4am’s Crack of Spare Change
Spare Change is an odd little Apple II game from 1983, where the player tries to thwart mischievous creatures who escaped from an arcade game, who are trying to steal quarters from the machines. One of Broderbund's earlier hits, although it never gained the recognition of Lode Runner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5l5JOPZmWk
Such
https://setsideb.com/4ams-crack-of-spare-change/
#retro #4am #appleii #crack #internetarchive #retro #softwarepreservation

Good morning! I'm reading this article and thought you would want to check it out. Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States: https://zenodo.org/record/7996492
#videogames #gaming #SoftwarePreservation

Something about a small clutch of companies buying up the rights to a load of old 8-bit and 16-bit computer games and then selling them on Steam for 3€ to 12€ a pop feels a bit off to me.

On one hand, I'm delighted that these games are easily available again, and that they have a legal status that isn't likely to result in them going poof and disappearing from the open internet if someone gets too DMCA-happy. (And which allows me to tell people where to download them in published articles without getting in trouble with legal.)

But a number of these re-release houses are just throwing up versions of the games that were distributed on abandonware sites for two or three decades, without even including the manuals and extra multimedia content that those sites usually included.

In some cases, they're now selling games that were previously made freeware. And while it's the rightsholder's prerogative to do that, again, it leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth when it's about five companies trying to consolidate the rights to as much nostalgia as they can lay their hands on.

All that aside, and most importantly, I really hope that the original developers are being adequately compensated and are receiving fair contracts (i.e. proper licensing for publication rather than a full-IP purchase).

#retrogaming #SoftwarePreservation

Reviving ZZT
ZZT was (is) an ancient shareware DOS game that runs in character mode, created and published by Tim Sweeney. Originally published by Potomac Computer Systems, a company ran out of the basement of Sweeney's house, when it expanded its software selection it was renamed to Ep
https://setsideb.com/reviving-zzt/
#indies #niche #retro #almostofzzt #dos #epicgames #epicmegagames #github #indie #kevedit #msdos #niche #reconstructionofzzt #retro #shareware #softwarepreservation #zzt

When putting software on the #WaybackMachine it's not enough to just save the front page on GitHub, you have to make sure you get the download link itself!

#SoftwarePreservation #DigitalPreservation

At this weekend's "SuperMagfest" there will be a talk on earl 70s #BASIC #games: https://bit.ly/3X6mPmw ... and DOZENS of other #game and #SoftwarePreservation realted topics!

I've been wanting to try and run the Inferno operating system again, so I built a 32-bit Debian VM just for this purpose (since Inferno is still 32-bit), and I didn't realize until a lot of search-fu later that more modern GCC versions (like version 10 and above) break compilation of Inferno's tools, as well as emu. Luckily there's a pull request on BitBucket for the code that looks to fix all that.

If it works, I'm definitely pulling in the Inferno source code, applying the patch, and pushing it to my own GitHub and SourceHut. We gotta keep this alive somehow!

(And next time I'll just use OpenBSD or 9front or something to do this! 😎

#softwarepreservation #infernoos #Linux #hacking

That moment where you look at the fluxgraph and think: "Oh, I recognise that copy protection track..."
#SoftwarePreservation #RetroComputing #RetroGaming #hxcfe

The Psygnosis owl is staring into the very depths of my soul... #softwarepreservation #GreaseWeazle (and also a DiscFerret)

A zip file with rb.5.500 #Games for the #Atari 8-bit computers (rb. 128 MB):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kczbtIkg5xRsabg34Gn3dr22X-ssOUfs/view?usp=drivesdk

#RetroComputing ##RetroGames #SoftwarePreservation

Here's my annual letter summarizing the #computerhistory work that I did in the past year.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/kays-2022-wrap-76408972

#softwarepreservation #interview #internetarchive #podcast

An iso of 1996 Windows/Mac CD-ROM game "Bible Sleuth - The Case Of The Purloined Pendant" is now on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/bible-sleuth
#Windows9x #Windows3x #NotDOS #Macromedia #Edutainment #Christian #SoftwarePreservation #InternetArchive

MazeBots from Innovatus: https://archive.org/details/mazebots-v-1-21
An educational programming system from the year 2000. #softwarepreservation