The collected works of commodorejohn - Page 6

Damn good article. Absolutely nailed it.

Picked up a Pismo in very good condition from a fellow over on 68kMLA. Still need to get it tricked out and set up for dual-boot, but it's really in great shape

robespierre wrote: Dual-boot OS9 and 10.4, you mean? I don't think there's any partition magic required, the switch is handled in OF.

No magic, just grunt work (i.e. doing a fresh install + update of each.)

ivelegacy wrote: (1) constrains: causing laughter or amusement, humorous, witty, comic, comical, droll, facetious, jocular, jockey, hilarious, hysterical, riotous, uproarious, entertaining, diverting, sparkling, scintillating, silly, farcical, slapstick, side-splitting, rib-tickling, laugh-a-minute, wacky, zany, off the wall, a scream, rich, priceless, difficult to explain and understand, strange

Oh, is that what that means.

For the same reason I'm scheming up a stack machine (yet to be fully implemented, but coming soon to an 8051 clone near you!) - because we can .

I'm just amused by the Turbo Pascal handbook sitting atop the commode.

Where do you live for other purposes?

Haha, they made an instruction specifically to implement the ternary operator

Great, now I can look into the Necronomicon that is the MAME source with the blessing of Stallman the Holy! I can't tell you how relieved I am!

ClassicHasClass wrote: Please, don't post the rms free software song again. I had just recovered.

Hee hee. Hee hee hee. Don't blame me, the zealots made me do it...

R-ten-K wrote: MS seem to be in a mode where they keep throwing shit to the wall to see what sticks during the past 5 years. Which I personally think makes for wonderful schadenfreude.

The really cruel irony is that they've been progressively undermining just about every one of their strengths in order to do it (*cough* iWindows *cough* XBone *cough*)

Debian is the Linux that least makes me want to kill myself. Generally installs correctly right off the bat with a minimum amount of bullshit involved. However, like most of the friendlier distros, it inevitably installs hundreds of packages you probably don't need even if you tell it to go for a more minimal install, so expect to either spend some time uninstalling stuff post-installation or have a bunch of useless crap sitting around taking up space. Also, whatever you do, don't install it with a graphical desktop right off the bat, it'll up the useless-crap quotient by at least a factor of four. Add that afterwards. It's a pain in the ass, but less of a pain in the ass than uninstalling tons more stuff you don't need.

A nice desktop would be XFCE (highly configurable, easy to use, and not too heavyweight,) or LXDE (lighter than XFCE and also quite configurable, but last I checked you had to do a lot of manual config-file editing to tweak it from the default settings.) Steer clear of GNOME or KDE; at this point they're basically entire mini-operating systems that install themselves on top of Linux and bring their fourteen billion dependency buddies along for the ride (because when you're choosing a graphical desktop, naturally you want to also install their media-stream framework of choice, right?)

If you're up for it, though, I'd skip the prepackaged desktop environments altogether and experiment with finding a combo of window manager + file manager + etc. that works for you. My current go-to WM is WindowMaker, which is a NeXTSTEP clone that gives you a nice all-in-one solution for window manager + session manager + applications menu + dock (a lot of the other independent WMs only do one or two of those and expect you to use some other utility to handle the rest.) For file managers, PCManFM (LXDE's file manager) or Thunar (XFCE's) are full-featured enough to be useful without getting in your way with duzitall whizbangery the way the GNOME or KDE solutions do, though both of them are still fairly heavyweight (just not as ridiculous as Nautilus or Konqueror.) For a much lighter-weight solution, xfe basically works, although it's a bit on the ugly, clunky side.

Photoshop does not exist on Linux, no. GIMP is the oft-touted Free And Open-Source Alternative, except that its user interface sucks ass. Still, the functionality is there, though if I were you I'd see about using MAME and Photoshop instead.

jan-jaap wrote: Looks like Microsoft hasn't nailed AI quite yet .

I'm sure this comes as a terrible shock to anyone who's never been on the Internet, ever.

Trying to coax this gorram Blade 1000 into re-formatting the hard drives I didn't realize were formatted with the wrong block size...

Man, that's way too clean and pleasant to be allowed on a modern operating system. Where's the transparent glossy 3D animated wobbling widgets!?

(Serious constructive feedback: the rounded borders on the icons and window switcher don't gel at all with the rest of it. I know that look is the default on most modern WMs for some damn reason, but as long as you're doing this, may as well make everything aesthetically consistent.)

Much better, although I'd also ditch the transparency. Doesn't fit with the rest of the aesthetic.

If only they'd keep SheepShaver's virtualization support on PPC Linux up-to-date...

Latest thing I bought is Korg's new ARP Odyssey recreation. Due to get in tomorrow

More properly, that would be undefined savings over the original list price.

Oh that is some bullshit . I'd demand money back.

Update: finally sat down and got (most of) the issues sorted out. I picked up a hard drive with the correct low-level format; hopefully I can LLF the other two once I've got a full Solaris install up and running on that one. I also nabbed an XVR-600, which has the advantage of having only one port, so I know it's correct. And I figured out that the reason it wouldn't come up in graphical console mode is that it didn't like my USB keyboard (I think it's because it's one of those built-in-hub ones with the pass-through port for a mouse.) So I've finally got it booting into the Solaris graphical installer and setting up an install...huzzah.

--

Aaaand now posting from Firefox on Solaris 10

paulfred wrote: My C8000 is one of my favourite workstations because it's incredibly quiet. Unfortunately I don't even know where I should start to find software for HP-UX. There must be something out there to run on that system, right? It feels a little wrong to just use it as an obsolete Firefox station.

You could always pursue the time-honored desktop-Unix tradition of modelling spaceships in POV-RAY.

Speaking of, would "a forum member" happen to have the software for the SunPCi II?

What you should do is shoot anyone who says "mobile first," and then explain to them as they lay dying that webpages that are actually designed sensibly as webpage and not as glorified print advertisements are already responsive.

Hell of a Sound Canvas you've got it hooked into

computron wrote: awesome !!!!

can we see it work while playing Turrican on C= 64 ??

Eve

Sadly, based on their remarks (because of course people already asked this ) its maximum operating frequency is somewhere in the neighborhood of ~400KHz, so it's not gonna be running much C64 software any time soon.

Utterly rad, though. Reminds me that I really ought to sit down and learn a bit more about homebrew hardware as I've been meaning to for a long time...

uunix wrote: Maybe I could pass on the numbers of some of our clients who have managed to obtain this crypto locking thing.. quite possibly they could do a better job than their own IT departments.

As someone who has to do cleanup/restore after a crypto-locker attack at least twice per quarter, I can tell you that the hell of it is that usually their IT department can't do much of anything to prevent it, because preventing it means either solid end-user education for everybody in the office (hahaha, right, pull the other one) or locking everything down with permissions controls (which invariably breaks whatever decades-old business software they rely on.)

Perhaps it's objecting to your heathen choice of the Enterprise-D over, say, the TOS version?

Ugh, Archer. Sterling Archer of the cartoon series would be more fit to command a starship.

Actually, hold that thought, I need to find someone to deliver a pitch to.

Well, there'll always be the BSDs. But yeah, huzzah, another step in the creeping assimilation of all alternative platforms into the x86/Lunix monoculture.

tomvos wrote: By the way, is it only me, or are these coloured buttons something you would like to see making a reappearance in todays software? Somehow I feel feed up with sleek uniform mono-coloured user interfaces.

It's interesting because color in modern OSes is either not done at all or it's done very poorly (see Windows 8 and its awful, awful garish color themes.) Somewhere along the line designers lost the notion that color should be used to convey information about interface elements or mutated it into the simpler, stupider notion that color should be used merely to differentiate elements.

I'm idly curious about the Fujitsu SPARC stuff - I know they've kept rolling with it, but I have no idea in what form it's available.

Anyway, my big problem with this is that nobody seems to make a decent non-x86 laptop that's not either a cheapass unusably tiny Android netbook or a wannabe-Apple Chromebook (dammit, enough of these trackpads with no fucking buttons already! And give me a proper goddamn keyboard, not this chiclet garbage!)

Writing an SDL rotozoomer with support for per-line rotation/scale/offset parameters so I can do SNES RPG-style tilted-plane map effects without having to dig into OpenGL. Already did a proof-of-concept version in FreeBasic, but it was slow as shit because I didn't make any meaningful attempt to optimize on even the algorithmic level. Hopefully the end result here will be a hell of a lot faster.

Heh Layer count will actually be pretty much arbitrary, and sprites are just graphic objects blitted into the layers, so (minus performance considerations) there shouldn't be much of a limit on that. (Heck, you could even have multiple rotozoomer layers - say, a ground map and then a sky map with the same rotation but inverted scaling and a much slower parallax motion. Just need a little fog to hide the sharp-edged horizon and voila, instant skybox.) As for sound, it's still (mostly) in the planning stages, but I'm scheming up a combination subtractive/FM softsynth (plus some kind of wavetable support so at least sampled drums can be used.)

(Also: the SNES sound chip is actually strict wavetable with no proper filter at all, save for the bit that does reverb. What occasionally sounds like a lowpass filter is actually adjustably-weighted linear interpolation between samples, to smooth out the artifacts caused by its built-in sample-compression format.)

The muffled quality to a lot of SNES games has more to do with crappy samples at low sample rates than anything else (I suspect there was a default set in the devkit or something because a lot of games from different developers seem to use the same ones.) In the right hands it can sound quite good (*cough* Chrono Trigger *cough*)

FM avoids that problem because every sound is always synthesized at the same (relatively high) master sample rate and nothing has to be compressed to save memory. (Plus, the technique just naturally lends itself to complex, overtone-rich sounds - Gordon Reid's excellent "Synth Secrets" series for Sound on Sound gives a clear explanation as to why in these three articles .) Of course, FM has its own pitfalls (particularly the "everything sounds like rubber bands and farts" syndrome heard on too many DOS games with token-effort Sound Blaster support,) but so does anything.

Has anybody played around with those MIPS Creator boards? I'm kind of curious about them, but I've already got a couple other SBCs hanging around waiting for me to actually put them to use.

150 to 200 MHz may not be as much improvement as you'd think, since the RAM is only 60ns or 70ns anyway. That was a major bottleneck for pretty much anything in the 100+ MHz range until higher-speed SDRAM became standard.

According to sgistuff.net, the IP22 systems take up to 384 MB (12x 32 MB SIMMs.)

That's kinda what I suspected. Really though I should just get my Orange Pi setup rolling, only there's a lot of BS involved in getting it to work with monitors that are *gasp* *shock* not 1080p .

Mmm, nice