When I was a kid, on dark, rainy days I’d play King’s Quest II on our Tandy 1000SX in the corner of my parents’ bedroom. Not King’s Quest or King’s Quest III. My rainy day game was King’s Quest II. Today, almost 40 years later, whenever it rains I feel like firing it up. Kolyma is my cozy place.

So the index sensor is what detects the little index hole in the disk, once each time it spins around. It’s a light sensor that shines through that index hole, and triggers exactly once per rotation, when the hole lines up. If the motor isn’t rotating the disk itself, the index sensor won’t work. …

Wow! That’s so much more interesting than the contents of my 1991 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon diskette!

I bet @thealmightyguru.bsky.social will appreciate this. I found this old BASIC program I wrote on our Tandy 1000SX when I was ten years old, creating a (mostly) 3x5 font. Sadly I didn’t create the letters R through Z. 😃 (A Python script rendered the image here from the original DRAW statements.)

Introducing Mocha! He’d been at our local Humane Society for three months without being adopted before we found him. He’s 11, super cuddly, and loves people so much. Every morning he wakes up SO HAPPY to find we’re still here and runs to us with his tail wagging and thumping against anything nearby.

Bumped up GCC to 16.0.1 for my DOS game engine today; making sure I'm reading for the impending release of GCC 16.1. To get the cross compiler built, I only needed one minor new patch (adding "struct timespec" to time.h) for this to work over GCC 15.2.

Also, here is Nano Banana Pro's attempt, today (2/19/2026), with the same prompt. It definitely threw away a lot of the charm:

It's been a minute, so I'm checking if AIs can successfully turn the logotype I made for a BBS door game 40 years ago into a font sheet with all the missing characters. I tried the same prompt today (February 19, 2026) on ChatGPT 5.2 that I tried with ChatGPT 4o last July. It's not hugely better:

12 down in today’s (Feb 18, 2026) New York Times crossword puzzle will be of particular interest to @commodoreofficial.bsky.social. If only they’d mentioned its rebirth…!

Here is the Commodore 64 Ultimate compared to an original Commodore 64 (left) and a C64 Maxi (right). I’d say very well done. I like the yellow-brown function keys. They feel right.

🎶 One of these things is not like the others… 🎶 Happy New Commodore Day, everyone! @commodoreofficial.bsky.social

My wife and I had a fun time playing Utopia on our new “Intellivision Sprint” this weekend. I hadn’t played it in almost 40 years; she hadn’t played it ever. Unlike many other Intellivision games, it really still holds up as-is! I have a feeling we’ll become evenly matched pretty soon.

Sadly, the New York Times still hasn’t updated their Spelling Bee word list to include King’s Quest III characters.

Throwback Thursday: The first thing I did when I got a car with a USB port was see if I could connect a floppy drive to it to play music. I could! Granted, I did have to build a custom disk image by hand, since the floppy disk had to be formatted as if it were an SD card and not a floppy.

I've now converted Chapters 2 and 3 of the GUSDK Word documentation into Markdown format. Combined with the annotated source code (which essentially moves Chapter 4 into the source code itself), I think this covers all of the core features. It is available on GitHub here: github.com/RobertSundli...

I am increasingly a fan of the Monaspace font family (monaspace.githubnext.com). I've added support for Monaspace features to the GUI TTY interface for my DOS game engine (which takes the place of an external MDA monitor). It's fantastic to be able to customize its look and feel so thoroughly.

It's crazy the kind of stuff you end up writing when you're building a network stack for DOS from scratch in C++26.

I'm testing GCC 15.2 today. I just used it to build the various test programs for my game engine for all available platforms, including DOS and Windows. Success! But it's always hilarious to me to see a test that runs at 60 fps in DOS on a 486 with a VGA run at 13,000+ fps on a modern machine.

GCC 15.2 drops tomorrow. Got a head start today and built a cross-compiler for my 32-bit DOS apps from the 15.2 RC. It's working well so far! (It reports as 15.1.1, but that's fine. I didn't touch gcc/BASE-VER or gcc/DATESTAMP, where I could have bumped it up to "15.2.0 20250808" had I wanted.)

Back in the DOS days, when you’d send a graphical mouse cursor to the mouse driver you’d give coordinates for its “hot spot” too. For a normal cursor it’d be (1,1), not (0,0), due to the one-pixel border around the cursor. Here’s a pointing finger example from the official Microsoft mouse book. 👆

Making decent progress on my 640x480 to 320x240 linear mode SVGA project. I first wrote a CRTC register dumper, then examined values on a card with a 320x240 linear mode. It's pretty clear how this card does it. Next step will be to take an SVGA card without the mode and apply these same changes.

Looks like I'm successfully parsing MOD pattern data. If you'd like a challenge, see if you can spot this song by the first pattern. 🙂

What I was wondering is how long it will be until AI models would be able to generate the rest of the font in a consistent manner. My assumption was that they’re not even close to being there yet. But I wanted a baseline, so here are a few attempts by ChatGPT 4o, today, July 26, 2025:

I thought I’d try a little experiment. First, some background. Back in the late 80’s or early 90’s I made this logotype for a BBS door game I was writing. I only created these specific letters for it, by hand.

It’s been so long (decades!) since I worked on my Mattel Aquarius emulator. It probably wouldn’t be the worst idea to release it as open source, although I’m not entirely sure there’s any point to that, considering the saturation of such things these days.

Anyone else remember when computer mice came in tins? #gaming #razer #boomslang

I'm able decompress the various other assets, too. Here is MOON13.TGA from MOJO_BAY.CRE. I'll write a Python script that lets you extract anything from these.

It works! Here is MUSIC000.HMI from EXTRANGE.CRE. Now I just need to package this all up in an easy-to-use utility. They used a variant of LZW compression with a special code for resetting the code width while maintaining the original dictionary.

Getting there. Was able to decompress SOME data. Don't have the entire algorithm reverse-engineered yet but I'm making progress.

I just happened across this old animated PC Christmas card I made in 1993. I made it from scratch in about an hour, creating the artwork and writing a tiny MS-DOS/VGA sprite system in Borland C++ and assembly. I put it on GitHub if anyone wants to see it. 😃🎅🎄 github.com/RobertSundli...