The digital world is divided in things that run DOOM, and things that soon will run DOOM.

I've never had a ZX Spectrum, or even seen one in real life, but it's been a source of endless fascination for me. Lost a lot of money on RCL's Vega+ scam.

Loved this game, even if I absolutely suck at it. Fraggle, who created the page, has done a port of the game to SDL (easily found through the link on the bottom) and is generally a cool person. An interview with the original creator of Sopwith is coming up.

It makes me really sad that Nintendo is shutting down these services. Though obviously a company can't be expected to keep things running indefinitely, the fact that things can just plain disappear when a company tires of it (i.e. it's no longer profitable) is one of the major reasons I am not a big fan of many online platforms.

As much as I'm for being gender-neutral, what they did here really annoys me. They've changed every instance of "he", "him" or "this" to "they", "them" or "their", which is fine. But leaving the old text in grey strike-through and the new text in italic makes it very jarring to read when you're just trying to get the actual information. I ended up resorting to custom CSS for making it read normally.

I used to use Turbo BASIC, but QuickBASIC was a major step up from that. QB4.5 made BASIC feel professional. Microsoft was very clever to replace GWBASIC with QBASIC. I wonder how many people graduated to QuickBASIC from it.

I tend to use a Windows XP laptop (off-network) for DOS development. Win9x might be more appropriate, but the laptop is too modern for it to work reliably - and XP is just generally more stable whenever I make a coding mistake :D It's not perfect, but it has some advantages over DOSBox. Two spring to mind: 1. DOSBox maps Ctrl-F9 to the killswitch by default, and I tend to forget to disable it (which can be done using the keymapper). Quite annoying when that is the "Run" key combination for Turbo C++ and similar IDEs. 2. Windows supports long filenames, which RHIDE (the DJGPP IDE) can make use of. I much prefer giving my source code filenames that aren't limited to 8.3 characters.

Wow, that is a comprehensive article. Very impressive!

I wonder how the performance would be in assembly. Replacing the floating point emulation done by BASIC with a fixed point implementation would probably do a lot. I'm always impressed at raytracing being done on systems that lack multiplication and division instructions.

It may have been tongue in cheek, but I actually find it endearing and cool that Shatner responded to this and responded in the way he did. Not to mention he's actually not wrong.