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The Contiki Desktop OS for C64, NES, 8-bit Atari,
Adam Dunkels writes "This is for those of you who think that a text-based operating system that fits compressed on a 1.44Mb floppy counts as 'tiny': the brand new Contiki operating system and desktop environment for the Commodore 64, with ports to a bunch of other platforms such as the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, the VIC-20, 8-bit Ataris, Atari Jaguar, the Tandy CoCo, and the Apple ][ under development. The Contiki system includes
the following: a multi-tasking kernel, a windowing
system and themeable GUI toolkit, a screen saver, a TCP/IP
stack, a personal
web server, and a web
browser. The Contiki web browser, which is likely to be the world's smallest browser given its extremely small memory footprint, is the world's first true web browser for an 8-bit system and probably makes the 21 years old Commodore 64 the oldest system ever to run a real web browser! All of the above programs are contained in a single, fully self-contained, 42 kilobytes large binary. The entire Contiki system with all programs running simultaneously is comfortable in 64 kilobytes of memory. The name 'Contiki' is derived from Thor
Heyerdahl's famous Kon-Tiki
raft which was able to sail across the Pacific Ocean despite being built using prehistoric techniques, something previously thought impossible. There are also screenshots
and a FAQ
avaliable."
There's no PPP yet folks
Some dial-up Internet access providers still support SLIP (serial line IP), the protocol that PPP largely replaced.
Will I retire or break 10K?
How the heck do you get a new operating system onto a gaming console like the NES?
Are the game controller ports used as serial ports?
Do you use a specially made cartridge?
My blog
Nostalgia.
I recently tried an emulator and had a look at some of the games that I spent hours and days on as a teen. Games such as Mercenary.
And frankly, most of those games that I had the fondest memory of, from today's perspective, plain and simply suck.
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You may like my a cappella music
the problem today compared to back when all code had to be small, tight and efficient is that there is a much greater demand for programming. the actual number of good, top flight coders is always going to be small as it was back then but these days you have a lot more code that needs to be churned out so a lot of it gets done by journeymen programmers (and i include myself in that)
While that is true for some games, I strongly disagree about many, many others I played in my youth.
/. about universities beginning to offer game development majors. I truly hope that something like "gaming heritage 101" is taught to new students. There's a goldmine of great ideas that have been sadly tossed aside that could be salvaged by a savvy developer.
Take the aforementioned example: Elite 2. Have you played it recently? The gameplay is STILL rock solid after all this time. The graphics engine is dated, sure, but what other game gives you such an open-ended experience? You could do almost ANYTHING you wanted! The universe was open to you.
Actually, I'd submit that that is one of the main reasons that games like Grand Theft Auto do so well - the fact that they are so open-ended and leave the decisions up to the player. Scripting is great if it's well done, but how many of us have wished we could have done something different and see the game adapt?
Overall, it's very sad how many games today are released hoping that eye-candy alone with crap gameplay will sell copies. *cough*Unreal2*cough*
Brink back some of these ideas from classic gaming! Older games were often head-and-shoulders above modern titles in originality and gameplay because they HAD to be. The platforms at the time were primitive and couldn't rely on eye-candy as a selling point.
I remember a recent posting here on
In fact, Fairlight created the first browser for the Commodore 64:
http://hem.passagen.se/harlekin/
Look at FairligHTML. (1997!)
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
How true. A couple of years ago I was given some code to review, written by an 'experienced' (i.e. paid more than me) programmer. I tryed to run it on a ppro 200, which was just painful. After about an hour of hacking it I'd got the CPU utilisation down to <60%. By the end of the day I had got it down to <20%. After that I came to the conclusion that coders should not be allowed fast machines for testing. You may need a powerful workstation for compiling (although with incremental compiling and good code this is debatable) but testing on a fast machine really does encourage bad code.
It was quite entertaining watching this guy's reaction when he read my changes to his code. 'How does that work? ... That wouldn't work! ... Oh. ... Hmmm ... Wow.' Almost as good as the expression on my project manager's face when I pointed out that they'd missed out the standard IP clause from my contract, an observation that was quickly followed by an offer of sponsorship.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Way back when I was studying computer science, we had this book called "The Psychology of Computer Programming".
.sig? Here's a .sig for you: Take THAT! How's that for a .sig?
It referred to a few legendary (back then) programming feats, including one about the guys at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
They found they had 1/2/I forget which/ Kb of RAM left on the Pioneer/Voyager/I forget which/ spaceprobe they were writing the software for.
So they wrote an image pattern recognition program that would study the atmosphere in jupiter/saturn/I forget which/ planet.
Ok so I don't remember all the details but it sounded like really, really, REALLY tight code.
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You want a