Welcome to Planet Neon!

My home planet floating around in cyberspace. Here you can find various topics that interests me, including vintage computers like the Commodore Amiga or the Macintosh 68k, music, physical media (mainly cassette tapes and CDs), programming, games, game development and the earlier web.

About Me

I've been using the pseudonym neongod since the 90s and still think it sounds cool. It came from an old music module’s title I found on a computer magazine cover disk back then. Can’t find it anymore though, so unfortunately I've no idea who made it. I'm a software engineer, retro computer nerd, hobby gamedev and a dad, not necessarily in this order. I've been hanging out online and around computer geeks since my youth, mostly on IRC and web forums, but also IRL in computer clubs and demoscene parties.

Currently feeling:

Contact

I'm @neongod@mstdn.social on Mastodon and you can often find me with the same nick on IRC (IRCnet and Libera.Chat). I'm also checking into the Particles BBS from time to time. If you just want to say hi, you can also visit my guestbook.

Or drop an

About this site

I imagined this website as the view from your spaceship in Frontier Elite II, when you approach a planet. There are several locations to descend to, each base offers something unique. I tried to keep it intentionally simple and use the aestetics of the late 90s web I appreciate so much. I don't like what the Internet has become, where most pages look the same and as if they'd be pages from a magazine. After many years without a personal page, I decided to create my own site again.

I find myself using vintage tech more often nowadays and longing for simpler times, when technology and the web were still fun. I decided to make the site by hand, like I did 20 years ago, with a text editor. It's been a while since I coded HTML and CSS by hand, and my goal with this is to relearn, but also to question and unlearn.

Under the hood

The planet neon logo uses the Cuddly bitmap font from the AmigaFonts package. The site is using the Topaz Amiga font or the Machintosh Charcoal font (if selected). For the planet graphics I used the amazing tools made by Deep-fold, the spaceship is from Frontier Elite II, while for the base graphics I used Buch's and rubberduck's Colony Sim assets.

My original idea was to aim for HTML 2.0 to be fully compatible with old computers, as I sometimes browse the web from my vintage machines, but then I realized that Neocities has SSL enabled by default, which wouldn't work on most old machines anyway without a proxy.

The main page uses CSS and JavaScript to scale the planet image and the image map, and redirect to a simple version in case of an old browser is detected. It also falls back to show a simple text menu if there is no JavaScript support.

Navigation

There are three levels of navigation. Planet -> Base -> Articles. Back to Orbit always takes you back to the main page. Back to Base takes you, well... back to the Base.

The planet image on the main page is 1000px wide. The simple version has an 500px planet image, so that it fits even on old computers with a lower resolution.

Main articles are indicated with red

Sub-sections within articles are marked with yellow bullets.

Articles and links with a New sign mean that the article is not older than a few weeks.

The updated sign lets you know that the article was updated since it was originaly posted.