Today we all take MP3 players for granted. iPods are ubiquitous, mobile phones can play the format, even most new car stereos support MP3 right off the showroom floor. But it wasn’t always like this - Back in 1998, highly illegal sites like Audiofind were giving away artist’s songs quite openly and completely for free in pretty poor-sounding 112 and 128KBps MP3 format, and we were downloading them with our 56K modems - often taking up to half an hour a time.

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This is either the latest in the mounting pile of evidence that I am indeed turning into a crazy cat lady, or just another example of how I love anything Atari-related. I’m not sure which is worse, so I’ll leave it to TTB’s readers to decide.

Click the image to go to a much bigger uncropped version. The picture was taken in 1987 by Flickr user sniktaWP.

Satta van Daal is a German street artist living in Melbourne, Australia. While he’s not out stencilling people’s rubbish, he’s working on his next big project - an art installation known as iPaint myMac, and as you can see from the pictures, this guy’s work is pretty damn impressive.

Above we have a Mac Plus painted up to look like the classic Happy Mac startup icon, and below there’s an Apple LC II stencilled with the iconic image of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs working on the first Apple computer in 1976. Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend, members of the Cincinatti Commodore Computer Club had something a little special to unveil at their 2008 C4 expo: an 8-player multiplayer game called NetRacer, which makes use of some of the modern ethernet cartridges available for these awesome retro machines.

What makes this special is that NetRacer is the first network-enabled game for the C64 which includes realtime support (an earlier game, Artillery Duel, was turn-based), up to 8 players, and even internet gaming. Whoever said that the C64 was dead?

There’s a gallery of pictures from the event here, and the official C4 site is here.

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The games industry these days is a multi-million dollar business, ruled over by huge multinational corporatons such as Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, as well as the third party games developers, and the entire PC gaming industry, of course. But what a lot of people don’t realise is that boffins were using their computers for more than just “serious business”, putting simple games together up to 20 years before the Magnavox Odyssey and Atari’s PONG hit the scene in 1972.

Let’s take a look at three of these early games, and explore what made them unique and important to the early videogames, and indeed computer, industries.

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“OXO” In An EDSAC Emulator For MacOS. Screen Outputs Are Top Left And Right.

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Last time we had the world’s first digital camera on Retro Computing Corner, and so I thought I’d cover another computing first which may have changed the world - another ubiquitous device we take for granted today that absolutely blew people’s minds when it was first released. I’m talking about what is widely regarded to be the first laptop - at least as we know them today.

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This digital camera prototype was invented in 1975 by Kodak engineers Steven Sasson and Jim Schueckler. It was the size of a toaster, and captured black and white images at a resolution of 100×100 - or 0.01 megapixels in today’s marketing terminology. The images were stored on cassette tape, taking 23 seconds to write.

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So I’m looking at my Google Analytics page for the site, and I spot something interesting. Seems like someone out there has viewed our site in 1-bit colour. Yep, 1 whole bit, that’s either on or off, true or false, or more accurately, black or white.

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Last time in Retro Computing Corner I introduced you to my two classic Macs, an SE and an SE/30. I also revealed something else to the world - a little fault common to the SE/30 known as SimasiMac. Well, today I’m going to tell you how you can fix it very easily, provided, that is, that you’re fairly proficient at soldering.

But first an introduction - what is SimasiMac?

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I once had quite a sizeable collection of retro computing gems, but with me finding myself strapped for cash and a move to a new house imminent last year, I flogged a lot of them off on eBay. I did pretty well for myself too, but there are always a few classic machines that one can’t bear to part with, and these all-in-one Macs have to rank pretty highly on any collector’s list.

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