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Domain: nvg.org
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Comments · 34
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TSR
Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application
Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs, from the heydays of non-multitasking OSs. Anyone else remember Int 27h and the magic of hooking a subroutine to make it appear like your OS was actually multitasking? Hmph...kids these days..
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Thank heaven for emulators!
So anyone can now get a BBC Micror unning on their PC thanks to emulators. Anyone recommend a particular BBC Micro emulator? There's a whole bunch here:
http://bbc.nvg.org/emulators.php3
heck, there are BBC Micro emulators for the PSP now! -
Re:Well...
After checking, it looks like the screw was added with the Master Series. So the screw post-dated the Model B.
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One word: blah.Blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah.
What you just read was what just about every kid hears in most high school classes. It's simple- lectures. In too many classes we still rely on lecturing as a teaching tool.
Frankly, lecturing is outdated. It was great back when books were scarce and we didn't have the book press, so knowledge almost had to be passed in a spoken form, but these days with information available in many different (and often expensive) text books and on the web, there's no need for the oral dissertation of fact in many cases.
So what happens is that kids lose interest in the class, their grade suffers, and then go ahead and give up because they think it's "too hard", but really haven't been paying attention.
What needs to change is that classroom activities need to become more interactive, or at least visual. Don't just tell me that atoms bond together, show me. Maybe find some neat video on the web showing molecule structures and formation thereof.
Here's another example: a video I found through StumbleUpon (can't find the link right now) is of a science professor demonstrating sound waves. The part that holds the interest of the students? He uses fire. I can't remember the entire set up, but he had a speaker attached to a PVC pipe, filled that with some sort of gas, and ran holes for the gas to escape from along the top of the unit. He played continuous notes at different frequencies, and you could see the sine waves with the fire! Then he put on some other kind of music to give an idea of how the sound changes. It was, in my opinion, a really cool demonstration, and a student would be more likely to remember things about sound waves that s/he learned from that.
Yet another example: When I took Computing & Algorithms II, I had the best damn professor ever. We learned about Linked Lists in the class, and he had what some might consider an "odd" way to teach them: a Barrel of Monkeys. He used these cheap plastic toys to simulate a list linking together, and then to show what happens when doing stuff to the list, like adding a "monkey" in the middle and not connecting it to the rest. (Unfortunatly, far too many college classes fall under the Lecture Syndrome as well.)
Sure, there's only so much you can do with it- after all, I doubt bouncing digital numbers would make derivatives much more interesting. But that doesn't mean teachers should do nothing.
Sadly, part of the problem is that schools lack the funding necessary to facilitate such things, and the teachers aren't paid enough to try and do it themselves.
Furthermore (and I'm probably just ranting, now) testing needs a major overhaul. Going back again to changes from what was done in the past, too great a portion of tests relies on memorization. Formulas, dates, function calls, the lot.
Think about it- what good is memorizing all of that? It fills your head with what would amount to useless information. After all, you can memorize every function involved in integrations, but if you can't recognize when to use them or in what order, then what good are they? Okay, so you can spout when we landed on the moon, who was the first astronaut, and the famous first words, but would you be able to tell me why we went to the moon, or explain how we crossed some of the hurdles and why they were a problem? Teaching should, whenever applicable, be about analyzing, problem solving, and resource use. Not about memorizing the ratios of Pi that relate to degrees through sin/cos/tan functions.
A story, attributed to Einstein, probably sums it up best:ONE OF Einstein's colleagues asked him for his telephone number one day. Einstein reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. "You don't remember your own number?" the man asked, startled.
"No," Einstein answered. "Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?"
In fact, Einstein claimed never to memorize anything which could be looked up in less than two minutes. -
Re:It's not just the CPU
Did the Atari do dynamic WYSIWYG editing? Were you able to have twenty programs running and half a dozen services at the same time?
Yep - here's the same software running on a more recent machine. My old ST ran Thing, qed, Papyrus, CAB and so on just fine - although in 640x400 monochrome. Multitasking with Geneva worked very nicely, and there was always MiNT for all the UNIXy stuff. WYSIWYG was more than possible with NVDI, which let me use Truetype fonts in all GEM applications.
I eventually saw sense and bought a PC, although I still miss that old grey wedge... -
The BBC Micro
The BBC Micro was quite popular in the UK and in India. "The BBC Lives" has extensive information about this microcomputer.
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Re:You made me a programmer
You're in serious danger of letting on as to how old you are!
The first computer I owned** was an Acorn Atom. It came partly assembled and I had to plug in some of the chips myself (CPU, Ram, VIA, etc). It was 6502 based. The manual for it was aptly named "Atomic Theory and Practice"! I've still got it (the Atom) somewhere, and I keep the book handy just to show off!!
The Atom was the fore-runner to the famous BBC microcomputer. It was rather limited as far as storage goes, saving to tape at 300 baud. No hard disk. No floppy disk! Mine had the 6522 VIA (versatile interface adapter) and my friends and I did manage to control led's etc. through it. You could program in Atom basic, and switch to assember for speed sensitive computations!
Having said that, the first computer I programmed for was the Sinclair ZX-81. It was owned by a friend of mine. If I remember rightly, he originally had a ZX-80, but that never worked properly and he got it swapped for the ZX-81. That came with a massive 1kB of RAM but he got the 16kB ram pack!! Wow 16k! Now, there's no way anybody could want more than 16kB!!
After that the list of computers I've used goes something like...
BBC Microcomputer
VAX 11/780 / VAX 8550 - University of Sussex
Atari ST 1024 - a whole MEG of ram + 720k floppy drive!!
Sequent Symmetry S81 (6x 386 @20MHz) - Unoversity of Sussex
Solbourn (Sun clone) - again at Sussex
Research Machines 386 - an MCA based PC clone... my first PC!!
Mac Classic - that was my gf's really.
Sun - University of Leeds
sgi 4D/Indigo/Indy - Leeds
Elonex 386's,486's - Leeds
Mac LC II - my first Mac!!
Lac LC475 w/ real 68040!!
UMAX Apus 2000 (C500) Mac clone w/ 603e/240 (no L2 cache
And since then a whole load of POS 486's, 586's, Pentiums, Pentium Pro's, Pn's etc!!
I now program for Windwoz, and so I've got an HP workstation PC.
** That is, the first computer I bought, rather than in the h4x0r sense -
The original Venus Express
MP3 RA
Between Lives Implants" lecture, SHSBC #317. 23 July 1963.
"Mary Sue gave the cue on this thing. She said, "Look at how hard they have to work to keep you from being OT!" Hey, now, that's quite a thought! Isn't that quite a thought? Hm? Now you look at this. You look at this, now. The complete idiocy of it. Somebody sits up on Venus -- there are probably some other stations around up in the system. This one's on Venus. I notice that we all believe that Venus has a methane atmosphere and is unlivable. I almost got run down by a freight locomotive the other day -- didn't look very uncivilized to me. I'm allergic to freight locomotives, they're always running into you." L. Ron Hubbard -
The original Venus Express
MP3 RA
Between Lives Implants" lecture, SHSBC #317. 23 July 1963.
"Mary Sue gave the cue on this thing. She said, "Look at how hard they have to work to keep you from being OT!" Hey, now, that's quite a thought! Isn't that quite a thought? Hm? Now you look at this. You look at this, now. The complete idiocy of it. Somebody sits up on Venus -- there are probably some other stations around up in the system. This one's on Venus. I notice that we all believe that Venus has a methane atmosphere and is unlivable. I almost got run down by a freight locomotive the other day -- didn't look very uncivilized to me. I'm allergic to freight locomotives, they're always running into you." L. Ron Hubbard -
Re:Patent these quickly!
Prior art for just about every story already exists - all that can be considered now is combinations. Whether the Patent Office regards elements of stories as atoms, and therefore allows the patenting of the discovery of certain stories (molecules) with particular combinations, and therefore properties, is certainly a contentious point, as in biochemistry and the pharma industries. As the philosopher says, there are no new stories under the sun.
Nonetheless, if they believe that there are new story-types, I would suggest they start with the AT index, a kind of mathematical expression of the elements and content of a folktale, and then look at its expansion to modern literature. And the AT index already contains some redundancy. -
A bit late
After all, who needs APIs for an 8-bit BBC Micro?
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Movie poster
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The final frame as PNG
Here's the final frame of the SVG animation: http://gunnarre.nvg.org/operaswim1.png
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Re:Hasn't this been done before?
Does anyone remember that the BBC also transmitted BBC-Micro programs using Teletext pages? (as mentioned on this page) I never had a BBC Micro but my cousin did. You could either copy the pages off the screen or if you had a teletext adapter the computer could fetch them. They did this right up to 1987.
Ahh, the old 8-bit days...... -
Re:Library analogy
Oops, I forgot one.
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Re:The style of an old home computer
The name isn't a coincidence - the computer was originally going to be called the Proton, but the BBC were looking for a computer for their BBC Computer Literacy Project - see here for more details.
(And in fact, teletext came first - the BBC Micro came out in the early 80s, teletext in the 70s...)
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Will it run on low end hardware?
It would be nice to know if the codec will run on one of these?
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Re:bios
Every board has a CPU (Actually, every chip is some kind of CPU), even if it is a dedicated CPU
Every chip is a "CPU?" Okay...
- Here's a chip that's a resistor array... Is that a CPU?
- What about this TI uA741 Operational Amplifier?
- Are Optoisolators a kind of CPU?
From Dictionary.com: central processing unit (n. Abbr. CPU ) The part of a computer that interprets and executes instructions. None of the chips I've mentioned interpret or execute instructions.
I think what most people around here want is something akin to the old Amiga Autoconfig system, plus a way to automate driver updates, and the whole shebang be platform independent. -
Re:What is this all about?
We are sitting on a planet that has everything we could possibly want. Water, food, sun, beaches, fresh mangos, carnival once a year, beer, ADSL for peanuts.
you forgot the most important one -
Repton 3
No remake could ever beat Repton 3. Check out BeebGames for more games, including a large collection of Superior Software games (scroll down on the left-hand nav), as well as AcronSoft and a whole heap of smaller companies games that didn't take off. Oh, and don't forget the emulators. (:
*sigh*.. they don't make 'em like they used to. -
Re:Ah, the good old days...
I don't know the BBC Micro. Does it have any relation to the BBC broadcasting company?
It certainly does. A potted history of how the BBC Micro came to be can be found here.
-MT. -
FreeVMS
Since VMS was mentioned, I'd like to let people know about this project:
FreeVMS (Mailing list archive)
It's based on Linux for the moment, but it'll split eventually. Despite the homepage being a bit out of date, the project is alive; in fact I'm working on cleaning up the code a bit. -
12 chromatic pitches?
Why do you think you have to limit yourself to that?
My brother had a demo version of a commercial auto-tuning program. Was great fun, though of course in was on windows so the latency was horrible.
You could have your voice corrected to any scale you wanted. Not just the chromatic scale, you could force it into the proper key, say d minor. Heh, Awful-Singer Spice probably needs that, I don't think she's accurate to a halftone most of the time.
It had support for some rather eccentric scales as well. I amused myself by transforming my bawling into mongolian yodeling
Just a PS: According to my former folk music teacher Olve Utne all scales used by humans are in some way based on the Natural overtones* except down in Mali and Java and those islands. There it is instead based on the relative weight of the gongs!
*(or what it is called. I am sure you know that if you double the frequency of a tone you rise an octave. If you start by doing that and thereafter keep increasing the pitch with a constant amount, the amount used in step 1, you get the natural overtones) -
Re:Congratulations Egypt
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BBC Micro emulation
They have developed software that emulates the obsolete Acorn Microcomputer system and the video disc player.
Given the numerous existing BBC Micro emulators, I'm curious as to whether they actually developed their own from scratch, or if this project utilises one of the existing emulators. The laserdisc work would have been new, of course.
The BBC Micro was a very nicely-designed piece of hardware, and (IMHO) the very best 8-bit computer of its day. The BBC Lives has a wealth of good information for the curious or nostalgic.
As a point of interest, Acorn also designed the (now incredibly successful) ARM processor when they made the jump from 8-bit to 32-bit computing with their Archimedes (later RiscPC) line of computers. ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine before they spun off into a separate company, and re-named themselves Advanced RISC Machines. (The ARM CPUs have come a long way since then of course, but it was a remarkable design from the start.) -
BBC Micro emulation
They have developed software that emulates the obsolete Acorn Microcomputer system and the video disc player.
Given the numerous existing BBC Micro emulators, I'm curious as to whether they actually developed their own from scratch, or if this project utilises one of the existing emulators. The laserdisc work would have been new, of course.
The BBC Micro was a very nicely-designed piece of hardware, and (IMHO) the very best 8-bit computer of its day. The BBC Lives has a wealth of good information for the curious or nostalgic.
As a point of interest, Acorn also designed the (now incredibly successful) ARM processor when they made the jump from 8-bit to 32-bit computing with their Archimedes (later RiscPC) line of computers. ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine before they spun off into a separate company, and re-named themselves Advanced RISC Machines. (The ARM CPUs have come a long way since then of course, but it was a remarkable design from the start.) -
The role of planningYou mention that you want a thorough plan before you write any code. As another poster pointed out, it's easier to change a plan than it is to change code; a plan involving a dead-end approach can be scrapped with a smaller loss than a large body of code involving the same dead-end approach.
So the first reason for "plan first, then code" is that coding is expensive. That expense represents a risk if you're pursuing an approach that doesn't work out. Throwing away a plan is quicker and less expensive.
The second reason for "plan first, then code" is that a written plan is a clear expression of the ideas in the plan. Code is often not very readable or very obvious, and a large body of code may require weeks or months of study to get all the nuances at work.
There is a hidden disadvantage to "plan first, then code". Remember that we're trying to manage the risk of choosing a dead-end approach, so we want to minimize the investment before the discovery that the approach is bogus. A non-executable plan won't catch all the design bugs. It will only catch the design bugs that you can recognize on inspection of a written plan; the screening process is limited by your own human cognitive faculties.
What if we could write an executable plan, in a language that is clear and expressive, and in which writing the plan is inexpensive? This would be the best of all possible worlds! Luckily you're not the first person to face a daunting software design challenge, and people have been designing languages for exactly these constraints for many years (Python, Perl, Scheme, Ruby, Smalltalk, and others. These languages vary in the expressiveness of their syntax. If you're concerned about the mental expense of coding, you probably will want to avoid Perl (which looks a lot like C) and Scheme (which requires a mental paradigm shift). My off-the-cuff recommendation among these would be Python.
Why not write your final product in one of these easy, inexpensive, readable, expressive languages? Alas, many of them don't have the performance of C or C++. If you're doing something computation-intensive, that matters. But wait! There is another saving grace, called SWIG, a program that lets you glue small bits of C or C++ code into your larger program written in one of the easy languages.
In most computer programs, the performance is gated by a small number of small pieces of the code. Usually, the majority of the code does not have a big impact on performance. If you can identify those small performance-expensive bits, and translate them to C or C++ and glue them back into your program, you get the speed you want, and 95% of your code is still readable and expressive, and easy to change later. The trick to finding these performance-limiting bits is called profiling (see 1, 2, 3).
So here's the advice (assuming Python):
1. Spend a day learning Python, two days if you're busy. Python has lots of great libraries, skim the list of libraries as somebody may have contributed something you'll need.
2. Write your entire program readably in Python. Don't worry about speed yet. Rewrite as required until you're sure you've got a good design.
3. Use profiling to locate the few small pieces that slow down your program.
4. Use SWIG and C/C++ to rewrite those pieces and connect them back into your program. -
FreeVMS
This project uses Linux 2.4.x to develop a free stand-alone VMS environment. I am hopeful to see this project succeed. I think they're also in need of developers.
If you're interested:
FreeVMS Project Homepage
freshmeat.net: Project details for FreeVMS
The FreeVMS Archive: By Date -
Re:INTERCAL
Well, as a matter of fact there is an Unlambda interpreter written in INTERCAL. Just what the world needed...
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Re:Lazarus anyone ?
Lazarus are dead, and will stay dead. There are better Amiga sites out there now, like Warlock's ADF vault and Amiga back2roots.
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Re:Your mother reminds me of a turd
I look at your desktop shot, and I can tell you it suck.
Why? Becasue it doesnt show a real functional desktop, it's just another one of those X11 dumps with a bunch of terminals, as if it was grabbed out of the "unix haters handbook" itself. And then there is the consistency and userfriendlyness. Or rather, the lack thereof, from the screenshots I cannot even determine if I should close windows from the upper tight or upper left corner, or perhaps I'd have to use the mmb to choose close. The only familiar gadgets are those on the x11amp (or xmms) as thei're "stolen" from winamp.
Please give us something that shows the brilliance of X11 and linux tied together in an integrated graphical operating environment.
Oh, no can do? How strange, and how sad. Duh.
Just for kicks, just to have something your oh so superiour desktop got some competition, take a look at this. It's my amiga's primary desktop, spiffd up with some system configuration tools just for you, oh an unlike X I can have several screens in various resolutions and depths. And I can use them more flexible, I often run X on one to connect to my linux machines, and I use a small 640x480 one for my VNC client to connect to my NT server at work, and I run MacOS on a macemulator every now and then on one too. And ofcourse a game every now and then, like napalm or quake, on their seperate screen, and they all multitask well and I an jump between them as I like. And it's not some windowmanager that makes this possible, it's the OS itself.
Oh.. and did I mention that I use truetype fonts as well?
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I have an A600, and I still use it :)
It's cute, it's got a o3o+883 combo and 32MB of RAM and a pcmcia ethernet card and runs a samba server on the local LAN, when it is not busy showing off animations for dept. of psychology here at the univ where I work.
Our collection -
Why bother? I`ll tell you why
Actually, it was a whopping 7.14MHz
Did you ever see an a5oo webserver?
amiga.nvg.org -
Why bother? I`ll tell you why
Actually, it was a whopping 7.14MHz
Did you ever see an a5oo webserver?
amiga.nvg.org
