Two Stop Bits | shdon's comments

shdon 296 days ago | parent | on: Grand Prix 2: Modernized and Natively Running on W...
Thanks for posting that! This is a cool project, and that comes across much better on a video than on the site, which lacks even a single screenshot.
shdon 300 days ago | parent | on: Microsoft Bob turns 30 today. It was terrible and ...
Funnily enough, I think Bob has become so notoriously reviled that more people hate it (or are at least very much aware of the hatred) than have ever used it.
And there's this, by Dave Plummer, who ended up being responsible for shipping more copies of Bob than ever sold: https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y
- bmonkey325 300 days ago
  Cool! well that answer my question about his still having the MS Bob t-shirt from day of yore...
shdon 300 days ago | parent | on: Parsing the c64 Bubble Bobble Wind Currents
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!
- IcePic 297 days ago
  On C64, all neat stuff is cheats. =)
shdon 346 days ago | parent | on: Two Stop Bits' birthday
Thank you for having initiated the site!
shdon 506 days ago | parent | on: “Micro Chart” CPU Reference Cards
I love these. Great for writing or even reading assembly code or implementing emulators.
shdon 508 days ago | parent | on: Mega Man X3 password crack
If you like this (and who doesn't?), check out Bisqwit "Cracking Videogame Passwords" series from quite a few years back:
Season 1 - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzLzYGEbdY5nEFQsxzFan...
Season 2 - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzLzYGEbdY5mmad-FKPIl...
shdon 511 days ago | parent | on: A C64 SID Replacement With Built-in Games
I'm really intrigued by how the data transfer works. In the video linked in the article, you can see them triggering the configuration panel of the chip by doing SYS54301, which effectively amounts to a jump instruction to address 0xD41D. The SID addresses range from 0xD400 to 0xD41F, with these addresses only being assigned to registers up to address 0xD41C. So, this is a jump to the first non-register address, with 3 bytes in the SID's address space that are normally being unused. Enough for a jump instruction itself. You could then technically have the Pico dispense the programme code in a tight loop using those 32 bytes as a tiny memory window into the code, 32 bytes at a time, each of them ending with a jump instruction to the start.
shdon 512 days ago | parent | on: Winevdm on 64-bit Windows
The NTVDM link reminded me of this. I still use this regularly to run 16-bit Win 3.x software on 64-bit Windows 10.
- Retro 511 days ago
  Curious to know what Win 3.x software you are still using regularly today, if you don't mind me asking. Is it mostly games perhaps?
  - shdon 511 days ago
    Some games indeed. But I've also done art (graphics and music) and programming on Win 3.x with some of it being in proprietary file formats that can't be loaded by modern software. I could export music to MIDI and load that in modern software like Sibelius or Musescore, but I'd lose much of the notation. So instead I use the old software to have it on-screen or print it, then transcribe it.
shdon 512 days ago | parent | on: ntvdm: portable "NT" Virtual DOS Machine
It may be text-mode only, but I absolutely love that there are still people doing this kind of thing and that such projects appear regularly, making sure that there are plenty of options for keeping the classic software alive.
shdon 515 days ago | parent | on: 3dfx Voodoo 4 video card in MXM format
I'm always in awe of people who are capable of designing hardware themselves. Somehow this feels even more amazing, as it's coaxing an ancient piece of hardware into working in a system and architecture that isn't even close to what it was designed for.
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