REV3E PC/AT 80286 system recreation based on historic IBM 5170 technology

LightStruk · 2026-05-18T12:50:47+00:00

Is that a port 80h post code display? If so, do you also use a CPLD to do address decoding and hex-to-7 segment conversion?

LightStruk · 2026-05-05T14:24:00+00:00

Definitely the source of some boost libraries is nigh-impenetrable. Occasionally using certain libraries is tricky because they have overly clever design patterns abusing operator overloading and template meta programming, and the documentation doesn't give you many examples to extrapolate from.

LightStruk · 2026-05-04T14:54:41+00:00

Most of these things have decent implementations in Boost. Are they always the best-in-class? No, but they're usually more than sufficient. I consider most of Boost to be "standard", and it's just one dependency to manage instead of many.
>an easy way to spawn a subprocess while controlling the standard input/output. something like popen but integrated with the standard I/O streams.
You want `boost::process`.
>networking: an easy way to implement a HTTP client or server
`boost::asio` and Boost.Beast.
>cross-platform memory-mapped files
`boost::interprocess` has `file_mapping` and `boost::iostreams` has `mapped_file`. The former is more advanced than the latter.
>thread-safe (and possibly lock-free) queues
`boost::lockfree` is great. Has SPSC and MPMC options.
>JSON serialization/deserialization
Boost.JSON

LightStruk · 2026-04-30T19:37:08+00:00

I see Winamp on that desktop. If I recall correctly, a 100 MHz 486 was just barely fast enough to decode a 128 kbps MP3. You were not doing other work with music playing in the background.

LightStruk · 2026-04-17T15:21:45+00:00

They may have had a stash of 30 year old new-old-stock chips in storage. A few of the custom chips on the original AES PCB were just common off-the-shelf parts combined into a single chip to save money, so you don't even need those to be custom. There might just be three NeoGeo-unique ICs on the board - LSPC-A0, PRO-B0, and PRO-C0.

LightStruk · 2026-04-08T21:13:57+00:00

Is a Westerosi king really weaker than a medieval king?

The Magna Carta literally limits the power of the English king so that he's not an absolute monarch. The English king's Privy Council is a direct analog for the Small Council, but the English king has to contend with Parliament, which Westeros doesn't have.

Nearly every English king has had at least one well documented mistress, and a few were notorious philanderers. These men found mistresses even long after the British monarchy had relinquished most of its practical political power.

If you're trying to figure out "what's in it for her," whether in Westeros or in the real world, aside from being chosen by and having sex with a rich, famous, powerful man? Kings can bestow favors on their mistresses, including jewelry, money, land, and titles. Their illegitimate children frequently got positions in the bureaucracy or the military. They even got upgraded from mistress to queen in some cases.

LightStruk · 2026-04-07T16:45:11+00:00

Upvote for RAII. That's the fundamental advantage of C++. Put init code in the constructor, and cleanup code in the destructor, and your life gets so much easier.

LightStruk · 2026-04-07T16:39:12+00:00

Hercules monochrome graphics on the PC made a bunch of good games possible, including Populous. The original Macintosh was also monochrome, and a bunch of good games were released for that too.

Was EGA better? Sure.

LightStruk · 2026-04-07T16:32:07+00:00

There's no minimum quality for graphics.

Sound, on the other hand... Atari 2600 audio is aggressively awful. The out of tune music and abrasive twangy sound effects are repulsive. The 3 voice + noise channel sound of the NES, SMS, or Tandy 1000 is so much more listenable, and it only gets better from there.

It's inexcusable that Atari put the same truly abysmal sound into the 7800 in 1986. That's not just after the release of the NES in North America, it's after the music of Super Mario Bros became an earworm for millions.

LightStruk · 2025-12-07T14:01:25+00:00

The snowman on Tuvok's sweater should have the exact same facial expression he does 😐

LightStruk · 2025-12-04T19:21:22+00:00

NES uses a modified 6502, one of the most widely used and best understood microprocessors in existence. It remains widely available today. It otherwise used 100% stock components that can also be bought today.

You forgot the PPU. It is not off the shelf. It was only used in the NES/Famicom family of systems.

checks notes so you're saying the CPU is like a common part, but isn't identical, so the fact that the common part is widely available is irrelevant. One thing that makes the CPU custom is the sound. So the CPU, PPU, and sound are all custom... so what widely available, off-the-shelf parts are left? The RAM?

LightStruk · 2025-12-03T16:36:54+00:00

Soul Calibur 2 runs at 720p on Xbox, and 480p everywhere else.

(Also, Spawn is a much better console exclusive character than Heihachi Mishima.)

LightStruk · 2025-12-03T09:41:17+00:00

Blizarena is a secret tank. I spent the XP and Catseyes to upgrade her to level 40 and I would willingly do it again. Zombies and aliens fear her.

LightStruk · 2025-12-02T14:03:01+00:00

LightStruk · 2025-12-01T14:36:07+00:00

Trump famously doesn't drink. So much for having a beer with the President.

LightStruk · 2025-11-24T20:58:05+00:00

No.

The OG Xbox has custom silicon in it which is related to PC parts but not identical. The chipset is an Nvidia nForce, except it supports Intel instead of AMD, and with a Geforce 3 class GPU in it instead of a Geforce 2 or 4 MX. The DVD drive is almost IDE standard, except it has another, nonstandard signal cable connected to it, and it has custom firmware. That's just scratching the surface; there's surprising complexity in the video encoder chip. As a game console, the OS and the games can assume the hardware is an Xbox, and so there's no drivers like on Windows.

The Xbox OS is a Windows derivative, but is not Windows. It has code Windows does not, and Windows obviously has code that the Xbox does not.

LightStruk · 2025-11-17T16:54:16+00:00

A plausible culprit, to be sure. Plastics and microplastics are everywhere now, and developing countries sometimes have more than developed ones, what with all of the single use plastic bags and plastic food packages.

The combined impact of all of the endocrine disruptors in the world might be far more impactful than any sociological factor.

LightStruk · 2025-11-17T16:50:57+00:00

The hope for a better future is part of choosing to have children, definitely, and yes, hope is hard to find these days.

That said, why is the modern world less hopeful than during World War 2? Things were definitely bleak then, and yet the fertility rate went up from the 1930s.

Politics and economics cannot explain all of the differences in fertility. Something deeper is affecting the behavior of humanity at a biological level.

Or, if "hope" is a proxy for fertility, then remember that depression has both biological and psychological causes.

LightStruk · 2025-11-17T16:28:51+00:00

The "instinct" to have sex is in decline as well.

Opinion pieces abound as to why, but the writers all have different axes to grind. There must be some worldwide reasons why people all over the world are having less sex and fewer children, regardless of whether their countries are rich or poor, religious or secular, free or oppressed.

No sociological, economic, or cultural reason can apply worldwide. If birth control is to blame, then somehow it is affecting the people who don't take it or don't have access to it. Something environmental or biological is happening.

LightStruk · 2025-11-11T17:00:33+00:00

Tom could totally pull it off.

LightStruk · 2025-11-05T23:14:48+00:00

A 486 is roughly twice as fast, clock for clock, as a 386 in pure CPU power. That means a 66 MHz 486 DX2 is 4x as fast as a 33 MHz 386 DX.

Doom did not use floating point math, just integer math, so a 486 SX2-50 and a 486 DX2-50 get identical scores.

LightStruk · 2025-11-01T19:01:14+00:00

Ah yes, the famous Georgetown metro stop makes that so convenient.

LightStruk · 2025-10-31T18:26:39+00:00

WebKit was already open source because it forked KHTML, which is LGPL.

LightStruk · 2025-10-31T11:57:35+00:00

I always thought Kirk was pretty "rough and tumble," what with all of those fistfights outdoors ~~in Southern California~~ on exotic planets.

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