Photos

Palm VIIx

Reading Mastodon toots on my Palm VIIx in Eudora Mail via a Mastodon-to-POP3 gateway: https://github.com/nkizz/mop3

This was surprisingly tricky to set up on a modern computer:

โ€ข Windows needs to be 32-bit because the Eudora conduit is packaged inside a 16-bit installer. Windows 10 needs some extra support files to run 16-bit apps, so I installed Windows 7 in a VM.

โ€ข Internet Explorer doesn’t work anymore, so had to copy the Firefox installer into my VM’s hard drive in order to download Palm Desktop, drivers, updates, etc.

โ€ข Outlook needs to be new enough to run CalDAV Synchronizer: https://caldavsynchronizer.org to import my NextCloud contacts / calendar

โ€ข Outlook also needs to be old enough to sync with HotSync and the Eudora conduit. Office 2007 is the minimum version that meets both requirements.

โ€ข HotSync and Outlook both need to be running in Windows XP compatibility mode in order for them to talk to each other and transfer data

โ€ข HotSync.exe needs to run as administrator, as it tries to write all the backups/sync data into Program Files instead of the user directory.

โ€ข Outlook.exe also has to run as administrator, otherwise HotSync wont communicate with it while running as administrator

โ€ข My USB-serial adapter needs drivers on older versions of Windows. They were nice enough to include them on a CD, but none of my computers have an optical drive anymore. Downloaded them from the manufacturer’s website with Firefox.

โ€ข CalDAV Synchronizer requires a recent version of .NET to run, so I had to get Windows Update working with Legacy Update: https://legacyupdate.net/

The HotSync conduit update for Outlook 2007 is very difficult to find, luckily there’s an archived copy here: https://www.palmdr.com/important-links. There are unofficial patches for 2010 and 2013 here: http://pizzaboy192.com/download/ but I’m using 2007 with the official update from Palm.

Sunlight ๐ŸŸ 

Smoke in the air from the #wildfires is giving the sunlight streaming in through my window an interesting orange color

Firmament by Cyan Worlds

As a fan of Myst and Obduction, I’ve been looking forward to playing this since I backed it on Kickstarter in 2019.ย ย The environments really look amazing in VR!

#Firmament #gaming #VRโ€‹

Star Citizen ๐Ÿ”ž

A bunch of players were tossing empty cans around in their underwear while @sebi673 tried to request his ship from the hanger

Lemmings ๐ŸŽฎ

I’ve recently been enjoying the Amiga version of Lemmings on my retro handheld. It’s surprising how many solutions to the levels I still remember after so many years!

Playing without a mouse is a bit tricky, but I’ve set the analog stick to move the mouse quickly, and then the d-pad moves it in smaller increments for fine adjustments. I also mapped some buttons to the keyboard controls for quickly switching between skills.

As someone that grew up with the MS-DOS version, it’s interesting to hear how the music was supposed to sound!

Veteran’s Park

DCSquares for Playdate

With the news that Playdate group 4 will finally start shipping soon, I’ve spent the weekend porting DCSquares to the #PlaydateSDK.

DCSquares was originally released as a homebrew game for the SEGA Dreamcast in 2004, and has been ported to various other platforms over the past 20 years.

Here’s a sneak peek of a very early prototype running on the Playdate simulator. The original game relies heavily on colors, so adapting it to a monochrome display was quite a challenge!