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dorothea | seven

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Playing With Computers

This is one of those topics where I feel a little self-conscious even bringing it up is just going to result in a bunch of eye-rolling "whatEVER grandma!" sort of responses, but I've found myself thinking a lot lately about how when I was a kid, you could really play with a computer in a way that's hard to even describe now. So here I am, here to describe it, and ask if there's modern equivalents to this stuff I'm just unaware of.

Obviously, you can play games on a computer. That's not what I'm talking about. At least not unless you are really seriously involved in some modding scenes anyway. What I'm talking about is a variety of software... I don't know of any actual acknowledged catch-all term for it, and most of the examples that really jump out at me betray my upbringing as a bit of an Apple girl, and of a certain age, but look, I'm going to just start getting specific now.

Logo Writer- Back in the '80s, a lot of schools had big ol' piles of computers donated to them, and realizing that computers were a pretty important thing it was increasingly likely people would have access to over our lives, kids needed to be taught what they could do with them. But there wasn't actually all that much you could practically do with them yet. There were games of course, and we had access to some of those, particularly when they could pretend to be educational. Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, O'Dell Lake, Number Munchers, that sort of thing, but nobody really bought that that wasn't just giving kids a break to play games. Past that, we had word processors, so let's teach kids how to type properly, and do fancy formatting stuff like bold and italic text and so on. And later we had early mouse-based art stuff like Superpaint out there. Past that though, there wasn't really a lot you could show a kid. I guess there were probably spreadsheet programs, but we can't go showing kids a way to avoid writing out all their math problems by hand, and otherwise, any sort of software you'd want you kinda had to code for yourself.

Enter Logo, which is technically just a programming language, and weirdly specialized at that, but in kind of a fun way, for kids. See, it was also a text parser based art program. And yeah, that's a bit of a weird thing to make, but it's kind of a fun thing to play with.

We've got a cursor called "the turtle." It isn't necessarily visible at all times, because it's going to obscure your work when it is, but when it's visible, yeah, looks like a turtle. Bit of a body, head where it's facing, four little limbs. The turtle has a pen which is either down (and thus drawing as the turtle moves) or up (so it'll move without drawing), and you give it commands like "forward 10" to move forward 10 steps, or "left 90" to rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise. And there was a repeat command, so if you want to draw a nice little circle, you can just type something like "repeat 360 [forward 1 right 1]" and tada.

What was really cool though, to me anyway, is that in addition to these and a few other neat commands (color changes, flood fill, thicker pen lines), you could just create new commands on the fly. Just type "edit" followed by the name you want to give your custom command, write out what you want that command to do, close the editor, and tada, you can just type "circle" now to draw your little circle, or whatever. Play around a bit more, you can work out how to put parameters in there, get custom sizes or whatever.

If you just sit yourself down with it, by the way here's a free version you can play with in a browser, maybe do a quick search for some basic commands because the built in help command is a bit overwhelming, and soon enough you should be making cool little spiral patterns and such. It does lose a lot of charm with a modern processor doing it all in an eyeblink though, back in the day you'd end up watching it step through. Again though, neat little way to play with the computer. You accidentally end up learning some programming stuff, defining functions and such, maybe you pick up some geometry doing all this repeated angle change stuff. It's neat.

Hypercard- Our next stop is sort of a weird mishmash of everything you could do with a computer. Text, graphics, sound, some programming. It's called Hypercard because it's one of the earlier implementations of the whole hypertext concept that's both the H and the T in HTML, and obviously that's where the Hyper- part of the name comes from. The -card part is for index cards. The general metaphor being that when you make a new THING in Hypercard, we call it a stack (of cards), where every screen worth of stuff is a card. You can have as many as you want (actually there was probably some limit but it was pretty damn generous), and on any given card you just kinda had the same sort of toolbox you get today in something like MS Paint. Draw stuff, write stuff, whatever... but you could also toss in buttons, customize those however you liked, and set what they did with a pretty simple and easy to learn scripting language. So a simple thing you could do is what feels today like making a website. You start on this card, we've got buttons acting as links to various other cards, but instead of having to do a bunch of nasty table code and uploading image files, you could just freehand draw all over everything, move text around, play with fonts, whatever.

Anyway, if you played around with Hypercard for a bit, one of the first things you'd likely work out is it's actually a really easy environment if you want to just full on design a graphic adventure game. And people did that a LOT. Myst, quite famously, is just a hypercard stack. I'm not sure if the MacVenture games (Shadowgate, Deja Vu, The Uninvited) were too, but I sure did sit down and recreate one of them in an afternoon once using Hypercard. Super fun thing to play around with. You accidentally learn object oriented programming, it's still just a better bit of software for doing multimedia stuff than anything I can think of to this day. Sadly I don't have a handy in-browser link for this one, but hypercard.org has a demo of someone messing with it and a bunch of links for emulation/source code/clones to poke through.

ResEdit- Now this one, I feel like if my mother had any sort of computer savvy at all, I would never have been allowed anywhere near, and it wasn't exactly a stand-alone thing. Basically, one of the key differences between early Macs and other OSes was that on a Mac, a given piece of software was always a nice neat self-contained little program. Installers were kind of hilarious. You'd just pop in a disk, open it in the file browser, there's the program, there's some folders with no icons or whatever spelling out "yeah just drag this to your computer." That big directory of supporting files you'd have crowded around the .exe in a DOS installation of something would all be tucked away inside, invisibly, in a structure called the Resource Fork.

... and ResEdit let you just poke around and edit that in a nice little GUI.

Here for instance, we have a screenshot of someone using ResEdit, on ResEdit, to redraw the icon for the program itself, and also set the mask for what parts of it are clickable. You could do this with all the graphics to everything, relabel all the drop-down menus, mess with their fonts, blindly poke around in random data structure tables. You could just completely customize or generally break any piece of software on your computer. It was great. I've got a dusty old Mac Classic somewhere where all the folders have been replaced with shiny ominous orbs and the menus are all in drop-shadow outline text and I also had like 30 system extensions to do dumb little things like have a cat on your desktop chasing your mouse around and eyes on the menu bar staring at it, and there was this thing called The Talking Moose I had set to pop up a little cartoon moose in the corner of the screen every 10 seconds to tell a real dumb joke with the same voice synth Steven Hawking used. Again, playing with the computer. Learning how stuff worked under the hood by messing around with weird software.

On a more modern front, earlier this week I learned about BrokenNES. It's a weird art project of a thing that kind of works like a way more literal NES Remix. There's a list of achievements for a pretty wide selection of classic NES games, ranging from "get a flower in Super Mario Bros. to "take out Dr. Wily" in each Mega Man game. And you play these via an ever-changing hacked together emulator built from code snippets of, I think, various rather early emulation projects, just kinda frankensteined together. (Almost) every time you complete an achievement, you get a collection of new options for emulating this and that chip, along with random graphical filters and background patterns and other stupid junk, and a new enforced challenge where you're locked into say, this buggy clock speed code paired with this PPU emulation but you can do whatever you like with the sound. It's a neat thing to mess around with (and has an option to just open all the options without making a weird metagame out of it), but honestly the strategy of the intended path is neat. You wanna keep some real easy challenges uncompleted for when you get stuck with a really unusable mess to quickly clear them out, maybe save twitchier challenges for when it's running at like 1/3 normal speed. Messing with janky emulators was never part of my childhood, but I feel like it's in the same spirit as these things I'm talking up here.

But again, sadly, I feel like this whole concept is just lost now. My PC is BASICALLY a game console. My phone is so locked down I'm unclear how to really go through all the files I have saved to it. Playing through the Pixel Remaster of the first 6 Final Fantasy games, it's been driving me up the wall that I can't mess with the window background colors in the SNES games. The initial release of 6 in particular gave you a whole bunch of different complex patterns and just let you directly set the RGB value of every color in the palette for them to whatever you wanted. You could make really nice tasteful expressive marble looking backgrounds or eyesearing awfulness, and learn about additive color while you were at it. Like how if you want yellow you can just crank up red and green (look it was a fun thread to write and I realized I hadn't linked it here).

Anyway, point is, stuff like this is cool and encourages technical skills and creativity and such and it's probably why I grew up to be the sort of weirdo who's just writing entry level comp sci blog posts and designing my own game console from scratch as a side project.

[blit-bitkin]

Bitkin.rsrc

32x32 is the size of a standard icon in System 7, and is also about how big Patch is on-screen, so I thought I'd see how they'd look as an icon. This, or something like it, is the style I'll be using for the Bitkin game (although I won't be using ResEdit to draw all of them)

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