Author: insecure_automaton

Little bit of this, little bit of that.

Dwarf Fortress earnings

The Adams brothers have been killing it numbers-wise w/ Dwarf Fortress the last few years. Good on them, it’s nice seeing folks succeed in this manner.

Screenshot of Dwarf Fortress, courtesy of slate.com
Screenshot of Dwarf Fortress, courtesy of slate.com

Tuttle Y-DNA matches

My paternal line is Tuttle. There was some confusion over which Tuttle line my branch belonged to so I recently took an FTDNA Y-DNA test to confirm it genetically. We descend from this gent, William Tuttle, b. 1607 in Ringstead, Northamptonshire, England, and d. June 1673 in New Haven, Connecticut, and his wife Elizabeth, b. ~1609, also in England, and d. 31 Dec 1684, also in New Haven. They immigrated to the New World about 1635.

Some concise interesting reading on these Tuttles from the New England Historical Society.

Much more in-depth genealogy (two volumes) on William and Elizabeth’s descendants.

30th anniversary interview with Galaga creator/designer Shigeru Yokoyama

Neat background info on everything Galaga, from the programming to the cabinet design: https://web.archive.org/web/20150803002342/http://shmuplations.com/galaga

Galaga screenshot, courtesy The Society of Peripheral Studies
Galaga screenshot, courtesy The Society of Peripheral Studies

“The Core”: resurrecting Atari 2600 homebrew abandonware/vaporware…

…from a single screenshot more than 20 years after it disappeared due to unfortunate circumstances.

Interesting thread here at AtariAge discussing the current effort and a contemporaneous description of the game by the original developer, Paul Oswood, here.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to the original screenshot of course:

Original screenshot of
Original screenshot of “The Core” ca. 2000

Digitpress interviews David Rolfe…

…developer of – among other things – the Intellivision Exec OS and Star Fire, the first arcade game to use a sit-down cockpit, and more notably, allow a user to enter their initials after achieving a high score: https://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_david_rolfe.html

David Rolfe, programmer of Star Fire and Intellivision Exec OS
David Rolfe, programmer of Star Fire and Intellivision Exec OS

 

 

Browser-based 8080 PCjs machine emulation of 1978’s Space Invaders

Suh-weet: https://www.pcjs.org/machines/arcade/invaders/

Also, the Github repo for PCjs.

Jeff Minter (Yak) of Llamasoft

Previously shared a trailer for an upcoming Atari game Akka Arrh. Forgot to link to the Wikipedia entry, but its developer, Jeff Minter, is a hoot. You may also recognize him as the actor whom murderous author Jerome Davies from the Black Mirror film Bandersnatch.

Poster for Black Mirror's film
Poster for Black Mirror’s film “Bandersnatch”

SCP liminality

qntm is a fantastic sci-fi author. Previously I’d only been exposed to the fiction at his personal site qntm.org, but lately I’ve started diving into his SCP works, specifically the works at the Antimemetics Division Hub.

Addictive, addictive reads.

Rare and valuable Atari 2600 games

Amazing the obscurity of some of these titles and the resultant sales prices: https://www.racketboy.com/retro/rarest-and-most-valuable-atari-2600-games

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