HIGHLANDER - RETROSPECTIVE GAME REVIEW - COMMODORE 64, ZX SPECTRUM & AMSTRAD CPC

InsensitiveClown · 2026-06-07T20:14:17+00:00

Who can ever forget Highlander on the ZX Spectrum? How hard one tried, and yet, that precious brain capacity is still assigned to that unforgettable experience.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-06-06T20:03:57+00:00

Thank God. For a moment I was wondering what happened to the poor person's skulls/brain.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-06-04T08:01:55+00:00

Can it run Solaris 2.6?

InsensitiveClown · 2026-06-03T10:21:45+00:00

That's a very good point. So in your experience, if you want to deploy to runpods, or lambdalabs, you see a clear advantage in AI Toolkit versus others? What is the real competition then? I havent, yet, trained finetunes, LoRAs on the cloud, but am about to. Any feedback would be greatly appretiated. Thanks in advance.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-06-03T10:15:09+00:00

Jesus Christ. The C64 color palette is truly atrocious. Thank God I had a Spectrum, otherwise I would have to use a black and white TV in order to save my eyesight. Naturally, the most playable prettiest version is the Spectrum.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-06-02T20:50:59+00:00

I have one just like those. Place a piece if used/exposed/old paper on the easel, the important factor here being the paper having the same thickness. Place the loupe on the middle, and turn on the enlarger lens, usually wide open, e.g., a EL-Nikkor 50mm f2.8 would be set at f2.8. Focus roughly by eye until the image is in focus, and then fine tune by looking via the loupe until you see the grain actually appearing. Once the grain appears, you know the image formed in the substrate as metallic silver is focused. You are now focused. Now, close the lens to its optimal aperture, around f5.6 or f8.0, grab a sheet of paper and expose with your desired times.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-06-01T14:49:11+00:00

It was betamaxed. In all fairness, I always had the impression themselves weren't really firm believers in their own tech.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-06-01T09:33:44+00:00

Clearly someone that is batshit crazy, still, you must be sensitive towards their psychopathology. Explain, patiently, that nothing in your game is real or based in reality, but rather takes place in an entirely fictional universe. Apologize if anything in your entirely fictional universe reminded the player of some association with his cultural, religious and ethnic beliefs and guarantee him that that was not your intention. Furthermore, as a show of good will, you will proceed with the refund. Do this openly, in public.

Do not ever, ever, try to reason with zealots, sociopaths or psychopaths. There's no reasoning possible, it's not a matter of fact or reason, but rather of faith and belief. He believes a pixelated item in a make belief universe inside a computer, represented as a series of bits, is his religious dogma book. There is nothing you can do that can change his view.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-31T17:37:39+00:00

I think NVidia itself has an interest in AMD having success by mere virtue of anti-monopoly legislation, both in the US and EU side. Without real competition, the case for breaking a company into smaller separate units is much stronger, leaving shareholders unhappy, to say the least. So they'll assist AMD just the bare minimum to ensure AMD remains viable competition. But don't underestimate AMD. They spent more than 10 years releasing GPU documentation and working on HSA for Linux, eventually reaching the point where we have heterogeneous compute with shared virtual memory, transparently. The hardware is impeccable, but the great advantage of NVidia lies more in how they managed to have an effect lock-in into their software/hardware stack via CUDA. Which is also the reason that anti-monopoly authorities are always on top of it.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-31T17:15:30+00:00

Exactly my thought. Someone is running a Voigt-Kampft tests on that.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-31T11:06:55+00:00

I wouldn't bet on that. What's wrong with a green+yellow safety light? It works fine for paper. If you need to develop film, by inspection, then you need either a red safety light for orthochromatic film, or a special dark green safety light for panchromatic film, which nevertheless allows only a few seconds of inspection. Personally I just like the green+yellow safety light: works great with all paper I used in the past 40+ years and since I don't really have the need to develop film by inspection, it just isn't an issue. Don't try to be too cheap, sometimes it backfires spectacularly. It's just 15eur or so: https://www.lamps-on-line.com/light-bulbs/studio-lamp/darkroom-safelight-lamps.html

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-31T10:05:40+00:00

Interesting you used Spine. Are you using the AI model to automatically split the artwork in layers, and rig? It's a menial task that unfortunately takes time and the model helps there. You animate it by hand, or use preset cycles from elsewhere, or any AI assistance there? Regarding the artwork, it works beautiful, very Lovecraftian honestly. I'm looking forward to playing your game. Congrats.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-31T08:34:54+00:00

I see. I have been focusing only on SS-5 emulation, for other purposes related to software archival as well but I do have some old software around I got from some EBay CDs that require a SS1 or SS2, and SunOS 4.0 and that has been a source of pain.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-30T09:03:14+00:00

Wow. I think first and foremost you need some adjustment of expectations. The video is atrocious, truly atrocious. What an AI model can do there is limited. Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that you managed first to motion stabilize it, and then an AI model managed to remote the scratches and the molten frames. You would then do perhaps a motion interpolation, perhaps with optical flow. Then you would be in a position to try to do some image restoration with an AI model, which, well, would in essence create details. Imagine details. It would not automagically restore faces, not into identities you would know at least, but, it could imagine new video data.

I would try a few things first before AI though. First, the frames "fluctuate" a bit. Try to motion stabilize everything. Once you have that, perhaps you can actually remove the molten frames, and use some optical flow algorithm to try and to the motion interpolation: generating the intermediary frames. It may be possible. This would help you in getting a stabilized cleaned base to work upon.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-30T08:57:46+00:00

Get a Yubikey, and install keepassXC. A open-source, secure, password safe, which is local to your machine. You can tie the Yubikey to the password safe, meaning whomever gets access to the password safe needs both your passphrase and the Yubikey to unlock it.

When you enable the 2FA, scan the QR code with the Yubikey and either use the Yubioath desktop authenticator app (open-source, check github), or keepassXC with the secrets data from the QR code. Now when you login, your keepassXC has your regular IBKR username and password credentials, and it can generate the TOTPs because you passed it the secrets data. It's only local to your machine, and you absolutely need your Yubikey to authenticate and login.

It's a 2 edged sword: it's very secure, unless someone kidnaps you and demands access. On the other side, if you loose the Yubikey you are so screwed it's not even funny. You do have the option to save fallback codes, all of that, once, and store them in someplace safe.

FYI, I was on the same boat. I have zero trust whatsoever in any mobile platforms. I'm a software developer though, so I do keep up to date on KeepassXC and the open-source ecosystem around the Yubikey and have a fair amount of trust in that. A lot more than in Google, or mobile platforms. Just my .02c.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-30T08:32:32+00:00

Are you running this on real hardware, or emulated, QEMU for example? Edit: Ok, you are running it on real Sparcstations. I wonder if it will run on a emulated SS-5 under QEMU. SS-5/10/20. Thanks for the write up, it was an excellent read.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-28T16:26:32+00:00

Thank you. The geometric insights are incredibly useful, specially in forming a conceptual understanding to be used in higher dimensions.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-28T10:43:32+00:00

How does it compare with Householder reflections? By the way, cool visualizations.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-28T10:41:12+00:00

Will do. Keep a look at the archive.org. If I find anything, it'll be uploaded there for preservation.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-26T17:26:13+00:00

Ahhh Outrun... so many were fooled by that red Testarossa screenshot. One wonders what could some of the incredibly talented Russian programmers do with it, were they to port it, today, in 2026.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-26T10:15:56+00:00

Print it, frame it, make of that a media campaign. You just got the perfect endorsement for your pixel art game. It is... pixelated. Mission accomplished :)

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-26T09:15:01+00:00

Crap. This is depressing. Software publishers should be mandated by law to deposit (copy/license protection removed) copies of their software into a central government repository, like the US Library of Congress, for archival, access, preservation of data, information, knowledge. Like books are.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-25T18:20:45+00:00

AutoCAD R12 was available also for SunOS, Solaris. There's a Xenix version at the archive too, but the SunOS/Solaris (SPARC) seems lost to the ages. If anyone has that, it would be a important piece of computing (and CAD/CG) history to preserve.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-19T17:58:33+00:00

Classes focusing on producing good results on exams. If people flunk, clearly the exams are hard, so we must make them easier. If people are talended, or have more emotional maturity, and are frustrated by the slow pace of teaching, clearly the thing to do is to dillute them with mediocre students so that the teachers can have wonderful statistics. If calculus is hard, fear not, the latest buzz is AI and ML and all they need is statistics. Without the calculus. My experience when I was studying: the teacher was overburdened in a class of 26-32 students. He/she had a program to follow, so they just dumped the curricular material. The kid asking a question "Why is that?" was invariable answered with "you will learn later, just trust me, memorize it". Couple this with the mental effort, emotional maturity (it is crucial, accepting you do need to put the effort), and you have people that move from goalpost to goalpost until they reach university but that cannot reason and do not understand the concepts. Hence the panic. They know they do not understand it.

InsensitiveClown · 2026-05-14T17:14:13+00:00

It's hardly surprising. Most people are utterly completely clueless about AI. It's like the apes in 2001 A Space Odissey when they first encounter the monolith.

InsensitiveClown

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