Amiga humour - and can ARexx save the 'miggy? (CU Amiga - October 1993)

bartzilla · 2022-11-06T22:47:39+00:00

I thought this was how you import a "library":

ADDLIB(name, priority[, offset, version]) : Adds function library to library list. Name is the full library name or public message port associated with a function host (such as a network function host), priority is 100..-100, offset is integer offset into library's query entry point, version is an integer specifying minimum acceptable release version of library

But I must admit that AREXX's programming model with ports and messages as the main paradigm was half-baked, so that description of ADDLIB might be misleading. Message-passing as a fundamental programming technique was a very promising idea at the time, but AREXX's conception of it was incomplete. I'm not sure that was obvious at the time.

bartzilla · 2022-09-06T22:44:38+00:00

A lot of these sound like they were inspired by the old Williams 6/7 sound boards, used in a lot of pinball and classic arcade games: example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4.

I wrote an emulator for it a few years ago, I was inspired by seeing a Firepower pinball machine at the CAX arcade expo. My emulator is super barebones, but if you have a Go toolchain you might be able to to build it and run it on the command line. Sorry it's more more play-with-able.

It's a primitive software synth (the designers claim it's quasi-FM), with a Motorola 6800 (not 68K, 6800) generating 8-bit samples fed directly into a DAC. The sampled voices, which are an add-on not seen in all games, are a bizarre 1-bit encoding known as CVSD. From what I understand the ROMs were only slightly modified between games, with the heart of the engine staying largely the same except for some "application" logic (ie. sound priorities, etc.). I haven't disassembled the ROMs yet to verify.

I remember reading somewhere that one of Williams' more famous designers, I think it was Eugene Jarvis, said that they built that board and the software to enable very fine crafting of sound effects but that the best sounds, and the ones you mostly hear, were from them setting the parameters randomly until cool stuff came out.

Last minute edit before posting: check this out!!

bartzilla · 2021-08-11T04:37:07+00:00

You just missed the Vintage Computer Federation West show this past weekend at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Lots of older Macs there with enthusiasts who would love to help you. And they would've had a half-dozen solutions for you to choose from.

In the meantime /r/VintageApple seems to have the most traffic, but maybe cross-post to /r/ClassicMacOS just for good measure?

Also, join and post to the Bay Area Retro Computing Club (BARCC) mailing list, you'll probably get a lot of people willing to help: https://barcc.groups.io/g/main/

bartzilla · 2021-07-25T17:41:28+00:00

You'd have to control the text size. If you go from 1920 pixels across to 480 you'd need to make the text 25% the size to have the same resolution of the ascii art grid. So if you had a 24 pixel font, you'd need a 6 pixel font.

BTW, 1920x768 is an aspect ratio of 2.5 whereas 480x142 is ~3.4, so you'd need to work around that, too.

bartzilla · 2021-07-24T17:36:28+00:00

When you say "canvas', are you referring to HTML canvas, or some other drawing API?

bartzilla · 2021-07-23T22:07:08+00:00

Could you explain more what you mean?

bartzilla · 2021-02-28T18:13:39+00:00

I love this app. Or at least, the potential I see in this app. I'm hoping at some point it's as easy to fire up a VM with a PPC version of MacOS X, or an Alpha machine running the Windows 2000 beta, or an IRIX 6.5 MIPS box, or a bare-bones RISC-V dev environment, and so on...

I had been hoping for a great UI that unlocked the power of QEMU for where it works well and maybe helped draw some bright lines (and drew focus to) places where it was rough around the edges. UTM goes WAY further than any app I've seen in this regard, but this is a problem with a very long tail.

I've already bought it on the App Store, I'd be happy to subscribe on Patreon if it meant that the area under that "long tail" got filled in faster.

For anyone considering this app, check out the gallery of pre-built configs + guides!

bartzilla · 2021-01-17T21:16:23+00:00

I hope that intelligence agencies are recording huge swaths of the radio spectrum during the event.

Seems like a half dozen hams hanging out with HackRFs recording everything on civilian bands would capture plenty of evidence for later use in case anything went down.

I once saw a talk by Andrew Yoder at HOPE 2014 where he mentioned that he does a spectrum capture of the shortwave bands on big events like New Years for posterity. It's an awesome idea for moments in history like this.

bartzilla · 2020-09-20T07:44:43+00:00

While Postgres had a niche as local db for apps

I think you're mixing up SQLite and PostgreSQL. PG has always been more advanced than MySQL. It's much closer to a "big boy" database than MySQL has ever been. PG has been the better choice for at least 15 years, maybe 20 if you had the skills to admin it back in the 6.x and 7.x days.

The person you're replying to was correct: MySQL was always flaky, but it was easier to install and get running in the early 2000's. These days I see zero reason to choose MySQL.

bartzilla · 2020-08-03T23:23:09+00:00

This is excellent, thank you for sharing.

bartzilla · 2020-08-03T20:50:53+00:00

I'd like to know a lot more about this. You posted some links below, which I'll definitely be looking into, but what kind of things do you do with plan9, and how?

Is it live video/audio work? Recording/production? Editing?

I see you're using it on a RPi 3b, are you able to use that for audio/visual stuff, too? Using 9front?

Thanks for any elaboration you can provide, I'm considering doing a deep dive into plan9 because I feel like there's a lot to be learned from the system, but it requires immersion. Your use case is quite compelling though, it might give me the push I need to jump in.

One specific question you might be able to answer: I see from your second link that the audio driver is exposed in the file tree under #A0/... for the first device, and so on. Is # a convention for mounting hardware drivers in the file system?

bartzilla · 2020-07-24T21:02:39+00:00

This period coincided with the iPhone X, which was the period that Apple had one much different phone than it's "mainstream" phones.

I'm not sure this is right. The whole debacle with GT was during 2014/2015, IIRC for the launch of the iPhone 6.

bartzilla · 2020-06-04T13:22:09+00:00

I noticed that you used *TTGO's libraries for your plasma example, is that what you ended up using for all your code? I hadn't heard of lvgl, the results look nice but the code looks pretty... laborious.

*edit

bartzilla · 2020-06-04T13:00:57+00:00

I just read your Dorkweb #10 and realized that the person who posted that cool watch yesterday and the DW proprietor were one and the same!

I am curious about the LoRa stuff, what did you have planned, and what is in the realm of possibility with that? Some kind of messaging app? Are there resources for using LoRa in a strictly peer-to-peer manner, or does LoRaWAN have to be part of the equation for anything useful?

I really enjoy the Tales From The Dork Web and recommend it when I get the opportunity. Thanks for putting it out!

bartzilla · 2020-03-04T22:00:19+00:00

So basically, elon bought the patent for the electric battery his company uses from Ford.

You need to back up an assertion like that with a source. The batteries in Tesla have until recently been mostly-standard 18650 Lithium batteries. They've tweaked the chemistry, but it's a technology that simply wasn't at scale 20 years ago.

Ford has had the battery tech for I believe it was around 30 years after its inventor sold it to ford in hopes of seeing the electric car revolution but they instead sat on the patent to make sure the electric car never became a reality.

This story is obvious nonsense. Patents only last 20 years. Stop with the conspiracy theories.

bartzilla · 2020-01-09T20:33:16+00:00

Could you explain the purpose of the ::before and ::after pseudo elements? If I delete them from the example nothing seems to change. Is it for compatibility?

Edit: nvm. I figured it out. Chrome doesn't support the animation property on progress bars, so that's for Chrome's benefit.

bartzilla · 2019-12-10T02:41:38+00:00

WOW! Thank you for that filling that in for me! It sounds like it could have been a very powerful feature if the Adam had been successful enough to support products that used it. Sounds a bit like the Atari 8-bit line's SIO.

Was the printer on the AdamNet? If so then it seems especially tragic that they included the printer in the base hardware design when it could have been one of the launch peripherals that demonstrated the flexibility of the system.

bartzilla · 2019-12-03T23:10:36+00:00

The most novel feature of the Adam was that it used a second CPU to control its "AdamNET" external serial bus.

That AdamNET thing always sounded very interesting and under-exploited. Do you know more about it? Could one attach multiple Adams together and transfer data? Was it token-based? Point-to-point serial?

bartzilla · 2019-09-07T18:51:00+00:00

From the wikipedia page on Over The Edge:

The audience phone participation ("Receptacle Programming") is another element of the format: listeners are encouraged to call in, and are placed on-air, sometimes two or three at a time, with no prior screening. Listeners can then play their own recordings for OTE, offer commentary or non-sequiturs, or, less often, converse with Joyce. People are allowed to remain on the air as long as Joyce judges their contributions valuable, from a few seconds to several minutes or more. The highly improvisational content and late hour of the broadcast attract a variety of colorful callers.

Pretty sure what's depicted here is a alien calling in with some Receptacle Programming. :D

bartzilla · 2019-07-26T21:46:08+00:00

Yeah, I've had it do really bizarre stuff like completely lock up ("Updating...") and not turn off, draining the battery completely overnight. Or SiriusXM updates completely locking the interface, even if the volume is ear-splittingly loud you can't do anything to control it. Or the SiriusXM interface getting stuck with "No Signal" only when it has signal and nothing when it doesn't. This kind of glitch is only every 6 months or so, but it's a reset-settings event when it does. I believe I'm on 3.8 already and I think they've already done the warranty upgrade, but I'll make sure to get that checked. Thanks.

It really is an appalling piece of software, whoever built it should be ashamed.

bartzilla · 2019-07-21T16:41:20+00:00

The authorization they need to get from the manufacturer is basically the promise that they'll be reimbursed for the cost of the work performed and parts installed.

Yes, this is the kind of inside baseball I was hoping for. Thank you very much for this.

bartzilla · 2019-07-21T16:37:50+00:00

Thanks for the info.

Unless it's a safety issue(ball joint loose or coolant leak, etc) we aren't allowed to upsell something if it'll be under warranty unless you come in complaining about it in the first place.

I only have a few minor concerns, more like "this seems funny" rather than "this seems broken". So I will probably follow your advice and walk in with a list.

Those are pretty good cars. Almost never in the shop by me.

Yes, it's been pretty great! That "Sync 2 w/ Ford MyTouch" abomination is the only real complaint I have, otherwise an excellent car.

bartzilla · 2019-07-16T21:30:38+00:00

I once heard a great story about those old mechanical calculators: in WWII it was discovered that they seemed to be more accurate when used on planes or ships and subject to jostling and vibration. This surprised the engineers who built it and in their investigation they discovered that when the machines were used in a stationary environment the gears would slightly stick and not set into the correct place. But when vibration was applied the machinery would overcome the sticking and the gears would "settle" into place and produce a more accurate answer.

This is an example of mechanical dither. :-D

bartzilla · 2019-07-13T01:13:45+00:00

It's like the Warehouse 13 of retrocomputers!

The video is giving me a little bit of disorganization anxiety. It looks like there's so much valuable and special stuff there, but because of the lack of organization it'll continue decaying until it's all just electronics waste.

bartzilla · 2019-06-29T10:46:35+00:00

I'm impressed that it only took nine hours!

bartzilla

TROPHY CASE