Pleroma

Pleroma

Richard Moss | @MossRC@social.mossrc.me

Author of *The Secret History of Mac Gaming*, *Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet*, *A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games*, and a soon-to-be-published book on the creation of #AgeOfEmpires, plus various other books in progress.

Writer/director on TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming, a critically-acclaimed five-part docuseries about horror games. Producer/co-writer on FPSDOC, a 4.5-hour documentary film celebrating the first-person shooter genre (with an emphasis on the 90s/early-2000s golden age) that's guided by the developers themselves.

Creates The Life & Times of Video Games and Ludiphilia podcasts.

He/him.

rich@mossrc.me
@MossRC on Twitter and @mossrc.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Posts mainly about #gamedev and #indiegames histories and stories, #retrogaming/#retrogames, #retrocomputing, #classicmac, #shareware, #tombraider, and #videogamehistory.

@jfaulken Likewise. When Gabe was briefing for the cover design, I said something like "it'd be cool if it could involve a priest" but was eager to see whatever resonated with the artist. And right from the first draft I loved their idea and the core composition of the artwork.

My latest book is much more than the story of how Age of Empires (1) was made; it's a story of brothers, camaraderie, innovation, and dreams — the cost of chasing them, the passion that drives them, and the joy when they come true. Now available for preorder from Boss Fight Books.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gabedurham/age-of-empires-how-ensemble-studios-made-history

Update: Figured out how to release the tabs holding it together and get the back cover off, thanks to some guides for other PDAs at https://www.ifixit.com/Device/PDA

Thanks to @wolfinpdx for the link.
The back over removed from a Toshiba e570 PDA, with swollen battery now exposed.

@wolfinpdx There don't appear to be any Toshiba models in there, but I got a few ideas for things to try from looking through the guides for PDAs from the same era.

Transfer Point is now available! It’s a point-and-click adventure game about regret, forgiveness, and email. It was made in World Builder, a Mac app from 1986. You can play it free in your web browser. InvisiClues are also available here if you need a hint! robotspacer.software/transfer-

This Toshiba PDA (model e570) has a very swollen battery. Anyone know how I can finish taking it apart? I can't see how/where to separate the metal plate behind the screen.
The back of the unit, showing a huge crack down the middle from battery swelling. Photo of the inside front, with screen held separate from the unit, showing a metal plate underneath.

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

I am nearly 95% funded for my new book, Flong Time, No See, a collection of what (I think) are charming and quirky essays that weave together the history of obscure printing practices and working people’s lives. The campaign ends Tuesday! kickstarter.com/projects/glenn

😂

"To underscore the consequences of not having that kind of data, Smiley pointed to a recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI."

"It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said. It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite. Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product. It's a dumpster fire. Throw it away. All that money you spent on it is worthless."

theregister.com/2026/03/17/ai_

This in-development C64 fan conversion of The Secret of Monkey Island looks incredible. https://pixeldust.se/monkey-island-project

Transfer Point is a point-and-click adventure game for Macintosh. It was made in World Builder and MacPaint, and it fits on an 800K floppy disk. It also has an egret. Coming soon for most web browsers, or as a download to play on your classic Mac. robotspacer.software/transfer-

@voxel @MichaelKlamerus @cyningstan Thanks guys. I'm adding these to my list and will give them all a go.

I already asked this on r/dosgamng, but eager for more responses: what are your favourite *modern* DOS games? Not DOS-inspired or DOS-style, but rather actual new games made for DOS systems in the past decade or so.

And now an Escher cat

orange cats arranged in impossible shapes

In celebration of International Women's Day, the team behind Tomb Raider Legacy of Atlantis has highlighted the enduring influence of Lara Croft by inviting women involved in the project to share what the iconic adventurer means to them.

tombraiderchronicles.com/headl

Tomb Raider Legacy of Atlantis, Crystal Dynamics, Flying Wild Hog, Amazon Game Studios

My mate Pete and I have a new game coming out that we made with Godot. It's called Super Robot Survivors and is a bullet hell/roguelite inspired by the robots we grew up with as kids.

Wishlist it on now Steam!
store.steampowered.com/app/435

@kalleboo @vga256 InputSprockets was user-facing, but there were others for networking, graphics, and sound. This old MacTech article offered a good summary of them and how they made gamedev easier: https://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.02/GameSprocketIntro/index.html

Bitmap published a fun and interesting interview with one of the LMA Manager programmers, which nicely augments the Simon Prytherch (series co-creator) interview in my football games history book. https://www.bitmapbooks.com/blogs/news/codie-s-coder-richard-smith-and-the-lma-manager-story

@vga256 We kind of did briefly have an Apple equivalent to DirectX: the GameSprockets libraries. It's just that they went the other way — they squeezed the resources afforded to the team and eventually shut it down (in a moment colourfully documented in my book with lead dev Chris DeLeon swearing at Avie Tevanian).

Loom (DOS EGA)

Room 004: Loom Island - Forest and Cemetery

»