- Interesting article; I remember seeing DR DOS in the eighties and that everyone told me that it was superior to MS DOS, but I never cared enough, and it's great that now we can learn the details of all the ploys at the time.
- Every time someone tells me how great and extensive Baldur's Gate 3's story and game world is, I refer them to one of the BG1 or BG2 walkthroughs or playthroughs.
Compared to BG1 and BG2, the world of BG3 looks terribly small and cramped, and the story, while it is still quite good don't get me wrong, just doesn't have the ... vastness and all-encompassing breadth of the story od the old BG games
- If you ever got to use the Mac emulator on a Mac XL - it highlighted how fixed Mac gui layout fit the 9” Mac screen like a glove. The extra screen resolution on the 12” screen was there but the menu stopped at the 9” mark. I had a Mac XL for a while but traded up to a Mac II when a/ux became available. A happier time in computing.
- tldr: nobody knows! but it's a fun read :)
- Yes, it was. I remember writing code to output a network diagram in VRML and it was possible to manipulate the diagram in the web browser (I think Netscape Navigator).
- VRML was everywhere in 1995. At least, everywhere in the media. Any time a TV show had to mention the Internet they would show some 3D avatars moving around a virtual world. Made for much more interesting footage than the grey Mosaic browser background.
- For 8 bits - Fuji net. Basically gives you mass storage access over a network. Atari, apple, coco , Adam and I saw some prelim work for IBM PC.
- with the end of 3.5 disks and the rise of retro machines usage i do feel there is a place for some standard device that would fit in a 3.5" slot that would replace it. some sort of 'super floppy'. whether it writes to mini-sd, sd, compact flash or usb wouldn't matter much. just a way to easily transfer from modern compute to retro computer. something that will be around for the next 20 years.
- Well, I found it ages ago, its still online and even got updated:
- the umd drive was for me what killed it. a brand new storage medium available no where else. and they want us to buy media in this format? when vcd was becoming increasingly popular at the time never mind dvd.
sony makes beautiful hardware, some of the best. but they destroy it with bad practices like cd players that can't read cd-rs. digital music players that weren't mp3. they became about protecting their copyright and not doing what their customers wanted.
- I dunno, I thought the PSP was just ill-conceived and pointless at the time. Sony was at the peak of their NIH syndrome, and just not caring what the market actually might want.
- > piracy
Off-site backups, please.
- The skeuomorphic era was one I appreciated. The artistry and little details were wonderful. Now everything looks the same. Boring.
- It certainly does, though I can't find any Intergraph stuff there.
- This might make you happy?
- I absolutely love OS/2, and I have since I was a kid playing with my brother’s laptop. OS/2’s voice recognition was great for the time, the tooling and object oriented abilities were mind-blowing at the time, and I loved the look and feel of versions 3 and 4. Just great. Using it now makes me sad. It should have won, and IBM just kept making the wrong moves.
- Always wanted to play with a Clipper RISC. It's about the only significant 90's RISC not represented in my collection.
- There's also a 1:1 replica of the Mac Plus mainboard by the same creator: https://github.com/max234252/MacPlus-Reloaded
DosFox posted his progress getting the board to work on Mastodon: https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/07/26/an-engineer-has-b...
Some of the parts for that board are a bit hard to find today. Amazingly, the components that are most difficult to find (at least here in Europe) are the angled 30-pin SIMM sockets…
(I also posted this on the related hackaday comment thread)
- Thats some vintage workstation pr0n....
- Yore ain't a bad place to be. (Bon Scott impression optional)
- > Most applications simply append an icon to the icon bar; the screenshot below shows the effect of launching !Edit, with the extra icon in the icon bar being the only clue that anything happened: This new icon in the icon bar has to be clicked to cause the program to appear.
This little idiosyncrasy confused me copiously when first trying RiscOS.
- I mostly posted this because it seems very rare with photos/screenshots of InterGraph's EnvironV. If anyone is sitting on a rare image goldmine, please share. :)
- Interesting paper. But not going to lie CRT in the title triggered me for TUI and ASCII art …
- Various folks have disassembled the Asteroids arcade ROM. This was helpful recently when I wondered how collision detection was implemented. It turns out to be a sort of axis-aligned octagon intersection algorithm that was easy to implement with just a few adds, subtracts, & compares (6502 doesn't have multiply or divide).
https://github.com/nmikstas/asteroids-disassembly/blob/maste...
(the commentary of the same lines at https://computerarcheology.com/Arcade/Asteroids/Code.html is incomplete by comparison)
My interpretation of the code is that it leads to an effective shape like the one in this graph, where the overall size is determined by the sum of the size of the two involved objects:
- I’ve lived the dongle life for 40 years because Steve jobs didn’t want people tinkering with the insides of the Mac. My ProFile and HD20 is testament to that.
- Like owning Cisco Catalyst 6509 chassis.
- Welcome to the PDP-10, it's not for everyone.
Or if TOPS-20 feels to user friendly, try ITS. It's hardly for anyone.
- Indeed. The level of dedication, time and skill it required for this guy to analyze and fix the dozen+ incredibly arcane and minuscule differences between the emulator and actual hardware just so he could remove the small mod that detected this one demo is simply unbelievable. All just for this one demo which does truly insane, deeply unnatural things no other demo (or game) ever attempted. Plus the existing mod already allowed the emulator to play the demo perfectly down to the pixel and millisecond. It just bothered him that a special case mod was needed, so he spent well over a year on research, debugging and analysis - including writing several quite sophisticated visualization tools to specifically identify these incredibly minor divergences.
It's double amazing because the demo is incredible for identifying these insanely challenging tricks and getting them to run on primitive hardware no one thought could display this level of colors or animation AND then a software emulation of the vintage IBM 5150 PC (and monitor) being so precise it's able to recreate this one-off insanity in cycle-accurate real-time with NO case-specific hacks. It blows my mind that either one of these actually exists. Both together is the stuff of heroic retro legends. I'm confident none of the 1970s designers of the 6845 chip would have ever believed their chip was capable of generating these graphics.
- Wow. That's all I have to say. This is the level of detail we can all wish for in our emulators.
- Well, look at the critique when Gnome3 came out to replace Gnome2. What pissed people off was exactly that it: 1. Set a certain amount of choices on how the gui should work and 2. Removed a lot of settings, especially those that would have allowed people to reset the things in point 1 to what they liked from Gnome 1&2.
It's one thing for a GUI maker to move the task bar from side to top/bottom for instance, but another to also not allow you to have it back where you "need" it to be. Even when you do want to move defaults (like tmux changing hotkey from screens ctrl-a to ctrl-b) it still is a good idea to allow people to set it back, even if only for a transitional period. Muscle memory takes a while to change for some, and GUIs are not except from that, so if you always had the trashcan to the right, moving it to the left will piss someone off, but not as much as preventing that someone from moving it back again, if that is their preference, perhaps even a preference that your previous versions of the GUIs made for them.
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