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1. 4am (a2_4am@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 04:56:08 UTC 4am

   Hard drive port of Transylvania (1985), from a cold boot to signing the guest register in 7 seconds.

   #AppleII #retrocomputing

   • 4am (a2_4am@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 04:56:07 UTC 4am

     in reply to

     The thing that even I forget — because I mostly use modern tools for developing and emulators for testing and I turn off "authentic" drive speed — is that 8-bit computers were terribly slow because media storage was terribly slow, way out of proportion to how those things evolved just a few years later.

     I said this in 2018 when we first released Pitch Dark, and it's still true: if you have a real Apple II, the best bang-for-the-buck upgrade you can get for it is a mass storage device.

   • Anatoly Shashkin💾 (dosnostalgic@mastodon.social@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 04:56:07 UTC Anatoly Shashkin💾

     in reply to

     @a2_4am Same applies to every vintage computer. A few years I bought a ZX Spectrum, mostly for nostalgia. After an evening of loading 128k programs, I couldn't click on the button to order a flash storage interface faster. I felt like I was getting closer to death with every load.

   • 4am (a2_4am@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 04:56:08 UTC 4am

     in reply to

     For comparison, the original takes 17 seconds to get as far as requiring you to flip the disk to side B, then loads for 10 more seconds before you can sign the guest register, then requires you to flip the disk again to start the game.