- Bought from them relatively recently myself. Old school way of doing business but the items were precisely as advertised.
- The Atari home computer division had a Data General “eagle” Mv/8000 mini computer it used to assemble code it wrote for its 8-bit line. The CAMAC was a port of the macro assembler on the atari 8-bit in the spirit of Apple Rosetta. This of course was much much faster than assembling on 8bit machines directly and being able to share work with other programmers.
Amazing to see this back from the dead. Also of note is the DG MV/8000 emulator being available. This machine was the focus of the book _The Soul of a New Machine_. Hope I can post on that later.
- Sun's console font is a beaut.
- the number of engineers and geeks i know that are using hardware that was out of date when they hunted down and bought obsolete hardware is constantly growing.
sometimes it's for a better keyboard (apple), sometimes it's for a better build (ibm thinkpads v lenovo), sometimes it's for a fondness of hardware they had prior to their current hardware.
new hardware just doesn't excite the way new hardware did even 20 years ago. with new oses and crapware like minix baked into every intel chip i just want hardware and software that works for me and me alone.
- i've used opera mini a lot. on dumb nokias, even on an iphone 3g and android. the built in rss reader and data compression made my 50mb quote of data on pre pay 15 years ago go a long long way. i could browse the web all day using rss and text only sites.
when it was taken over by the chinese the rss went away for a few years but it did come back. when stuck in hospital for a few months over the last decade it kept me from boredom.
now that my dumb nokia can't do data i do miss it. last time i was in hospital i used an rss reader on android on hospital wifi. just wasn't as neat and easy to use. the dumb nokia was meant to be used in one hand. android and smartphones need two hands to use.
- A starter kit for CP/M-86 with everything ready to unpack and run. It bundles the PCe PC emulator (Windows only), preconfigured PCe environments for running different CP/M-86 versions including Concurrent CP/M-86 and Concurrent DOS, and other software such as the Pirx Commander file manager.
- Hah, I did the reverse a while ago: a ZX Printer emulator peripheral, printing on a receipt printer 😁
- thank you! I'll let this play out a few days. I have felt like I have been in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike on this one for a long time.
- If you don't get an answer here, you might want to ask on intfiction.org which has a lot of text adventure historians as regulars.
- The slowdown.exe can be found here:
- Years ago, there was a documented issue when attempting to sync a Newton device with modern PCs (unsure about Linux) over serial, where the default port speed to too fast for the sync software to handle. The solution was to use a slowdown.exe package
https://www.newtontalk.net/archive/newtontalk/2003-December/...
- Nah, it was:
- People who wanted a Unix workstation could build one cheaply on commodity hardware with Linux
- SGI, HP, Sun, and others didn’t adapt to Linux’s disruption quickly enough. So much fucking about with Itanium.
- NT became good enough such that if you didn’t care whether it was Unix, you could actually use Windows.
- Mac OS X — the only Unix that’s ever managed to be user friendly in the true meaning of the term — ate the rest of the market. (You _could_ build a version of Unix that has a nice GUI and isn’t the Mac, but people are so wedded to X11’s 30 years of misfeatures.)
- Nice. Thank you for what you do making this site a fun place to visit.
- . I’m only adding the year recently as I was admonished for not putting a year on something that was “rather old”. To me it seems ironic to request the year on a site where the content is almost by definition “old”.
I’m glad there will be more clarity in what is expected of a quality post to the site.
- The PDP-11 was one of the first systems to use vectorized interrupts and interrupt chaining. This meant that when an interrupt occurred, the CPU could jump directly to a specific handler for that device, execute its code, and even pass control to other handlers if needed. Once completed, execution would resume exactly where it left off.
For example, a sensor connected via a bus card could trigger an interrupt when new data was available, allowing code to store the value in memory or write it to disk automatically, without the main program needing to check for updates. This eliminated the need for wasteful polling, making the system more efficient and responsive by handling events asynchronously in the background.
- I guess the most mundane explanation is that proper 'BIOS support' for this mode would have been too complicated. It's character based, so you'd need to write all-new versions of those BIOS graphics routines for setting pixels and printing text - not to mention the BASIC stuff for lines, ellipses, and flood fills. That could well have exhausted the allotted ROM space, but you'd also have to "snow-proof" those routines, what with the CGA RAM bandwidth issue in 80 column mode... which would've made them even slower than the original versions, if you can imagine that!
In hindsight of course, the BIOS functions didn't matter when you wanted any sort of performance, regardless of the video mode. But IBM will be IBM.
- I don't think so but... maybe? I guess there's no real data, so no way to know except guesswork estimates.
The entire retro market around all Amiga related things is larger, including people releasing modern games, but owning the rights to monetize the original Amiga IP is much smaller than the overall interest in Amiga. And even new Amiga games are almost all shareware, freeware or Patreon-supported, not a real commercial software model. I think the Amiga IP at this point is just down to:
* Getting royalties on licensing ROMs for distribution to retro enthusiasts (like Cloanto's Amiga Forever) or PowerPC derivatives born long after Commodore's demise (which are just a new and different thing from OG Amiga).
* Licensing the Amiga logo and name for T-shirts, mouse pads or if someone makes an Amiga recreation.
Any patents would be long expired at this point. So, I'm guessing maybe a few thousand dollars a month? Even that may be optimistic. The ROMs have been widely available from unofficial sources forever. I suppose you could try to leverage owning the Amiga name into adjacent businesses marketing new products to the retro-interested base but that still requires making new products, spending money to market them and profitably selling them. None of which is included in owning the old Amiga IP rights. I just can't see how it's really worth much.
- AKA the one where IBM mentions the unsupported "160 PELs by 100 rows" low-resolution mode, but gives only a vague hint about actually setting it up... and even that is wrong! ("requires special programming and is set up as the 40 by 25 alphanumeric mode.")
Smooth move, but the real details cropped up in magazines and BBS writeups a couple years later.
- As a fellow child of the 80's I totally get what you mean, but you still can't really do that. You can get close with a simulation inside a closed roadway, I guess. People would probably pay for that experience, actually. Hmm.
- Same, and it's politics we NEED to care about. If enough of us don't, then we will have to live with the will of people we very seriously disagree with.
Emulation, virtualization, compartmentalization are all basic ideas in computer science and they are used all over the place in general computing.
The difference between an emulation and virtual machine are quite interesting as well.
Consider that in the context Nintendo is claiming: Emulation is illegal (based on how it's used).
That (based on how it's used) is EVERYTHING in this discussion, and similar ideas exist in copyright too.
The DMCA boils down to making smart people illegal. George Hotz vs SONY is a prime example, and morally SONY was in the wrong by updating "Other OS" away, thus taking Linux away from many Playstation owners.
Copyright was originally put in place to insure sufficient motivation to create remained a part of society.
Of course Disney extended it to the point of silliness, yet it's law now.
Disney is now leveraging Trademark, which they should have done before fucking copyright up for generations to come by the way, and it's likely to cause similar harm.
Nintendo is the Disney of gaming, and these things can very easily take root!
Fact is damn near every, and maybe every game group has went back to the emulation / preservation communities to fetch accurate copies of their own work they lost or discarded!
Free expression, and the importance of gaming in society today, more or less demands we preserve these games somehow, and emulation is the primary way we can do that.
Which brings me back to emulation vs virtualization...
Both feature a meta code body that runs outside the scope of a target code body. In the case of gaming, it's the presenting of virtual hardware to a body of game code in order to obtain the correct responses with the real game media and game hardware being the authority in much the same way nature is the authority in science.
These companies basically refuse to commit to maintaining working machines and or some means to explore old works. Maybe they can't actually do that?
It may be true! I am unsure. But I tend to think long term, it's true. We won't have 8 bit era hardware much longer. Or, if we do, it won't be generally avaliable.
What is an FPGA?
Emulation or virtualization?
Interesting isn't it?
I'll stop there. Just wanted to share a few thoughts with the community here and see what, if anyone else's take, will come in response.
- The comment at the end of the article sums this up perfectly:
>> It‘s amazing what 21st century programming skill brings to a machine that originated basically halfway between today and the 2nd World War.
- Yeah, except the site hosting the blog is bloated to hell. What a times...
- That is really cool to see. There's a cheat code for the DOS version of Bubble Bobble that makes them visible during the game. That was such an eye-opener for me when I was making a game in that style and tried to come up with an algorithm for how the bubbles floated. The reality was so much simpler... they basically cheated!
- It warms the heart to see persons spending time developing new code for retro systems like this.
- This makes me happier than it probably should.
- I mean, it probably has more exclusive games than either of them
- You are all welcome!
I really enjoy this little hole in the wall.
To: our gracious host
Do you need / want anything? Seriously!
I appreciate your time and effort needed to make this place happen and would gladly help.
- Probably worth mentioning that PNG was created to attempt to sidestep the GIF patent mess.
- dBASE is still a file format that is used, Microsoft Access files not so much.