The Apple IIGS Turns 40, FujiNet Interview from VCF East, New Antic Episode
Posted on 15 Sep 2026
Posted on 15 Sep 2026
The folks at The Oasis BBS interviewed Thom Cherryhomes and Jaime Idolpx at VCF East to discuss FujiNet.
FujiNet and Meatloaf Interview
A new episode of Antic the Atari 8-bit Podcast was publlished last week.
Posted on 13 Sep 2026
Kate Fox from the Macintosh Librarian podcast and Veronica from the Veronica Explains podcast have teamed-up to bring us a new podcast. An audio version of the podcast is available from the website. A video edition of the podcast is also available on YouTube.
Website: www.kateandveronica.net
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@KateandVeronica
In her interview on the Retro Hour podcast, Veronica alluded to the realization of this podcast.
Dave Cook discusses InfoCom's game Bureaucracy:
Bureaucracy, or Michael Bywater Saves the Day
In his vintage computing blog, Cameron Kaiser goes into a deep dive about the various incarnations of the VTech Laser 200 computer.
A Dick Smith VZ200 without the Dick Smith (but with a serial port)
Posted on 12 Sep 2026
If you haven't tuned in to Kari (rhymes with "Atari") Lawler's retrocomputing podcast, you should give it a try. She presents all sorts of adventures in coding, restoring old systems, and other retro topics. Here's an episode where she tries to recrate a Terminator II scene using the venerable Turbo Pascal compiler:
Recreated the Terminator 2 EASY MONEY Scene
// Using a real 1989 Atari Portfolio and Turbo PASCAL
If you take a look at the image here...
...you might not notice that each one of the little rectangles on each line are pages out of Byte Magazine. Click on any one of them to drill down to see that page.
I just received a recommendation to check out the Commodore History podcast on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/@commodorehistory
I haven't had a chance to do much more than check out the main page, but this looks like a good podcast. I'll be sampling these episodes soon.
Posted on 11 Sep 2026
The new issue of the revived Compute's Gazette magazine is available.
From their Facebook page:
Our cover story, Clean Sheet of Paper, is a long-form visit with Steve Leininger â the engineer who designed the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I.
Also in this issue:
It's never too late to subscribe! New subscriptions begin with the October printed edition, and every new subscriber gets the September digital edition free. Contents subject to change.
If you'd like to follow them on Facebook, you can find their page at the link below:
Posted on 10 Sep 2026
The Vintage Computer Festival Midwest will take place on September 12th through the 13th in Schaumburg, Illinos.
The Apple II enthusiast gathering WOzFest 46 will take place on September 26th in Sydney, NSW, Australia.
This year's Tandy Assembly conference will take place on October 2nd through the 4th in Cincinnati, Ohio.
RetroGameCon will take place on October 2nd through the 4th in Syracuse, New York.
The Chicago TI International World Faire will take place on October 24th at the Evanston Public Library.
Chicago TI Users Group Website
October 9th through 11th in Portland, Oregon
Oregon Convention Center Website
Vintage Computer Festival Montréal will take place on November 7th through the 8th.
The World of Commodore conference will take place on December 5th through the 6th ( celebrating 40 years of GEOS! )
World of Commodore Site - TPUG
Posted on 08 Sep 2026
Working with sound on the Spectrum must be a lot like playing with sound on an old TRS-80 Model I where you had to modulate sound through the cassette port into an amplifier. In his ongoing ZX Spectrum series, Michael Martin shares his experiments with 1-bit sound on the Speccy.
Experimenting with 1-bit Sound
Before the Internet was widely available to consumers, we had online services like CompuServe and Genie. I kept up with CompuServe (user 74217,531) until a local ISP became a more cost-effective way of connecting with others via computers.
Davia Minn describes his first commercial software for the Amiga in 1999 (via LinkedIn):
Posted on 06 Sep 2026
In the mid-80's, a peripheral for the Commodore 64 was released that boasted Apple II emulation. I just saw a post talking about the product here:
The item below is my post about my first website that I built in 1995. The post also includes the details my article in the 1995 Dr. Dobbs Journal special edition on Internet and WWW programming:
Posted on 05 Sep 2026
I really enjoyed the recent podcast interview with Veronica (from the Veronica Explains podcast ).
Veronica Explains Why Old Computers Were Better At Teaching Us
Veronica talks about her tech upbringing, her days coding COBOL, being a musician, and how she got into podcasting. I would urge you to listen to the show to the end.
Episodes of Veronica's own Podcast can be located here:
Arthur Jordison has released version 4.10.0 of CBM Prg Studio:
Issue #3 of a new C64 / Amiga gaming magazine Pitstop Retro as been released. You can download a copy here:
www.patreon.com/cw/PitstopRetro
I've been slowly posting links to this site on social media platforms. I did this before the site had frills that other blogs have built-in. The first thing that I was missing was a syndication feed. I now have an RSS feed available at this URL:
The above URL can also be found with the RSS Feeds link in the Handy Links section at the bottom of each page.
Although I had a brief announcement when I stood up the site, I thought that it should have a formal About page. Now, we do:
This is also available in the Handy Links section at the end of each page with the About this site label.
I've been trying to avoid adding features that I don't think I'll need, but syndication and an about page were in my list of to-do's.
Posted on 04 Sep 2026
No Starch Press is having a book sale over the Labor Day weekend:
I noted this book in the ad that I saw:
The processor used in the Game Boy is a Sharp SM83 processor that is apparently some sort of spiritual knock-off of the Z-80 with IX and IY, prime registers, and block-operation instructions removed. I guess that would make it something closer to the classic Intel 8080, wouldn't it? I'm not sure why the tech trade press had compared it to the Z-80 instead of the 8080. But, I digress...
This processor has always intrigued me. I do not need a book on development for the Game Boy but, I'd love to read this one.
I saw a post and the thread of replies about Bill Gates releasing the Altair BASIC source code. The original link and HN reply links are below:
As usual, the discussions in the comments are worth reading. There's a debate about how heavily Altair BASIC was based on DEC BASIC. There are also links to the 6502 versions of Microsoft BASIC that were released no too long ago along with links to posts about string garbage collection techniques used in MS 6502 BASIC.
Posted on 02 Sep 2026
I saw an ad for a company that sells hats, shirts, and things with "abandoned" software / hardware logos and such on them. ( Some of these aren't really abandoned ... they're just classic logos and such. )
Abandonware Collections (this is just the link to the hats)
I like the Amiga hat and the WinAmp hat.
Martin has posted the beginning of a serialization of another chapter in the OutRun saga.
I'm not going to post further updates here. You can keep up on them by following Martin on LinkedIn.
Posted on 01 Sep 2026
Martin Webb, has posted the final installment to his autobiography as a teen video game developer. You can read the entire saga via the linked posts in this page:
Posted on 30 Aug 2026
Although I didn't own any Atari 8-bit computers in "the day" I've always been interested in them. I used to read the articles pertaining to them in magazines that served multiple brands of computers. Some years ago, I happened upon a podcast called Antic the Atari 8-bit Podcast. Antic episodes vary between a monthly news podcast and hundreds of interviews. The interviews aren't limited to Atarians ... there are a number of folks interviewed who were pivotal in the pioneering days of 8-bit computing.
You can see a list of current episodes here:
I particularly enjoyed the recent episode with Lisa Link Melville and her high school project written in Atari BASIC. You can find the episode here:
Back then, BASIC seemed to bring together the "everyman" in computing. Folks from all walks of life were able to use it to accomplish their computing tasks.
I had the pleasure of interviewing the three Antic hosts ... Kay, Brad, and Randy ... on my podcast. You can listen in here:
The Stray Pointers Podcast - Season 2, Episode 19
Posted on 29 Aug 2026
The Retro Hour podcast is one of many that I'd been meaning to listen to. There's quite a back-catalog of episodes at this link.
I've been listening to a number of these episodes, but one that I really enjoyed recently was this episode ... Netscape: The Spectacular Rise and Fall with Tara Hernandez.
Posted on 27 Aug 2026
Jawaid Bayzar announced his new release of the GSSquared (v 0.11.0) emulator suite in this Facebook post.
The Github repo for this release can be found here.
Michael Heilemann announced the re-creation of his old BBS known as The Norse Wanderer BBS in this Facebook post.
The BBS itself is here.
I had assumed that this would be a BBS that one could telnet to. However, it's a browser-based simulation of a serial terminal on the web page.
Posted on 25 Aug 2026
Track 18 was the track where most Commodore disk drives of the 8-bit era held their directory information. This new LinkedIn blog begins with Martin Webb discussing OutRun. We sure seem to be talking about Martin a lot, these days.
These probably aren't considered to be part of retrocomputing, but I thought the release anniversaries of each was worth noting.
Happy 35th Birthday to Linux and Happy (belated) 31st Birthday to Windows 95!
Posted on 23 Aug 2026
I began to build a list of the BBS's that I visited in Fall of 1984. Here's what I've written about so far:
The Greater Omaha Commodore Users Group (GOCUG) BBS
DRBBS - Dynamic Remote Bulletin Board System
This looks pretty cool! It's a markdown editor for the Apple II+ and enhanced Apple IIe.
trompingmarmots.com/AppSites/ZipEdit/
Posted on 21 Aug 2026
I saw via HN this morning that Zilog had produced a promotional set of comic books in 1979 for their Z8000 microprocessor. The micro-series was called Captain Zilog.
Here's a collection of the issues:
https://www.zilog.com/captain_zilog/
A quick search indicated that comic book legend Joe Kubert was the penciler for those issues.
In the HN commentary here, user xioxox cites this blog post talking about the series, but it looks like it refers to a comic other than the ones collected at the Zilog site:
I saw a blurb on Facebook about THEA1200 ... a forthcoming machine that appears to embody the function of the Amiga 1200 computer system.
Here's a clip of a video from Retro Games Ltd ... the makers of the forthcoming machine ... along with commentary on the You've Been Gamed podcast:
Although the pre-order pages are up on Amazon, I'm not sure if I want to get one of these or not.
Posted on 19 Aug 2026
Greetings, all!
jumptable.net is a retrocomputing site with a heavy focus on programming. I expect to use a fair amount of C and assembly language in my own posts, but I'm sure we'll have a variety of topics.
This root page will serve as a newsfeed. It will contain news, links to other sites, and links to my own posts and podcasts.
More to come!
Last year, a conversation on the lemon64.com forum led me to write a little program for the Commodore 64 that generated a short Fibonacci sequence. You can find the code here:
https://github.com/jimlawless/fibonacci
A binary PRG file is there already assembled and ready to run ( org'ed at $c000 ). Here's how to load and run it:
And yes .. I know the C64 has a 6510 and not a 6502, but I didn't use any 6510-specific mnemonics.
Posts are copyright © 2026 by James K. Lawless