Break Into Chat
Josh Renaud’s blog about BBS history, retro computing and technology reminiscences.
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Revisiting my ANSI tile map
Nearly 10 years ago, my daughter Jadzia wanted me to make a game called “Jewel Mountain.” One of my early ANSI experiments for the game was to make an RPG-style tile map in ANSI. When I started it years ago, my initial idea was to adapt 16×16 pixel-art tiles to sprites made of ANSI text,…
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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…
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Unearthed: Kirschen’s “Magic Harp” for Commodore Amiga
When I published the original four-part “Bringing dry bones back to life” series where I shared 10 pieces of previously-lost computer programs developed by Yaakov Kirschen, I couldn’t include “Magic Harp,” his original Amiga-based “artificial creativity” music composing software. At the time, Kirschen’s wife, Sali Ariel, believed that it was likely gone forever, because she…
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Our latest special collection: The ACE-St. Louis “NewsLine”
It’s time to stop waiting. Years ago, I scanned and OCRed my own collection of eight issues of “NewsLine”, the newsletter of the Atari Computer Enthusiasts of St. Louis, or ACE-St. Louis, club. Of course there were many more issues of the “NewsLine” beyond these eight. I held off publishing them for a long time,…
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Unearthed: My old OASIS BBS Atari floppy disk
For the last few years, I’ve been researching and imaging other people’s old disks — but recently someone turned the tables and salvaged one of mine! Let me tell you the story.
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Slides yield glimpses of Kirschen’s lost “Magic Harp” software
Yaakov Kirschen and his wife, Sali Ariel, are in the process of downsizing and moving to a new home in Israel. Sali has been hard at work, sifting through decades of collected belongings in preparation. She found a bunch of things related to Kirschen’s 1980s software development firm, LKP Ltd., and sent them to me…
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