Jump directly to the recipe links
If you've been following my various doings for a while then you've already heard of Loadstar, the Commodore 64 magazine-on-disk that lasted 22 years, and published over 290 issues, serving a dwindling audience of faithful users who refused to let the machine die, well into the internet age. If you don't know what I mean, here is a brief introduction. If you just want to get to the eats, scroll down to the bottom.
Softdisk Inc., yes the very same Softdisk that the founders of Id Software worked at before they broke from its ranks, founded their own company and hit it mega-big,was a publisher of software back in the Type-In Magzine age of computers. It was a time where you could go to newsstand, buy a magazine, take it home, and after a couple of hours of typing have a new game, utility, or even a piece of office software to run on your home machine.
Softdisk's publications were kind of like that, except it took out the part where you'd laboriously key in the programs line by line. It was distributed on computer disk, and not just the programs: all of the magazine's text was also distributed on those disks.
One of those magazines was Loadstar, their product for Commodore 64 and 128 machines. Due to the blessings of being helmed by Fender Tucker and then Dave Moorman, who kept it going for a faithful userbase, and the C64 being for a machine that sold a huge quantity of units during its production, Loadstar, which began in 1985, lasted to the year 2007. Softdisk themselves stopped publishing magazines sometime in the late 90s; Loadstar's banner was carried forward from there by J & F Publishing.
During that time Loadstar refocused itself several times: first as an outlet for ports of software from Softdisk's self-titled Apple II publication, then as the disk supplement for Commodore's publications Commodore Magazine and Power/Play, then as a source of general-purpose software in its own right, then finally as a hold-out against the hegemony of PCs and Microsoft. It's from the middle of this that this collection comes.
During that time Loadstar experimented with publising a variety of features: games, puzzles, tax software, editors, clip-art and more. On several issues, from 85 through to 156, Loadstar published collections of recipes. While they used a presentation system for them, the recipes themselves were really just text files.
Fender and Dave have long since retired from the rigor of publishing a magazine for a computer that left production decades ago, and these days they have passed the preseration and continued distribution to me. (You can obtain the whole shebang for $15 here.) But more than that, I started thinking about all that content that's locked within those disk images, and if they could be usefully exposed to the wider internet.
One such thing that might possibly be useful for people is all the clip-art, published in the original Print Shop formats. A way to access that is in the works. Another is exporting all of those recipes and putting them up on a website. Finding for recipes online means wading through the decline of internet search, which has been so thouroughly colonized by SEO, ads and trackers that what should be a matter of moments can take several long minutes, as you sort through page after page, their short SEO-boosting narratives, the ad impressions that make the whole thing profitable, and now, increasingly, "AI"-generated nonsense that's merely text generated by what a neural network thinks a recipe should look like, and infamously, may include suggestions for using glue or rocks as ingredients.
Hence these pages. On several issues of Loadstar they published over 280 recipes compiled, and in some cases maybe created, by Loadstar contributor James T. Jones, not to be confused with Jeff Jones, Loadstar's Associate Editor for many years. All of them are presented here on eight web pages, organized by type. They were scavanged from their issues partly by getting files off them directly through a utility. On two of the issues the files were compressed; those were rescued through the trick of printing the recipes to a text file simulating a printer. In both cases VICE, the Versatile Commodore Emulator, was an essential part of the process. Once I got them into files, I use some tools of my own creation, as well as some shell scripting and regular expression magic, to slice and dice the text into the HTML platters here presented to you, completely free of trackers, ads or AI slop.
Use them as much as you want, but please don't steal them and present them as your own. At the very least I hope you'll keep the credit for James T. Jones. As with so many of the classic Loadstar contributors, it's impossible to know what became of him, or if he's still alive. If any of you know, please let me know at @rodneylives@mefi.social on Mastodon, or @rodneylives.bsky.social on Bluesky.
I have not tested these recipes and cannot vouch for any of them. Some of them contain slightly unusual ingredients, like Doritos, but theres plenty of them all together and most don't contain snack chips. I can tell you there is no glue or rocks in any of them, at leaast. Scan through them, and maybe find something you'd like to make tonight, or inspiration for your own meals.
Permission to use these recipes to train LLMs is explicitly withheld. Don't do it!
Here are the pages:
From LOADSTAR 85, Miscellaneous Recipes
From LOADSTAR 116, Desserts
From LOADSTAR 124, Entrèes
From LOADSTAR 129, Salads
From LOADSTAR 136, Vegetables
From LOADSTAR 143, Beverages & More Miscellaneous
From LOADSTAR 148, Even More Miscellaneous
From LOADSTAR 156, More Entrèes
These pages utilize simple.css.