HN user
Bearded hacker from Sweden. Learned M68k assembly on the Amiga in the late 80s. Compiling C on a 7 MHz CPU was slow. Working as a contracting software developer since almost 10 years, enjoying visiting various parts of the software world.
I hang out a lot on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/users/28169/unwind, mainly answering questions about C. I love C.
Wow this is really cool!
Epic to see that it has "No Man's Land" [0] and really really weird feeling to read the readme. No idea why it's listed as a "17 Bit" title though, perhaps they distributed it at some point but they certainly were not involved in creating it. Source: I wrote it. Fun times.
Edit: formatting.
Nah I'm still against repeating the type name all over the place, and the cast adds nothing good imnsho.
Meta: a space is missing in the title.
Since this is one of the bugs, I always recommemd writing
game->boardPieces = swAlloc(sizeof(ThingHandle*) * row * column);
game->boardPieces = swAlloc(sizeof *game->boardPieces * row * column);
Meta: confusing typo in title. Mods , please fix penciN -> penciL. Thanks.
Can you elaborate on how it detects and signals if it runs out of output buffer space? I couldn't see how the amount of available space was even communicated to `fc_enc()`.
Also there some "C icks" (to me, I'm very picky and used to know the standard awfully well from answering many SO questions) that you might want to look into. The two I remember now are the casting of `void` pointers from allocation functions, and (worse) the assumption that "all bits zero" is how a NULL pointer is represented.
Probably [1], from 2025.
[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/31374/pinocchio-by-collodi-c...
Meta; typo in title, should be "learNEd".
This is fantastic, thank you for doing this. I hadn't thought of the poor Jaguar in ages! Heh.
Found a tiny typo, this sentence from quite early (page 17):
Notice how apparently wasteful this file format is: some of the triplets contain only byte.
I think the word "one" is missing before the final "byte".
Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.
There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++)
for (;;)
How about "R, G, B Mars" [1], then?
As a ultra noob in the art of knotting, I liked this when I stumbled over it a few weeks back. I agree that for newbies it would be even more instructive with smoother flows, I guess they're held back by the animations being photos and not, well, animations.
I also have read their backstory/naming thing [1] several times but I still don't quite get it. I first thought they were related to the historical Grog, but that was a misunderstanding. I think.
Meta: This is a very messy title, it should just be "The minichord: a pocket-sized musical instrument" or something like that. We have the github info in the auto-generated blurb right after the title, after all. Thanks.
Reasonably, that language is MicroPython [1] which is the special pared-down version of Python for memory-constrained embedded targets.
Just a few months back I worked in embedded development on a project and there was a physical dongle to unlock the compiler, which was surprising during on-boarding as I've spent years doing commercial embedded work relying on GCC. :)
“The historical significance of JUMPSEAT cannot be understated,” said Dr. James Outzen, NRO director of the Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance.
I'm no native speaker but that is backwards, right? Shouldn't it be overstated if it was a success?
Me too, from Firefox in Linux and no (!) blockers. Weird. Maybe geo-fenced for not being in the US, sometimes companies do that which is ... weird.
Uh that piece of horror was not in the post. Phew.
Brown in German is actually, wait for it, "braun".
Cool!
I love seeing new games for "retro" machines, it's awesome that people keep pouring time and love into them after all these years.
I'm not super familiar with 8-bit Atari machines, and found the designation "classic unmodified 8-bit ATARI XL/XE" a bit imprecise. Tried looking up specs on Wikipedia [1] but was unsure what to settle on. Perhaps the original 1200XL would match? Or the 800XL which seems to improve on the 1200XL even though the naming suggests the opposite ... Or the 65XE, or both then I guess since the latter is compatible with the 800XL, but in an updated case?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_computers#1200XL
Very cool, nice effort and a good write-up!
If my math is right it seems the cost in material for the printed part is around $5 which seems ridiculously cheap for a custom-designed and adapted solution like this. Nice!
I wish the author had spent a few words extra to motivate why it needs to be in PETG filament for "heat resistance", is the regular PLA limit of ~55 degrees Celsius not okay for a desktop accessory? I guess if it's in direct sunlight that might be exceeded, or perhaps if the laptop runs very hot?
That sounded fascinating as a rather large difference in world view stemming only from using different languages.
It turns out that there are various models for the number of continents, and that is (phew) known in Spanish, too. See the Wikipedia page [1] (link to Spanish version) for instance. This is for European Spanish though, but I couldn't find a version of the page in es-AR.
[1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continente#Modelos_continental...
I think this is very cool, even though I have no historical connection to the Z80 it's of course a well-regarded and firmly entrenched/popular retro CPU.
But this really is a stretch:
The Z80 Membership Card itself is a stand-alone single-board computer that can "power up" your projects, like the Parallax BASIC Stamps or Arduino microcomputers.
Both of those are very commonly called microcontrollers, not microcomputers, since they have all of those extra chips merged into the single package of the CPU.
Take a look at the Arduino Uno [1] which is a very typical (if old) example: you will see that the board is not covered in ICs from edge to edge, since all of the main functionality is in the single-chip microcontroller. I think the second big-ish package visible is for the USB, but that also disappears on more modern controllers with on-board support for USB.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino_Uno#/media/File:Arduin...
Which one? I did a quick search but that didn't turn up anything so perhaps it's a partial word overlap or something.
I did find the projects "user-facing" home page [1] which was nice. I found it rather hard to find a link from that to the code on GitHub, which was surprising.
Ah, that was a typo: you meant "GPU" (Graphics Processing Unit, not "GUI" which of course is Graphical User Interface) since that is listed in the system requirements. Explained implicitly by an existing comment, thanks!
Agreed, that really stood out as a ... questionable design decision, and felt extremely un-ergonomic which seems to go against the stated goals of the language.
True story: I was once (late 90s, I think) made part of an impromptu taste-test in a 7 Eleven store in Stockholm [1], when a (probably bored) employee grabbed a Coke, a Pepsi and a Dr Pepper and some espresso-size paper cups and made me and some friends close our eyes and try to guess which was which.
I remember being upset since he claimed I failed to even point out Dr Pepper, which I still think is unbelievable since even its smell is super distinctive and way different from a cola.
[1] https://www.mitti.se/nyheter/buset-pa-kungsgatan--butiken-bl... is the same store, article (in Swedish) about a recent prank someone did there
Interesting! According to [1] it's labelled as "less sugar" though, so it's not as if the original/standard Coke is different. There seems to be some widespread thinking that Singapore has issues with sugar consumption so I guess this is Coke's response (or perhaps they were forced by authorities).
In Sweden, the lowest postage (one stamp, 22 SEK or around $2) is for max 50 grams.
At the speeds in question, I'm pretty sure the logic could be in a general-purpose microcontroller, too. But I'm not sure detailed schematics for the analog parts are available/open.
Very cool and impressive performance.
I was worried (I find it confusing when Unicode "shadows" of normal letters exist, and those are of course also dangerous in some cases when they can be mis-interpreted for the letter they look more or less exactly like) by the article's use of U+212A (Kelvin symbol) as sample text, so I had to look it up [1].
Anyway, according to Wikipedia the dedicated symbol should not be used:
However, this is a compatibility character provided for compatibility with legacy encodings. The Unicode standard recommends using U+004B K LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K instead; that is, a normal capital K.
That was comforting, to me. :)