Filed under: Retrocomputing

Did you know you could play Commodore 64 games on your iPhone?

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 11th 2009

C64 emulator on the iPhone. Image ruthlessly stolen from the c64iphone.com website.

Maybe you did, maybe you didn't... but now you know!

The aptly-named Commodore 64 Emulator is yet again available in the App Store for the frugal sum of $4.99 (£2.99 for my fellow imperialists).

It was originally released back in June but unavailable due to violation of Apple's rules on launching executable code (which is what an emulator does). Then in September it was actually approved by Apple -- but only for a few days because of another security issue.

And now... it seems it's back! Properly! 30% faster!

There's bad news however: you can only play games downloaded from the App Store. No uploading your own abandonware ROMs I'm afraid. Maybe some enterprising fellow will manage to hack it...?

There's a fun and detailed 9 minute video of the emulator in action after the break.

[via TouchArcade -- or visit the emulator's official site]

Tags: c64, c64 emulator, C64Emulator, emulator, iphone, retro gaming

Filed under: Games, Apple, Retrocomputing

RPGs like Fallout and Oblivion coming to your iPhone?

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 8th 2009

Wolfenstein on the iPhone. Totally ripped off from Joystiq.

After an acquisition that most of us thought was fairly minor news, it turns out that John Carmack of Doom and id Software fame is a mobile games enthusiast! Not only is id Software still flogging the Doom horse, but we may be in for a little treat in the coming months. Gaming iPhone users are probably already aware that Wolfenstein is available and it's really good. And on the back of its success they are now looking to release other classic titles, new franchises and even... role-playing titles.

In Kotaku's great interview with the man himself, Carmack discusses the roadmap for id's iPhone games and some other really interesting possibilities. Amongst others: Fallout might come to the iPhone. One of the most popular franchises of all time is owned by id Software's parent company Zenimax. The path is there! This is more than mere positive thinking! He even admits that some early proof of concepts have been developed...!

I don't think we can expect to see it soon, but if a Fallout title appears it can only be a matter of time before we start seeing other RPGs -- and eventually... more massively-multiplayer online games. That reminds me -- do people play FarmVille on their iPhone? They must do...

[via Destructoid]

Tags: app, id software, IdSoftware, iphone, rpg

Filed under: Retrocomputing

Ever wonder who your hard drive's father is?

by Grant Robertson Jul 27th 2009

Do you ever think about the family lineage of your hard drive? Heck, do you ever think about the history of your hard drive at all? Of course you don't. Hard disk storage has become so ubiquitous, so reliable, and so inexpensive that most of us never give it a second thought. But where would Download Squad be if you didn't have all that cheap, seemingly endless space to download your prize finds to?

Nowhere, that's where.

So hard disk drive, we salute you. These videos, which I found on the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center are true gems. The first, an IBM marketing film-strip ca. 1957, dramatizes the invention of the hard disk at 99 Notre Dame, San Jose, California by IBM engineers in the early 1950s. The entire concept of storing data in such a way that it's directly addressable, and accessible at random is so heady and incomprehensible for the time, they explain it over and over again. It even demonstrates how they built a marketing tour bus and went on the road to demo the new hotness to customers across the USA.

The second is a true geeky-pleasure masterpiece. A very technical discussion of the inner workings of IBM's second generation of hard drives. Possibly intended for engineers who serviced the units -- which look larger than your washing machine and dryer put together -- it's as dry as a bread sandwich, but it shows some amazing footage of the inner workings doing their thing. Amazingly, those inner workings haven't really changed *that* much in principle, they've just gotten a whole lot smaller, faster, cheaper and densely packed with bits and bytes.

Grab some popcorn and click through to check out both videos.

Tags: ephemera, hard disk, HardDisk, hdd, IBM, retrocomputing, storage

Filed under: Developer, Fun, Features, Hardware, Retrocomputing

How powerful was the Apollo 11 computer?

by Grant Robertson Jul 20th 2009

With all the buzz about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing I got to thinking, how powerful were the computers that "took us to the Moon?" It turns out, they were nothing short of amazing. If you've never had a nerdy bone in your body, feel free to skip this post. But, if you ever laid on your back under the stars and thought about Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or the Space Shuttle, read on and see if you're as geek-struck as I was researching this.

Tags: Apollo 11, Apollo11, history, real time operating systems, RealTimeOperatingSystems, retro computing, retrocomputing

Filed under: Time-Wasters, Retrocomputing

World's Oldest Time-Waster? Lunar Lander

by Grant Robertson Jul 20th 2009

It won't win any beauty contests, and it has a pretty weak storyline unless you have a magnificent imagination, but Lunar Lander may well be one of the oldest time-wasters in existence.

High-school student Jim Storer, obsessed with the Apollo missions -- and obviously inspired by what he'd witnessed along with the rest of the world, 40 years ago today -- took his inspiration to class in the fall of 1969. The result was a very simple text-based game for his school's Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-8. "It had 8 Teletypes, a small hard drive, and 12KB of main memory, where 8KB was used by the system and 4KB time shared by the users."

Storer, can lay claim to the first primitive game but, what about the graphical Lunar Lander we've all known and loved on one platform or another? DEC consultant Jack Burness developed the first known graphical Lunar Lander as a demo project for the DEC GT40 console in 1973. It certainly wasn't the first video game, but it definitely holds its place in video game history.

Feel like wasting a little time day-dreaming about the 40th aniversary of the Apollo moon landing? Flash versions of Lunar Lander are easy to find, but I especially love this one -- which is incredibly true to the Atari arcade version I remember as a kid wandering the halls at the Cumberland Science Museum.

Tags: apollo 11, Apollo11, atari, dec, flash games, FlashGames, lunar lander, LunarLander

Filed under: Internet, Retrocomputing

This is what the web looked like in 1994

by Brad Linder Jul 12th 2007

Wow. We never thought about it this way before, but if the web still looked like this, you wouldn't need an iPhone with Safari to surf the web on your phone.

Remember back when the web was basically text and an occasional logo or product picture on a plain background? And remember when the idea of buying and selling things online was new and kind of scary?

This promotional video from 1994 does beg one question though. If this company was trying to promote itself, why does it tell viewers to email for more information at the end? Shouldn't they have an amazing web site of their own?

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Tags: 1994, retro, web, web sites, WebSites

Filed under: Developer, News, IBM, Retrocomputing

Fortran father John Backus, dead at 82

by Grant Robertson Mar 20th 2007

John Backus made software back when no one called it software. As the project leader of the IBM team which created the venerable Fortran language, Backus helped define the "hacker ethic". Leading a small team to do great things quickly, and leverage their own mistakes in order to learn, Backus shattered the paradigm of 1950s corporate IBM and, developed a language that is only now beginning to fade into history.

The NYT examines how Backus defined what may have been the Alpha test version of the dot-com years, "Mr. Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. I.B.M. had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Mr. Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it."

Sounds like a boss you'd love to have. The Times article includes a beautiful quote from Backus which defines one of software development's philosophical keystones elegantly, "You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."

[via O'Reilly Radar]

Tags: FORTRAN, John Backus, JohnBackus, obit, obituary

Filed under: Hardware, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Retrocomputing

You'll never have gigabytes of RAM

by Grant Robertson Feb 19th 2007

Long ago, in a newsgroup far away a few computer geeks predicted that one day, computers would address gigabytes of RAM. It caused quite a stir.

One particular pedant shot back, "No personal computer will ever have gigabytes of RAM, just as no automobile has giga-gallon gas tanks." Never say never, right? His reasoning was simple, "Somewhere in the 50 to 200 megabyte range, all applications, (or at least their active portion), will reside in memory. Doubling memory may allow the entire set of applications to reside in memory, but the performance gain will be small. The larger the memory capacity, the smaller the gain." Oh how wrong he was. My current desktop is stuffed with 2GB. The laptop I'm writing on is bursting with 768MB, and could use an upgrade.

How many barriers that we perceive as solid will be smash through in the next ten years; A world full of multi-terabyte solid state drives, cheap and plentiful LCDs in mind melting dimensions, ubiquitous access to all your data from everywhere?

What do Download Squad readers see deep within the crystal ball which might blow a modern mind?

Filed under: Hardware, Retrocomputing

The history of the personal computer in TV commercials

by Grant Robertson Jan 30th 2007

When the computer takes a big step forward, I always like to take a look back. We can argue all day over whether Microsoft Windows Vista (win your copy from Download Squad here!) is revolutionary, evolutionary or just marketing hype. With around half a billion Dollars being spent on Vista's marketing launch I'd personally lean towards the latter of the three but, it does make me think... What about the marketing for the computers of our past, when home computers promised, as Atari once put it, "A World Beyond Your Wildest Dreams"?

The earliest "home computers required skills far beyond what today's most hands-on computer enthusiasts need to master. The earliest promise of computing at home came from an obscure company called MITS, in the form of the Altair. A DIY, soldering iron and lots of patience required, read output off the LEDs on the front panel, hope you took computer science classes kind of hobby machine, we owe the Altair one major thing; Microsoft. Founded around the BASIC language interpreter Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote for the fledgling machine, "Micro-Soft" wouldn't be the company we know today without the Altair 8800. In 1977 MITS started selling the Altair as a pre-assembled computer, removing the giant barrier to entry that was assembling the beast from scratch in your basement and creating the personal computer market as we know it.

Of course, it wasn't until the 1980s that the personal computer got a real marketing department. Atari, Apple, Commodore and IBM all duked-it-out in 30 second increments during the early 1980s with ads like these.

Tags: ads, advertising, commercials, computers, computing, video

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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Filed under: Retrocomputing

Did you know you could play Commodore 64 games on your iPhone?

RPGs like Fallout and Oblivion coming to your iPhone?

Ever wonder who your hard drive's father is?

How powerful was the Apollo 11 computer?

World's Oldest Time-Waster? Lunar Lander

This is what the web looked like in 1994

Fortran father John Backus, dead at 82

You'll never have gigabytes of RAM

The history of the personal computer in TV commercials

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