ASCII by Jason Scott

So, Mark Trade and I have never talked, once.

All I know about Mark is that due to his efforts, over 200 scans of magazines are up on the Archive.

These are very good scans, too. The kind of scans that a person looking to find a long-lost article, verify a hard-to-grab fact, or needs to pass along to others a great image would kill to have. 600 dots per inch, excellent contrast, clarity, and the margins cut just right.

So, I could fill this entry with all the nice covers, but covers are kind of easy, to be frank. You put them face down on the scanner, you do a nice big image, and then touch it up a tad. The cover paper and the printing is always super-quality compared to the rest, so it’ll look good:

But the INSIDE stuff… that’s so much harder. Magazines were often bound in a way that put the images RIGHT against the binding and not every magazine did the proper spacing and all of it is very hard to shove into a scanner and not lose some information. I have a lot of well-meaning scans in my life with a lot of information missing.

But these…. these are primo.

When I stumbled on the Patreon, he had three patrons giving him $10 a month. I’d like it to be $500, or $1000. I want this to be his full-time job.

Reading the patreon page’s description of his process shows he’s taking it quite seriously. Steaming glue, removing staples. I’ve gone on record about the pros and cons of destructive scanning, but game magazines are not rare, just entirely unrepresented in scanned items compared to how many people have these things in their past.

I read something like this:

It is extremely unlikely that I will profit from your pledge any time soon. My scanner alone was over $4,000 and the scanning software was $600. Because I’m working with a high volume of high resolution 600 DPI images I purchased several hard drives including a CalDigit T4 20TB RAID array for $2,000. I have also spent several thousand dollars on the magazines themselves, which become more expensive as they become rarer. This is in addition to the cost of my computer, monitor, and other things which go into the creation of these scans. It may sound like I’m rich but really I’m just motivated, working two jobs and pursuing large projects.

…and all I think about is, this guy is doing so much amazing work that so many thousands could be benefiting from, and they should throw a few bucks at him for his time.

My work consists of carefully removing individual pages from magazines with a heat gun or staple-remover so that the entire page may be scanned. Occasionally I will use a stack paper cutter where appropriate and will not involve loss of page content. I will then scan the pages in my large format ADF scanner into 600 DPI uncompressed TIFFs. From there I either upload 300 DPI JPEGs for others to edit and release on various sites or I will edit them myself and store the 600 DPI versions in backup hard disks. I also take photos of magazines still factory-sealed to document their newsstand appearance. I also rip full ISOs of magazine coverdiscs and make scans of coverdisc sleeves on a color-corrected flatbed scanner and upload those to archive.org as well.

This is the sort of thing I can really get behind.

The Internet Archive is scanning stuff, to be sure, but the focus is on books. Magazines are much, much harder to scan – the book scanners in use are just not as easy to use with something bound like magazines are. The work that Mark is doing is stuff that very few others are doing, and to have canonical scans of the advertisements, writing and materials from magazines that used to populate the shelves is vital.

Some time ago, I’ve given all my collection of donated Game-related magazines to the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, because I recognized I couldn’t be scanning them anytime soon, and how difficult it was going to be to scan it. It would take some real major labor I couldn’t personally give.

Well, here it is. He’s been at it for a year. I’d like to see that monthly number jump to $100/month, $500/month, or more. People dropping $5/month towards this Patreon would be doing a lot for this particular body of knowledge.

Please consider doing it.

Thanks.

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In 2009, Josh Miller was walking through the Timonium Hamboree and Computer Festival in Baltimore, Maryland. Among the booths of equipment, sales, and demonstrations, he found a vendor was selling an old collection of 3.5″ floppy disks for DOS and Windows. He bought it, and kept it.

A few years later, he asked me if I wanted them, and I said sure, and he mailed them to me. They fell into the everlasting Project Pile, and waited for my focus and attention.

They looked like this:

I was particularly interested in the floppies that appeared to be someone’s compilation of DOS and Windows programs in the most straightforward form possible – custom laser-printed directories on the labels, and no obvious theme as to why this shareware existed on them. They looked like this, separated out:

There were other floppies in the collection, as well:

They’d sat around for a few years while I worked on other things, but the time finally came this week to spend some effort to extract data.

There’s debates on how to do this that are both boring and infuriating, and I’ve ended friendships over them, so let me just say that I used a USB 3.5″ floppy drive (still available for cheap on Amazon; please take advantage of that) and a program called WinImage that will pull out a disk image in the form of a .ima file from the floppy drive. Yes, I could do a flux imaging of these disks, but sorry, that’s incredibly insane overkill. These disks contain files put on there by a person and we want those files, along with the accurate creation dates and the filenames and contents. WinImage does it.

Sometimes, the floppies have some errors and require trying over to get the data off them. Sometimes it takes a LOT of tries. If after a mass of tries I am unable to do a full disk scan into a disk image, I try just mounting it as A: in Windows and pulling the files off – they sometimes are just fine but other parts of the disk are dead. I make this a .ZIP file instead of a .IMA file. This is not preferred, but the data gets off in some form.

Some of them (just a handful) were not even up for this – they’re sitting in a small plastic bin and I’ll try some other methods in the future. The ratio of Imaged-ZIPed-Dead were very good, like 40-3-3.

I dumped most of the imaged files (along with the ZIPs) into this item.

This is a useful item if you, yourself, want to download about 100 disk image files and “do stuff” with them. My estimation is that all of you can be transported from the first floor to the penthouse of a skyscraper with 4 elevator trips. Maybe 3. But there you go, folks. They’re dropped there and waiting for you. Internet Archive even has a link that means “give me everything at once“. It’s actually not that big at all, of course – about 260 megabytes, less than half of a standard CD-ROM.

I could do this all day. It’s really easy. It’s also something most people could do, and I would hope that people sitting on top of 3.5” floppies from DOS or Windows machines would be up for paying the money for that cheap USB drive and something like WinImage and keep making disk images of these, labeling them as best they can.

I think we can do better, though.

The Archive is running the Emularity, which includes a way to run EM-DOSBOX, which can not only play DOS programs but even play Windows 3.11 programs as well.

Therefore, it’s potentially possible for many of these programs, especially ones particularly suited as stand-alone “applications”, to be turned into in-your-browser experiences to try them out. As long as you’re willing to go through them and get them prepped for emulation.

Which I did.

The Festival Floppies collection is over 500 programs pulled from these floppies that were imaged earlier this week. The only thing they have in common was that they were sitting in a box on a vendor table in Baltimore in 2009, and I thought in a glance they might run and possibly be worth trying out. After I thought this (using a script to present them for consideration), the script did all the work of extracting the files off the original floppy images, putting the programs into an Internet Archive item, and then running a “screen shotgun” I devised with a lot of help a few years back that plays the emulations, takes the “good shots” and makes them part of a slideshow so you can get a rough idea of what you’re looking at.

You either like the DOS/Windows aesthetic, or you do not. I can’t really argue with you over whatever direction you go – it’s both ugly and brilliant, simple and complex, dated and futuristic. A lot of it depended on the authors and where their sensibilities lay. I will say that once things started moving to Windows, a bunch of things took on a somewhat bland sameness due to the “system calls” for setting up a window, making it clickable, and so on. Sometimes a brave and hearty soul would jazz things up, but they got rarer indeed. On the other hand, we didn’t have 1,000 hobbyist and professional programs re-inventing the wheel, spokes, horse, buggy, stick shift and gumball machine each time, either.

Just browsing over the images, you probably can see cases where someone put real work into the whole endeavor – if they seem to be nicely arranged words, or have a particular flair with the graphics, you might be able to figure which ones have the actual programming flow and be useful as well. Maybe not a direct indicator, but certainly a flag. It depends on how much you want to crate-dig through these things.

Let’s keep going.

Using a “word cloud” script that showed up as part of an open source package, I rewrote it into something I call a “DOS Cloud”. It goes through these archives of shareware, finds all the textfiles in the .ZIP that came along for the ride (think README.TXT, READ.ME, FILEID.DIZ and so on) and then runs to see what the most frequent one and two word phrases are. This ends up being super informative, or not informative at all, but it’s automatic, and I like automatic. Some examples:

Mad Painter: paint, mad, painter, truck, joystick, drive, collision, press, cloud, recieve, mad painter, dos prompt

Screamer:  screamer, code, key, screen, program, press, command, memory, installed,activate, code key, memory resident, correct code, key combination, desired code

D4W20: timberline, version, game, sinking, destroyer, gaming, smarter, software,popularity, timberline software, windows version, smarter computer, online help, high score

Certainly in the last case, those words are much more informative than the name D4W20 (which actually stands for “Destroyer for Windows Version 2.0”), and so the machine won the day. I’ve called this “bored intern” level before and I’d say it’s still true – the intern may be bored, but they never stop doing the process, either. I’m sure there’s some nascent class discussion here, but I’ll say that I don’t entirely think this is work for human beings anymore. It’s just more and more algorithms at this point. Reviews and contextual summaries not discernible from analysis of graphics and text are human work.

For now.

These programs! There are a lot of them, and a good percentage solve problems we don’t have anymore or use entire other methods to deal with the information. Single-use programs to deal with Y2K issues, view process tasks better, configure your modem, add a DOS interface, or track a pregnancy. Utilities to put the stardate in the task bar, applications around coloring letters, and so it goes. I think the screenshots help make decisions, if you’re one of the people idly browsing these sets and have no personal connection to DOS or Windows 3.1 as a lived experience.

I and others will no doubt write more and more complicated methods for extracting or providing metadata for these items, and work I’m doing in other realms goes along with this nicely. At some point, the entries for each program will have a complication and depth that rivals most anything written about the subjects at the time, when they were the state of the art in computing experience. I know that time is coming, and it will be near-automatic (or heavily machine-assisted) and it will allow these legions of nearly-lost programs to live again as easily as a few mouse clicks.

But then what?

But Then What is rapidly becoming the greatest percentage of my consideration and thought, far beyond the relatively tiny hurdles we now face in terms of emulation and presentation. It’s just math now with a lot of what’s left (making things look/work better on phones, speeding up the browser interactions, adding support for disk swapping or printer output or other aspects of what made a computer experience lasting to its original users). Math, while difficult, has a way of outing its problems over time. Energy yields results. Processing yields processing.

No, I want to know what’s going to happen beyond this situation, when the phones and browsers can play old everything pretty accurately, enough that you’d “get it” to any reasonable degree playing around with it.

Where do we go from there? What’s going to happen now? This is where I’m kind of floating these days, and there are ridiculously scant answers. It becomes very “journey of the mind” as you shake the trees and only nuts come out.

To be sure, there’s a sliver of interest in what could be called “old games” or “retrogaming” or “remixes/reissues” and so on. It’s pretty much only games, it’s pretty much roughly 100 titles, and it’s stuff that has seeped enough into pop culture or whose parent companies still make enough bank that a profit motive serves to ensure the “IP” will continue to thrive, in some way.

The Gold Fucking Standard is Nintendo, who have successfully moved into such a radical space of “protecting their IP” that they’ve really successfully started moving into wrecking some of the past – people who make “fan remixes” might be up for debate as to whether they should do something with old Nintendo stuff, but laying out threats for people recording how they experienced the games, and for any recording of the games for any purpose… and sending legal threats at anyone and everyone even slightly referencing their old stuff, as a core function.. well, I’m just saying perhaps ol’ Nintendo isn’t doing itself any favors but on the other hand they can apparently be the most history-distorting dicks in this space quadrant and the new games still have people buy them in boatloads. So let’s just set aside the Gold Fucking Standard for a bit when discussing this situation. Nobody even comes close.

There’s other companies sort of taking this hard-line approach: “Atari”, Sega, Capcom, Blizzard… but again, these are game companies markedly defending specific games that in many cases they end up making money on. In some situations, it’s only one or two games they care about and I’m not entirely convinced they even remember they made some of the others. They certainly don’t issue gameplay video takedowns and on the whole, historic overview of the companies thrives in the world.

But what a small keyhole of software history these games are! There’s entire other experiences related to software that are both available, and perhaps even of interest to someone who never saw this stuff the first time around. But that’s kind of an educated guess on my part. I could be entirely wrong on this. I’d like to find out!

Pursuing this line of thought has sent me hurtling into What are even musuems and what are even public spaces and all sorts of more general questions that I have extracted various answers for and which it turns out are kind of turmoil-y. It also has informed me that nobody kind of completely knows but holy shit do people without managerial authority have ideas about it. Reeling it over to the online experience of this offline debated environment just solves some problems (10,000 people look at something with the same closeness and all the time in the world to regard it) and adds others (roving packs of shitty consultant companies doing rough searches on a pocket list of “protected materials” and then sending out form letters towards anything that even roughly matches it, and calling it a ($800) day).

Luckily, I happen to work for an institution that is big on experiments and giving me a laughably long leash, and so the experiment of instant online emulated computer experience lives in a real way and can allow millions of people (it’s been millions, believe it or not) to instantly experience those digital historical items every second of every day.

So even though I don’t have the answers, at all, I am happy that the unanswered portions of the Big Questions haven’t stopped people from deriving a little joy, a little wonder, a little connection to this realm of human creation.

That’s not bad.

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As I enter into a new phase of doing things and how I do things, let’s start with something pleasant.

As part of the work with pulling Prince of Persia source code from a collection of disks a number of years back (the lion’s share of the work done by Tony Diaz), Jordan Mechner handed me an additional pile of floppies.

Many of these floppies have been imaged and preserved, but a set of them had not, mostly due to coming up with the time and “doing it right” and all the other accomplishment-blocking attributes of fractal self-analysis. That issue is now being fixed, and you are encouraged to enjoy the immediate result.

As Karateka (1985) became a huge title for Brøderbund Software, they wanted the program to run on as many platforms as possible. However, the code was not written to be portable; Brøderbund instead contracted with a number of teams to make Karateka versions on hardware other than the Apple II. The work by these teams, Jordan Mechner told me, often suffered from being ground-up rewrites of the original game idea – they would simply make it look like the game, without really spending time duplicating the internal timing or logic that Jordan had put into the original. Some came out fine on the other end; others did not.

Jordan’s opinion on the IBM port of Karateka was not positive. From his Making-of-Karateka journal (thanks to Anatoly Shashkin for finding this entry):

You can now see how it looked and played when he made these comments. I just pulled out multiple copies of Karateka from a variety of internally distributed floppies Jordan had in the set he gave me. I chose two representative versions and now you can play them both on the Internet Archive.

The first version is what would now be called the “Alpha”, but which in this collection is just called “Version 1986-01-30”, and was duplicated on February 4, 1986. It is a version which was obviously done as some sort of milestone – debugging information is everywhere, and it starts with a prompt of which levels to try, before starting the game.

Without going too much into the specific technical limitations of PC Compatibles of the time, I’ll instead just offer the following screenshot, which will connect you to an instantly playable-in-browser version of the Karateka Alpha. This has never been released before.

You can see all sorts of weird artifacts and performance issues with the Alpha – glitches in graphics and performance, and of course the ever-present debugging messages and system information. The contractors doing the work, the Connelly Group, have no presence on the internet in any obvious web searches – they may have just been internal employees, or a name given to some folks just to keep distance between “games” work and “real” work; maybe that information will come out.

The floppy this came on, as shown above, had all sorts of markings for Brøderbund to indicate what the build number was, who had the floppies (inventory control), and that the disk had no protection routines on it, which makes my life in the present day notably easier. Besides the playable version of the information in a ZIP file, there is an IMG file of the entire 360k floppy layout, usable by a number of emulators or viewers.

The next floppy in terms of time stamp is literally called BETA, from March 3, 1986. With over a month of effort into the project, a bunch of bugs have been fixed, screens added, and naturally all the debugging information has been stripped away. I’m assuming this was for playtesters to check out, or to be used by marketing/sales to begin the process of selling it in the PC world. Here is a link to an instantly playable-in-browser version of the Karateka Beta. This has also never been released before.

For the less button-mashy of us, here are the keys and a “handing it over to you at the user group meeting” version of how Karateka works.

You’re a dude going from the left to the right. If you go too far left, you will fall off the cliff and die. To the right are a bunch of enemies. You can either move or fight. If you are not in a fighting stance, you will die instantly, but in a fighting stance, you will move really slowly.

You use the arrow keys (left and right) to move. Press SPACE to flip between “moving” and “fighting” modes. The Q, A, and Z keys are high, middle and low punches. The W, S and X keys are high middle and low kicks. The triangles on the bottom are life meters. Whoever runs out of triangles first in a fight will die.

It’s worthwhile to note that the games, being an Alpha and a Beta, are extremely rough. I wouldn’t suggest making them your first game of Karateka ever – that’s where you should play the original Apple II version. 

Karateka is a wealth of beginnings for understanding entertainment software – besides being a huge hit for Brøderbund, it’s an aesthetic masterwork, containing cinematic cutscenes and a clever pulling of cultural sources to combine into a multi-layered experience on a rather simple platform. From this groundwork, Jordan would go on to make Prince of Persia years later, and bring these efforts to another level entirely. He also endeavored to make the Prince of Persia code as portable and documented as possible, so different platforms would have similar experiences in terms of playing.

In 2012, Jordan released a new remake/reboot of Karateka, which is also cross-platform (the platforms now being PC, iOS, PS4, Xbox and so on) and is available at KARATEKA.COM. It is a very enjoyable remake. There are also ports of “Karateka Classic” for a world where your controls have to be onscreen, like this one.

In a larger sense, it’d be a wonderful world where a lot of old software was available for study, criticism, discussion and so on. We have scads of it, of course, but there’s so much more to track down. It’s been a driving effort of mine this year, and it continues.

But for now, let’s enjoy a really, really unpleasant but historically important version of Karateka.

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Some time ago, I wrote about the amazing efforts to bring a realm of accuracy to emulation, especially arcade machine emulation. The work was (and is) amazing, but one problematic aspect was that the main components for this work in MAME were for the Windows version only, with plans to make it more cross-platform down the line.

The fact that it is down the line and work has been done and we’ve improved the turnaround on the compile time from “new version of MAME released” to “the new version of MAME is running at the Internet Archive” meaning that we can finally put up a nice example of this wrinkle in emulating the vintage experience.

So, by visiting this item on the Archive, you can boot up an arcade machine that is blurry, has ghosting, is slightly curved, and has bleed through some of the pixels and an obvious set of scanlines and reflection….

hooray

Seriously, though, this is incredibly important news. It’s a living demonstration of the hurdles and considerations of ’emulating’ older technological experiences. It’s not all ultra high-definition happiness and razor-sharp graphics over surround sound blasted through bluetooth speaker bars. It’s about capturing components of these games that are coming from a different realm than just what the code had to say about it. Between 50 and 80 milliseconds after an emulation is working, people come out to say “it’s not the same, it doesn’t have _____” where _____ is an ever-more-picky set of attributes that makes the experience of the game “real” to them and which they think ruins the entire emulation if the attribute is not right there.

Bear in mind that the potential additional settings for these monitors being emulated are many times more complicated than in this demo, and that the higher the resolution, the better – because now you’re not just emulating the pixels themselves, but the actions and effects around those pixels.

Welcome to the cutting edge of the cutting edge of the blurry edge.

The game I chose for this particular demo is its own nutty story: Crazy Kong. As recounted in The Secret History of Donkey Kong article, and not in Wikipedia any more, Donkey Kong was actually programmed by an outside party for Nintendo. (It was designed by Nintendo, for sure.) This same outside company went on to do other games you might know, like Zaxxon and Congo Bongo. Part of this is that Crazy Kong is not a bootleg of Donkey Kong but a legit license.

It’s also terrible, and wasn’t supposed to be in the US, but then with the skyrocketing success of Donkey Kong, it ended up here in bootleg form.

So, for me personally, Crazy Kong brings back memories of being one of those games shoved into bowling alleys, pizza places, and in shifty locations where the purchase of drugs heavily overrode the quality of the arcade game experience. It seems only right, then, that the slightly crappy monitor panorama be bestowed upon this emulated game, brought up from the depths. I know that’s how I experienced it so many years ago, and you can experience it now.

Some notes: The resolution on this web-based emulation is much higher than the usual games in the Internet Arcade, mostly to really bring out the qualities of the monitor properties. This might slow on some machines, or annoy with some different setups out there. But setting the whole thing to fullscreen will probably make it better for you. As is still the case, Firefox tends to run it better than Chrome and both better than Microsoft Edge (for now) and Safari. You can also always go back to the non-CRT emulation on the site to compare.

A huge amount of applause to the MAME development team for this years-long effort to emulate this important aspect of the vintage experience, and a thanks to everyone who helped make it run at the Internet Archive.

Now get blurry.

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