Al's Retro Geek Lab

I mess with retro computing, infosec stuff and gadgets on YouTube:
// Support me:

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@PuzzleMindsa Monkey Island

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@ActionRetro1 Thinking healing thoughts for you Sean

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@FreddyVETELE Yes and one that supports EGA and Sound Blaster

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@FreddyVETELE One of the busiest mods out there and the PicoMEM 2 makes it easy work! Good job @FreddyVETELE !

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@Elifbenad all I see is cock and balls

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@FreddyVETELE Let me know if you want to send me a pico2 for a review @FreddyVETELE

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@RetroMemoriesHQ It was a pretty beautiful thing!

[Dante retro dev 💾 @dantemendes]

Indianapolis 500: The Simulation for the Commodore Amiga (Papyrus/Electronic Arts/1990) is a groundbreaking racing game and one of the best motorsport simulators of the 16-bit era.
1st on MS-DOS PC (1989), it's essentially the same game (although on A500 you'd turn off details, A1200 shown here enables it maxed). Game's downside is that it features only one oval track. Formula One Grand Prix a year later featuring the tracks from 1991 season, surpassed it, content-wise.

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

What a great insight this is to read. You don't often get to hear such important opines on X. IMO nothing was so important a gift to the world as DooM, but perhaps I'm biased.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days.

Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters.

I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.

On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better.

One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.

We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.

Sorry, Sandy.

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@Rossmuir_Art Aye but actually, gonnae no dae it

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

I was today years old when I became aware that the OG Redhat/Fedora Bluecurve theme from the days of Redhat Linux 9 or Fedora 6 was available for GTK 3 & 4 (& Qt). Yay for reboots!

[tidux 🎃 @skibidiblazor]

@LundukeJournal That Bluecurve theme has been ported to newer toolkits. Works great with Xfce since Xfwm retains a Bluecurve theme of its own.

https://t.co/JSAedCRUzr

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@Retroldies Odd, the pallete on the logo Almost looks CGA-like in nature. I assumed it was always way more colorful on the mighty 'miggy!

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@Retroldies The BBC micro was the father machine for Elite and it was a great version, in less than 32K of RAM!

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

Nice

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

A Brazilian YouTuber killed the Photoshop subscription.

It's called PhotoGIMP. It takes GIMP, the free image editor, and makes it look and feel exactly like Photoshop.

Same toolbar. Same panel layout. Same keyboard shortcuts. Your hands already know how to use it.

Photoshop vs PhotoGIMP:

- Price: $275.88 a year → $0
- Account: Adobe login required → No login, ever
- Files: Saved to Adobe cloud → Saved on your computer
- Updates: Forced when Adobe says → Only when you want
- Works on: Windows and Mac → Windows, Mac, and Linux

No Adobe account. No cloud upload. No AI trained on your photos.

How small is the patch? Tiny.

→ Nine settings files. That's it.
→ Copy them into one folder. Done.
→ Open GIMP. It now looks like Photoshop.
→ Don't like it? Delete the folder. GIMP goes back to normal.

Three steps to install. One command to uninstall.

8,751 stars. 272 forks. 30+ people from around the world helping translate it.

One honest note: the license is GPL-3.0. Free for everything. Personal work, paid client work, your own edits. No "Pro" tier hiding behind it.

Dionatan Simioni runs the biggest Linux YouTube channel in Brazil. He built this from Marau, a small town in Rio Grande do Sul. No VC. No team. No fundraise.

This is what Photoshop should have been from the start.

(Link in the comments)

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@gnukeith

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

@JuiceEyed @brockpierson I didn't know doom on 5.25" was actually a thing!

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

I didn't know you could use a BBS to chat on Discord! Find out how!
https://t.co/IvDrNZkQXs

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

Run Google's Gemma 4 Locally: Better than Claude for Coding? Here's how to install and use it like Claude Code and ChatGPT!
https://t.co/gcdGC7xtyt

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

Local AI by Google's Gemma 4 that actually works like Claude Code and ChatGPT, here's how!
https://t.co/Jj6hSHG7ht

[Al's Retro Geek Lab @AlsGeekLab]

Use this hack to get your vintage PC faster with a simple setting! https://t.co/Y9H8X4C1oN