robinsonb5

> Some open source projects have also starting adopting Discord to manage their communities.

And I've chosen not to engage with more than one such community because I'm not perpared even to give Discord my phone number, let alone any kind of ID document. Luckily there's nothing on Discord I care about that much, so I'm not having to make too difficult a choice. I totally get why most people won't take such a stand.

It wouldn't be a problem in the first place if we hadn't migrated away from 4:3 aspect monitors to these ridiculous widescreen things. ;)

Maybe someone should invent a tiling tab manager for the web browser.

I used a PSOC (4) for a project once, and while the chip itself was awesome the software was so bad that attempting to use the next version of the software "bricked" the devboard I was using. (Something to do with the new serial bootloader being a different size. "Bricked" in quotes, because with the right kind of expensive programming cable it could have been resurrected - but the whole point of the devboard in question was that it was cheap and self-contained, not needing an external programmer.)

Vivado offers some embedded debugging and logic analyzer infrastructure, which allows you to tap into signals within the design and monitor them from the PC. (For instance, the Memory Interface Generator will report its initialisation status to the PC and if something failed it will tell you what). This is done over JTAG, and Vivado will only support that when using a select few JTAG dongles.

If you're happy to create your own debugging infrastructure (which isn't that hard - almost all FPGAs have at least two dedicated IR scancodes specifically for user applications) then you can use any JTAG dongle supported by OpenOCD.

You'd think, wouldn't you? But in some regards they still feel less responsive than the desktop of a sub-10MHz machine from the 1980s.

(I'm not kidding - the tight coupling of quadrature-based mouse counters and hardware sprite mouse cursor - bypassing all the wireless, serial / PS/2 / USB encoding and decoding we have today - and on-screen gadgets being drawn and redrawn in the input subsystem's context without messages having to trickle through a ten foot long pipeline of frameworks and UI toolkits, all gave a sense of immediacy, of "having the computer's full attention", that's rare to find in today's world of janky semi-functional web apps.)

Interestingly, gcc-amigaos-gcc 6.5 uses dbra without having to jump through any of those contortions, as long as the optimisation level is set to at least -O1:

  _clear_screen:
        move.w #28672,3932160
        move.w #1,3932164
        move.l #3932162,a0
        move.w #-13570,d1
        move.w #1279,d0
  .L2:
        move.w d1,(a0)
        dbra d0,.L2
        rts

My own blog - which gets maybe a couple of posts a year these days, and almost no audience - had 59 spam comments so far today. It really is time I turned off comments.

Yosys doesn't do place-and-route - typically that part would be handled by nextpnr, and there's an experimental fork of that for Xilinx series 7 devices: https://github.com/openXC7/ (full toolchain)

It works well enough to build a working litex RISC-V SOC capable of running Linux, for the QMTech Kintex-7 325T board.

I don't think the Cyclone V project has got as far, but I could be wrong. (It kind of slipped off my radar after I realised I was spending way too much time on Discord and purged all but a very few servers to reduce my distractions.)

One thing I will say in favour of the Gowin IDE - it does seem to be much more lightweight than the larger vendors' tools. For smaller designs it will often go from zero to bitstream in less time than Quartus or Vivado would have taken to even start synthesizing.

The reverse engineering efforts are impressive (though as I understand it, limited to Xilinx series 7 and Cyclone V) but without robust and reliable timing data to go with the rest of the chip data, they can't give you the same level of confidence that a design will work across a range of a devices and operating conditions.

I can definitely relate - but I have noticed that the bursts have got longer and less intense as I've got older.

Or buying, for example, electric toothbrush heads at half the cost they are in the supermarket and then being surprised when they turn out to be counterfeit.

But that's the other aspect to commingling, I guess - you might pay full price for the real deal and get a fake, due to bad actors' stock being commingled, but on the flipside a punter who's paid an unrealistically low obviously-fake price might actually get the real deal, adding an air of legitimacy to the bad actor.

At least the days of those screenshot being pasted into a Microsoft Word document are mostly behind us now...

If you do ever test this, and do it rigorously (i.e. using analogue and digital versions of the same recording, with no pitch inaccuracies) you'll find the strings will resonate equally well with analogue and digital recordings, all other things (volume, tuning of the instrument, etc.) being equal.

It does, yes. But the DDR RAM available on the target board is DDR3 which is actually quite inconvenient for retro projects for a number of reasons.

Quite apart from the increased complexity, the most important difference is that there's a minimum speed as well as a maximum speed for modern DDR RAM, which means there's usually quite a narrow window of achievable clock rates when getting an FPGA to talk to DDR3.

I suspect that's why the author chose to use the DDR for video: It's usually easy to keep plain old SDRAM in lockstep with a soft-CPU, since you can run it at anything between 133MHz (sometimes even more) and walking pace, so there's no need to deal with messy-and-latency-inducing clock domain crossing.

Streaming video data in bursts into a dual-clock FIFO and consuming it on the pixel clock is a much more natural fit.

Yes indeed - and yet both the carriage and the paper move in the opposite direction compared with that arrow!

(I guess the arrow's supposed to represents the movement of the cursor, not the paper/carriage.)

You're not alone - it took me way longer than it should have done to figure that one out!

Depends how it's implemented - once you've found the correct IP address you still have to connect to it, and some ISPs block and otherwise mess with traffic at that stage.

In the early days of the IWF blocklist I had trouble with a Joomla install timing out when using my own ISP but it was fine if I used a proxy. It turned out to be because the Joomla install was on cheap GoDaddy hosting, and something on the IWF list was in the same IP block as my hosting - so my ISP was directing traffic through a filtering proxy which was causing problems with Joomla.

(IP address alone isn't enough to identify a particular site, filtering everything for target websie was too expensive, so IP-based filtering was used to decide which traffic went through the filtering proxy.)

The site seems to be blocked for me in the UK, too, by the way.

I'm currently on a Windows 10 machine with Core i5 that's more than a decade old. The calculator takes a couple of seconds to start up - provided it's a "good" day (i.e. one when Windows isn't downloading updates or doing search indexing or malware scanning in the background.)

But I also have a Core 2 Duo-based WinXP machine in easy reach (just to keep a legacy software environment alive) and its keyboard has a dedicated calculator button. The calculator is just there the moment I press that button - it's appeared long before I can even release the button.

Even in McDonalds if what they give you is defective they will replace it without question once you bring it to their attention.

If it turned out the door locks on the car were defective you'd expect them to be replaced under warranty. If the warranty had expired the situation would, admittedly, be a bit murkier - but you could still make a case that since the locks had always been faulty they'd be the manufacturer's responsibility.

Someone I used to work with had a car a few years ago on which the battery would mysteriously drain for no obvious reason. It turned out to be a defect in the infotainment system's firmware - and he was furious that he was expected to pay for the firmware update to fix it. (The car was long out of warranty, though.)

As a Brit I don't really care too much about the age verification aspect. It's stupid and easily circumvented but I'm happy to just ignore sites that expect it.

I'm far more bothered by this being yet another nail in the coffin of web forums. The issue is the burden the regulations place on any site which hosts user-generated content. For small low-risk sites the burden isn't all that great - OFCOM have some guidance on their website - but it's still enough to be offputting. A 100-user web forum isn't going to want to bother with it, so those run by UK nationals are just pulling the plug, while those run elsewhere are just blocking UK users because it's the easiest solution.

Which reminds me, I should go and disable comments on my blog...

The problem is there's plenty of crap masquerading as the good stuff, at the higher price point, and telling the difference is not easy. (At least pre-purchase!)

Nitpick: you absolutely would use colour names in that industry - it's just that the colour names would be more along the lines of "Pantone 137C" than "Yellow".

If any of those Amigas had a battery backed clock, please remove the batteries at the earliest opportunity and neutralise the area affected by any leakage with a mild acid such as lemon juice. They'll almost certainly have leaked by now but the longer it's left the worse the damage will be.

Yes, this. When I first heard about OS X all those years ago, I dismissed the ideas as eye-candy until I actually played with it. I quickly noticed how much thought had been put into what was conveyed by all the little animations and finesse touches.

The same thing applies here, I think - I watched the video expecting to see the exact opposite of what I want in a UI, but came away impressed by how much thought and consideration has been put into it.

> I agree that their keyboards and mice are the worst.

They are now. A couple of weeks ago I bought an Apple keyboard from the late 80s on EBay (M0116 model). After a quick solder job wiring half an S-Video cable to a ProMicro, it now talks USB, works perfectly and is one of the best feeling keyboards you could hope to use. (One of the later iterations with saner cursor key placement would be better still, though...)

Yeah I had similar thoughts, but the name's certainly clever - it made me grin!

I'm assuming it's emboldening text by thickening up the strokes instead of using a (possibly non-existent) bold variant of the font?

Ironically, speaking as an Amiga guy, those diagonal function keys were an aspect of the ST I really liked!

I don't know if they were consistent with the other keys in terms of feel, but they were a striking, unique design feature that instantly identified the machine as being Atari without compromising practicality.

I recently got a build of the Minimig Amiga core running on IceSugarPro (which has the same FPGA and same size SDRAM) - only the ECS chipset (no AGA) but I did get RTG graphics working at 1280x720x16bit. It uses PS/2 rather than USB for keyboard and mouse, but apart from that it would be trivial to port to this new board.