Category: IBM PC

  • Instant Graphics and Sound, Part 6: Legacy

    Instant Graphics and Sound, Part 6: Legacy

    This is the sixth part of a multi-part series. The Instant Graphics and Sound format reached its zenith in September 1991 when artist Steve Turnbull published two psychedelic animations on a messageboard on the CrossNet network for Atari ST bulletin boards. Both were built around large triangles: a pyramid in one, a volcano in the…

  • Try Kirschen’s games and software on the Internet Archive

    Try Kirschen’s games and software on the Internet Archive

    It’s been a little over a year since I began publishing the Kirschen software collection, and during that time I have also worked to upload Kirschen’s software to the Internet Archive and make it playable in the browser. The entire collection is tagged “kirschen-software” to make it easier to find. The emulation works well for…

  • Unearthed: Kirschen’s “Music Creator” for IBM PC

    Unearthed: Kirschen’s “Music Creator” for IBM PC

    Decades before the debut of DALL-E, Israeli cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen was developing an “artificial creativity” system to let computers compose their own music, by extracting components of existing songs and combining them in new ways. The software was originally written for the Amiga, but business changes led them to abandon that platform and port the…

  • Introducing our first special collection: Door World Magazine

    Introducing our first special collection: Door World Magazine

    Today I’m adding a new section of special collections to Break Into Chat. These are going to be small, targeted collections unique to this website. The first such collection is Door World Magazine, a monthly online magazine about BBS door games, which was published from 1995-96 by RoAnn Vecchia and Dave Wendling of the N.U.G.I.…

  • Telnet to a BBS using a PC terminal program within the DOSBox emulator

    Telnet to a BBS using a PC terminal program within the DOSBox emulator

    A few months ago I wrote about my experiences trying to telnet in to Atari BBSes using an emulated Atari on my Mac. Basically the solution boiled down to this: Use tcpser4j to change a telnet connection to a serial connection, use socat to pipe that serial connection to a file, and set the Hatari…