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.

Richard Moss MossRC
@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

Richard Moss MossRC
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

Richard Moss MossRC
@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).

LucasArts Places lucasarts_places@mastodon.social

Loom (DOS EGA)

Room 004: Loom Island - Forest and Cemetery

Richard Moss MossRC
Found my first book at the University of Melbourne (my alma mater) library.
A photo of some videogame books on a library shelf. The yellow cover is my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming.

Richard Moss MossRC
@bink Playing old games on period hardware really elevates the experience, I find. Doubly so when it's something as beautiful as a G3 iBook. The convenience trade-off gets harder the further you go back, though, as I'm sure you know, given your C64 photo.

Richard Moss MossRC
@gordoooo_z It's got a couple of cracks, the battery is as good as dead, and one of the keycaps is missing. But otherwise the iBook in great working order, and absolutely delightful to use.

Richard Moss MossRC
@matt_diamond @grumpygamer Totally agree. I was super impressed by the outstanding quality of the design (and art and writing) on Pajama Sam 1 when I played it recently. Great, meaningful, logical puzzles and interactions.

One of the big motivators for me with my SCUMM history project is to bring the brilliance of the Humongous games to light and to show they were so much more than mere "kids games".

Richard Moss MossRC
My four year old just informed me that a monster is eating the Infernet and the infernet is getting smaller as a result.

Keith Kaisershot blitter@mastodon.social

@MossRC @vga256 Yes and no. Iliyas Jorio's modern source ports were open-sourced, but the original source code remains inaccessible. Shame, too, because the original Power Pete runs great on Pippin hardware, while the "modern" Mighty Mike eschews the optimizations that make that possible. Would be cool to see the differences.

Richard Moss MossRC
@resistor @vga256 The publisher (MacPlay) insisted on the name change because they worried about Mighty Mike being similar to Mighty Mouse. Pangea changed it back to the original name immediately after they got the IP rights back in 2001.

Richard Moss MossRC
For anyone unaware, all the Pangea classics (Bugdom, Nanosaur, Cro-Mag Rally, Otto Matic, Power Pete/Mighty Mike, etc) were open-sourced a few years ago and ported to a bunch of modern platforms.

From: @vga256
https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/116160761853024439

RT: https://mastodon.tomodori.net/users/vga256/statuses/116160761853024439

Richard Moss MossRC
@MichaelKlamerus I'm really enjoying them too. They have the same kind of layering of humour for different age groups that great kids' TV offers, the art and animation is superb, and there's a lovely message of inclusiveness and courage pervading through each one. Plus charm in spades.

Richard Moss MossRC

I've been introducing my four year old to point-and-click adventure games via the Humongous Entertainment "junior adventures" series. She's loving them, aside from occasional frustrations and some scary bits, and is now showing a great deal of interest in any grownup adventures she sees me playing.

Freddi and Luther embarking on a new adventure through the haunted schoolhouse. This photo shows the inventory bubbles at the bottom of the screen. We hadn't picked anything up yet, but it notably has pre-set positions in the UI for each item you can collect. Freddi angrily confronts the ghost who has been scaring all the other kids. Photo of my laptop screen playing the intro to Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside. Sam is shining his torch into his bedroom closet.

ebalsa ebalsa@mas.to

♻️ legendofmi.com: Nice easter egg on DuckDuckGo.com. If you search for “Guybrush Threepwood”, the logo transforms into Guybrush.

Spotted by Technical_Pass7714 on Reddit.

Halcyon halcyon@bitbang.social

I've gone down a deep rabbit hole working on a strange new project: a standalone After Dark module player for modern macOS. No OS emulation or ROM required -- just the original classic Mac OS AD module files! I can't believe this is working!

CONFIG.SYS: LOADHIGH loadhigh@bitbang.social

When I was testing something with 2000's traffic routing I was thinking: "I wish there was a OpenTTD or OpenRCT2 of SimCity 2000"

There is actually a project that has started the work!

Current releases have focused on patching SimCity 2000 SE to run on modern (Windows) systems, and adding a modding API, but the first parts of the game have been reverse engineered and reimplemented in C++. Very cool!

sc2kfix.net/

Richard Moss MossRC
This article from the excellent Super Chart Island blog is the most complete chronicle I've seen of the travesty that was World Cup Carnival and its bizarre journey to the top of the UK sales charts. (A game I wrote in my Tale of Two Halves book was "so bad they released it twice".) https://superchartisland.com/world-cup-carnival/

Daniel Amiga_News@fosstodon.org

Planned: Documentary film about SCUMM
Australian Richard Moss and Englishman Daniel Richardson are planning a documentary film entitled "Passport to Adventure: The SCUMM Story" about SCUMM ("Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion"), a video game engine used for e.g. Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island or Zak McKracken.

amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2026-

Richard Moss MossRC
@eirikmyhr Totally agreed on Loom. I played through most of it recently, having previously only done the first section, and there's so much beauty in its graphics, sound, and story. Really special, unique experience. My (narrow) favourite is Sam & Max. There's something about its madcap humour, pop culture send ups, and satire that always makes me giggle.

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