2mlWQbCK

8 ms·

1.
by 2mlWQbCK 11mo ago
> My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks Mine as well, but luckily many years ago I copied all the contents of my old floppies to CD-ROMs, and then later all the CD-ROMs to DVDs, and finally to USB-harddisks, and now a
2.
by 2mlWQbCK 11mo ago
Swedish government archives (Riksarkivet) (IIRC; could have been some library or other archive?) used to have a page asking for donations of equipment that can be used to read old disks/discs/tapes. Basically any kind of drives, o
3.
by 2mlWQbCK 11mo ago
There was a few mentions of KryoFlux in the X-Copy article linked from HN 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552913 (X-Copy developer Christian Bartsch that is interviewed now works on KryoFlux.)
4.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
Do you really need this to explain WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3? They, like many others, built their castles on Microsoft's land. Isn't it that easy? What could they have done realistically once Microsoft decided they wanted to own
5.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
Some future manager will look at a graph and think monetization can be improved X% while only losing an estimated Y% of users. It is guaranteed to happen. Question is only if most in the current generation will outlive free access to their
6.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
I used to have 200+ tabs open all the time, but it's just noise. Now I close tabs asap. If the page contents are of any interest I save the contents first using the Single File extension. If the page address is for some reason interest
7.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
I installed Homebrew Channel and got all our Wii games ripped to a USB stick. That was far easier and cheaper than to replace the failing DVD player in the Wii. Now the kids can still play all our old Wii games when they want to (not that o
8.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
And good enough does not mean "as good as". Companies happily outsource programming jobs to worse, but much cheaper, programmers, all the time.
9.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
Chris Crawford wrote in his On Game Design about a trick like this, that he implemented in Patton Strikes Back. Plus some other tricks. He claims that he never found a cracked version that had fixed the secondary checks. The result was a cr
10.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
My favorite documentary I have not seen (yet), I Dream of Wires from 2013, about modular synthesizers. I know in some trailer there was a maker of modules saying something to the effect that if only people actually making music with their s
11.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
I don't think I ever had a A4 printer that could not also print Letter. It is almost certainly the exact same models that they also sell in the US, but with just some bit flipped in the firmware to change the default paper size. My cur
12.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
Turns out there is no Pike package for FreeBSD, no port, and the Pike git repository has a FreeBSD subdirectory last updated 22 years ago. But ./configure && gmake && gmake install seemed to work, or at least it runs an
13.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
Not sure what they are referring to, but it may be that you can declare things as having one of several types (e.g. int|string|void) or even that something can be any type at all (i.e. turn off static type-checking for that thing)? I do not
14.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
From what I remember of working with Pike, the best part was probably the included image module. Maybe I will install Pike again just to see if I still like it. https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/man/chapter_13.html
15.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
Reminds me of Dialog, a domain-specific language for writing adventure games, heavily inspired by Prolog: https://github.com/Dialog-IF/dialog/ https://linusakesson.net/dialog/
16.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
That you need to go to the center is not necessarily an issue, but it looks like there are cycles in the labyrinth, and that can ruins the "just follow the left/right wall" trick. I do not see for sure if there is any place w
17.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
Does turning off data (mobile+wifi) when not actually using any app help at all (on Android)? Will apps still be able to phone home in the background? Or will they just fill up a huge cache with data and bulk-transfer it the next time the p
18.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
Is that really true? It is true for me, but I always assumed that is just because I were younger last century. In 1990 I could easily tell if someone was looking like 1980, but today I could never guess if someone looked like 2015 or 2025.
19.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
Not just a modern application with a retro gaming aesthetic, but this year I got heavily into using (ex-Autodesk, now open source) Animator as my programmer art application of choice. Actual 16-bit software. https://github.com&#x
20.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
How does it compare to Löve 2D, other than shipping with a IDE? Looks like Defold supports more platforms, but I guess there are some strings attached since packaging games for various consoles usually come with very non-open dependencies.
21.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
You can have TLS with TOFU, like in the Gemini protocol. At least then, in theory, the MTIM has to happen the first time you connect to a site. There is also the possibility for out of band confirmation of some certificate's fingerprin
22.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
I prefer Janet, but Fennel is great in places Lua is already supported, like in Löve2D. https://git.sr.ht/~benthor/absolutely-minimal-love2d-fennel
23.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
Old DOS games are often sold (e.g. on GOG or Steam) with an installer and a full copy of DOSBox, so you get an entire operating system plus hardware emulator to run the game. Looks like this adds less than 10 MB to each game installed in Wi
24.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
I set up two old computers to play some Minecraft with my youngest kid. Unfortunately it turns out recent versions are much slower than old ones. I have not bothered to bisect it to figure out exactly what version(s) killed performance. My
25.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
One thing that made an impression on me when reading the 1991 Blue Book About GW-BASIC (1991) earlier this year was the chapter on making a text-mode user interface, that recommended drawing a characters+attributes interface 80x25 using an
26.
by 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
I am not into this end-of-the-world collapse thing at all, but I like reading about the strong focus on simplicity and support for limited hardware. There is a lot of talk about keeping things simple in software, but very few act on it. I d
27.
by 2mlWQbCK 2y ago
Clean hierarchy? How do I even guess if some config-file is hidden in ~/.config/ or ~/.local/share? I never figured that out. Looking at the contents of those directories here I can't guess better than a coin-toss.
28.
by 2mlWQbCK 2y ago
Why all this MASM hate? I barely ever used it, but I noticed that MASM 5.1 is included (together with MSC 5.1 and various other Microsoft tools from 1988) in Microsoft's MIT-licensed MS-DOS repo. Trying some hello world level examples
29.
by 2mlWQbCK 2y ago
Screenshot shows program in GW-BASIC 3.23 from 1988. I tried it in GW-BASIC 1.0 (the version Microsoft released with a free license a few years ago) and it worked as expected. It also worked well in PC-BASIC. https://gitlab.com&#
30.
by 2mlWQbCK 2y ago
I think of MS-DOS mostly as the ultimate fantasy console. It is sad that the only way to write something once and not have to maintain it to keep up with breaking dependencies all the time is to target a dead platform. But I never had any c

More ›