Notices by Tim 🎮 (timixretroplays@digipres.club)

@foone there is a typo in the main binary in Mechwarrior 1 from 1989 where a particular battlemech is called the "PHONIX HAWK". Correcting it causes the game to freeze when loading the menu on-planet. I don't understand it because the phoenix hawk is not the only 'mech with a 12 letter name.

I don't know if it shipped like that or if it's part of the copy protection crack and is the reason behind the game auto-passing levels if you put a friendly mechwarrior in one of those 'mechs.

@foone did IBM keep their enterprise brands? I'd go an i-series laptop. Gimme an AS-400m

@foone thanks!

Did you know: you're allowed to just go and put whatever strap you like on a wristwatch!?

I felt like being a little louder than usual today, so here's a rainbow strap on my nerdiest watch.

@foone I'm not in love with it either. I've learned to say "text or WhatsApp me" when exchanging numbers with someone and they can just latch onto whichever option they understand best

@foone halfway across the river, the scorpion begins to disassemble the frog, and says "I am sorry, but I couldn't help myself. It's my charac-- oh shit a Varta? This is your lucky day, pal"

K1n9_Duk3, a skilled #retrogaming modder and researcher, has just released a modern level editor for Epic Megagames's 1994 PC hit, #Xargon. Get it here if this sounds like your thing: https://archive.org/details/xmod_1000/

Ah yes, the three genders:

@jpm art.

@jpm also I might want a couple of these when you reach v1.0, unless someone starts making a 5V-tolerant Pi Pico soon

@foone out of context, the dissonance between the text and image in this post is art

@foone actual generated photos? Not even just stock photos of a thing where someone was too lazy to take real ones, but actual AI-generated images? How do they expect to justify it when people demand returns for "item not as described"? The AI descriptions are bad enough, but those are at least munged together from the 5-6 boxes a seller ticks to categorise a thing first.

Here's a thread on how the Gravis GamePad Pro - a game controller with ten digital buttons - was made to work on the PC gameport interface, which actually only supports a total of four buttons. You've probably never actually wondered about that, but you very probably *have* wondered about where all those zeroes and ones they talk about in computing come into things, and this thread has that, too! 🧵

#retrogaming #retrocomputing #GravisGrIP #GravisGamePad

@foone obverse engineering

@foone would it be a useful tool for others in the same position / doing the same general work, or is it one of those super niche things that really only worked for you and the way you were doing things?

Just missed out on picking up this crazy gamepad on eBay - if I hadn't had an early night I might've spotted it.

Will you just look at this thing!? It's not a gameport device, it plugs in through PS/2 or a DIN port (with what look like adapters from one to the other). It's got Alt, Control and Delete buttons. It's got an enter button. It's got a second D-pad in the middle for some reason. The most normal thing about it is the "P" button, and that's saying something. #retrogaming #retrocomputing

@foone excluding projects that use general-purpose stuff like raspberry pis, my serious guess at an answer to this question is one of Art Lebedev's OLED button keyboards

Time to check out #Linux to see if it could conceivably replace Windows 10 on my home desktop. I'm installing Linux Mint - the "you should try this one" consensus, from what I could see - on my new little Acer PC, rather than a VM or a live session on my actual PC, to get a feel for what a completely fresh start will feel like.

This won't be written as a guide to follow - this will be my first impressions as I set this up for myself. Suggestions and troubleshooting tips welcome as I go along. 🧵

I've chosen Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. I liked XFCE when I tried it on a lower-power PC a very long time ago, and most of my Linux experience comes from Ubuntu in the Gnome 2 era, so those options are very nice to see from the start, but I specifically want to check out what Cinnamon has to offer.

A couple of minutes in, and I like it - it's clean and fast, if a bit grey. This is a 4K screen, and it's not applied any scaling by default - checking that out will be step 1 after installation.

Display scaling was very easy to find, and it wasn't difficult to turn on the "experimental" fractional scaling so I could go more granular than 100% (too small) or 200% (too big). See, Windows? You don't need to make someone scroll a mile down to find these settings.

It was also trivial to make things a bit less grey (I've gone for a sickly green theme, in honour of Acer). I have already entered my password more times than I would in a week on Windows - is this why people like Yubikeys?