cathode ray print shop

Ok I know we were just talking about the transcendental power of art or whatever but it can't be overstated how fun it is to do stupid shit on the computer. And so today's project- making art in ancient versions of Print Shop on the Macintosh.

emulated macintosh plus version of print shop with an easter bunny on a floral background with the text i think something good should happen

This was spurred by the recent 1.0 release of Snow, an emulator for Motorola 680x0-based Macintosh computers. It's really cool! I much prefer these full system emulations a la 86Box to virtual machines, they're lightweight and relatively easy to get going, especially for the purposes of doing dumb stuff. Last time I was ill I set up a Windows 98 machine...

Windows 98 desktop with a Lain theme installed, as well as Daria's Sick Sad Life Planner

...today I have no such excuse, but Snow handles software through my new favourite file name, the ".moof", of which you can find countless of on the Internet Archive and even play straight in your browser. Alas, I couldn't get printing from Print Shop working no matter what I tried, but I did get an entire Macintosh II emulated on my iPad. Finally, a use for the Apple Pencil!

Macintosh II emulated via vMac, opened on MacPaint with the word "gaming" scrawled next to a beautiful black and white pixel art rendition of a Japanese woodblock

But en lieu of the ideal solution, there is a much easier one: The Print Shop Club, an emulation of the very first (and far more charming) edition of the software, and after a lot of THINKING/PRINTING (stay on the tab!) you'll get a PDF greeting card/banner/sign/whatever to use as your heart desires. Here are some that I made earlier:

If you have any solution to getting other versions to print, or if you make anything cool yourself, feel free to share it the guestbook or email me.

Keep having fun online :)

thinking printing text from the print shop