Keith Kaisershot s little corner of cyberspace
Rebecca Ann Burger Becky Heineman passed away last month, after a brief but intense battle with cancer. Her contributions to video game history are innumerable; if you ve played a video game made within the past 30 years, chances are she had a hand in its creation in some way. After meeting her at GDC in [ ]
The Bandai Pippin? Yeah, it runs Quake. with caveats. 😉 It doesn t run well, but it does run. This is the 1997 Lion Entertainment port, version 1.08.4, published by MacSoft. I ve observed that 1.09 breaks sound, and 1.08.5 is unobtainium as of the time of this writing, so 1.08.4 it is. And it s playable. [ ]
Knowing my penchant for retro gaming and vintage computing, for a few years now several friends of mine have recommended I visit Tokyo, Japan, specifically the Akihabara ward famous for its shops full of esoteric electronics. I had booked such a trip for April of 2020, but nature had other plans. Now that individual tourism [ ]
Tony Diaz passed away recently. He was a very fervent Apple enthusiast, particularly a fan of the Apple ][. I never met him in real life, but over the past few years we talked quite a bit on IRC—where he alternated between the handles amd and tdiaz —about his involvement with the final few weeks of [ ]
I closed out 2020 by piecing together a minor update to Pippin Kickstart (then spent most of January writing this blog post 😛 ). Version 1.1 patches the SCSI Manager on Pippins with ROM 1.0 (most models with a white case) so that they too may boot from SCSI devices other than the internal CD-ROM [ ]
I picked up Ken Williams s book Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings back in October and read it over my Thanksgiving break. I recommend it, especially if you re interested in the history of video games or software. Even at 530 pages, it s a very quick read, and I was able to get from start [ ]
It s astounding to think back and consider how much technological progress has occurred in just the past 15 years. Most folks today carry a smartphone in their pocket everywhere they go, and a great many of those smartphones have powerful cameras built in capable of recording multiple hours in high definition. Pair this ability with [ ]
Great am I going to have to crack this thing too? 😉 https://t.co/CBJf7CZrGM Keith Kaisershot (@ablitter) April 12, 2020 It was a rhetorical question. OK, I ll admit that the Retroquest Super Retro Castle isn t really a Pippin Classic, but it sure looks the part, and when I learned of its existence back in April, [ ]
I owe a lot to Mark of the Unicorn s Professional Composer. Had my dad not encountered this program around 1985 and subsequently adopted it (and its corresponding Mac hardware) for himself two years later, I would not have grown up with Macs, possibly even computers. I certainly wouldn t have become as familiar with music notation [ ]
I ve been busy. The Pippinizer is going to take me longer than I expected to put together into a releasable form, so I wrote a small utility that should tide folks over until that s ready. Introducing Pippin Kickstart. This is a small, carefully-crafted boot disc for the Pippin that circumvents the console s built-in security and [ ]