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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 all the files live happily (hopefully forever) in my hoard ZFS (and several off-site backups).

The only significant exception is most 1.2 MB floppies. Those were also 5.25", but the drives were much more difficult to calibrate well. Can't get the files from almost any of those. A few I can list the filenames, but not access the file contents. Most are just unreadable. I could not even find a drive that worked well enough to copy those using my KryoFlux.

(* Not that there is anything at all of real value on all those old floppies. This is pure nostalgia/hoarding.)

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, old computers that those drives can be used with etc, precisely for this reason that sometimes the archive have to rescue data from ancient media.

Can't find it now so not sure if it is still up, but I can't imagine they ended up with enough equipment that they will never need more. Must be something all archives struggle with and there will always be some format they do not already have equipment for, or some machine they need spare parts for?

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.)

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 the market for word processors and spreadsheets?

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 entire Steam library or not.

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 interesting (that is far less common) I save a bookmark. I started having the bookmarks bar enabled again and it pretty much serves the purpose that the tabs used to serve for me, but in a more organized way.

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 often to be honest). I have resisted the temptation to sail the seas to expand our game collection beyond the games we already owned.

And good enough does not mean "as good as". Companies happily outsource programming jobs to worse, but much cheaper, programmers, all the time.

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 crash just before winning the game.

This looks like an older version of the same text that he later edited into a chapter of the book (does not have the claim about only finding failed cracks):

https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/j...

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 synths bought modules he would be out of business. Can't find that trailer now or I did not watch carefully enough now. There are a few different ones on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQSxqha62j0

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 current printer, like most printers I believe, can be configured to print custom sizes. The maximum is something like 9 or 9.5 inches wide IIRC, and the length can be set much longer.

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 and nothing weird has happened so far.

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 think the type-checker will ever randomly decide to just not check a type given that you have provided types for it to check, but it was a long time ago since I had to read or write any Pike code.

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

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/

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 where you may end up stuck in a loop though?

The article oddly argues the opposite, that it is difficult to solve because "each junction or fork never allows you to find an alternative route, but always leads to a dead end".

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 phone is online?

Maybe at least disconnecting from the internet while not using it will make location tracking slightly more difficult?

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. I would be happy to learn that this is because fashion actually slowed down, but until proven wrong I will just assume it is because I am older and not paying attention.

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/AnimatorPro/

https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro/tree/f5ed37135ad...

Fun restrictions to work with/around and it has some fun features too. Running in DOS also makes it run everywhere, including on my phone.

Would be happy to use more old DOS software, but I just have not found more that seemed as useful (maybe VGAPaint 386 for a different paint app?). No constant (forced) upgrades to keep up with. I can compromise a lot with features if it means that I can spend years/decades on mastering a tool instead of just barely keeping up with how the latest version works. (Guess that is why I always liked Emacs so much.)

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.

https://love2d.org/

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

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 Windows.

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 weakest old computer can run the latest version with 1-2 fps. It can run 1.12 with at least around 30-40 fps, which is more than enough for me to be able to enjoy the game (being old enough to have grown up in an era when we were happily playing flight sims at 5-10 fps). Anyway it is nice that the launcher makes it possible and easy to go back and play older versions. I much prefer drm-free games, but at least supporting old versions like this is better than 99% of games.

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 external editor, save that as a raw 4 kB file, and then from the BASIC program just BLOAD the file straight into graphics memory to render the screen in one line.

Everything is so much easier when you have standardized hardware instead of layers upon layers of abstractions supporting all sorts of weird things, like we have to put up with this century.

https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic

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 don't need the threat of a global disaster to be interested in running operating systems like that.

Been doing some retro hobby (16-bit, real-mode, 80286) DOS development lately. It is refreshing to look at a system and be able to at least almost understand all the things going on. It might not be the simplest possible system, not the most elegant CPU design, but compared to the bloated monsters we use today it is very nice to work with. DOS is already stretching the limits of what I can keep in my head and reason about without getting completely lost in over-engineered (and leaky) abstraction layers.

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. Why not just have a single ~/.dotfiles or something (if hidden files in ~/ is somehow a problem that needs to be solved)?

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 there was nothing obviously annoying about it so far.

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/main/v4.0/src/TOOLS

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/tkchia/GW-BASIC

https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/ (or just pip install pcbasic)

The debug-commands seemed to work fine with the debug included by default in DOSBox-X, but I was too lazy to input all of the digits. I never had any idea how to use debug, so I learned something new here in addition to some more things about mnemonics.

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 compatibility issues with FreeDOS? It seems like a good implementation of DOS. I mostly use DOSBox-X, but I use FreeDOS now and then as well. It is the only DOS I would consider running on hardware.

BTW did anyone else notice that Microsoft included almost a complete 1988 vintage 16-bit DOS toolchain in their MIT-licensed MS-DOS repo? It has Microsoft C 5.1, MASM 5.1, Make, and several other tools, plus libraries and include-files. All of it in less than 3 MB.

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/main/v4.0/src/TOOLS

It is specifically illegal to make a copy of something that has been illegally published, not illegal to make copies for personal use in general.

Not that I am a lawyer.