This is a fascinating older post made by the NYC Resistor group detailing the technical data behind the images left behind in the Apple Mac SE ROM<. As the ROM only used 89kB of the available 256kB, the original development digitized pictures of themselves and hid them away in the remaining space. The article goes into some interesting details about the image format and CPU opcodes.

Damian Ward has also posted some nice shots of the images on hardware: here, here, here and here.

2014 is beginning to come to a close.

I’ve wanted to redo this website for a while now, and what better time to get it done than before the new year. The first iteration of the site was simply a front-end for a tumblr blog, which was focused on retro gaming and computer, digital archaeology, interesting hardware, etc., but also contained a fair amount of unrelated interests. It was also one of my first attempts at cobbling together a Javascript SPA; the original code is pretty nightmarish.

I dabbled in rewriting it with AngularJS which was… a learning experience. I got pretty far into it too, but in the end ot was more trouble than it was worth. Besides, while using the tumblr API was a neat exercise, I’d rather keep my posts on my own server, where I can back up and export the database as necessary. Nerd paranoia and desire for control, I guess.

So, here we are with a new blog/CMS system called Chyrp. It seems to be a nice balance of small and functional. I’m sure I’ve missed some nooks and crannies when making the custom theme, but they should be fixed sooner than later.

The content will focus on old video games and computer software, game hacking, digital archaeology, software easter eggs and secrets and retro hardware… I hope you find all of that as interesting as I do! For now I’ll be re-posting some of the more relevant content from tumblr, but I hope to keep it regularly update with new stuff after that.