#floppy emulator

[techav]

I suggested previously that a Gotek floppy emulator would probably be the easiest way to get this old Sanyo MBC-1000 booted and running again. Turns out that was even easier than I expected.

The first thing I did was reflash the Gotek with FlashFloppy to add support for more image and drive types. FlashFloppy doesn't directly support Teledisk images, but the HxC software can convert them into something both FlashFloppy and HxC can use on a Gotek. I only needed a normal 34-pin ribbon cable for the mainboard interface, and I cobbled together a USB power adapter.

And ... that was it. The computer booted right into CP/M 2.2 without any complaints.

I do still want to try developing some new hardware for this machine. Now that I have a proper operating system with BASIC and an assembler, development should go much smoother.

[mingos-commodoreblog]

The Gotek drive in detail - Part 3 - Configuring and using the drive (German)

[adafruit]

Floppy Disk archiver and emulator, prototype is in! - video 💾

[fagenthusiast]

Okay, attempt 2.

in 8 days time, the indy vintage computer club will be meeting, and i will be there. i need to finish my mac 128k emulated pc by then.

WHAT IS DONE/I HAVE:

-the CAD for the case

-the mouse components

-the screen

-the FDD

WHAT NEEDS TO GET DONE:

filament

fernel lens for screen

case

smoothing case

paint

assemble

tomorrow, i will go to micro center and get some filament, and order the lens

beyond that, all that i need is to assemble.

MY PARTS LIST

i am in no way an expert, but this is the list of components i am using

mouse 3d model i hacked together, designed to fit modern wired mouses, not designed by me originally, i dont know the creator.

case for the pc. designed for the 2012 mac mini

My screen was hard to find, and requires a 12V 3(or greater)A DC VOLT cable.

and the spray paint is just Krylon Matte Clamshell And flat clear finish.

i dont really like macintosh, but its what i had on hand, so whatayagonnado

i want it to have longevity, and connect to the internet, so mac is the way to go, as i dont want to pay for a w11 license and a machine that can run it, so mac. (or pi if i can get my hands on it)

I will be updating w/ pics as i work.

WISH ME LUCKKK

[cyberpunkonline]

THE AESTHETICS OF ABANDONWARE: WHY DEAD SOFTWARE FEELS HOLY

By R A Z, Queen of Glitches, Rat Prophet of the Post-Crash Pixel-Chapel

INTRO: Oi, you ever boot up a DOSBox emulator and feel your soul whisper "Amen"? No? Then saddle up, you absolute fetus, 'cause we’re going full pilgrimage through the haunted cathedrals of dead code, cursed shareware, and disc rot salvation. This is for the ones who dream in .BMPs, weep in MIDI, and hit “Yes to All” when copying cracked ZIPs from forgotten FTPs at 3AM. Abandonware ain’t just nostalgia—it’s digital necromancy. And some of us are bloody good at it.

DEAD SOFTWARE = HOLY SHRINE

Let’s be clear: abandonware is software that’s been, well, abandoned. The devs moved on. The publisher collapsed in a puff of VC smoke. The website's now a spammy shell selling beard oil or crack cocaine. The software? Unupdated. Unsupported. Gloriously obsolete.

So why does launching Hover! or Starship Titanic in 2025 feel like entering a chapel with weird lighting and a dial-up modem choir?

Because it’s sacred, mate.

We’re not talking about the games themselves being perfect. A lot of them were janky as hell. We’re talking vibe. These programs exist outside capitalism now. They’re post-market. Post-hype. They don’t want your money, your updates, your logins. They just want your attention—pure and simple. You’re not a user anymore. You’re a curator. A digital monk brushing dust off EXEs and praying to the Gods of IRQ Conflicts and SoundBlaster settings.

WHY IT HITS DIFFERENT

Dead software doesn’t update. It doesn’t push patches or ads. It won’t ask you to connect your Google account to play Math Blaster. It’s a sealed time capsule. Booting it up is like receiving an artifact from a parallel dimension where the internet still had webrings and every kid thought Quake mods would lead to a dream job at ID Software.

But it also represents a lost sincerity. These weren’t games made to hook you for eternity with algorithms. These were games made by six dudes in a shed with a caffeine problem and one working CD burner. And their README files were poetry. Half of them end with “Contact us on AOL or send a floppy to our PO Box.” What do you mean you don’t know what a PO Box is?

FOR THE ZOOMIES: YOU JUST MISSED THE GOLDEN ROT

Listen up, juniors. If you were born after 2005, you missed the age when the internet was held together with chewing gum, JPEG artifacts, and unspoken respect.

Back then, finding a rare game was an adventure. Not an algorithm. You didn’t scroll TikTok and get spoon-fed vibes. You climbed through broken Geocities links and begged on IRC channels. You learned to read. You learned to search. You learned that “No-CD crack” doesn’t mean what your mum thinks it means.

So here’s your initiation: go download something weird from a forgotten archive. No guides. No Discord server. Just the raw, terrifying joy of not knowing if you’ve just installed Robot Workshop Deluxe or a Russian trojan. Welcome to the cult.

THE TWO-YEAR RULE

Online communities? They’re mayflies with usernames. Peak lifespan? Two years.

Here’s the cycle:

A niche game/tool/art style gets revived.

People form a forum/Reddit/Discord.

A zine or remix scene emerges.

Drama. Mods quit. Someone forks the project.

Everyone vanishes.

This cycle has always existed. The only difference now is that it’s faster. But dead software bypasses this. It’s post-community. You don’t have to join a scene. You are the scene. Every time you open it up, you’re plugging into a ghost socket. You’re chatting with echoes. It’s beautiful.

CONCLUSION: THIS IS A RELIGION NOW. PRACTICE IT.

Abandonware isn’t about gaming. It’s about reclaiming reverence. About saying “This mattered” even if no one else remembers it did. It’s about surfing the ruins, not for loot, but for meaning. There’s holiness in opening a program that hasn’t been touched in decades and seeing it still works. Still waits for you. Still loads that same intro MIDI with the confidence of a god.

So light a candle. Install a CRT filter. Screenshot that low-res menu and print it on a t-shirt. You’re not just playing with the past. You’re preserving the bones of the digital age.

See you in the BIOS, kids.

—

RAZ out.

[diabetesnscoliosis]

I'm so glad for all the times I've moved, I've still kept all my gaming collection. So much of it is so old though and I do worry for how it will last over time

Lately, I have been feeling very sentimental and sad about losing media and planned obsolescence and all that. Mainly thinking about all my favorite childhood video games. I sold my GBA many years ago, along with all its games, including Pokemon Leaf Green and Pokemon Yellow: Special Pikachu Edition. I sold my copy of Pokemon Black 2 and Pokemon X. Im dying to buy them again...but damn, the price is outrageous. Aside from the cost, there's also the fact that these old Gameboy and DS games(along with the consoles themselves) simply won't last forever..3DS will soon lose its online capabilities too. Man idk...I'm feeling genuine sadness over all this :,)

[memento-morianon]

Elvish Ear Binding

(Image description: a sketchbook page showing elf ears in various shapes as a result of ear binding. At the top is a normal elf ear, below it is a narrower ear that looks rather folded inward due to ear binding. The next ear down is fully folded inward like a tube of ear, the result of over binding. The final ear has collapsed into a flopped over shape like a dog ear. On the side of the page there is a simple sketch of an elf wearing bindings on their ears, tied with a bow and having the strands hang down. End description.)

The written notes on the page will be described below:

Ear binding is a common practice amongst the wealthy and noble families in several elf cultures worldwide. It is believed that the narrower ear shape is more beautiful and more "pure" in some cases, distinguishing them further from the lower classes and other sylvanids like drow and stroi who have wider ears.

It is achieved by tying very tight bandages, often alongside bits of metal or wood for shaping, around each ear. It typically begins from infancy and continues into young adulthood. Much like real world body modifications, such as foot binding, extra tight laced corsetry, earlobe stretching, and many forms of plastic surgery, it comes with health risks.

Ear binding always causes permanent damage to the ear cartilage. It cannot be put back into a normal ear shape after the binding has done its work. Other less certain risks include impeded hearing, chronic ear aches and infections, and skin problems on or around the ear, such as an increase of acne or cysts, skin flaking, and built up dead skin that can smell quite bad. It also becomes more difficult to remove earwax, which can lead to its own set of problems.

Over binding can also cause enough damage to the cartilage that the ear shape collapses and it hangs down in a floppy way. But this also happens with age, as the ear cartilage of any sylvanid will eventually degrade the older they get. It is not uncommon to see an elderly drow with bent ears, for example. But the effect is much more severe for those who have had their ears bound.

Not every elf culture does this, but it also isn't limited to a specific region of the world. Ear binding has been around for a long time in many different cultures, coming and going according to current trends wherever it crops up. Lower class elves and even other sylvanids have also practiced it, just to keep up with the trends and emulate famous or powerful figures who have had their ears bound.

[hatsnothoods]

You're just jealous that the Tracies still have hair.

Justified, honestly.

Jealous? JEALOUS?! Of the Tracy's hair?!

Oh yes, I weep into my silk pillow every night that I too cannot emulate an early 2000s boyband.

Alas, I simply cannot spend an absurd amount of my dead father's fortune on industrial-grade hair gel just to keep every follicle perfectly in place while I strut around pretending to be the second coming of Jeff Tracy and lecture the world like I’m its glorified mall cop.

Or better yet - pretend I’m not an heir to the world’s largest fortune, but instead some floppy-haired “surf bum” from the least academically competent stretch of California, grinning like I haven’t got a single functioning neuron in my golden little head.

And let us not forget the space elf - yes, that one - who seems to defy gravity, physics, and common sense with whatever eldritch product he uses to levitate his hair in orbit and commune with the satellites.

All of this to say, I am unequivocally not jealous of a single strand of Tracy DNA containing hair.

You think I lost my hair? No, I ascended. I transcended the frivolous tyranny of shampoo and vanity. My scalp is a solar panel for raw, unfiltered psychic chaos.

Do you see Jeff Tracy with a bare dome? No - because he’s still clinging to the illusion of control. I embraced it. I became it. I don’t need mousse, I need minions.

I don’t style hair - I style destruction.

[bowser-garyopa]

My latest donation is an Texas Instruments Professional Portable Computer.

These machines run MS-DOS v2.13 and use an 8086 CPU, and the cards are almost XT bus, but not really, and for a while, was the nicest luggable PC out there.

It fully works, but it is open to add a GoTek Floppy Emulator, as I currently don't have any original Floppy discs for it, but I have lots of archived images I can place on a USB stick and use on the GoTek.

Also this is good time to remind my supporters of my GoFundMe, that I also accept donations of equipment like this if its related to my TI hobby, and can be useful, it also keeps my mind active and healthy.

This one was available locally, and was worth it to take an Uber there and back to pick it up, many thanks again to all my supporters here!

[quick-drawl-mcgrawl]

How I help myself

Heres a little art tip from a sub-par artist

-If you're really into a fandom and want to get good at drawing the characters:

* draw first from memory, then second with ref and look at them side by side.

-Compare what you got right to what you got wrong so then you can just focus of what you need to improve on. This helps for emulating art styles as well.

-Here, you can see that while I know the eyes are right next to each other with a lil round nose, I've severely underestimated the size of them. I got the noodle limbs but didn't make them quiet floppy enough, and the hair shape is not horrible but I need to work on making everything rounder, and softer.

Here now I'm able to combined the two and not feel like everything's off.

[mingos-commodoreblog]

The Gotek drive in detail - Part 1 - Flashing Gotek (DFU) (German)

[myrfing]

it’s a lot when you see modded floppy eared viera that look very cute and well done and then you remember in the actual game they decided to just add an option that bent the ears partway at like 90 degree angles to emulate this

[dirtyriver]

This one won't surprise anybody who's worked in IT for a while. Legacy systems are hard to get rid of.

[retronator]

I never played Karateka in the 80s, but as a big fan of Prince of Persia and Jordan Mechner's journals, I was stoked to hear that an interactive documentary about Jordan's prototypical cinematic platformer was in the works by Digital Eclipse.

Released this week, The Making of Karateka on the surface looks like any other game you buy through Steam ($20, Windows-only), GOG, or whichever favorite store or console you prefer (available also for Xbox, PS4/5, Switch). Once the thing loads though, you really get 3 things: a documentary, the original Karateka, and a new remaster.

The documentary part is an audio-visual slideshow retelling Jordan's development story starting with his teenage years pitching his earlier title Deathbounce to the publishing house Brøderbund. It's an interesting look into the iterative process, seen through correspondence letters, journal entries, and many playable builds at various stages of completion. After we reach the eventual rejection of that title, Jordan comes back with a prototype of a visual-narrative experience unseen on home computers. We get to follow Karateka's full life cycle from pre- to post-production, ending with the conception of its sequel (which eventually turned into Prince of Persia). It's a real treasure trove! Fellow pixel artists will appreciate the many graph-paper sketches and interactive overlays of final game sprites compared to rotoscoped outlines and filmed footage. There are also video segments, from a comprehensive breakdown of the music to interviews with other developers reflecting on the impact Jordan's games had on their careers. You'll even encounter a fan letter signed by the one and only "John Romero, Disciple of the Great Jordan and worshipper of the Magnificent Mechner!" (I kid you not, you can't make this stuff up).

Perhaps just as crucial for an interactive documentary like this, you can launch any of the floppy disks in the emulator, trying out various iterations and ports of Karateka.

The emulation is fantastic and lets you fiddle with display settings (monochrome or color display, scanlines, pixel perfect or zoomed) as well as enhance the frame rate. You can even rewind the many deaths you will face if you've never played the game before (like me). If you spend some more time obsessing over the weird artifacts of the Apple II hi-res graphics, you might even go down the rabbit hole of realizing that on the Apple II you didn't really paint colors as much as you used different monochrome dithering patterns that the graphics display would then turn into 4 different hues. A fascinating learning experience if you include some of your own research online!

Add to this the Commodore 64 and the Atari 8-bit versions to compare how the graphics got adapted across the earlier ports and you have a nice way to relieve the mid-80s with a bit of help from modern emulation (I did beat the C64 version without rewinding though!). I'd love to see more art from the other remakes, especially the 16-bit Atari ST port, but I understand their decision to omit playable versions of those due to the lower quality on the gameplay side of the translations.

This brings us to the final part of the package, the modern remaster. Unlike the 2012 complete reimagining of the game (with 3D graphics and all), Digital Eclipse approached the remake as the ultimate port of the original to an imaginary system along the lines of a 90s VGA PC.

It's well done. Some of the fully-redrawn scenes are a bit overpainted for my taste (I'd prefer a pixel art rendition of the castle than a blurry photographic collage, although there were many games in the 90s that did take this approach), but the in-game graphics are really in style, including the smooth animations that are like one would imagine granted a beefier CPU. It's also a sort of director's cut with previously unseen scenes added, in particular, the battle with the leopard as a clever action-puzzle in the middle. The AI is unfortunately even less challenging than Jordan's implementation. As great as the 6-move fighting system could have been, you yet again resort to simply kicking away opponents as they tirelessly crawl into your range. There isn't even the nuance from the original where you were the one who had to approach some enemies with skilled timing. On the other hand, you now have optional goals and achievements that make the repetitive/easy combat work in your favor (stringing various combos, beating opponents or the level under a time limit …). As the Digital Eclipse president Mike Mika admits at the end of the welcome commentary mode, they didn't manage to achieve their perfect port, but they did come close.

In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed playing both the original as well as the remake and while the combat system lacks any sort of depth beneath its stunning animations, Karateka is instead a monumental experience for its presentation. Big characters with personality and realistic motion are displayed through cinematic camera cuts and story vignettes (3 years before Ron Gilbert came up with the word "cutscene"). There are details like animating the unfortunate falling off the cliff at the start of the game, or respectfully bowing to the first guard as they bow in return. Jordan's creative work is precious and worth the attention this release gifts it.

I highly recommend The Making of Karateka to all retro gamers and/or game developers for its immersive documentation which provides an experience that goes beyond the usual video documentaries. It's interactive—just like the subject it's talking about—something I want to see more in the future. And if the $20 by any chance seems high to you, consider that the original retailed at $35 (and that was in 1984 dollars).

[clatterbane]

Ah, the joys of C64 gaming! This time, in an emulator that I'm still getting used to.

On a modern display, so we'll all just have to imagine the experience on my usual (B&W) monitor, back in the day.

At any rate, tonight's little delight is a 1988 abandonware title that I didn't know existed, but had to download when I saw it:

It was released on multiple platforms, and you can apparently also play it through a browser on archive.org.

The soundtrack is based on a Devo album, and Timothy Leary was involved in the project.

As for the video here? This was the second time I loaded the game.

The loading delays definitely hearken back to the good old days, even when you're not relying on one slow floppy drive (or, gods forbid, a cassette drive) and physical disk swaps. This particular game evidently came as 5 disk sides for the C64, so we're no doubt in for a lot more virtual swaps later!

(Is the screen supposed to look like that, or is it just crashing while loading???! Guess we'll have to wait and see!)

I have no idea if it's the emulation, or if the title screen music was that messed up on the original hardware. The rest of the sound so far isn't as blatantly wrong, so it's even harder to tell. May have to look for some videos to find out.

Also very reminiscent of trying to play games way back when: what are the controls? We just don't know! In the absence of a paper manual like everything came with then, let's just poke at a bunch of random keys to see if they do anything!

(Though, when I went looking, I did see that the C64 Wiki has us covered, along with some other gameplay info. Better keep that tab open for reference, or possibly print out the control info to make my own pseudo-manual cheat sheet.)

There appears to be a pointer, which could presumably be moved around if you did have a physical joystick connected? I do not, and the keys that I do have configured to stand in for the joystick do not appear to be working. Again, no idea if that's a configuration issue, an emulator issue, or what. Hopefully get something figured out.

Almost a shame that even if I did still have the crappy Atari 2600 joystick that I used to use with the C64, this laptop doesn't have any compatible ports to connect the thing.

I am also not sure if the "Exit" option which I stumbled upon while I was jabbing at random keys not actually doing anything is an emulator thing, or original behavior. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Anyway, looking forward to hopefully getting further into the game once I do get a better idea of the controls.

[dragongodryss]

Some Miracles May Happen Rogues for Rogue Day

Design Ramblings under the cut

Left to Right:

Left: Viperion (Stealth form) activating Second Chance.

Hides both the fact that he is Rogue and that he's a superhero. He's got green eyes in both viperion forms to hide that's he's Rogue/Cat Noir.

Snake elements: The mesh on his arms emulates scales. The pattern on his mask is supposed to be simplified fangs. The strings of his hoodie are meant to look like a forked tongue. And obviously, he has the snake eyes on his hood and the snake emblem on his shoulder.

Middle: Puppeteer (Rogue's Akuma Form) moving (I forgot to add the strings but he has them hanging from under his hood.

Tried to make him look floppy because he's based on a stuffed animal and those don't typically have bones.

Top Right: Viperion (Full form) surveying the mess he has to fix

The outfit is partly inspired by Rogue's GMG outfit. I also wanted him to have a hood because all his other designs have them.

Generally, he needs to be able to move quickly because of the 5 minute time limit on his powers so his clothes are loose and flowy. The pants are mostly there because making the scales on Rogue's legs gold looked weird and he'd probably want to cover his legs more anyway.

Bottom Right: Cat Noir hanging out

Rogue's first superhero form so he went pretty hard on the alt stuff.

Miracles May Happen