Cammoromu C64 was bad because the build in Basic hogged memory of course.
BASIC interpreter hogging memory? Hell, no. Commodore 64 was based on 6510 which had a processor channel on the $00 and $01. These addresses could be used to toggle ROM banks off, like this:
LDA #%11111110; AND $01; STA $01
...turns of the BASIC ROM and you can put whatever the hell you want to the RAM bank right under it. Bit 0 for BASIC ROM, bit 1 for Kernal (sic) ROM, and bit 2 for Character ROM. Character ROM is useful unless you want tor redefine your characters, and Kernal ROM has many nice I/O routines (LOAD and SAVE and CHROUT, among other things). But BASIC is mostly dead weight. (Though I like $AB1E personally. But that's not the reason to keep it there.)
My current favorite trick is to use a BASIC stub: A PC crossassembler adds a BASIC program that basically says only "SYS addressrightaftertheprogram" and program is assembled right after the BASIC program. LIST command only shows the start, and I have the whole BASIC RAM to store my program in. And BASIC and other RAMs can be toggled off and you get several kb of free RAM for your variables.
(And don't you dare to call it Cammoromu, you filthy Sarpamasa user. =)
Let me clarify: I tried coding again in the same Commodore Basic that I had been such an integral part of my programming hobby since the early days.
Since those days, I have coded in many many languages, including QBasic and VB, and noted that most new BASICs indeed do not suck (at least not as much as the old BASIC).
Commodore BASIC v2, on the other hand, has not got all neat programming constructs, mostly because it obviously has been sitting in the same ROM chip all these years with no upgrades. It was still the same, limited, SLOW and painfully programmable interpreted heap of junk I so much loved back in the day.
In fact, Commodore BASIC was the only steaming heap of junk BASIC that Microsoft has ever produced. I was surprised to learn that a company known for producing more or less brilliant BASIC interpreters had produced that garbage, but obvious solution was given... They were not the ones designing it - C64 BASIC was designed to be 100% compatible with PET BASIC.
I was looking at the 6502 part and immediately thought "Commodore BASIC". So they made their own BASIC interpreter, very cool!
And since they made a custom BASIC, I had to take a look at the language reference. To be honest, it doesn't look that much advanced compared to Commodore BASIC v2 (apart of being custom-made and thus being way cooler), apart of some interesting machine language-related functions (word poke/peek). It may be whole lot better engineered and more efficient than the Microsoft-Commodore monstrosity, but there sure aren't that much more language features. You know, the kind of BASIC that Dijkstra called "mental mutilation", not the ones that are produced today.
So, it seems like a limited BASIC interpreter, which makes coding this server thing extremely impressive.
Back 15-10 years ago I was coding simple text adventures in Commodore Basic. Those worked just fine. A few months back I got a crazy idea to code a Tetris clone. That was painful. Very painful. Especially to someone who has, during these long years, got used to luxuries offered by C and Perl - simplest example of these would be local variables and named+parametrized subroutine calls.
A homebrew BASIC interpreter is nice, while it's a shame it's not as feature-packed; Writing a server in this thing is amazing.
Interesting. I wish I had known this before I sent a short story I wrote for people to review. Now they see exactly how much coffee I needed to pull that together. =) But at least I'll probably also see their changes...
And I think it's good that it stores the changes, though I would much prefer it if there would be some kind of external revision control mechanism - like this article shows, storing revisions in the file itself is not good, safe or even desirable. Has anyone tried to design a RCS/CVS-like system for OpenOffice.org? Since it's zipped XML, It wouldn't even be particularly challenging...
Ah, but LaTeX supports % comments. Which is unfortunate, because when people know they can leave Notes For Themselves, they sometimes write stupid things in them.
Ask around if anyone's ever found odd comments from corporate source code, or worse, released source code...
(A simple example: "Fuck it, I do it in perl. Fucking sh drives me nuts." - 3Delight 0.9.6 Linux install script)
What's wrong with using an actual roadrunner and not something that just resembles it?
Ah, you see, the real thing is nowhere near silly enough. You need a thing that looks the same and is just as funny.
And that particular personality trait has to come from animal side, because human beings are simply incapable of producing actually funny works of humor. (I hear the local skeptic society is paying a large money price if anyone can prove the existence of an actually funny joke demonstrably and documentably created by a human in laboratory conditions.)
Things worse than Damn Lies, besides statistics: Book back covers, movie trailers, game packaging and game opening videos.
There have been countless cases of box art, screenshots or their captions being in clash with each other.
Blizzard is especially guilty of this; The first game I got from them was Warcraft, and box screenshot captions sure felt goofy if you had actually played the game. (Glad in Warcraft II they at least had something to do with each other...)
Game opening videos are extremely odd also. I wrote this piece about them. My favorite example is Battlezone - While it's more or less like the actual game even to the cockpit controls, there are more odd mistakes than you can count...
There's one game I love and, ironically, at the same time hate most. Nethack.
I believe it's a great game and definitely one of the best CRPGs ever made. Clearly blows away every other action-oriented CRPG ever made. Monster bashing just isn't the same anywhere else.
But it's also so damn hard that it turns easily frustrating. It's possible to die in million gruesome ways just by sneezing to the general direction of the Dungeon. I need certain kind of equipment, which are hard to get, to get anywhere near the end (which I have so far only managed to see by cheating...)
Every time I play the game, I have a great game and the death is so epic that I have to take a break of weeks before playing again. =/
But on the other hand, while deaths are annoying and stupid, when the game goes well it's incredibly rewarding and interesting.
Several years ago I switched from FVWM2 to Window Maker.
Among my first reactions was "hey, the titlebar can't be customized that much."
The conclusion: "Doesn't matter. I can change its color to whatever I want, and that's enough."
Nowadays, I think it's simple, elegant and functional. Just my kind of WM.
After a while, I realized what the coolest part of the Window Maker titlebars was: They always look the same and behave the same way, but can be customized. Easily.
Sure, it may be bad in your opinion that you can't "go wild" with the theme design and do "creative" user interfaces and play with the "eye candy". But the thing is, Even when WM is minimal, it can be customized and it works the same way all the time.
I had a problem with Enlightenment, specifically, there were a lot of cool themes and all, but most of the time, the buttons in those themes were wrong. "Gee, sure this is a good theme, but why the hell it has those buttons?" or "...why is that bar on the side? Outrageous" or whatever. Window Maker themes change appearance but won't touch the functionality - the theme and UI are separate items.
And I believe Window Maker has antialiasing in CVS already =)
"funding" doesn't necessarily mean "controlling". I mean, there are people still out there who actually have ideals and treat donations as donations without letting the donors influence their judgement.
Is there another ftpd that provides guest access as well as wu-ftpd?
You mean anonymous FTP, right? ProFTPd! Does anonymous, does uploads, does all sorts of stuff, and I believe the configuration file format is more readable (same as in Apache).
And for non-anonymous stuff, I can only recommend OpenSSH =)
So Unix has a 'philosophy' then? And I thought it was just a fucking operating system.
This is just as wanky as companies talking about their 'mission statement'.
Huh?
Well, most people who create something usually think what is their goal, their guiding idea; they need to think what the hell they're trying to accomplish by creating the thing.
So operating systems, like everything else, have been built based on the design principles. A philosophy, if you will.
Most people do not realize the simple truth that things you do are often easier to do if you know what you're supposed to be doing. Profound thought, eh?
Ah, but he's talking of old Atari. (The modern atari is Infogrames, which got the name around the time the actual game development company was sold to Midway - and they quitted recently. Or something like that.) Infogrames, on the other hand, has done many many bloody games through their history. =/ (Can't remember any others right now, but my earliest Infogrames memory was North & South, which was a war game, admittedly one with comedic edge...) We'll yet see how well they bring honor the old trademark.
Do you have to bid or pay for weapons like in other games?
No, but you need to pick a primary and secondary weapon and your gear and can't change them until you respawn, so that way you've got your limited firepower all right.
(This is from 2.8 beta. I haven't tried 3.0 beta yet, mostly because I needed to nuke it to get some temporary disk space. Hmm, got to reinstall it now...)
The spammer put the links in the e-mail, obviously intending people to follow them
Yeah, but what stops spammers from obscuring their URL into machine-unreadable format, and providing innocent URLs in machine-readable format?
Example: "See our CEO hauled into prison, live Realvideo broadcast on http://www.cnn.com/! Order our herbal nigerian make-money-fast penis-extending hardcore porn video from dubya dubya dubya dot clever spammer tech dot com!"
Users already obscure their mail addresses and seem to have no problems understanding them. What would stop spammers from doing that too? They already try...
You want to use nukes, as usual. Especially in certain cases.
Consider the recent case of SomethingAwful vs. SPEWS. "Collateral damage" of one IP address out of the whole blocked IP block, and the noise the survivors created was annoying. You want to use nukes to make sure no one survives.
Ah. I was under the impression the OS tells the drive to lock the drive and it's the drive's responsibility to keep itself closed... but if it's done on software, then it's different.
If I press the eject button... I really ought to get a popup window and warning ding
Good idea, but it raises the question: Is it possible in hardware? Does the CD drive have a status/signal for "user pressed eject but the drive is locked"? I'm not sure, but I was under the impression that the computer knows only "drive open/drive busy/etc..." sort of information and has no idea of when the eject button is pressed... but I could be wrong. Could anyone with an ATAPI spec in front of them tell us if this is even possible?
Neverwinter nights, although terrific graphically, was little more than a diablo sequel using the D&D engine.
Will people PLEASE forget the Official Campaign already, please... NWN is more than that!
I tell you, NWN: Shadows of Undrentide campaign was far better and had quite a bit of the magic already. Picked a ranger character, talked to the dogs, ended up in a well-laid-out ambush, saw a wolf chasing a deer, had meaningful discussions with dragons... wow. And FAR less l00table bArr3lz and Cr8tz. =)
Not to even mention the community-made mods... great stuff.
Yep. The "shells" in question are the very reason I have some respect for Real - the codecs may be proprietary crap, but the fact that there is a cross-platform streaming framework is a very nice thought indeed. Real is still the only provider of cross-platform streaming video (with "cross-platform" meaning "also other platforms besides Windows and MacOS".)
What happens these days when I click on a.rm link? Mozilla asks what to open it with, suggesting RealPlayer, then RP pops up, and begins the difficult task involving some buffering, buffering, and maybe even "buffering". And one day it will show a video and audio compressed in Real's codecs, in glorious crappy Motif with slooow software scaling. The miracle isn't the video codec or the player, but rather the fact that it gets there at all.
I'm hoping the Helix folks can work on same kind of miracle solution that works on other codecs, and also improve the player software. Click on a link and see a streamed Ogg Theora/Vorbis file (or MPEG4/Vorbis, or whatever), in a modern GTK+ GUI with full Xv glory.
Heh. I have to admit the idea has some merit - yes indeed. =)
Speaking of writing notes in odd languages or characters... since Multics had "Hodie natus est radici frater" as an error message, when will Linux get impossible kernel panics in Klingon? =)
I think this is the first and only time a major game release was made using this language. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
Actually, most of Abuse was written in other languages. According to SLOCCount, 115799 lines (91.45%) ANSI C, 6792 lines (5.36%) C++, 2066 lines (1.36%) Lisp, and the rest is shell script and assembly. (I just realized I always have the Abuse source tree ready, for some obscure reason... I haven't even read much of the code =)
It had a Lisp interpreter for interpreting creature AI code / game logic / whatever, but, well... it wasn't actually that huge part of the game. It was good for writing mods.
And yes, it's probably a first commercial game to feature a Lisp interpreter... but not the first game ever to be written in Lisp. I'm pretty sure all of the games in Emacs predate it =)
Slashdot Mirror
BASIC interpreter hogging memory? Hell, no. Commodore 64 was based on 6510 which had a processor channel on the $00 and $01. These addresses could be used to toggle ROM banks off, like this:
LDA #%11111110; AND $01; STA $01
...turns of the BASIC ROM and you can put whatever the hell you want to the RAM bank right under it. Bit 0 for BASIC ROM, bit 1 for Kernal (sic) ROM, and bit 2 for Character ROM. Character ROM is useful unless you want tor redefine your characters, and Kernal ROM has many nice I/O routines (LOAD and SAVE and CHROUT, among other things). But BASIC is mostly dead weight. (Though I like $AB1E personally. But that's not the reason to keep it there.)
My current favorite trick is to use a BASIC stub: A PC crossassembler adds a BASIC program that basically says only "SYS addressrightaftertheprogram" and program is assembled right after the BASIC program. LIST command only shows the start, and I have the whole BASIC RAM to store my program in. And BASIC and other RAMs can be toggled off and you get several kb of free RAM for your variables.
(And don't you dare to call it Cammoromu, you filthy Sarpamasa user. =)
Let me clarify: I tried coding again in the same Commodore Basic that I had been such an integral part of my programming hobby since the early days.
Since those days, I have coded in many many languages, including QBasic and VB, and noted that most new BASICs indeed do not suck (at least not as much as the old BASIC).
Commodore BASIC v2, on the other hand, has not got all neat programming constructs, mostly because it obviously has been sitting in the same ROM chip all these years with no upgrades. It was still the same, limited, SLOW and painfully programmable interpreted heap of junk I so much loved back in the day.
In fact, Commodore BASIC was the only steaming heap of junk BASIC that Microsoft has ever produced. I was surprised to learn that a company known for producing more or less brilliant BASIC interpreters had produced that garbage, but obvious solution was given... They were not the ones designing it - C64 BASIC was designed to be 100% compatible with PET BASIC.
I was looking at the 6502 part and immediately thought "Commodore BASIC". So they made their own BASIC interpreter, very cool!
And since they made a custom BASIC, I had to take a look at the language reference. To be honest, it doesn't look that much advanced compared to Commodore BASIC v2 (apart of being custom-made and thus being way cooler), apart of some interesting machine language-related functions (word poke/peek). It may be whole lot better engineered and more efficient than the Microsoft-Commodore monstrosity, but there sure aren't that much more language features. You know, the kind of BASIC that Dijkstra called "mental mutilation", not the ones that are produced today.
So, it seems like a limited BASIC interpreter, which makes coding this server thing extremely impressive.
Back 15-10 years ago I was coding simple text adventures in Commodore Basic. Those worked just fine. A few months back I got a crazy idea to code a Tetris clone. That was painful. Very painful. Especially to someone who has, during these long years, got used to luxuries offered by C and Perl - simplest example of these would be local variables and named+parametrized subroutine calls.
A homebrew BASIC interpreter is nice, while it's a shame it's not as feature-packed; Writing a server in this thing is amazing.
Interesting. I wish I had known this before I sent a short story I wrote for people to review. Now they see exactly how much coffee I needed to pull that together. =) But at least I'll probably also see their changes...
And I think it's good that it stores the changes, though I would much prefer it if there would be some kind of external revision control mechanism - like this article shows, storing revisions in the file itself is not good, safe or even desirable. Has anyone tried to design a RCS/CVS-like system for OpenOffice.org? Since it's zipped XML, It wouldn't even be particularly challenging...
Ah, but LaTeX supports % comments. Which is unfortunate, because when people know they can leave Notes For Themselves, they sometimes write stupid things in them.
Ask around if anyone's ever found odd comments from corporate source code, or worse, released source code...
(A simple example: "Fuck it, I do it in perl. Fucking sh drives me nuts." - 3Delight 0.9.6 Linux install script)
Ah, you see, the real thing is nowhere near silly enough. You need a thing that looks the same and is just as funny.
And that particular personality trait has to come from animal side, because human beings are simply incapable of producing actually funny works of humor. (I hear the local skeptic society is paying a large money price if anyone can prove the existence of an actually funny joke demonstrably and documentably created by a human in laboratory conditions.)
Or something. I'm going to sleep.
Things worse than Damn Lies, besides statistics: Book back covers, movie trailers, game packaging and game opening videos.
There have been countless cases of box art, screenshots or their captions being in clash with each other.
Blizzard is especially guilty of this; The first game I got from them was Warcraft, and box screenshot captions sure felt goofy if you had actually played the game. (Glad in Warcraft II they at least had something to do with each other...)
Game opening videos are extremely odd also. I wrote this piece about them. My favorite example is Battlezone - While it's more or less like the actual game even to the cockpit controls, there are more odd mistakes than you can count...
Depends on case. (But I'm not saying it'd not be likely. =)
Personally, I had no such feelings; I merely wished they'd try a coyote next. Or whatever's the closest living bird that resembles a roadrunner.
This might be Interesting and maybe even as far as Fascinating if I didn't have any coffee and it'd be past 3 in the morning.
I believe it's a great game and definitely one of the best CRPGs ever made. Clearly blows away every other action-oriented CRPG ever made. Monster bashing just isn't the same anywhere else.
But it's also so damn hard that it turns easily frustrating. It's possible to die in million gruesome ways just by sneezing to the general direction of the Dungeon. I need certain kind of equipment, which are hard to get, to get anywhere near the end (which I have so far only managed to see by cheating...)
Every time I play the game, I have a great game and the death is so epic that I have to take a break of weeks before playing again. =/
But on the other hand, while deaths are annoying and stupid, when the game goes well it's incredibly rewarding and interesting.
Several years ago I switched from FVWM2 to Window Maker.
Among my first reactions was "hey, the titlebar can't be customized that much."
The conclusion: "Doesn't matter. I can change its color to whatever I want, and that's enough."
Nowadays, I think it's simple, elegant and functional. Just my kind of WM.
After a while, I realized what the coolest part of the Window Maker titlebars was: They always look the same and behave the same way, but can be customized. Easily.
Sure, it may be bad in your opinion that you can't "go wild" with the theme design and do "creative" user interfaces and play with the "eye candy". But the thing is, Even when WM is minimal, it can be customized and it works the same way all the time.
I had a problem with Enlightenment, specifically, there were a lot of cool themes and all, but most of the time, the buttons in those themes were wrong. "Gee, sure this is a good theme, but why the hell it has those buttons?" or "...why is that bar on the side? Outrageous" or whatever. Window Maker themes change appearance but won't touch the functionality - the theme and UI are separate items.
And I believe Window Maker has antialiasing in CVS already =)
"funding" doesn't necessarily mean "controlling". I mean, there are people still out there who actually have ideals and treat donations as donations without letting the donors influence their judgement.
Or something. I'm a trusting kind of person. =)
You mean anonymous FTP, right? ProFTPd! Does anonymous, does uploads, does all sorts of stuff, and I believe the configuration file format is more readable (same as in Apache).
And for non-anonymous stuff, I can only recommend OpenSSH =)
Huh?
Well, most people who create something usually think what is their goal, their guiding idea; they need to think what the hell they're trying to accomplish by creating the thing.
So operating systems, like everything else, have been built based on the design principles. A philosophy, if you will.
Most people do not realize the simple truth that things you do are often easier to do if you know what you're supposed to be doing. Profound thought, eh?
...with a system consisting of traction wheels...
...using a wool manufacturing widget (which probably implies the citizens are Sheep who are to be sheared for taxation).
Don't blame me, this is what the USPTO patent search says =)
Ah, but he's talking of old Atari. (The modern atari is Infogrames, which got the name around the time the actual game development company was sold to Midway - and they quitted recently. Or something like that.) Infogrames, on the other hand, has done many many bloody games through their history. =/ (Can't remember any others right now, but my earliest Infogrames memory was North & South, which was a war game, admittedly one with comedic edge...) We'll yet see how well they bring honor the old trademark.
No, but you need to pick a primary and secondary weapon and your gear and can't change them until you respawn, so that way you've got your limited firepower all right.
(This is from 2.8 beta. I haven't tried 3.0 beta yet, mostly because I needed to nuke it to get some temporary disk space. Hmm, got to reinstall it now...)
Yeah, but what stops spammers from obscuring their URL into machine-unreadable format, and providing innocent URLs in machine-readable format?
Example: "See our CEO hauled into prison, live Realvideo broadcast on http://www.cnn.com/! Order our herbal nigerian make-money-fast penis-extending hardcore porn video from dubya dubya dubya dot clever spammer tech dot com!"
Users already obscure their mail addresses and seem to have no problems understanding them. What would stop spammers from doing that too? They already try...
You want to use nukes, as usual. Especially in certain cases.
Consider the recent case of SomethingAwful vs. SPEWS. "Collateral damage" of one IP address out of the whole blocked IP block, and the noise the survivors created was annoying. You want to use nukes to make sure no one survives.
Maybe if someone can miraculously get me interested of politics I could make backups more often...
(End of a Predictable Joke. Please return to your normal daily posting.)
Ah. I was under the impression the OS tells the drive to lock the drive and it's the drive's responsibility to keep itself closed... but if it's done on software, then it's different.
Clear, definitive answer on this would be cool.
Good idea, but it raises the question: Is it possible in hardware? Does the CD drive have a status/signal for "user pressed eject but the drive is locked"? I'm not sure, but I was under the impression that the computer knows only "drive open/drive busy/etc..." sort of information and has no idea of when the eject button is pressed... but I could be wrong. Could anyone with an ATAPI spec in front of them tell us if this is even possible?
Will people PLEASE forget the Official Campaign already, please... NWN is more than that!
I tell you, NWN: Shadows of Undrentide campaign was far better and had quite a bit of the magic already. Picked a ranger character, talked to the dogs, ended up in a well-laid-out ambush, saw a wolf chasing a deer, had meaningful discussions with dragons... wow. And FAR less l00table bArr3lz and Cr8tz. =)
Not to even mention the community-made mods... great stuff.
Yep. The "shells" in question are the very reason I have some respect for Real - the codecs may be proprietary crap, but the fact that there is a cross-platform streaming framework is a very nice thought indeed. Real is still the only provider of cross-platform streaming video (with "cross-platform" meaning "also other platforms besides Windows and MacOS".)
What happens these days when I click on a .rm link? Mozilla asks what to open it with, suggesting RealPlayer, then RP pops up, and begins the difficult task involving some buffering, buffering, and maybe even "buffering". And one day it will show a video and audio compressed in Real's codecs, in glorious crappy Motif with slooow software scaling. The miracle isn't the video codec or the player, but rather the fact that it gets there at all.
I'm hoping the Helix folks can work on same kind of miracle solution that works on other codecs, and also improve the player software. Click on a link and see a streamed Ogg Theora/Vorbis file (or MPEG4/Vorbis, or whatever), in a modern GTK+ GUI with full Xv glory.
Heh. I have to admit the idea has some merit - yes indeed. =)
Speaking of writing notes in odd languages or characters... since Multics had "Hodie natus est radici frater" as an error message, when will Linux get impossible kernel panics in Klingon? =)
Actually, most of Abuse was written in other languages. According to SLOCCount, 115799 lines (91.45%) ANSI C, 6792 lines (5.36%) C++, 2066 lines (1.36%) Lisp, and the rest is shell script and assembly. (I just realized I always have the Abuse source tree ready, for some obscure reason... I haven't even read much of the code =)
It had a Lisp interpreter for interpreting creature AI code / game logic / whatever, but, well... it wasn't actually that huge part of the game. It was good for writing mods.
And yes, it's probably a first commercial game to feature a Lisp interpreter... but not the first game ever to be written in Lisp. I'm pretty sure all of the games in Emacs predate it =)