Comment Re:PETSCII for me (Score 1) 10
Awesome! I have a collection of ATASCII animations (such as the Bruce Lee one) available for online viewing at "AtasciiTube":
https://breakintochat.com/coll...
Comment Re: I took a quick look (Score 1) 10
If we want to understand our current moment, and how we came to it, I think it's pretty important to look back at stuff like this, not erase or ignore it. Bulletin boards were then (and still are now) complicated places where many viewpoints collided.
Comment Re:I took a quick look (Score 2) 10
There was a scarcity of unique visual content back then, unlike today where we're awash in it. Sysops were willing to pay for unique games, doors and other regularly refreshed content that would give their users reasons to keep calling. For a few sysops, these telecomics fit the bill, but yeah, it wasn't many.
Submission + - Before webcomics: Selling political cartoons on BBSes in 1992 1
Kirkman14 writes: A year before the Web opened to the public, Texas entrepreneur Don Lokke was trying to syndicate weekly political cartoons to bulletin board systems. His "telecomics," as he called them, represent an overlooked early experiment in online comics.
Lokke launched his main series, "Mack the Mouse" at the height of the 1992 Clinton-Bush-Perot presidential race. His mouse protagonist voiced the frustrations felt by everyday Americans about rising taxes and the recession.
Lokke gave away "Mack" for free, but sold subscriptions to his other telecomics, betting sysops would pay for exclusive content. The timing wasn't crazy: enthusiasm for BBSes as an industry was surging, with conferences like ONE BBSCON promoting "BBSing for profit."
But the Web soon deflated those hopes, and Lokke left BBSes behind in 1995. Decades later, about half of his nearly 300 telecomics were recovered and preserved on 16colors.
Lokke launched his main series, "Mack the Mouse" at the height of the 1992 Clinton-Bush-Perot presidential race. His mouse protagonist voiced the frustrations felt by everyday Americans about rising taxes and the recession.
Lokke gave away "Mack" for free, but sold subscriptions to his other telecomics, betting sysops would pay for exclusive content. The timing wasn't crazy: enthusiasm for BBSes as an industry was surging, with conferences like ONE BBSCON promoting "BBSing for profit."
But the Web soon deflated those hopes, and Lokke left BBSes behind in 1995. Decades later, about half of his nearly 300 telecomics were recovered and preserved on 16colors.
Submission + - Unearthing the story behind the 1994 ANSI art comic "Inspector Dangerfuck" (breakintochat.com)
Kirkman14 writes: In the first chapter of the 2006 book "A History of Webcomics," the author makes an eyebrow-raising claim: that an ANSI artist named "Eerie" had created the "first known comic on the internet," provocatively titled "Inspector Dangerfuck."
The book offered no dates, no details, and no sources, which should have raised red flags. But for 20 years, authors, bloggers, Wikipedia editors, and content creators have repeated versions of this statement, without adding anything new, except the date: 1994.
Clearly, the original assertion was wrong. There definitely were earlier online comics.
But so many questions remain! What is ANSI art? Who was Eerie? What was "Inspector Dangerfuck?" Was it even a comic? Were there other ANSI art comics?
Computer historian Josh Renaud (Break Into Chat) has interviewed Eerie and dug through BBS archives, ANSI art collections, and contemporaneous documentation in a new multi-part series that reconstructs this overlooked corner of digital culture.
The book offered no dates, no details, and no sources, which should have raised red flags. But for 20 years, authors, bloggers, Wikipedia editors, and content creators have repeated versions of this statement, without adding anything new, except the date: 1994.
Clearly, the original assertion was wrong. There definitely were earlier online comics.
But so many questions remain! What is ANSI art? Who was Eerie? What was "Inspector Dangerfuck?" Was it even a comic? Were there other ANSI art comics?
Computer historian Josh Renaud (Break Into Chat) has interviewed Eerie and dug through BBS archives, ANSI art collections, and contemporaneous documentation in a new multi-part series that reconstructs this overlooked corner of digital culture.
Comment Re:Pack link and anyone remember IGS? (Score 1) 6
Do I have to go buy an ISA modem and get POTS to use this? When does CompUSA close today? I might have re-subscribe to Computer Shopper to order a modem.
Those were the days -- though I doubt CompUSA would have stocked Atari ST hardware.
For anyone who might be wondering, no, you don't need any special hardware to experience this pack. If you grab the pack, it includes PNG and MP4 versions of the art for viewing on modern systems
Many of the animations in this pack can be seen on my telnet BBS, Guardian of Forever -- but only with a special Atari setup that probably only the most diehard of diehards would consider.
Comment Pack link and anyone remember IGS? (Score 1) 6
If anyone would prefer to download the actual artpack, you can get it here.
I'm curious if there are any present-day Slashdot users who ever saw or used IGS (or its later PC successors "BIG" and "CONDOR") during the years 1988-1993. I'm sure it's unlikely, but I'd love to hear from anyone if you're out there.
Submission + - IGNITE: Artpack is "love letter" to obscure graphics protocol for Atari ST BBSes (breakintochat.com)
Kirkman14 writes: How do you get people interested in an obscure Atari ST graphics format used on BBSes in the late 1980s and early 1990s?
Recruit some folks to help you make an artpack full of images and animations showing it off!
That's the idea behind IGNITE, a new artpack from Mistigris computer arts and Break Into Chat, featuring 18 images and animations created in "Instant Graphics and Sound" format.
Kirkman (Josh Renaud) explains:
Recruit some folks to help you make an artpack full of images and animations showing it off!
That's the idea behind IGNITE, a new artpack from Mistigris computer arts and Break Into Chat, featuring 18 images and animations created in "Instant Graphics and Sound" format.
Kirkman (Josh Renaud) explains:
I love telling unknown underdog computer stories, and IGS sucked me in. This fall, I published a six-part, 14,000-word history, introducing readers to a cast of characters that included Mears, the self-described “working man without a degree” who often downplayed his own coding ability; Kevin Moody and Anthony Rau, two Navy guys in Florida who bonded over their love of Atari and BBSing; Steve Turnbull, an artist and scenic designer working in Hollywood; and many others.
But IGS isn’t just a thing of the past. Two years ago, on New Years Eve 2022, Mears made a surprise announcement — he was releasing a new version of IGS, thirty years after he had stopped working on the project.
Because I (inadvertently) had spurred Larry to action, I felt an obligation to make some art using his new tools. I completed my first piece — a drawing of a ship from the sci-fi game FTL — in early 2023. Over the subsequent months, I kept at it, and ended up creating a number of fun animations. I’m particularly proud of the animated Guardian of Forever login sequence, and a brand-new Calvin and Hobbes-themed animation I created just for this pack.
I had long wanted to release an all-IGS artpack as a way to honor Mears, highlight IGS, and maybe stir other people’s interest in trying this format. To lower the barrier to entry, I created my own web-based drawing tool, JoshDraw, which supports a small subset of IGS’s features. To my surprise, I successfully recruited seven other people to submit nine static images to include in the pack.
Comment Re:did anyone try out The Music Creator? (Score 1) 39
Hi, this is Josh Renaud, the Break Into Chat guy
The three-disk installer did not work properly in DOSBox, for some reason. But it *did* work for me in QEMU, so I installed to a hard disk image.
Then, after successfully completing installation, I tried to run TMC in QEMU. The program launches just fine, but when I hit "play", I hear no audio of the music. I tried tweaking the configuration a bunch of ways, but nothing made a difference.
So then I tried using DOSBox to run TMC from that same hard disk image. And it worked great -- the audio plays fine.
If you try it yourself, I'd be curious to hear if your experience differs from mine!
P.S. After getting it work locally, I zipped the installation, and uploaded it to the Internet Archive, along with necessary metadata bits to enable IA's Emscripten DOSBox to play the program in a browser. Frustratingly, while TMC seems to run fine in the browser, the audio is again problematic -- I have been unable to hear it in any browser that I have tried. I don't understand why it works in local DOSBox, but not IA's Emscripten version of DOSBox.
P.P.S. I scanned and uploaded a physical manual of the TMC Professional 1.3 for anyone who's interested.
Comment Re:Even retrocomputing stories get the AI badge (Score 2) 39
Mentioning AI has is a time-honored tradition in computing! Even back in 1988, Kirschen was giving his twist on the "AI" label. From a profile in the Los Angeles Times:
"It's not artificial intelligence," said Kirschen of his system. "It's artificial creativity."
[...]
Kirschen's system goes beyond that, however, creating melody, harmony and rhythm from what the Brooklyn native described as the musical "genes" he has programmed into it.
"The premise is that music is alive, and anything alive has a genetic structure," he said. "What the system does is to extract the 'DNA' from music and allows us to recombine it."
Submission + - "Artificial creativity" music software for Commodore Amiga unearthed (breakintochat.com)
Kirkman14 writes: Josh Renaud of breakintochat.com has recovered two early examples of "artificial creativity" software for the Commodore Amiga that generate new music by recombining patterns extracted from existing music.
Developed by cartoonist Ya'akov Kirschen and his Israeli software firm LKP Ltd. in 1986-87, "Computer Composer" demo and "Magic Harp" were early attempts at AI-like autonomous music generation. Kirschen's technology was used to help score a BBC TV documentary in 1988, and was covered by the New York Times and other major newspapers. None of the Amiga software was ever sold, though the technology was ported to PC and published under the name "The Music Creator" in 1989.
Developed by cartoonist Ya'akov Kirschen and his Israeli software firm LKP Ltd. in 1986-87, "Computer Composer" demo and "Magic Harp" were early attempts at AI-like autonomous music generation. Kirschen's technology was used to help score a BBC TV documentary in 1988, and was covered by the New York Times and other major newspapers. None of the Amiga software was ever sold, though the technology was ported to PC and published under the name "The Music Creator" in 1989.
Comment Re:Old gen-xers vs young gen-xers (Score 1) 55
I think this is why someone came up with the concept of the “Xennial” generation, because to us the BBS scene consisted of DOS machines and ANSI art, not this Atari stuff. Lord, Usurper, Trade Wars... those are the BBS doors I remember.
The BBS scene was more heterogeneous than that. Sure the PC was dominant in the 90s, but there were still Amiga, Atari, Mac, and other kinds of BBSes in small numbers. In fact, many DOS BBS games were ported from (or copied from) other platforms. For example, Assassin began as an Atari ST BBS game in 1990, then migrated to the PC in 1995. Space Empire Elite for the Atari ST was the inspiration for Space Dynasty and Solar Realms Elite on the PC (not to mention Barren Realms Elite, Falcon's Eye, etc),.
Anyway, Atari's platform inferiority is one of the reasons Thieves' Guild is like a hidden gem
Most of the users I remember from that era seemed to consider graphical front-ends to be too inefficient to use over the slow ass analog models of the day.
I don't get what you mean by "inefficient." Overcoming slow connections was one of the *points* of using a front-end client. OOIITERM is a perfect example. You downloaded a ZIP file with all sound effects and menus up front. Then when you used OOIITERM, very little had to actually be transmitted over the modem -- the resources were already stored on your computer. Using the client, people with 300 or 2400 bps modems would see the menus appear instantly, rather than crawling across the screen letter-by-letter.
Maybe you mean that each one was proprietary. If you wanted to use the graphical clients for Operation Overkill, Land of Devastation, and The Pit, it probably would have been inconvenient to keep switching terminals.
Comment Re:Couple other tidbits (Score 5, Informative) 55
You can see the direction the BBS industry was headed if you watch the "Make it Pay" episode of the BBS Documentary ... around 1993-95 there were conventions like One BBScon, there was a cottage industry of books about how to become a sysop, there were even short-lived trade groups like the Door Authors Marketing Association.
Comment Couple other tidbits (Score 5, Informative) 55
A couple other interesting tidbits:
Witte and Flower didn't just sell the game to sysops. They also developed things to sell directly to BBS users, such as a standalone version of the game, and a parchment map of the game's world
CompuServe was impressed by the graphics in the Thieves' Guild front-end client, and began negotiating with Witte about licensing the game, but it didn't pan out.
Earlier this year, Herb Flower's previously-unreleased Atari ST platform game Dark Fortress was rescued, and is now available to download and play.
Submission + - Thieves' Guild: a BBS game with the best 1990s pixel graphics you've never seen 1
Kirkman14 writes: Thieves' Guild is a BBS door game for the Atari ST that came out in 1993. What made it unique was its graphical front-end client, which features dozens of eye-popping pixel art vignettes, along with simple animated sprites, sampled speech, and sound effects.
As a BBS door game (strike 1) for the Atari ST (strike 2), not many people played this game or saw its front-end in the 90s. But it's worth re-discovering.
The game was created by Paul Witte and Herb Flower who teamed up again in the early 2000s to produce the MMORPG "Linkrealms."
The Pascal source code for several versions of Thieves' Guild, including an unreleased 1995 port for PC BBSes, has been rescued and published on GitHub.
As a BBS door game (strike 1) for the Atari ST (strike 2), not many people played this game or saw its front-end in the 90s. But it's worth re-discovering.
The game was created by Paul Witte and Herb Flower who teamed up again in the early 2000s to produce the MMORPG "Linkrealms."
The Pascal source code for several versions of Thieves' Guild, including an unreleased 1995 port for PC BBSes, has been rescued and published on GitHub.
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