mass:werk / Blog
“Now Go Bang!” is named after a source comment in Spacewar!, the first digital video game.
It marks the very instance, when a spaceship which has been dragged into the gravitational star starts to explode. What follows, is impressionist pixel-dust floating along the ship’s former trajectory in a sparkling bloom of phosphor activation.
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6502 “Illegal” Opcodes Demystified
A closer look at the “illegal” opcodes and undocumented instructions of the MOS 6502 MPU.
More 6502 Updates
Further improvements on the Virtual 6502 suite.
A Quick CSS Tip Regarding Legacy Image Tables
Dealing with legacy image tables and modern web standards.
An Update to the Virtual 6502 Suite
Improving one of the oldest 6502 tool sets on the web.
Spacewar 1 and the Beginnings of Video Game Aesthetics
Tales of the early days of the first digital video game.
Rare Retro-Computing Find
Atari Heavy Sixer running System V.
Great, A Boat is Stuck!
Finally, something to agree upon.
PDP-1 Spotting — The Mystery Solved
Update: Solving the Amherst Mystery.
PDP-1 Spotting — The Amherst Mystery
Yet another PDP-1 riddle, extended mode.
Trainspotting (I)
A story of trains, computers, and two images.
Update of the MOS 6502 Instruction Sheet
Some work for better accessibility.
Copy & Paste for PET 2001
A quick update on the PET 2001 online emulator
Big Sur System Update — Cargo Cult in Progress
A few notes on the system update process in Apple’s Big Sur (macOS 11)
A Modernist Christmas
Festive architecture & optimism
Season’s Greetings
Better late than never, an old-school e-card…
Visual Story Telling: Revisiting Minard’s Map of Napoléon’s Russian Campaign (1812–1813)
Another view at Minard's famous flow map.
meSpeak.js Update, v. 2.0.7
TTS in JS, and a curious bug. Also, Safari desktop compatibility.
PET 2001 Emulator — V. 1.1
Proudly announcing version 1.1 of the PET 2001 online emulator.
IBM Punched Card Typography
The surprising mechanical store for exchangable fonts of the IBM card punches
Stay at Home Edition — Permalink
Five retro computing related long reads to keep you from getting bored at home
Stay at Home Edition: Refraction for the Atari 2600
RetroChallenge 2018/04: Writing a proper Atari VCS / 2600 game
Stay at Home Edition: Personal Computer Space Transactor 2001 (2017)
RetroChallenge 2017/04: Computer Space for the Commodore PET 2001.
Stay at Home Edition: Ironic Computer Space Simulator (DEC PDP-1, 2016)
RetroChallenge 2016/10: Programming a 60 fps video game for early 1960s hardware.
Stay at Home Edition: Maze War for Olivetti M10 and NEC PC-8201A (2016)
Implementing a 3D dungeon crawler in MS BASIC for RetroChallenge 2016/01.
Stay at Home Edition: Inside Spacewar!
A Software Archeological Approach to the First Video Game.
Lehman Bros., Liquidity, Austerity, COVID-19, and the Inevitable Rise of John Maynard Keynes
Veering off of our usual topics for a bit of political economy.
PET 2001 Emulator — V. 1.0
Proudly announcing version 1.0 of the PET 2001 online emulator.
PETSCII Revealed
A closer look at the logic behind Commodore ASCII, AKA PETSCII, and the PET 2001.
Calm Panic in the Face of Influenza
Learning from history: How to keep calm while panicking and carry on with face masks
Writing a PET 2001 Ten-Line Canyon Run Video Game
String exploits and a reasonably paced video game in just 10 lines of Commodore BASIC.
BASIC Variables & Strings — with Commodore
Investigations into the memory utilization of Commodore BASIC (PET 2001, VIC-20, C64)
BASIC (Re)Numbering — with Commodore
How to thoroughly renumber Commodore BASIC programs (PET 2001, VIC-20, C64)
Announcing meSpeak.js 2.0
TTS in JS, now even better.
LGP-30 — A Drum Computer of Significance
Affordable computing by rotating bits at 3700 rpm.
Recommendation: Astronaut.io
YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views.
The Peculiar Case of a Self-Referential Computer Instruction (DEC PDP-7, 1964)
Or, how to lift Kurt Gödel’s hat by −0.
Instant PET: Commodore BASIC as Data-URL
mass:werk proudly presents: Running BASIC on a virtual PET 2001 from URL-data.
Digital Video Game Firsts — Michigan Pool (1954)
On the origin of digital video games and the complexity of classification.
A Curious Bug in the Commodore BASIC Tokenizer Routine
Investigations into a lesser known bug in Commodore BASIC abbreviations.
Raster CRT Typography (According to DEC)
A closer look at the glyphs drawn by the DEC terminals VT100 and VT220.
Binary Grain — The Hare in the Mandelbrot Set
Images from the outer limits of numeric precision.
Forgotten JavaScript: Object.handleEvent()
Tales of event-handling in JavaScript and some historic oddities of Netscape Navigator 4.
Legacy Graphics Range for Char8.js
The Char8.js 8-bit character generator library supports the newly proposed legacy graphics range.
Anatomy of a Wordpress Backdoor
Reverse engineering the command and control structure of a Wordpress attack.
Design & Engineering
Yet another tech related internet cartoon.
Snowflake Archeology (DEC PDP-1)
Software archeology of an early computer animation (1960s) for the DEC PDP-1.
Portraits and Selfies
Recommended link: An ironic (re)mix of classic portrait art and selfie posture.
Snowflake: The Original Virtual Christmas Ornament
A program which ought to be remembered.
Minard / Morse / Tufte and Authenticity on the Web
Observations on information spread and authenticity of well-known objects on the Internet.
Observing Minard Observing Napoléon
Observations on textual strategy in infographics by the example of the "Greatest Infographic of All Times".
Anatomy of a Random Number Generator
Tales from the realms of software archeology.
Not xkcd: Failing the Nerd-Test
Yet another tech related internet cartoon.
Visual Vacation
Visual vacation... (link)
A New Website and a Blog
Initial post.
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