ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for May, 2015

MAME and the New Emulation Reality —

I’m sorry all my weblog entries seem to be variations of emulation, Internet Archive, Archive Team and Vintage Computing, but that’s kind of all my life is right now anyway. (I’m also editing documentaries, but that’s even less informative. HEY UPDATE FOLKS I AM EDITING DOCUMENTARIES.) Time to talk about MAME. Like surfing, ventriloquism, or […]

A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open —

The world of Apple II “cracking” has always held an interesting fascination for me – the thinking involved, the magic of tracing programs, and of course the “crack screens” that pirates would add to declare their victory. (Here’s a massive gallery of them that I collected.) I interviewed long-retired Apple II crackers for the BBS […]

Yes, I Want Your Goddamn AOL CDs —

Yes, yes I do. As you might expect, someone who does a lot of something (collecting) like I do, in a pretty public fashion, tends to get some pretty shiny-polished chestnuts tossed over the fence. The two winners, by a landslide, are: “_______ 8″ floppies” (a whole variety of statements, from people having them to […]

I Helped Make a Shirt! —

No project is complete without a shirt, and I helped design one for all the emulation going on at the Internet Archive. (My co-worker Jeff Kaplan did the actual mouse-to-screen effort after I sketched out what I was looking for and pointed to the right fonts to use.) Entitled GAME NOT OVER!, these shirts are […]

My Smarty-Smart Boss, 23 Years Ago —

One of the most inquisitive and detail-oriented members of Archive Team, godane, asked after a file he’d found on the Internet Archive that had been uploaded by my boss, Brewster Kahle, in 2005. Simply called “untitled”, with a collection of seemingly-randomized metadata, this 4 gigabyte video file had been viewed a handful of times (which […]