sehugg

Follow me at https://twitter.com/8bitworkshop -- I'll be releasing a book soon that you might like.

Is it common to set autopilot below 5,000 feet or so? Seems kind of like setting your cruise control at 25 MPH.

This is a good time to link to Apple Disk Server, which supplies audio files that Apple ][s can load with their built-in cassette ROM routines, bootstrapping a program that loads a compressed image, then formats and writes it to floppy disk: http://asciiexpress.net/diskserver/

( This is one of the few ways to transfer data to a vintage computer without additional hardware, at least until devices started showing up without a headphone jack :^P )

I added a similar feature to my 8bitworkshop IDE that lets you upload your own C/asm programs to your Apple ][ via cassette port: http://8bitworkshop.com/v3.2.0/?platform=apple2

Reminds me of that episode of "Benson" where they game out a nuclear attack scenario in the basement (bonus: first mention of ARPANET on TV): https://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?q=benson&p=3&it...

Gosh, there's more depth in that layer of cream cheese than in the entire iOS 7 interface remake.

Not just endorsement of violence, but organizing it: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/08/02/facebooks-fig...

And before Assembly there was VHDL and Verilog, and the eldritch instruments that turn them into baroque patterns of silicon that cannot be contemplated by man (well, not since the 1970s...)

There's also TVTropes (warning: abandon all home of productivity): https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RolePlayingGame

I usually sleep with a white noise app running, and I can always hear when the cat is crawling around nearby. (Free app idea, Sonic Cat Detector -- you're welcome :) )

Yes https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/13/massive-meta-study-confi...

And had to be convinced not to unilaterally pull out of South Korea, and not to back the Saudis' blockade of Qatar that was assisted by his son-in-law, and that the North Korean missiles he saw on Fox News were from an earlier video, and ...

Meanwhile, we're building tactical nukes again, and signaling that we're willing to use them (and that somehow we can avoid further escalation): https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2018/07/24/tactical-nuc...

Arcade games could also more readily use ROM, so tile and sprite data could just flow in parallel to the rendering subsystem -- without worrying about sharing with the CPU or refresh cycles.

I remember on my Apple ][ playing Wizardry, written in UCSD Pascal: https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/making-wizardry/

Pretty sure there were a few text adventures written with it too. The non-flashing cursor and glacially slow text output is a sure tell: https://archive.org/details/RamboFirstBloodPartII4amCrack

(edit: another article from the same source about the P-Machine and Bowles: https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/pascal-and-the-p-machine/)

I note that the existing JSMESS emulator supports C64; for what reasons was VICE chosen?

Nothing beats my dependency manager, which I'll just call DrGonzo:

  var exports = {};
  function require(modname) {
    if (modname == 'jquery') return $;
    else if (modname.startsWith('.')) return exports;
    else { console.log("Unknown require()", modname); return exports; }
  }

(Of course you've gotta <include> the modules ahead of time -- I actually use this for http://8bitworkshop.com/)

Propublica: After Budget Cuts, the IRS’ Work Against Tax Cheats Is Facing “Collapse”

https://www.propublica.org/article/after-budget-cuts-the-irs...

There used to be a relevant X screensaver ... ah, here's a port of it to JS: https://rtoal.github.io/galaxies/galaxies.html

We still don't fully understand all of the various quantum mechanical hacks that biology uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology

I could grep the heck out of some log files on that.

"The answer ... is no. We are therefore going anyway." -- Kirk, Star Trek III

You might want to contact Jason Scott at the Internet Archive, especially if some of those are copy-protected: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5180

The ZX80/81 used Don Lancaster's "Cheap Video and Lying To the Machine" method of graphics output: http://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/KimKlone/BrideOfSon%20...

Essentially, the CPU executes each line of video, jumping to the start of each line of cells. The video system latches each byte onto a shift register and displays it.

But the CPU is tricked -- NOPs are forced onto its data bus right before it decodes the instruction. So it merrily marches along fetching successive bytes for the video subsystem, without interpreting them.

That is, until a certain bit of the character code is seen, then the CPU is allowed to execute the instruction and terminate the scanline (usually HALT on the ZX). This process repeats over and over for each scanline.

As a result, it's pretty tricky to program animations. There's not much CPU time left for anything while a frame is being displayed.

Some good technical info here: https://problemkaputt.de/zxdocs.htm

Nice writeup, thanks. I'd been thinking of playing with Go/WASM for http://8bitworkshop.com someday. For now, JS is plenty fast enough for 1-3 MHz 8-bit emulators.

BTW, I've never had performance problems with HTML Canvas, and I use setTimeout(), not requestAnimationFrame. The only thing I do every frame is putImageData() on a retained Uint32Array buffer. Maybe you could use the Chrome Performance devtools to figure out what is going on.

Something I didn't know is that the US Library of Congress considers SQLite databases to be long-term storage formats, on par with CSV and JSON: https://www.sqlite.org/locrsf.html

I've been looking for a system that lets me track replication of online/offline data, as well as a search tool + format obsolescence report on files. I once started writing such a thing using Python + SQLite. It's kind of trickier than it seems.

Yes, unfortunately. "Reveal Codes" FTW :)

I was just thinking about DOS apps, specifically how nice it was when keyboard shortcuts pertinent to your current mode were helpfully displayed at the bottom of the screen.

You could even make a chess program in 392 bytes: http://nanochess.org/chess6.html