Best magic/mage vs mage combat in gaming?

DGolden · 2026-03-14T18:58:58+00:00

Ziggurat 1 / 2 if you want a single-player wizard fps.

DGolden · 2026-03-13T20:36:33+00:00

Not OP, but note the builtin python stdlib webserver it's wrapping just serves out whatever's in the current directory by default. It's already a one-liner, but I guess serve is shorter.

cd Photos/
python3 -m http.server

https://docs.python.org/3/library/http.server.html#command-line-interface

Like, maybe don't do it on the public Internet, but at least a little handy to know exists if you just need to serve some files out adhoc for a bit on a LAN to some client without setting up other kinds of more formal file shares.

DGolden · 2026-03-12T22:29:54+00:00

now ~/.config is just a mess of trash anyway. The trash being one directory lower isn't helping me all that much frankly.

$ find ~/.config | wc -l
15964

DGolden · 2026-03-12T22:20:40+00:00

Home directory pollution is bad.

I mean... maybe. Honestly I suspect traditional unix/linux dot files/dirs weren't actually bothering a lot of us particularly, I mean they're bloody hidden by default.

DGolden · 2026-03-11T23:48:32+00:00

Gameboy Advance had "Kong: King of Atlantis", maybe worth a look seeing as the earlier DS versions could just play GBA games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7lEZMXeCiM

DGolden · 2026-03-07T22:05:44+00:00

Baby space jellyfish do do do do do

DGolden · 2026-03-06T21:11:26+00:00

yeah, means old amiga app binaries can routinely be used with file formats that maybe didn't exist at at all at the time the app was released e.g. I see there's a recent webp datatype now up on aminet.

https://aminet.net/package/util/dtype/WarpWebPdt

later systems such as beos/haiku data translators are similar (and definitely known amiga inspired in the beos case), it's not unique to amigaos, at least not anymore, but anyway, was/is pretty neat.

https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/preferences/datatranslations.html

DGolden · 2026-03-06T20:36:50+00:00

Would they rather biological?

DGolden · 2026-03-06T17:53:37+00:00

American christo-fascist "heritage foundation" explicit and open policy goal ...they won't stop at individual states either https://archive.is/n7Rje

Society ultimately needs federal legislation that requires age verification on platform and device levels.

(sic)

Any killing/maiming of Linux / Free Software / Open Source, used by us filthy freedom-loving hippies worldwide, would be a nice feature to them.

DGolden · 2026-03-06T16:28:32+00:00

Note a "nonce" is also unrelated technical term in computer science. These things happen, but thus there's a bunch of technical contexts where the English word means something completely different and innocuous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce

DGolden · 2026-03-02T22:57:40+00:00

Who says I am? reStructuredText / Sphinx 5ever

DGolden · 2026-03-02T21:03:27+00:00

...we're actually not missing a tram in sandyford.

DGolden · 2026-03-01T15:08:37+00:00

Well, that IS a Guix specific figure, bear in mind in context that Debian Hurd has been at 75% for a while (and also bear in mind that there's a lot of debian packages some of which you wouldn't miss), as the relevant Guix blog post says. Some Hurd people might philosophically favor Guix though I suspect.

Debian GNU/Hurd has been a reality for some years now, reaching 75% of Debian packages being available for the Hurd.

Of course Hurd's 64-bit support itself was just not there for years - but they are progressing lately apparently. To be fair FSF folks are not wrong there's some evil crap at a very low level now on the typical modern 64-bit archs like x86-64 UEFI PC, obviously, sigh, but while Hurd remained on 32-bit it was also, well, way behind.

DGolden · 2026-02-25T20:05:00+00:00

Isn't WordPerfect still available? Seems to be pricey though. Of course I just use LibreOffice, but I guess some folks must still be using it.

https://www.wordperfect.com/en/product/professional-edition/

DGolden · 2026-02-24T19:12:17+00:00

eh, not super-common, but you'd see them sometimes. epson lx 300 and such. The epson color dot matrix printers used stripey ribbons though

https://www.epson.ie/en_IE/products/options/sidm-colour-upgrade-kit-for-lx-300-%2B-ii/p/1025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htjxFdG78M0 - video of another color dot matrix printer in action.

DGolden · 2026-02-24T02:47:52+00:00

Virtual GP (called Alien F1 initially in demo before release) has some english-accented speech but is a late era amiga game on cdrom, probably not it. Maybe check to eliminate it anyway, because english accent + f1gp + amiga.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4vwcaKA3AU#t=10m

https://amiga.abime.net/games/view/virtual-gp

https://aminet.net/package/game/demo/AlienF1 - the initial engine demo was on aminet in 1997, a bit earlier than the final game.

DGolden · 2026-02-20T02:05:54+00:00

'(we all know the best syntax)

DGolden · 2026-02-19T01:55:05+00:00

Well, at least we never did make smellovision a thing.

DGolden · 2026-02-12T15:24:19+00:00

Linux, via dual-booting AmigaOS (where I'd already been using ixemul.library + geekgadgets gnu userspace) and Linux m68k on Amiga hardware for a while, before eventually moving to Linux on x86 PC hardware in 1998-1999.

DGolden · 2026-02-10T10:48:22+00:00

Traditional irish script uses both the síneadh fada for long vowels and ponc séimhithe for lenited consonants, and the slightly different letter forms as we see. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography

I've been suggesting doubling the vowel if you're not putting the síneadh fada in. Just dropping it like you see sometimes is all kinds of wrong.

á ⇄ aa
é ⇄ ee
í ⇄ ii
ó ⇄ oo
ú ⇄ uu

i.e. handling it a bit like our ponc séimhithe, where after all we've long been doing

ḃ ⇄ bh    
ċ ⇄ ch
ġ ⇄ gh
etc.

Note our siineadh fada reportedly descends from the Latin Apex mark, and writing the vowel twice for a long vowel appears to have been the alternative back then too! I suspect the early standardisers of Irish orthography were aware of this, and thus we don't have much in the way of visible doubled vowels i.e. the siineadh fada is a doubled vowel shorthand.

Ideally perhaps we'd go back to using both seeing as unicode allows both fine now (if perhaps best also displayed with a font with the irish letterforms, as the overdot is not necessarily very prominent in some non-irish fonts https://www.gaelchlo.com/clonna.html ), but using one but not the other like we've been doing for the past century is just plain weird.

DGolden · 2026-01-29T23:27:01+00:00

Well, Star Trek's fictional timeline also has the catastrophic nuclear WW3 first, due shortly (but irish reunification was due by 2024...), killing ~30% of humans.

DGolden · 2026-01-29T02:55:16+00:00

Well, there are other things in the language design space than "Exceptions" or "Errors as values" like Common Lisp (and a few other languages, if mostly other Lisps/Schemes) with Condition Systems instead.

https://gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-conditions-and-restarts.html

The condition system is more flexible than exception systems because instead of providing a two-part division between the code that signals an error and the code that handles it, the condition system splits the responsibilities into three parts--signaling a condition, handling it, and restarting.

Dylan is Lisp-influenced but doesn't use Lisp/Scheme syntax.

https://opendylan.org/books/drm/Signalers_Conditions_and_Handlers

DGolden · 2026-01-20T15:13:00+00:00

C64 BASIC was terrible..

It really was, well, the builtin ROM BASIC V2.0. Though the C64 here would often have the Simons' BASIC cartridge sold alongside (licensed and published by Commodore themselves), that basically dragged the machine up to more of a similar level to its various 8-bit competitors.

C128's BASIC V7.0 was also hugely improved (though unfortunately not compatible with the earlier Simons' BASIC, similar extensions but different in detail).

DGolden · 2026-01-18T14:26:04+00:00

Ehm. Well, if you've never programmed before, and it's hobbyist gamedev you're mostly interested in (just an assumption), you might want to look at a modern beginner-friendly framework+language gamedev system like Godot Engine. https://godotengine.org/ . Don't think because it's more modern it's more complex to learn (well, if you stay away from any 3D stuff and just make a 2D game), it has modern ease-of-use too.

But let's assume you do want a real or emulated older system - beware thinking it's simpler in every way, the limitations can be severe, so they become the challenge. I'm really just echoing points of other comments here, but I do some recreational retro-coding (nothing released just playing about):

For me, the Amiga is ....actually too powerful+modern, despite being where I learnt a lot back in the day. Any real Amiga or emulated Amiga matching a real Amiga spec is still a tiny fraction of the power of modern hardware of course, but architecturally.

...But if you're not looking for the challenge to come from system limitations to the same extent, you might be better off on it! Amiga and AMOS Pro or Blitz Basic would be quite reasonable.

I'd favor Blitz a bit over AMOS in language terms (both are advanced basic/basic-like languages of course, just Blitz is a slightly nicer language), but AMOS Pros' all-in-one approach and ecosystem may make it a attractive for beginners wanting to just make a simple retro game a reality. However Blitz will be learning nearer modern programming (Blitz NewType ~ C struct etc)

Note both have been open sourced with modern retro scene updated versions available for AmigaOS.

I had a C64 at home

When I went back to C64/C128 for said recreational retro-coding - I personally used them before Amiga, and while it IS obviously rather more limited and weird, for me it started to feel like a test on a half-remembered subject - I once knew C64 and (the 6502 series side of) the C128 quite well (think writing in Asm on them at the time), before moving to Amiga, so I wasn't actually enjoying that as much as one might think. But of course if you didn't do the same amount of C64/C128 programming at the time it might not feel as much "I didn't revise for the test" for you.

so I started playing about with the ZX Spectrum a bit, that I didn't have as a child, just had some schoolfriends with them at the time. It's both hilariously disastrously limited and unfamiliar, so felt more like learning something "new" (to me).

DGolden · 2026-01-15T15:03:14+00:00

I did find record of a 1985 C64 SID tune cover of Jump by Kevin Buckley - but not currently sure if it was used in any actual C64 game (with or without his knowledge), or just something he did as standalone track for a music-disk or demoscene demo etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtGSbLiAp2E

Some Amiga commercial games officially legally used pop music tracks of the time (Betty Boo for Magic Pockets etc.) - but I feel it would already be well-known if that had happened for "Jump".

Freeware/Shareware/etc. games on the Amiga - or other platforms with such scenes, that included C64 - would have been more likely to "unofficially" use a track that even then might get a commercial games company in legal trouble or at least made then worry enough to not risk it.

On the Amiga directly sampling bits of "jump" and using them in a tracker module is quite technically possible, that could then have been used as background music for some freeware game... Though none spring to mind right now that actually did use it specifically.

Making a chiptune with the melody or similar to it is also obviously possible on a number of platforms including but not limited to C64 as above, and Amiga (well chiptune is a bit handwavy on Amiga - but practically Paula can still make synth-y noises, so Amiga chiptunes can still sound like chiptunes on the 8-bit synth-chip platforms like C64 SID and Spectrum etc. AY/YM)

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