erwan577

Bisqwit's nesemu1 source is 940 lines at https://bisqwit.iki.fi/jutut/kuvat/programming_examples/nese... It also uses SDL.

NES emulation is a great low level programming project and the tradition will probably continue for some time.

I strongly agree with the point the problem was that compilers weren't using these addressing modes at all

at least in the 80s microcomputer compilers were very primitive compared to what we have now which maintained a strong need for ASM. Dev tools used to be very expensive and proprietary too.

GCC started to slowly changes that starting by 1987.

So there was a time when software started to be mainly compiled high level language but using stupid compilers and CPU designers had to live with that.

Rust should help with the stability issues that plagued the 80s/90s before fully enforced memory protection. Now I wonder if MMU really brings other benefits.

In my latest workstation, I do not use virtual memory to use the disk as extra memory for my running software, i use compressed memory as a disk cache. 30 years of progress has changed the requirements and usecases. Maybe the MMU will survive in a different form that would require a new name.

I read the 4k virtual memory pages and TLB caches are becoming a performance bottleneck so this needs to be redesigned anyway.

I was a user at the time, and also a reader of many computing magazines.

GUI environments of the 80s all brought multitasking with them, and system stability was mediocre to very bad... All writers pointed to memory protection as the cure of all this. See also Mac os history for a more detailed usecase.

Rising software size and complexity made the industry abandon assembly programming for higher level languages and for GUI apps this quickly meant C/C++.

One of the idea I take from the piece is that CPU design success is intimately tied to the software ecosystem of the day and Memory Management Units were a big thing for C langage multitasking.

I wonder if Rust or similar could make the MMU transistors and energy budget redondant.

Disclaimer: I am a 68k fan.

In my experience, your point is mostly true in academia and business settings. The "foundation" layer of CS only brings a negligible number of jobs.

But with the global availability and affordability of computing devices plus the global knowledge base of the web curious geeks never had so much opportunities to learn and practice.

Here is just a link which i hope will bring some joy to your day : https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=28422...

Other sources of hope are retro computing communities, emulation devs, FPGA scene (Mister) for hardware side, assembly devs / optimization communities for software side.

Hardware changes slowly make current system design choices obsolete. Persistent RAM, TBs of RAM will require low level OS redesign sooner than expected.

Beyond the tiny binary result, I understand that Justine want the OS maintainers to understand that there is value in supporting a common ABI and that there are very little changes to do for that once they already standardized on the CPU arch and POSIX. But changes would need to be synchronized accross all OS, so there would be a large communication cost. So this bogs down to how much innovation is expected in system ABIs.

I forgot to say that TC simulator aims to high performance. That makes it more fun to use than Logicsim even if the feature set is more limited for now.

Turing Complete is maybe more a tutorial in digital logic coming with its own simulator than a game.

It is designed to feel like a puzzle game and is distributed on Steam but that's only the surface...

Building your own CPU and programming it in your own assembly language is exactly what TC promises on the tin.

The "game" discord server may be worth checking also.

If Mac are so expensive why are hackintoshes still out of favor ?

Is there any clue in the story as to why the meta professions are kept secret from the general public ? Is there a sociological aspect in the story ?

Windows used to make a sound when shutting down too...

This page has the files for the default system sounds for Win95. https://www.rjgeib.com/about-me/sounds/sounds95.html

You can see that there was a sound when the trash was emptied or when you receive a new mail.

This was really a different, simpler time. Imagine an open space where each computer make a sound each time you receive an email, even with a good spam filter...

This is a very different question from the root parent.

I used my first computer in the early 80s so my answers can relate to a very different world/context than ours now.

First personal computer users had only experience with mechanical typewriters that made a lot of noise when typing. So 8bits computer keyboards usually have a feedback sound on each character. The sound was different in repeat mode and maybe backspace mode.

On input validation failure, systems usually made an annoying beep sound.

In the early mouse based GUI systems, the same kind of sound was used if you clicked outstide the current modal dialog box for example.

So sound was used as some kind of error signal mostly. On the mac the system beep was replaced with a duck sound (or whatever it was configurable).

Different sounds hinted the user if the message was some kind of error or an event notification. Until recently this may have an ergonomic value for some users.

PCs used plain system beep for a long time. These days the motherboards still use them as error message for things like missing RAM...

the energy market price record is real, so click-bait aspect is relative.

Isn't it the first sense of the verb to compile and a return to the original way of doing things ?

(transitive) To put together; to assemble; to make by gathering things from various sources. Samuel Johnson compiled one of the most influential dictionaries of the English language.

In your colored car analogy all cars use the same fuel. An Apple computer with a different chip arch will use different software. Yes fat binary are a thing but anyway all different archs should be tested separately. This is a real bummer especially for small dev shops.

So if you are a self motivated CS type of person considering what kind of education is available to you and that "socializing" is not your panacea, is there any alternative to the traditional college? Would Bill Gates still drop out of Harvard these days?

This byte article does not seems concerned about the choice of endianness (big-endian or little-endian).

Is there any practical way to review all the links to my shared Google Photos and maybe disable sharing of most of them quickly ?

Metamath is very different from an initiative to make math more accessible. This is a specialist project to write formal/mechanical proofs of many theorems.

I would be curious to discuss how this can be useful in practice for laypeople, but I don't see any.