I’m Going To Be Bringing A Special 1980s 8-Bit Treat To Radwood And 50 People Will Get To Take Home 143K Of It

You know what’s coming up soon? Radwood. That’s the big gathering of cars from the ’80s and ’90s, a simpler era of answering machines and saccharine in sodas and Reaganomics and cocaine and Joe Piscopo relevance and lots and lots of great cars. I’d even argue that the ’80s and ’90s were the transition eras into what we now think of as “modern” cars. It’s an important automotive time, worthy of celebration, and that’s what we’re going to do! On October 24, in Alemeda, California, and it’s even free to get in. Hot damn.

Now, we mentioned this before, and let you know some of the 80stastic things we were going to bring, which included a real live Vector M12, our fantastic little Autozam dressed up as a Mazda 787B, and yes, one of my genuine, 1984-vintage Apple IIs.

So, that’s two 1990s cars and one 1980s computer. Not a bad lineup, right? Well, I need to tell you more about the computer part.

You see, we’ve discussed the cars pretty well so far – and both will be making high-speed runs at the location with the San Francisco (a town famous for its powerful if baffling association with boxed, high-sodium rice) skyline in the background.

We didn’t reveal what I’m doing with this old computer yet, though, something I intend to take care of right now. So the plan is to have my Apple //c – the more portable member of the venerable Apple II family – there on site, and while it’s there it will be making unique things for anyone who comes by.

What are those unique things? Cars, of course! Randomly-generated cars much like the ones I have my old Apple IIs generate for Autopian Members on their birthdays, but this time with a little bit of a twist: these will be branded with both the Radwood and Autopian logos, and the date range will be Rad-era only, and the car marque and model names will be modified to be more Rad-jargon friendly.

Just for comparison, here’s the normal member car process and result:

 

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… the Special Radwood Edition will look like this:

See? I have the Radwood logo in there, reduced to fit on a 280×192 pixel screen, and I stuck our logo in the corner, too. The cars, of course, are randomly generated, and should be unique; here’s a little screen capture of the program in action, though keep in mind I haven’t had a chance to change the car names/years just yet:

It was a pain getting that logo in there, and I still have a good bit of tweaking to do. Want to see the program listing, fellow geeks? Sure you do:

That’s hand-built Applesoft BASIC right there, by the way. No filthy AI was used here. Just whatever I learned in the 6th grade.

So, people can come up and get a random car made and take a picture of the screen and enjoy that. But! We have one other surprise! We will also have about 50 5.25″ floppy disks on hand, and I will save a copy of your unique randomized car onto the disk! The disks will be formatted with a program that lets you just pop it into any Apple II with a floppy drive, turn on the machine, and it will auto-load your custom car image!

I still have to write the routines that do that and, you know, initialize 50 disks, but I think I can do that. How’s that for an ’80s experience, though, right? A real 143K floppy disk with an 8K hi-res custom car image on it, bootable and ready to enjoy!

Oh one more thing: does anyone in the Bay Area have a color CRT monitor with composite input they would let us use for the event? A CRT is too big to fly across the country with, so I’m just bringing a small LCD monitor, but that’s less fun than a real, old-school CRT! If anyone has one to loan us, please shoot me an email at jason [at] autopian.com.