- That's cool!
What's a Tektronix 4404? Is it a graphical terminal, like the Tektronix 4014 that xterm emulates? Is the software running on the device itself, or is it just displaying the output of software running on some other computer in the background?
- onre 563 days agoIt is a m68k-based workstation, not a terminal, so the software runs on the machine itself.
- I wondered why the Amiga specifically, but the article talks about that:
> What makes the Amiga particularly suitable for creating text art, however, is its default monospaced font "Topaz". Its letterforms and column settings allow for the creation of cohesive patterns. In Amiga, the line spacing and character spacing are very narrow, so certain characters "merge" if arranged correctly. For example, by typing an underscore followed immediately by a slash, it looks as if these two characters were one cohesive pattern and not two separate characters.
...and yeah, looking at some examples[1] I can see why the Amiga got its reputation and style.
[1]: https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/assets/qzXH73V-55-749.png
- Did this software survive? Can it still be run on SPARC/Solaris, or with some kind of QEMU-SPARC emulation layer?
- I don't know much about CP/M except that it was pretty closely tied to the Z80 family of processors. How liberal a translation is this to 6502? Does it try to replicate all the Z80 registers in the 6502 zero page, or is it a much higher-level recreation that just implements APIs with the same names and signatures?
- I believe it's higher level. Note that there's precedent: CP/M-86, a port to the Intel 8086, existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86
- Post things you want to see. Upvote and comment on other people's posts that you like, to encourage them to post more. When you come across an interesting comment you like, post that link to your friends.
A site like this can exist on interesting submissions for a little while, but community is what will give it staying power, and help it collect interesting submissions for a long time to come.
- Absolutely don't miss the companion documentation site¹, which describes the game in detail, along with background information about the hardware and the people who made the game.
- This includes a discussion of what Wozmon is, how it works, and how hard Steve Wozniak had to squeeze to fit useful functionality into 256 bytes of ROM.
- Is there an easy way to figure out which talks are in German before the video comes out?
- Is this going to emulate the generic 6502 architecture, or specialise into one specific model like the NMOS, CMOS, Rockwell or Ricoh variants? Or perhaps configurable at runtime?
The PlayStation 2 was one of the best-selling consoles of all time, so I'm not surprised it's popular... on the other hand, it's also one of the most awkward architectures to emulate; the SNES and PlayStation and GameCube and GBA are much more efficient to emulate and have great games, so I would have expected one of them to be at the top of the list.