[grisly pixel art] DreamWeb got a generally lukewarm reception from many gaming mags at release, but almost all of them mentioned how extreme some of the depicted violence was. one of the early scenes in the game has some incredibly detailed animation worthy of […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

laundry basket/prison #catsofmastodon

i have no idea if graffiti gear was a thing outside of canada, but i hope it was 🙏 it enjoyed a brief fad in my elementary school, until someone realized writing swear words in permanent marker was much more appealing than their autograph. #canada #1980s

Due to technical limitations with mastodon's architecture - which does not support domain name changes or data migration - dialup.cafe will be closing permanently in one month. Dialup.cafe instance users: please see the server announcement and get thine affairs in order. 💀

holy crap: mastodon server does not support domain name changes. 😆 i now have to give some serious thought to migrating dialup.cafe -> dialup.party it would mean setting up a new server from scratch, migrating users to the new server, and losing all of their post history in the process. i am […]

walnut brains and big dreams #beaver #animals #alberta #yeg #canada

500+ canada geese on the trans canada trail #canada #animals #yeg

two years ago our resident hare dug herself a soft spot on the front lawn, and sat in it for weeks. twice a year - in the spring and autumn - she returns to that exact spot and has a good sit for a few days. she arrived this morning #rabbits #urbananimals #animals #yeg

huh. https://apnews.com/article/ea-electronic-arts-video-game-silver-lake-pif-d17dc7dd3412a990d2c0a6758aaa6900 #ultima

Last weekend of the month, and I finally have the time to check out our @dosgameclub September game: Ascendancy. It's a space-themed 4X game from 1995, very much in the same vein as Master of Orion, and it rules. What's especially great imho is how wild and […] [Original post on dosgame.club]

happy 28th birthday ultima online! #uo #ultima #retrogaming #win95

welcome to the dialup café @kegwin!

The first Global Newton Users Meetup (GNUM) in over a year is in the works! Global Newton Users Meetup #16 Saturday, September 27th 2025, 17:00 UTC Join us on Zoom for a casual get-together for fans, aficionados, developers, and collectors of the #applenewton platform. Details on the […]

this interview with jeff vogel has a fascinating 15-minute tour of jeff's homebuilt IDE and engine for building spiderweb software RPGs in an age where the vast majority of developers are building games using general purpose platforms like unity/godot, it's fascinating to see how jeff has […]

#silentsunday #mushtodon

on the prairies of western canada it is harvest time for hops and apples with the hot and dry autumn, we got a surprisingly bountiful harvest of both #gardening #bloomscrolling #autumn #fruit

The Invisible City Beneath Paris by Robert Macfarlane, The New Yorker Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms and chambers. https://archive.ph/0Z2g9 photo credit: Gaspard […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

today's software preservation task one of the great crimes of the 21st century was that Mark Jones' (Core Design) Darkmere - an isometric adventure-RPG for the amiga - was poorly visually documented by the usual places like lemonamiga/mobygames/etc. perhaps for […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

Back when I bought my iMac G5 as a grad student, I could never have afforded Macromedia Director - even with its heavily discounted “academic” license. finally acquired it today, complete, so I can begin turning my upcoming book Mages & Modems, into an […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

a 20km hike through prairie deciduous in the autumn. this is the strathcona regional trail, which recently connected edmonton to fort saskatchewan. difficulty: easy distance: medium surface: 10-20mm gravel pic 2: there is a well hidden footpath connecting the […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

finally know what it means to be rich i didn’t choose to rescue canadian culture from the landfill - it chose me #canada #tv #highlander

discovered this ad for a Panasonic PV-SD4090 in a march 2000 issue of Wired mag 99% of the time i see sony mavica posts for retro digicams, but this one is a real treasure. those LS-120 drives did not really catch on at the time, and it’s a shame because iomega […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

@alec welcome to the dialup café! :)

found a 20 year old receipt for my iMac G5 20-inch, ordered brand new from the apple store when i was a grad student. this was their flagship imac at the time. it has been a long, long time since i even imagined spending that kind of money on a new computer 🤯 […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

sometimes life presents you with a choice: you can spend a sunday in the comforts of home, or you can drive 4 hours to rescue 40 issues of Wired mag from hitting the recycle bin the seller planned to toss these the next morning if someone didn’t pick them up […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

today’s filthy shitty unhappy job: pulling a dead drain pump from my mom’s aging samsung front load washer. the worst part was draining very old undrained effluvia. the pump is accessed from the underside of the washer, via a small access port. just enough room […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

how to instantly get yourself blocked by an ebay seller 😂

although I am months late in finding this out, a short eulogy for Thom Miller/Retro Guy, the creator and maintainer of RockSolid Light (RSL) - a web-based NNTP server i have rarely known someone so dedicated to their passion project as he was. many of the features RSL came to support, like […]

well ffs https://globalnews.ca/news/11388712/graham-greene-actor-dances-with-wolves-dead-indigenous/ #canada

for almost thirty years i've thought about the early pre-alpha screenshots of Ultima IX there is something incredibly charming about the combination of 3/4 perspective, 640x480 res, 256 colour palette, zero alpha blending or mipmapping or filtering, and global […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

After Dark's bathroom wall screensaver still hurts, don't it dark forces #doom #vintageapple #macintosh #dosgaming

charming icon from kiddonet.com - an IE4-based browser for children. reminds me of the macOS finder #retrocomputing

anyone else remember the page html you could add from icq to show your on/offline status on your homepage 😅 #icq #1990s #softwarepreservation

some of you know that i wrote a book - "Mages & Modems" - soon to be published, about my experiences growing up in the 80s and 90s with microcomputers in northern canada. back in 95-97, as a teenager, i worked at the arctic's first ISP. but before it became an […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

[spider] #silentsunday

I’m so pleased to share Annie Fox and my @homecomputermuseum talk with everyone who wanted to attend but couldn’t. Thank you Anne Bras for putting this all together. The audio gets much better about 7 minutes in when a phone was placed next to us. #retrogaming #LucasfilmGames #lucasarts #atari […]

today's buried treasure: an interview with john henry thompson on the history of Macromedia Director. it's one of the only interviews ever recorded on the subject. as the lead programmer and creator of Lingo - the OO scripting language used in director - he relates intimate knowledge of its […]

today's retro rescue is a palm tungsten T5 - the late flagship model in the tungsten line of PDAs ten years ago i had nothing but a tungsten for all of my computing needs - i wrote emails and letters on it, and played a lot of Infocom text adventures at night […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

i absolutely admire @beatscribe's attention to detail in their gameboy color BBS hacking game that 2400 baud dialup handshaking sound is 👌 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuFL29vgNeE play here: https://beatscribe.itch.io/gbbbs95 #bbs #retrogaming #gameboy

instead of memorizing our birth years, most millennials could just have logitech logo tattoos inked at birth source: https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Logitech

some time ago i discovered the 1940s General Electric Epicure 2QH2 kitchen wall clock and fell in love with the modernist face design it took a few months, but i finally tracked one down today for $20 locally. i was surprised to learn that the movement is […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

i wrote a 120,000 word book on my experience growing up in the BBS and dial-up internet era, from ~1985-1997 it's chock full of stories about ibm pc and macintosh hardware and gaming it's going to be published this autumn as an ebook and might get a print edition but i have a far more stupid […]

how did it never once occur to me to swear at the You Don't Know Jack parser i absolutely love that they rewarded the player for this #retrogaming #win95

bbs enthusiasts might remember the name Telegard - a bbs server written based on wwiv's source code and hugely popular with the ibm pc/ms-dos crowd telegard had a long and tumultuous history by its authors, and its own source was eventually leaked and was modded […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]