ajxs

In case you want a webring, but don't feel like setting up your own server to run it, I run a webring hosting service that you might find useful: https://webri.ng/

Thanks for sharing! What was your role at Hyde Field?

The Sequential Prophet X is another modern synth with a full-blown x86 PC running inside it. You can see the mainboard in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8QDCocnt0M

Really awesome work! A simple OS for retro x86 hardware is a really cool project! I wish I still had some era-appropriate hardware I could test-drive it on.

When the author says 'I tend to run older hardware', how old do they mean? I'm typing this message right now on my Thinkpad x220 from 2011, which is unfortunately too old to run Zed because its internal Intel HD graphics card doesn't support Vulkan. I'd be an everyday user if not for this.

One of the coolest projects I've seen in a while! Amazing work! In case anyone missed the write-up^1, it's very well-written. I really enjoyed the chapter about designing the instruction set.

1: https://baltazarstudios.com/calculator-introduction/

A lot of effort goes into accurately emulating historic processors in the MAME project, as well as other vintage hardware. It's generally accurate enough that MAME is regularly used to emulate vintage hardware when reverse-engineering devices.

Very cool! Would you believe I was actually just listening to some of the old Ultima game soundtracks when I saw this?

I wonder if they considered writing their disassembly in the 'pre-C++98 dialect of C++' used in the original, and targeting the original compiler. I've done some disassembly of binaries which ran on vintage systems, and I would've targeted the original toolchain if I could have. It's an interesting philosophical question.

Thinking about what would be going through Bill Kerman's little head as he approaches the rocket having just seen poor Jebediah Kerman vaporised on the launch pad was pretty funny. I don't think this same gallows humour extends to kittens.

If I set a folder colour in Finder on my work MacBook, and then plug that USB drive into my personal computer which uses Thunar as a file browser on Debian, nothing would happen.

To me it seems more sensible to store information relevant only to this OS in a specific cache somewhere within that OS. It would even make cache-like functionality such as evicting old entries super easy.

In case anyone doesn't know, Oxyrhynchus is a major source of archaeological discoveries. Particularly ancient (Ptolemaic/Roman Egypt) papyrus fragments recovered from an ancient landfill on the outskirts of the city. Notably some of the earliest-known Christian textual artefacts were found there (the actual earliest fragments came from elsewhere in Egypt). It turns out that Egypt's hot and dry climate provides the perfect environment for their long-term preservation.

This isn't the kind of music I'd normally listen to, but I'm enjoying your album! Very well produced. I bought a copy. Thanks for sharing!

The SPARK subset of Ada^1 has a similar kind of move semantics for pointer types^2.

1: SPARK is a formally verifiable subset of Ada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)

2: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.05576

Its unlikely that another platform would be able to reach this state...

Is this really true? The computer ecosystem is more open now than ever. The original PC BIOS (which PC-compatible manufacturers needed to implement) was never an open, documented standard. It was a proprietary, closed system made by IBM. It's pretty fair to say that IBM didn't anticipate a PC/x86 ecosystem developing around their product. They even sued companies who made their own compatible BIOSes (like Corona). Intel didn't really have much to do with the success of the product at that point in time either, much less Microsoft.

In contrast, every widely-used modern system for hardware abstraction (UEFI/ACPI/DeviceTree/OpenSBI/etc) are open, royalty-free standards that anyone can use. Their implementation in ARM is newer, and inconsistent, but that's only because of how hugely diverse the ARM ecosystem is.

Some of my first experiments with Ada were based on this tutorial series! Great to see it on the front-page of HN.

Since this was published, it's become a lot easier to set up an ARM toolchain using Alire, Ada's package manager. AdaCore have also created some new tools for auto-generating the startup code for ARM systems: https://www.adacore.com/blog/ada-on-any-arm-cortex-m-device-...

Somewhat related: https://pixelmoondust.neocities.org/archives/archivedtiles/b...

Hello! I don't have a website for your webring, but I do run the webri.ng service (https://webri.ng), where you can host your webring! Just thought I'd mention it in case it's useful to you.

Speaking as an Australian that works on React CRUD applications because there's nothing else in the market, I've been reading through this thread thinking the exact same thing.

Something about these JS-heavy sites I haven't seen discussed: They don't archive well.

Websites that load a big JS bundle, then use that to fetch the actual page content don't get archived properly by The Wayback Machine. That might not be a problem for corporate content, but lots of interesting content has already been lost to time because of this.

At the risk of sounding like a language zealot, have you ever looked at Ada? It was explicitly designed to be very readable, and for use in safety-critical systems. Ada isn't perfect in all the ways Rust isn't, and it might not be the right choice for your system, but if you're writing systems software it's worth a look. If you're writing a web backend on the other hand, it's not worth a look at all.

Unfortunately the missing ingredient to recreating UO is a playerbase that can see the virtual world with innocent eyes. This HN post[1] always comes to mind.

By complete coincidence, yesterday I was just looking at the website for a guild I was in 25 years ago on Oceania [2], which is somehow still online! I had a great time playing UO back then, but I don't think the experience can be recreated today. The people have changed.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33189823 2: http://tdr.iwarp.com/main_nfl.html

Tool-wise - refactoring was a bit of a pain.

Could you share what tools you were using, and what you felt was missing? I write Ada in vscode, because it's what I use in my dayjob. AdaCore's plugin has good language support^1, but I don't use it for much other than formatting, or expect sophisticated automated refactoring functionality from it.

^1: It's still missing support for some Ada202x features. I can't wait for it to support `return when...`.

I use Ada for a lot of projects where C would otherwise be the default language of choice. I find that I spend much less time getting tied up debugging silly errors. In a lot of cases, Ada makes it difficult to do things the wrong way. When I move from working in C to Ada, there isn't much I miss, but when I move the other way around, I feel like I'm missing so much!

Audley isn't actually that bad. I just had it in my mind because I visited there recently. You'll still find bits of rubbish around the place, but the NPWS do a great job keeping it clean. Unfortunately any nature area that gets a lot of people will just inevitably get a lot of rubbish.

When I worked for an Australian telco (not Vodafone), some developers on another team had used a very conspicuous mobile phone number in their integration tests, which actually connected to a real SMS service somewhere else in the company. No idea why they would do this. It turned out that this number belonged to a real person, who got absolutely buried in test SMS messages, when the integration tests ran as part of a CI/CD pipeline. The owner raised a complaint to the ombudsman, which led to all kinds of trouble for the developers.

In case anyone else here is curious, the ACMA maintains a list of reserved numbers for use in creative works, which you can use for dummy data: https://www.acma.gov.au/phone-numbers-use-tv-shows-films-and...

I always bring bags/gloves/grabber with me whenever I visit the local national park. The rubbish is particularly bad in popular picnic spots, like the areas around Audley^1. The NPWS staff do a great job of keeping the parks clean, but they can't get everything. You'd be shocked how quickly you can fill a garbage bag on a short walk. The most common items by far are disposable coffee cups and cigarette packets (with nearly 100% imported packaging). Just make sure you're careful about snakes in summer. I once put my hand within striking distance when picking up a chip packet! Some of them are so well camouflaged.

1: https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/things-to-do/cafes-and-...

I actually still have one of these shirts in a box somewhere: https://www.kmfms.com

People say a very similar thing about the number of Greeks in Melbourne, Australia.

The kernel is Multiboot compliant, so it's already compatible with real bootloaders. Creating a disk image with a real bootloader wouldn't be much extra code, but if your point is just to demonstrate a 'bare-bones' Zig kernel, is it really necessary?