" system fonts were proportionally rendered to great effect.

Included here are bold and non-bold as well as the tiny desktop icon font as a bonus!

https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/GEOS64.zip

#adventoffonts #8bit #geos #c64

@foone ah that makes sense. Copy protection is crazy. Some great coveage of the Apple 2 stuff based on 4ams works in PoC || GTFO..

@foone You can achieve the same effect just writing lots of disk-level 0's (not data 0's which will be MFM or FM encoded to not be 0's on the disk) - aka Weak Bits.