‘Tis the season, and that means it’s time to push out the thirteenth annual Byte Cellar vintage computer Holiday demo roundup so everyone can feel that warm, fuzzy, pixellated holiday glow (which I think we could all especially use this year). With scanlines. Enjoy!

I’ve been a computer geek for a long time now, but I’ve been enjoying The Holidays even longer…

I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A, on Christmas morning in 1982. I was 10 years old and from that Christmas on, it was nothing but games and computer hardware that I wanted Santa to leave me under the tree. On through my teenage years, part of my ritual for getting into the Holiday spirit was downloading and watching Christmas demos on whatever system I had at the time. And, apparently I wasn’t alone in this, as Benj Edwards explains in his piece, “The Oddball, Nostalgia-Inducing Christmas Tech Art Of The 1980s And 1990s.”

Enjoying these demos is a personal tradition that I had, sadly, long left behind until 2010 (the year before I began writing these posts) when I was inspired to seek out the demo I remember best, Audio Light’s 1985 musical slideshow for the Atari ST. With the help of an emulator, I captured it to share online with readers. A year later, I fired it up again and watched it run through it’s 16-color, pixellated images and 3-voice musical holiday greetings. As I watched, it occurred to me that it might be nice to gather a few of the other demos I remember from the good ole’ days and present them here, in order to try to share some of the holiday cheer that they used to inspire within me.

The following list of demos ranges across a variety of platforms of olde and is sure to bring the warmth of the season to the hearts of any and all retrocomputing enthusiasts who behold it. Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoy the shows!

Be sure to also have a look at the dozens of demos gathered through the years in the 2023 edition, the 2022 edition, the 2021 edition, the 2020 edition, the 2019 edition, the 2018 edition, the 2017 edition and the 2011 – 2016 editions of this post.

The post Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer! (2024 Edition) appeared first on Byte Cellar.

Lately, I’ve been spending time in the evenings listening to tracker tunes on my Gravis Ultrasound-equipped 486 PC. My go-to player program is Open CubicPlayer for DOS, which does a great job of both accurate playback and adjusting and sorting samples to work as well as possible within the GUS’s 1MB of wavetable RAM.

Now, of course I like das blinkenlights (as one does), and OCP offers a number of satisfying ways to light up the phosphor during MOD, S3M, IT, and XM playback. Recently, however, I spotted a free-standing LED VU Meter on the web that looked like it might be a welcome addition to my tracker player setup down in the Byte Cellar.

The unit is available from a variety of sources scattered across the globe, each of which seems to refer to the device by a different name while offering it at a different price. Digging around a bit, I have come to the conclusion that the actual name / description of this thing is something close to: “D’ESIGN R12 Rhythm Lights Voice Activated RGB Music Light LED w/ Pseudo Tubes.” Whew. It’s about 3.25-inches tall; 11-inches wide; has 12 LED bars, each in a tube with a mesh in front of it for a nixie-tube sort of look, all in a nice wooden frame; has a variety of color and display modes; and picks up on sounds in the room as input for its VU meter display. After initially seeing it offered at a higher price, I found it elsewhere for about $90 USD.

And, I love it! I have it sitting on top of the Tandy 1000HX, just down the desk from the aforementioned 486 (it’s an AMD 5×86 160, actually), and it adds enormously to the overall vibe of the room (which I wrote about in my last blog post) while listening to these tracks and watching demos. I usually run with the green fading-up-to-orange color scheme, as it reminds me of the bars in the original Soundtracker that I spent hours in on my old Amiga 2000, way back when.

The video above consists of a few quick and dirty clips I took with my iPhone to give a feel for the setup in action — forgive the crudeness. It’s an amazing little device that is really giving me my money’s worth as far as the enjoyment it brings me during tracker time. And, I kind-of want a second one….

The post Leveling Up Tracker Time with Glowing VU Meters in the Byte Cellar appeared first on Byte Cellar.

So, I started with the Apple IIe.

The enhanced 128K Apple IIe is capable of displaying “double high-resolution” graphics in 16 colors. (The Apple //c and IIgs support this mode, as well.) Only a relatively small percentage of software for the Apple II supports this mode, including games like King’s Quest (and many other Sierra games), Airheart, Rampage, etc. Dazzle Draw was a very popular 16-color drawing program that utilized this mode, as well. The programs that use this mode have an effective color resolution of 140×192 but, as all pre-IIgs Apple II graphics use NTSC artifacting to generate color, there’s some “play” in the technique, and several recent software applications written to convert modern images to the Apple II are able to generate DHGR images that could not be easily drawn or pixel-arted on the II with any of the tools available back in the day. I discussed these modern converters in several posts (linked at the end of this one) and used one of the tools I discussed, tohgr (macOS & Windows), to convert the set of images I wanted for the slideshow.

I was pleased with the results of the converted images I had chosen and put as many as would fit into a standard 800K disk image file (the size of a ProDOS 3.5-inch floppy disk) along with auto-booting slideshow software. In the end, there are 45 images in total, including the vibey rainbow Apple logo image from the 2022 “Peek Performance” event that I converted and discussed earlier (linked below).

Grab the disk image and feel the vibe on your own Apple II! (CRT definitely recommended…)

Related Byte Cellar posts:

• Bmp2DHR: The Best Apple II Graphics You’ll See This Week
• Bmp2DHGR Revisited: A Slideshow Running on Real Metal
• Full Motion, Double High-Res Video Playback on the Apple IIe
• A Colorful “Peek” at the Graphics Performance of the Apple II

The post Vibing With Some Tunes and a Retro Wave Slideshow on the Apple IIe appeared first on Byte Cellar.

This is the first.

Last night, I fired up my Amiga 2000 ‘020 and started running through some of the demos installed on its SCSI2SD volumes. One that I really enjoyed was Gagrakacka Mind Zones by Disaster Area, an Amiga Original Chipset (OCS/ECS) demo that took the first prize at the Oldskool Demo compo at the Flashback 2015 party. After watching it through, I pulled out the iPhone 15 Pro Max and did a quick and dirty capture of the demo running on my dual-screen A2000.

(The system next to the Amiga is a 5×86 160MHz DOS PC that shares (thanks to the Indivision ECS scan-doubler in the Amiga) the dual-input 19-inch Sony CPD-G420, the best looking CRT monitor I’ve ever owned.)

The (many) demos created in recent years for even the base, 8MHz Amiga models are truly a sight (and sound) to behold.

The post Q&D: Enjoying Some Demos on the Amiga 2000 appeared first on Byte Cellar.

‘Tis the season, and that means it’s time to push out the twelfth annual Byte Cellar vintage computer Holiday demo roundup so everyone can feel that warm, fuzzy, pixellated holiday glow (which I think we could all especially use this year). With scanlines. Enjoy!

I’ve been a computer geek for a long time now, but I’ve been enjoying The Holidays even longer…

I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A, on Christmas morning in 1982. I was 10 years old and from that Christmas on, it was nothing but games and computer hardware that I wanted Santa to leave me under the tree. On through my teenage years, part of my ritual for getting into the Holiday spirit was downloading and watching Christmas demos on whatever system I had at the time. And, apparently I wasn’t alone in this, as Benj Edwards explains in his piece, “The Oddball, Nostalgia-Inducing Christmas Tech Art Of The 1980s And 1990s.”

Enjoying these demos is a personal tradition that I had, sadly, long left behind until 2010 (the year before I began writing these posts) when I was inspired to seek out the demo I remember best, Audio Light’s 1985 musical slideshow for the Atari ST. With the help of an emulator, I captured it to share online with readers. A year later, I fired it up again and watched it run through it’s 16-color, pixellated images and 3-voice musical holiday greetings. As I watched, it occurred to me that it might be nice to gather a few of the other demos I remember from the good ole’ days and present them here, in order to try to share some of the holiday cheer that they used to inspire within me.

The following list of demos ranges across a variety of platforms of olde and is sure to bring the warmth of the season to the hearts of any and all retrocomputing enthusiasts who behold it. Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoy the shows!

Be sure to also have a look at the dozens of demos gathered through the years in the 2022 edition, the 2021 edition, the 2020 edition, the 2019 edition, the 2018 edition, the 2017 edition and the 2011 – 2016 editions of this post.

The post Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer! (2023 Edition) appeared first on Byte Cellar.

I’ve been buying a copy of Maximum PC magazine at the airport newsstand on every long-distance trip I’ve taken over the past two decades. I’m primarily a Mac user but Maximum PC, which started life as boot, bought at these intervals kept me comfortably up to date on the state of affairs in the PC hardware world (not to mention making for a nice timeline of my significant travels). Thumbing through these issues a few times a year, I got an overall feel for what was the state of the art in PC CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, RAM technology, and so on. I’ve got all of these issues over there on the shelf, handy to look back on when trying to assess this or that mildly-vintage system that might come my way.

But, when I flew to Boston this spring, I couldn’t find my copy of Maximum PC on the newsstand. It wasn’t at Washington National or at Logan, on either end of the week-long trip. A few days later when I was back in town, I checked the local Barnes and Noble for the current issue and wasn’t able to find it there, either.

It was then that I did a bit of searching on the web and was rather alarmed to find Harry McCracken’s recent Technologizer post, “The End of Computer Magazines in America,” subtitled “With Maximum PC and MacLife’s abandonment of print, the dead-tree era of computer journalism is officially over. It lasted almost half a century—and was quite a run.” I somehow didn’t see this coming nearly as well as I should have and I very much lament that the April 2023 issues of both of the aforementioned magazines’ were there last.

Ever since I got my first home computer on Christmas morning, 1982, I have been buying and reading computer magazines. Some general — Creative Computing, BYTE, Compute!, Personal Computing, Computers & Electronics, Pen Computing, Next Generation, etc. — and some platform specific — A+, InCider, ’99er, AmigaWorld, STart, INFO 64, NeXTWorld, etc. — these magazines riveted me with the promises of upcoming software, hardware, new systems, and the like in a world before the internet when monthly magazines like these were how we knew what was coming. They were what got me excited about the Next Big Thing.

And now, basically all American computer print magazines have vanished. Some have gone online in various fashions…but it’s not the same. Coming to realize that this reality had crept slowly upon me was a sad moment.

It is the case that the British computer magazine business is still rolling along, to some degree. Indeed, I have been a subscriber of Retro Gamer magazine since it started up in 2004 and it has taught me most of what I know about the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, and other British machines of the sort. (I was featured in issue 148, in fact.) But, the systems that were in use here in the U.S. and those that were in use across the pond — especially early on in the home computer era — differed notably, and it is the American magazines that formed my notion of the computing industry relevant to me as a whole.

I am glad to have saved what magazines I did (though sadly most I let go, sold with various systems as I moved from one to the next) and to have acquired some here and there since beginning my vintage computer collection. I still flip through those old magazines from time to time, which is a part of my vintage computing hobby that I quite enjoy. But, it seems my magazine shelves are unlikely to find themselves much more burdened, now that this era of computing history has drawn to a close.

The post The Era of American Computer Magazines Has Drawn to a Close appeared first on Byte Cellar.

November marked the 40th anniversary of Turbo Pascal, the first Integrated Development Environment (or IDE), which allowed a user to quickly and easily write a program in the Pascal programming language and see it compiled and linked — all in one go — with an executable dropped to disk at the end. Much simpler a process than the traditional model of programming in a text editor, using a compiler to convert the source into object code (often over several passes), and running a linker to integrate any required libraries, Turbo Pascal was friendly, fast, and cheap. Created by Anders Hejlsberg, the development package was released by Borland in November 1983 at a price of $49.99 for both CP/M and DOS-based systems.

Created by Niklaus Wirth in 1970, Pascal is a small and efficient procedural programming language that is easy to use and, thanks to its structured programming nature, was often employed as a language for learning programming concepts at a level higher than traditional, early BASIC. It is in this capacity that I had my first hands-on experiences with the language in an A.P. Computer Science class I took in high school during the late ’80s. Here, at its 40th anniversary, I thought I would share the memories I have of spending time with Turbo Pascal.

Having joined the ranks of the home computing on Christmas morning in 1982 and become instantly swept up in all of it, I quickly learned BASIC (in the backroom of a Singer sewing machine store down at the mall, which is a story on its own) and was poring over computer books and magazines constantly. So, I had heard of Pascal. In fact, Texas Instruments offered a UCSD Pascal p-System for my beloved TI-99/4A, which allowed the system to access a large library of Pascal programs out there via their P-Code card which provided a virtual machine for running these platform-agnostic programs, though I never owned that hardware.

Flash forward to my junior year of high school when I took the aforementioned A.P. Computer Science class, taught by the late Col. Ken Jenkins, at Hampton Roads Academy in Newport News, Virginia. At the time, the school had a computer lab full of Apple IIe computers used for teaching BASIC programming and for typing classes. For the APCS class, four or five DOS PCs were setup along the back wall, featuring lovely, amber MDA displays (pictured). These were the systems our small APCS class (I think there were only about five or six of us) used for Pascal classwork, which was done in Turbo Pascal v4 for DOS. (In retrospect, they should also have dropped Z-80 cards in a few of those Apple IIes — the CP/M version of Borland’s IDE ran well in that environment.) The class was a lot of fun and it was great getting my first taste of procedural programming. (And there was a particularly memorable anecdote about a lesson on the unary minus, I recall — but that’s a story for another time.)

I was so enamored by procedural programming and the ease of putting together little projects that could be written, compiled, and tested so easily that I sold my Atari Mega ST2 system and replaced it with a DOS machine, a Tandy 1000TL, in order to be able to use Turbo Pascal at home and to my heart’s content. That’s a fun time to think back on, writing little widget programs doing nothing of consequence just for fun and uploading them to local BBSs.

A couple of years later I had moved on to an Amiga 2000 and was attending college at Christopher Newport University pursuing a Computer Science degree. One of the first programming classes I found myself in used a Pascal compiler running on a PR1ME minicomputer that students dialed into on a 7-bit connection, using Kermit to transfer files, as I recall. Wanting to be able to work on my Pascal programs locally rather than waiting for the mini’s modem pool to be free, I purchased the Macintosh version of Turbo Pascal in hopes of running it on the A-Max Mac emulator I had for my Amiga. It ended up working rather well for me, though the short-lived Mac version was limited in some ways.

Given the circuitous route I took to get my beloved Turbo Pascal running on the Amiga, doubtless you have concluded that there was no Amiga version of the package. And, you’re right — however, it is a little known fact that at some point Borland planned an Amiga version of Turbo Pascal and even ran a particularly enthusiastic advertisement for it in the premier issue of AmigaWorld magazine back in 1985. Sadly, though, this release never materialized.

Later, I moved on to Turbo C++ for my college coursework (which I ran under the PC-Task PC emulator on my Amiga 1200HD at the time) and, later still, did some of my first professional programming for a local NASA Langley aerospace contractor using the more full-featured Borland C++ package to control a software-driven serial port switcher for a realtime general aviation pilot weather advisor system.

It’s been a long time since I wrote a line of Pascal, perhaps sadly. But, that’s not to say others aren’t doing so, daily. And, I’m not just referring to likeminded retro computing aficionados enjoying Turbo Pascal on their vintage systems. Borland’s Turbo Pascal has evolved into the rapid application development (RAD) environment Delphi, which uses the Object Pascal language. Embarcadero’s Delphi is a modern RAD that deploys native applications to all major desktop and mobile operating systems from a single code-base. It’s worth mentioning that another popular option for Pascal programmers is Free Pascal, which features a text-mode IDE similar to that of Turbo Pascal and supports a graphical IDE similar to that of Delphi. It compiles and deploys to a dizzying array of both modern and not-so-modern targets.

So, Turbo Pascal lives on in spirit, and these are my experiences with it. I hope you’ve enjoyed my little stroll down memory lane, here as the product turns forty. (There’s a programming pun in there, somewhere…)

UPDATE 01/03/2024: It seemed appropriate to return to this post, less than a month after its publication, to mention that on the first of January, creator of the Pascal programming language and software engineering pioneer, Niklaus Wirth, passed away at the age of 89.

Related and informative links:

• Turbo Pascal turns 40 [ Marco Tech Blog ]
• 50 Years of Pascal and Delphi is In Power [ Marco Tech Blog ]
• I first met Philippe Kahn and Turbo Pascal 40 years ago this month [ Embarcadero ]
• 40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs [ Register]

The post Thinking Back on ‘Turbo Pascal’ as It Turns 40 appeared first on Byte Cellar.

It was in the late summer of 1985 when I first heard of the Amiga. I learned about the forthcoming system in an issue of Personal Computing magazine that featured the Amiga on its cover and contained an in-depth dive into the what was the most amazing computer — by an incredible margin — I had ever seen. The specifications I read and the photos I saw within made such an impact on me that I wrote a post to this blog about the magazine itself, A Look at the Sauciest Magazine I Ever Owned, about ten years ago.

The magazine’s deep dive into the Amiga (take a look for yourself) featured various examples of graphics created on the system, the most impressive of which — to my eye — was entitled “Four-Byte Burger,” a whimsical and lovely, exploded digital painting of a floppy-disk cheeseburger of sorts created by Jack Haeger, Director of Amiga’s Art and Graphics Department at the time. The 32-color image utilized the Amiga’s 4096-color palette to produce graphics the likes of which I had never seen before. (At the time, I was using an Apple II that was 6-colors only, basically.) A short time later the premier issue of AmigaWorld magazine appeared on the shelf, also featuring the image within, and finally after the launch of the system, “Four-Byte Burger” made its way to the inner covers of the Graphicraft paint program’s user manual which is the source of the high-res scan I was able to secure a few years back.

Around the time of that earlier post, I tried to track down a digital copy of the image, but to no avail. It wasn’t in the Amiga Graphics Archive, or seemingly anywhere else I looked. I came to find out that “Four-Byte Burger,” along with several other early Amiga paintings featured in these magazines, were created with a version of Graphicraft so early in development that it did not yet feature file I/O capabilities. These images were drawn, the CRT display was photographed, and then those lovely pixels were cast into the void when power was taken from system RAM with the flick of a switch.

These images, in digital form at least, were lost to time…like tears in rain.

Luckily, I wasn’t the only one that had been carrying that image around in his head for the past 40 years or so. Stuart Brown, YouTuber XboxAhoy who is renowned in gamer circles, recently posted to his video game documentary channel a video in which he laments the loss of this memorable image and sets out to recreate it based on the photographs we have available. This digital restoration was an arduous process, and it is fully documented by the benevolent restorer in his video. And, in the end, I believe he achieved his goal. The results bring an enormous smile to my face.

Once I watched this amazing video, I immediately knew that I had to get this piece of digital artistry that’s so beloved to me onto the glowing phosphor screen of my Amiga 1000. Ahoy was kind enough to provide a link to the resulting Amiga IFF image file when asked, so I loaded it onto the Parceiro device’s SD card and after waiting for the 1080 monitor to degauss post-rotation (I encountered the same obscured color due to the Earth’s magnetic field that he did in his video), I beheld an incredible sight indeed: an Amiga 1000 displaying its very best image — and on my desk — in the Byte Cellar.

Thanks, Ahoy.

The post Lost Amiga “Four-Byte Burger” Painting Digitally Recreated (And Looking Amazing in Glowing Phosphor!) appeared first on Byte Cellar.

Readers can find quite a few posts on this blog about my enjoyment of modern-day BBSing — “dialing in” to online Bulletin Board Systems that can still be found out there on the net. I consider BBSing to be a wonderful opportunity to sit down in front of the various systems in my collection and spend time with them — to put them to use. The process itself, involving vintage hardware, I find to be quite satisfying and the online discussions I’m part of in the message areas of these BBSs are a lot of fun as well. As such, there are certainly times when I want to login and check messages but it’s not possible or convenient to go down into the cellar and fire up an old system.

Being primarily a Mac user (when it comes to modern systems), I will usually use my MacBook Air and iTerm 2 or, if I need something beyond VT100 emulation, SyncTerm to login. These work well enough, but I need to have my Mac with me to use them, and of course I often don’t.

A while back, I spent a considerable amount of time (and money, actually) trying out various enterprise-targeted terminal apps in the iOS / iPadOS App Store that claim to offer some of the emulations I need for proper BBSing, but not a single one of them ever managed to pull it off. Some have ANSI emulation but lack the extended character sets needed to render the “ANSI art“-style login screens and menus used by many of the BBSs out there. And, you can just forget about emulation of anything like the Commodore 64’s PETSCII or the Atari 8-bit’s ATASCII character sets. So, proper BBSing on the devices that I do have with me most of the time has been a no-go.

That is, until now.

A new terminal program called MuffinTerm has recently appeared in the iOS / iPadOS App Store and the Mac App Store that is specifically designed for telnet BBSing. Oh, and it’s free.

Developed by Molly Black, MuffinTerm offers several terminal emulation options including full and proper ANSI, Commodore PETSCII, and Atari ATASCII support as well as several different “video modes,” including MDA (green/amber/white), CGA 40/80, EGA, VGA, and VIC-II NTSC/PAL. Several “CRT effects” can be enabled to add some real personality to the BBSing experience: CRT curvature, scan lines, warm TV tint, and VIC-II luma bars. Additionally, the app offers simulated modem speeds from 110 to 56 000 baud as well as full-speed, file transfers via X/Y/Zmodem protocols, and functioning “modem LEDs” in the title bar. A handy Post-It-Note-type feature lets you apply reminders and other info to a particular BBS session that may be of use online, as well. Another nice touch, for those of us used to using the recent “WiFi modems” that make BBSing on vintage machines so easy, is the ability to use the Hayes AT command set to connect to a telnet BBS (ex: ATDTbbs.fozztexx.com ).

I reached out to Molly to find out what motivated them to create this app in the first place and learned that they got into BBSing in the mid-’80s (like myself), and enjoyed the scene until the internet took over. Fast forward several decades and they were working on a MUD/BBS hybrid server project, and had a desire to use an iPad with its fold-up keyboard as a terminal client. Finding nothing that fit the bill in the App Store, they decided to set the server project aside and create a client for the iPad that actually worked for BBSing. Not long into the project, Molly decided to expand the app to support the Mac and iPhone, reusing the core code but developing a custom interface for each device.

Long-ago Apple II users will be tickled to learn the reasoning behind the name of this app, a very nice little computing history throwback.

Once upon a time, there was an Apple DOS disk utility program named, rather cryptically, MUFFIN. I always liked that name, and was perhaps inspired by it when coming up with a name for a new terminal program. (Also, I just kind of randomly like the word “muffin.” It’s a nice-sounding word.) But really, it was a bit of a placeholder name at first.

I had several other, different names that I’d been considering, but whenever I went to see if any were in use already, it seemed that every single one of them had been used for something, somewhere, between roughly 1978 and the present. But “MuffinTerm,” perhaps unsurprisingly, had not been taken, so I kept using it as the placeholder. Eventually, I decided that I liked it as it was, and kept it!

I have put MuffinTerm through its paces on the iPhone and iPad and am rather impressed. What’s more, the featureset and standard macOS interface of the Mac version have made it my go-to Mac BBS terminal program, taking the place of SyncTerm in my login arsenal.

Whether you are a veteran BBSer still enjoying the scene or are new to the experience, have a look at MuffinTerm. It’s a dream come true for those of us who have been waiting for a true mobile BBS terminal app, and it’s certainly well worth the price.

See my BBSing resource page for more tips on getting logged in, and my gallery of vintage systems doing some modern-day BBSing and IRCing, if you dare.

( Author Molly Black has also created BookFolder, a particularly nice and simplistic PDF reader and library available in the App Store for iPhone and iPad. )

UPDATE: ATASCII support was added in v1.2.

Related Posts:

• Configure Your Mac to Allow Vintage Computers to “Dial In”
• The Wonderful WiFi232: BBSing Has (Literally) Never Been Easier
• BBSing on various vintage systems (a short video) [YouTube]

The post “MuffinTerm”: A Great New Terminal App for BBSing on iPhone, iPad, and Mac appeared first on Byte Cellar.

‘Tis the season, and that means it’s time to push out the eleventh annual Byte Cellar vintage computer Holiday demo roundup so everyone can feel that warm, fuzzy, pixellated holiday glow (which I think we could all especially use this year). With scanlines. Enjoy!

I’ve been a computer geek for a long time now, but I’ve been enjoying The Holidays even longer…

I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A, on Christmas morning in 1982. I was 10 years old and from that Christmas on, it was nothing but games and computer hardware that I wanted Santa to leave me under the tree. On through my teenage years, part of my ritual for getting into the Holiday spirit was downloading and watching Christmas demos on whatever system I had at the time. And, apparently I wasn’t alone in this, as Benj Edwards explains in his piece, “The Oddball, Nostalgia-Inducing Christmas Tech Art Of The 1980s And 1990s.”

Enjoying these demos is a personal tradition that I had, sadly, long left behind until 2010 (the year before I began writing these posts) when I was inspired to seek out the demo I remember best, Audio Light’s 1985 musical slideshow for the Atari ST. With the help of an emulator, I captured it to share online with readers. A year later, I fired it up again and watched it run through it’s 16-color, pixellated images and 3-voice musical holiday greetings. As I watched, it occurred to me that it might be nice to gather a few of the other demos I remember from the good ole’ days and present them here, in order to try to share some of the holiday cheer that they used to inspire within me.

The following list of demos ranges across a variety of platforms of olde and is sure to bring the warmth of the season to the hearts of any and all retrocomputing enthusiasts who behold it. Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoy the shows!

Be sure to also have a look at the dozens of demos gathered through the years in the 2021 edition, the 2020 edition, the 2019 edition, the 2018 edition, the 2017 edition and the 2011 – 2016 editions of this post.

The post Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer! (2022 Edition) appeared first on Byte Cellar.