- Yeah, I thought it ended with trying to optimize bresenham and just leave it at that.
- Haha, fractint is a modern tool?
- Hello!! I love working on and programming my mac color classic!
- Doesn't the Analytical Engine work count as retrocomputing?
- Hello! I not only lurk, I mostly use the RSS feed so I probably don't even show up on site statistics.
I started with a PDP-8e in the old old days and then worked a lot on PDP-10 (DECSYSTEM-20) hardware before eventually landing in Unixland on the VAX 11/750, so I suppose I'm much more of a retro big iron guy.
I did touch some personal computers in the old days, though, including the C64, and I owned an original IBM PC.
- Hello from Pennsylvania! Just a lurker, but I enjoy this site immensely. Started programming in BASIC on a c64 and have a soft spot for all things Commodore, but love the articles about workstation machines of that era (PERQ, Symbolics LISP, etc.) that I never got the opportunity to experience in person!
- Got to "catgirl ray tube" then stopped reading.
- Thank you for the OP for sharing our blogpost. And I agree, I will expand to include more info on the why jungle was a good choice (besides good timing).
- The 2nd part of the series will take a brief look at IGS' command structure. If you made a spectrum of protocols based on their commands' "terseness", I imagine NAPLPS would be among the most compact on the left side, RIPscrip might be in the middle, and IGS would be at the right among the least compact.
Code for some of its commands is fairly readable, but others (particularly the `&` Loop command) can be nearly inscrutable.
- I'd love to donate some stuff ;)
- Can't build a hardware clone of a PC with it. I'm sure your friend knows that.
- I had a similar experience. I shelled out for a dual CPU Intel 440fx setup with SCSI disks which was my desktop well into the P3 era, and got migrated to home server where it served for many more years. I think the PPro had the longest useful life of any processor I used.
- PPro was a premium chip designed for the 32-bit market; it's the equivalent of Xeon branding. You didn't spend the extra scratch to run Win 3.11 on it.
Of course, looking at his other posts he thinks the 80186 was a failure because it wasn't used in many PC compatibles, so he's pretty limited in his understanding of computer history and economics. Google can only teach you so much.
- I had an Asante SCSI->Enet adapter for my much missed SE/30. Avoided dealing with atalk most of the time.
- Author here, great to see this article getting some attention again. It was quite a journey connecting all the pieces
- How is this post relevant to retro computing?
- It probably has something to do with Woz choosing to become irrelevant to Apple after approximately 1980. His last interesting project for Apple was the Disk II controller, as far as I can tell.
If it were me, I’d still celebrate him & the Apple II, but it’s Tim Cook’s call.
- > Apple had largely been imitating Xerox
can we please stop with this canard
The development of the Mac UI is documented at https://www.folklore.org/ (with polaroids!). It was influenced by Xerox — with Xerox’s permission — but “largely imitating” is completely false.
- Surprisingly interesting for developers (not just musicians), I'd say.
- Thank you!
Even though here I was restricted by my own capabilities mainly, it's interesting to note that in creative work people also artificially impose certain restrictions on themselves in order to bring out something new. Say, use the medium of charcoal.
- The installment got too big so I cut it in pieces. Here is the first part, where assembly is really more a goal at the horizon.
https://blog.startifact.com/posts/teenage-programmer-call-of.../
- Did they really call it black and white? I know in the early 90s there was a whole "paperwhite" screen thing, but I didn't realize they had tried to sell light blue as white earlier. Hm, perhaps I did hear a reference to "grey" in this context, but I'm not sure.
- It sounds like you were in a much richer information landscape than the one I found myself in, indeed! At some point I got access to a book about Z80 assembly and it had that kind of material in it, but I didn't have the ability to interpret it. And the grocery store definitely had absolutely nothing relevant to my computing interests.
But assembly is the next installment.
- Not an expert, but from what I see the code is being recompiled for the new platform, so no, this is not an emulator. Emulating would require running the original binary on top of a virtual representation of the console in question.
Decompilations OTOH are work-intensive recreations of the source code, and people expect this recreation to have certain resemblance to the original (unavailable) code. This tool doesn't do this.
It grabs the binary "translates" it to C by using some clues to restore some of the structure, but it's C output is basically unreadable for humans. This output is then piped into a compiler for the target platform together with the pulled assets.
- Oh yes, the first photo is acurate. There was always the guy who appeared wih a mac and we all have to wait for him to make the games work in his computer.
- I need to know what you're talking about. Like, I'm actually curious to hear how I've gained a reputation of not being a dependable source.
- Well, not exactly: those pictures seem to be taken from Disney's EPCOT, specifically the Spaceship Earth ride.
https://www.wired.com/2008/01/whos-the-mystery-man-in-epcots.../
- IIRC it had something to do with keeping people from reusing the photos/serial numbers in scams on eBay and the like. It's been years since I learned to start doing that and I don't remember the specifics. It might have been unnecessary in my case.
- Kinda blazed over the Talkspot/WorldStream thing. Was actively involved in that and my boss had the "pleasure" having technical debates with Ken (a billionaire at the time). A lot of ex-Sierra folks were there and ended up working in Fintech with me. Some will still tell tales of how they coded some of those early games.
- More
This may be inherited from other systems, but it uses a bitwise add and shift algorithm for multiplication which may be slower than an equivalent using mul.