ASCII by Jason Scott

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Archive for the ‘computer history’ Category

The BITSAVERS Renewal —

The Bitsavers-Internet Archive bridge continues to be a wild success. (I mentioned this whole thing with an announcement from a couple years ago.) If you’ve not been aware, there’s this amazing, amazing project undertaken by a small handful of individuals to go through stacks of computer documentation and just flat-up digitize it all. No muss, […]

The Emularity —

Last week, on the heels of the DOS emulation announcement, one of the JSMESS developers, James Baicoianu, got Windows 3.11 running in a window with Javascript. That’s impressive enough on its own right – it’s running inside the EM-DOSBOX system, since Windows 3.x was essentially a very complicated program running inside DOS. (When Windows 95 came […]

The Digital Nostalgia Heat Differential —

This post is, once again, my favorite kind of idea: a terrible one. If you’re walking into the emulation-in-a-browser-thing cold, then this big massive essay from me is not going to be of interest. And if you’ve read my stuff before, it’s going to be a bunch of stuff you probably already knew, presented to […]

That Whole Thing With Sound in In-Browser Emulation —

We’re past 4 million verified MS-DOS players on the Archive this week. So that’s something. It’s time to really lay out the floating elephanty-thing related to this whole in-browser emulation kick – sound. Sound on the in-browser emulators (be they JSMESS, EM-DOSBOX, or others) suffer from sound strangeness. In JSMESS, it works fine except when […]

The MS-DOS Flood (And the High Flight of V2) —

A couple days later from my entry above. This has already significantly dwarfed the Internet Arcade. Thousands of people are hitting the site a minute, playing MS-DOS programs, writing reviews or keymappings or just freaking out about seeing this whole collection available and playable. The choice to send everyone to the Version 2 beta interface […]

The MS-DOS Showcase (And The Ascension of Version 2) —

2,400 MS-DOS games and programs have gone live on the Internet Archive. The full collection is here and the games-specific section (basically all of them, for now) is here. But wait before you click on those two links. That’s the headline, and based on the thousands of plays that this collection has already gotten, a pretty well-known […]

Each New Boot a Miracle —

This week, we got the emulation of MS-DOS programs (mostly) working on the Internet Archive. Up to now, every single emulated system has been via the JSMESS project, which supports well over 600 systems and which does a hell of a bang-up job on it. The fact that one system (MESS) emulates everything from an […]

Gamepads! —

A week into the explosion of the Internet Arcade, with what has now been millions of visitors to the Archive as a result, and we’re getting pretty far down the “what still confounds people” realm. As someone who worked in tech support as his first “real” job at Psygnosis, (shout out to Chris Caprio and […]

Before It All Arrives —

The numbers are a little hard to calculate, because the Internet Archive, heroes to the core, do not keep logs for pretty much any time at all. But using a few methods, comparing some general graphs, and doing math, the admins handed me an estimate of how many people have played video games at the […]