Crow's Nest BBS (#MARCHintosh)

 

      Just in time for #MARCHintosh- The Crows Nest is back.

     Credit to Todd Knight on Facebook and Reddit, the Crow's Nest is hosted on a 40mhz 68040 IIci with a bunch of upgrades and modems added to it. Really cool shit, check it out!

The Strange But Amazing Pioneer MPC-GX1 & CLD-PC10

 

A Pioneer branded Macintosh with attached Laserdisc player.

     Nothing excites me more than strange and almost useless tech from the 80's and 90's, especially vintage Macintosh stuff, and defunct forms of media. I'm totally infatuated by the Pioneer Laser Active, a Laserdisc player with plug in modules to play LD based Sega Mega Drive games, and PC/TG16 games exclusive to the system. Super rare today, such oddities rarely come up on ebay, especially the games. Imagine a Laserdisc player that utilized the media like a giant sega CD, and no one knew about it. Even more insane and rare, was a PAC cartridge for the Laser Active that allowed you to interface with Macintosh computers via serial port, and give the ability to write software to it using the included program editor. Well do you know what is even MORE rare and crazy? A dedicated Laserdisc Macintosh addon and branded PC.

No one asked for this, but we want this. 

     The MPC-GX1 is a licensed Japanese Macintosh clone from the 90's, using the PowerPC 601 processor, popular at the time. Large powered speakers and a subwoofer were added to the case, which was a very unusual option for the time. One feature however was much more crazy than the rest; the ability to connect to a pioneer Laserdisc player, the CLD-PC10. Several programs were made for this crazy combination of technology, all education and Kiosk based. The Computer history museum made a 2.5 hour video on The Visual Almanac, and it explains how the PC controlled the player, and it how to worked in depth. Someone recently setup a collection of this technology for display at the Vintage Computer Festival East, 2025- where LGR stopped by and was given a quick demo.

     Essentially- It's a giant Apple/Bandai Pippin. The PC controlled the LD player much like you could control a DVD player today. You could chapter through the disc, record the screen if you had certain upgrades, and also build hypercard stacks that could control the tracks on the player. The MPC could also be outfitted with an MO (Magneto Optical) drive, another rare and expensive, senseless upgrade. This combined with some other needless upgrades (Full TV Tuner card and upgraded Video) spawned the MPC-LX200, another MPC series Apple clone with a Power PC 603e on a daughter card, running at a reasonable clock speed of 100mhz, so it's somehow better and aimed at the prosumer market. 

My 90's picture made it to the top of Reddit.

The 90's all wrapped up in one image.

My dad was going through some photos at home and stumbled upon a stack of my sister and I, one time when she was visiting Florida. Lot's of pictures from Busch Gardens, Disney World, and random vacation spots around the area. I sent this one to my sister who responded.. "Well that's the 90's in one picture." Click here to view the reddit post in question. This picture really stood out:

     Soooooo naturally I posted it on Reddit for imaginary points that no one cares about. It swiftly made it to the top of Reddit, and the r/90's group, and I've already seen my own picture once in a Tiktok video slideshow of the 90's. Crazy how that works, and how fast it happens. In 24 hours the post had 204k views and 1.9k upvotes. 

Top comments from the post that stood out to me:

• Wicker backed chairs for the win
• Lol caption on the TV
• Quart of Icehouse
• Rocking the JNCO jeans
• I can hear the computer start up in this picture

     This is one of the few pictures I have of my original battle station in High School. As I have talked about many times, I had a Macintosh Performa 636cd, DOS card, and video capture card. This was as close as you could get to having a Quadra 840av for a third of the price. Connetix Color Quickcam, aftermarket Keyboard and mouse, and a Laserwriter printer under the desk. This was cutting edge in the mid-90's! On the screen is AOL 3.0 with OJ's Tool's installed. Using this setup, I was able to create my Legend Website, Hack the Planet, Rip music and video from VHS tapes, and play/tape/document the emulation gaming scene at the time. 

Hack the Planet

Hypercard Stacks - Macintosh Mainstay and Homebrew Oddity

Who wouldn't want a black and white pixelated Samantha Fox? (Link)

    Time and time again I have expressed my love for early 80's and 90's Macintosh gaming and computers. The classic beige boxes and tiny screens fascinated me, and rules the roost both at home and school when I was but a wee lad. For more on my experience with Macs, read here and here, oh and here and here as well. Of course now-a-days you can emulate a classic Mac in a browser window, download all the files you need in seconds automatically; This is the future after all. 

Welcome! Look at all this cool shit you can do in the 80's.

      What is Hypercard you ask? It's one of the very first hypermedia systems that gained any kind of traction before the adoption of the World Wide Web. Links, audio, video, and text- all presented as an easy to use development kit free of charge to the lucky people who bought an early Macintosh or Apple IIGS. Think of Hypercard as a primitive Microsoft Powerpoint, but with a more simple front end and without any kind of database engine. You could essentially code something without the knowledge of coding, redirect and link different media types, and add controls, links and text in the "Stack". A Stack is terminology for a bunch of documents, individual documents are called 'Cards'. Basically it's just how the documents and data are stored, and how you link to them. Compare this to how Powerpoint has slides and how they link and interact. Using this subsystem, Hypercard users could make presentations, educational software, or even games. What is a good example of a game with Hypercard you ask?

Ahhhh Myst. The game that changed everything. Including making people buy 1x speed tray loading CD drives.

          Yes. This primitive black and white program with limited programming abilities, was just a bunch of Hypercard stacks linked together to play animation or show pictures and audio at predetermined times, was used to create this groundbreaking game that we know and love. Myst is a game that was revolutionary for it's day, had industry leading graphics and cutting edge gameplay that changed the way people thought how game should be designed and played. Unfortunately, for every one game like Myst, there was 100000 Hypercard games uploaded to Keyword: Download on AOL that defied logic and sense. Let's look at a couple shining examples below. I'll provide links to all the games, all you have to do is click the green power button on the screen, it will load the rom into the Macintosh Emulator automatically, and all you have to do is open the disk on the virtual desktop to launch the program. Let's get started.

RIP Steve Jobs 1955-2011

My first computer was a Mac, i lived in Vermont and Florida and all the schools computers were Macintosh computers. I had one at home, school, and at my father's work. I spent my highschool life learning graphic arts, website design, and writing, on an Apple computer.

The picture above is my son, Major II, learning how to use his first computer for the very first time...

Sexy Robot Saturday : Now available on the Sabbath

Attention! Attention!

Sexy Robot Saturday has now been relocated to Sundays. And will be known from this day forth as Sexy Robot Sabbath.

Our scientist have determined through hours of research and development concluding in the statistics now showing Sunday is the best and most requested day for a new Sexy Robot to stimulate the working class just enough to get them through the following workweek.

Unfortunately, our scientist also discovered that the working class is also interested saving time. So, for their sake, and with the help of our lawyers, we have decided to combined two of the three parts for today.

We give you - The Sexy & The Sabbath!!

The robot part is still in the
development stage.

Hole in the Sky - 1997 Edition - Realmz Review

Welcome to the Unknown Hole in the Sky, 1997 edition. Ill be updating from my Mac LCIII in the living room while i talk on AOL version 3.o to my online girlfriend from Minnesota. Her name is... Robin. I love her. ;-).

Today we will be review the Macintosh game, Realmz. Its a game made by Fantasoft LLC. I was at my friends Brian's house after school and we called that number so we could get the cloud expansion for $5.00. My dad said if washed the car he would get it for me, which is prety cool of him.

The system requirements for Realmz are: A 68020 processor, 15MHZ (Pahleeze! I have the new 33MHZ lc68040!! lol) 8 megs of ram, and a 50 meg hardrive. If you don't have 256 colors or at least 1 meg of video ram installed.. your in trouble as your graphics will be the sUxOrz!




The first thing i noticed after installing the game from the 3.5 disk is that its pretty big; and each expansion has a new folder which is also pretty big. I had to delete a few things out of my picture folder to make sure i had 100 megs left for photoshop to run right. The games loaded fast and character creation was tight. The graphics were amazing on my 13 inch MacBright monitor to say the least.

I named my character Kevlar because thats what bulletproof things are made out of. :-0. I noted right away that i was in a town and i could interact and click on things and that was pretty cool. Again i can't explain how sharp and awesome the graphics are. The stone background on the item screen looks like real rock/stone stuff!

I'd say Realmz gets a 4 out of 5 flaming dragons. (flaming dragons are like stars in my rating system)


-DoCDrOz