retrocomputing

Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.

UNIX V4, the first ever version of the UNIX operating system in which the kernel was written in the then-new C programming language, has been successfully recovered from a 1970s nine-track tape drive. You can download it from the Internet Archive, and run it in SimH. On Mastodon, "Flexion" posted a screenshot of it running under SGI IRIX.

Last month, we wrote about the remarkable discovery of a forgotten tape with a lost early version of Unix, found by Professor Robert Ricci at the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah. At the time, we quoted the redoubtable Kossow, who also runs Bitsavers, as saying that it "has a pretty good chance of being recoverable." Well, he was right, and at the end of last week, he did it. Ricci also shared a video clip on Mastodon.

Amiga computers may have been popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in media production, but their filesystems are not directly compatible with modern computers. The new 'amifuse' project aims to fix that with a new filesystem driver built around an invisible m68k CPU emulator.

Amifuse is a FUSE driver for macOS and Linux, allowing you to natively mount disk images using the Amiga's Professional File System 3 (PFS3). The project's documentation says other Amiga filesystems might work, "but have not been tested." Disks are read-only by default, but you can enable the experimental read-write support through a command-line argument.

Hello. I've been doing some digging on how tripcodes worked on old BBS and imageboards and tried to write a small article about it. I'm not a seasoned expert by any means so all criticism is welcome.

Once get FPS: FBP ‘98 working on my brandnew & gifted Framework 12 LT, preferably without Windows OS, but with Linux OS.

Need help in managing/running a huge amount of FBP ‘98 leagues, in same playoff system.

&

Once get FPS: FBP ‘93 working on my brandnew & gifted Framework 12 LT, preferably without Windows OS, but with Linux OS.

Need help in managing/running a huge amount of FBP ‘93 leagues, in same playoff system.

I have experience in participating in such tiny & dumbed down/uncreative league, but the commissioner (which the refusal to allow creativity of plays & Etc. had us falling-out, will not even reply to my let get back to friendship E-Mail) got my copy of the game to work on my Windows 11 LT, by taking over the LT & cut & pasting things. That old (by LTs standards) LT is dead & I was now gifted a Frame Work LT. & gifted pre-bought Windows, on the LT, so forced to install. I am looking in to if best Alternative to Windows would have local Computer Repairperson, willing, to work on non-Windows OSs LT; if not sticking with Windows.
I want to get back to F.ront P.age S.ports: F.ootB.all P.ro ‘93 & ‘98 playing, on this type of LT. Can anyone help me?

The Amiga 600 was in its day the machine nobody really wanted — a final attempt to flog the almost original spec 68000 platform from 1985, in 1992. Sure it had a PCMCIA slot nobody used, and an IDE interface for a laptop hard drive, but it served only to really annoy anyone who’d bought one when a few months later the higher-spec 1200 appeared. It’s had a rehabilitation in recent years though as a retrocomputer, and [LinuxJedi] has a 600 motherboard in need of some attention.

As expected for a machine of its age it can use replacement electrolytic capacitors, and its reset capacitor had bitten the dust. But there’s more to that with one of these machines, as capacitor leakage can damage the filter circuitry surrounding its video encoder chip. Since both video and audio flow through this circuit, there was no composite video to be seen.

Maurice Ravel's Boléro performed on homemade 8-bit instruments. Official music video.

9 hours and 42 minutes of footage
52 mixer channels
13 neck- and bowties
9 different instruments
1 crazy automaton
0 regrets

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40421305

It took me way longer than I wanted to to post this video, but I finally got around to cutting up and editing the live streams. Hope you all enjoy. More is on the way, But sometimes life and work gets in the way of the hobbies.

And please let me know if you find my behavior spammy, or to self promoting.

/ Folium Creations

I hope I look this good in 30 years time.

About the Commodore PET startup sound

#retrocomputing #commodore #pet #mildlyinteresting @retrocomputing

https://scruss.com/blog/2025/12/11/commodore-pet-startup-sound-again/

Candy Cruncher stands as an interesting piece of Linux gaming convergence, with it pulling on almost all of the major threads that defined the industry up to that point. The lead developer of the game was Brian Hook, who is best known for being one of the key architects behind the Glide API for 3dfx, but he would also find success working on both Quake II and Quake III Arena at id Software; founding Pyrogon was his attempt at a slower pace after being at the top of his field for so very long.

The Linux port was crafted by Ryan "icculus" Gordon, not long removed from his initial freelance work on Serious Sam, with the game also being one of the first titles to be picked up by Linux Game Publishing. Founded by retailer Michael Simms in 2001, LGP was an attempt to carry the torch dropped by Loki Software, and thus extend the shelf life of his Tux Games online store. So many people's hopes were tied up in this otherwise unassuming product, making it a shame it was but a mixed success.

So, I got this. But I also know these things aren't the most reliable and I am really paranoid about breaking it, and there's some suspicious things.

First, it feels cheap, especially the USB port on the back feels like it wants to break off.

Second, and quite worrying, when I first got it, it was clicking and not reading disks. Slower when I held it with the opening towards the top, faster with opening towards bottom. I thought it was dead, when eventually after a few retries it started working. Now, this was faster clicking, especially fast shortly before it started working, so perhaps it was just stuck.
On the other hand, I found this: https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq2.htm

Most users who have lost their crucial data tell the same sad story of hearing "those clicks" some time ago "but then they went away and everything seemed okay for a while."

Now, 2 of the disks also had some smaller issues. One had trouble loading. Formatting it seems to have fixed the issue. Maybe. I used fdisk so it left out the first 1MB.
The second loads fine, but doesn't seem to like writing. It seems to do it in bursts, and it is audible. There's also 2 sections where it produces a buzz, both on read and write.
Here's an audio sample from continuous (one file) write to that disk:

https://files.catbox.moe/yo6g50.flac

Current ideas

Checking disks for damages by pulling back the metal cover and rotating the disk manually, looking for stuff like this: https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq4.htm or anything suspicious (the white cloth inside is too close and hairy for my liking).

Peeking into the drive to check for head damage and dirt.

Treating it like I treat running HDDs (do not unpower without parked heads, avoiding movement and vibrations), and generally being careful even when off (avoiding drops).

The Commodore 64 is officially back. Just months after signing paperwork to acquire the original brand and assets, Commodore 64 Ultimates are slowly rolling off the assembly line, and some units may arrive in customers' hands before the holidays.

This news comes direct from Commodore CEO Peri Fractic (aka Christian Simpson), who posted a video from the assembly floor. [Warning, TT link]

On this day in 1996, a freshly inked U.S. patent quietly laid the cornerstone of the digital music revolution. In addition to facilitating this now vast internet-based entertainment business, the humble MP3 file format would propel broadband proliferation, usher in the iPod era, and arguably precipitate the iPhone and all the other touchscreen-slabs that remain indispensable gadgets to this day.

MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) files were devised by scientists to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent an audio file. Key personnel behind the invention of MP3 included: Bernhard Grill, Karlheinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, Ernst Eberlein, and Dieter Seitzer. Brandenburg is often credited as being the father of MP3, for leading this and similar research since 1977, but Seitzer (for example) brought expertise in transferring music over standard phone lines.