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by <span class='p-author h-card'>gpotter</span> on Play

Citizen Rewind

Update: November 23, 2015 – Takedown

Back in 2013 I found a box of cassettes containing some CBC Nightlines shows from the 90’s – I shared them on a page here at NetworkEffects http://networkeffects.ca/?page_id=1301 and highlighted a few more of my favourite finds like the Nightlines Pub Rock Show and some Pooby Christmas tunes.

Soon after I posted these I received some emails from fans of CBC Nightlines & CBC Brave New Waves offering to share some of their digitized cassettes.  Some of these fans had even used their VCRs to record the radio programs – taking advantage of the VCR programmable timers to capture their favourite late-night programs.

It became clear to me sometime in 2014 that the submissions finding their way to my shared Dropbox volumes were going to far outpace my ability to update the humble collection on my blog so I started looking for a better way to not only host them, but a means for all of these great people to grow the collections + provide info/tracklists/program details.

After poking around far too long I have decided to setup the Nightlines and Brave New Waves collections at audio.networkeffects.ca using Omeka – an open source content management system for online digital collections.  I’ve called this little project Citizen Rewind … a little play on words with hat tips to CitizenFour and CBC Rewind.  I think of this project as a fan-led CBC Rewind for those of us who miss our late-night public broadcasting as it was in the 80s and 90s.  The CBC Digital Archives likely have all these program archives somewhere (or did) but are also likely handcuffed by risk averse copyright considerations … this fan-site is not.

The more I use Omeka, the more I love it.  I’ve found just enough features and extensibility to make collecting, organizing, and serving a large collection of audio files and the more I explore it the more I am finding it is also capable of considerable large-scale projects – like serving digital collections of the New York Public Library system.

I have been working on getting archives uploaded this weekend by getting started with the Brave New Waves archive uploads.

http://audio.networkeffects.ca/items/browse?collection=1

 

 
by <span class='p-author h-card'>gpotter</span> on Play

‘The Prisoner’ + ‘The Prisoner 2’ video games

With all the great in-browser software emulation emerging over the last few years I thought I’d take a cue from Jim regarding The Prisoner game released for Apple II and see if I could find an emulated version.

30 minutes into my search I not only found .dsk files for both The Prisoner and The Prisoner 2, but a great piece from The Digital Antiquarian that digs into the backstory of the game developments.  Some great bits:

It consists of some 30 individual BASIC programs which are shuffled in and out of memory as needed by a machine-language routine, the only non-BASIC part of the structure.

 

Throughout all this the game is constantly trying to get us to reveal our resignation code, through ploys obvious and subtle. The most devious of all comes when we visit the Hospital. In the midst of an absurd free-association personality test, we are suddenly dropped to BASIC with an apparent error message. The natural reaction to the above would be to LIST line 943 to see what the problem might be. If we do, however, we have just lost. The number 943 is of course our resignation code, and we have just been tricked into revealing it. There was never any real error at all; we are still in the program. We are still the Prisoner.

There isn’t much different between ‘The Prisoner’ and ‘The Prisoner II’ – story is essentially the same with ‘The Prisoner II’ adding a first person perspective to the maze/map puzzles.

If you are digging #prisoner106 give ‘The Prisoner’ a shot by downloading this prisoner.dsk file and loading it into this javascript-powered Apple II emulator.

‘The Prisoner II’ is available at archive.org and offered via MESS below: