Two Stop Bits | qingcharles's comments

qingcharles 25 days ago | parent | on: Optimizing a 6502 image decoder – part II: assembl...
I used to write software 3D renderers in the 90s and I think of all the time I spent optimizing the assembler, but now I look at stuff that we thought was optimized at the time and people are discovering all sorts of new speed-ups. There are a bunch of videos on YouTube about optimizing N64 games where they found tons of stuff the developers missed, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_rzYnXEQlE
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qingcharles 50 days ago | parent | on: All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been pr...
Definitely available in UK and EU. I was working with the major labels at the time to ingest all their music and we'd get calls saying "Apple just turned up, you won't believe what they have."
qingcharles 57 days ago | parent | on: Avalonia Visual Basic 6 - VB6 reimagined in C#
Amazing. I always loved VB6. The crazy thing is, to this day I'm still using the exact same interface to make Windows desktop apps every day in Visual Studio. 30 years later, same UI.
qingcharles 60 days ago | parent | on: When the IBM PC Came to Town
I don't think the article is AI. I use AI to write a lot of research documents, with footnotes, and it never feels as casual as this writing, even if you prompt it that way. And I'm using all the SOTA tools.
Could be wrong, though. AI is getting nearly impossible to detect in most tasks.
qingcharles 62 days ago | parent | on: The day Return became Enter
Makes an interesting point that we actually need a "Return" key again nowadays for chat clients where we are always having to type [alt]/[shift]/[ctrl]+enter to get a new line without submitting the message. Or sometimes those submit the message and we have to do it without. There's no standard.
qingcharles 70 days ago | parent | on: Fifty Years of Microsoft Developer Tools
These are the only tools I've really used for the last 30 years of professional development. Before that I was mostly on the Borland C and Turbo Assembler train. Before that it was Spectrum Basic lol
qingcharles 70 days ago | parent | on: How many BeBox can you have in one room?
Amazing how many have actually survived!
qingcharles 72 days ago | parent | on: A lost game and other curiosities from a 1989 IBM ...
Huh, I never knew about the copyright discrepancy in Italy. I just researched it since pirated software was available at every corner convenience store in many mainland European countries in the 80s and 90s and I always wondered why. I would stock up on every vacation, at first piling up cassettes for home computers, then later multi-cart console games.
Here's what GPT said: "The key shift was the EC Council Directive of 14 May 1991 (91/250/EEC) on the legal protection of computer programs. This forced member states to explicitly protect software as literary works under copyright. Implementation varied (Italy did it in 1992, Spain in 1993, etc.), but by the mid-1990s the patchwork was gone."
qingcharles 76 days ago | parent | on: EPSON MX-80 Fonts (1980 Dot Matrix Printer)
This is neat :)
Now we need one for the Star LC-10
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cDX3rVuW-7U/maxresdefault.jpg
- bmonkey325 75 days ago
  My first word processor :
  Star micronics lc 10
  Bank street writer / atari writer
  Atari 800
  Atari 850
qingcharles 77 days ago | parent | on: 29 years later, Settlers II finally gets Amiga rel...
Settlers was awesome. Is it better than Civ II? Hard to say.
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