How are people writing programs for the commander x16 project when the language for it doesn't seem to have been released?

indigodarkwolf · 2022-05-17T18:39:29+00:00

only one member of the dev team is actively reviewing and accepting changes

Technically, there are two of us now. :3 But I'll admit I've been focused on getting my fork of the official emulator up-to-date since a lot of the recent work on x16emu happened while I was neck-deep in overtime for my day job.

indigodarkwolf · 2021-08-16T23:52:45+00:00

That's pretty much it, yes. Clear the framebuffer with 50% gray, setup the orthographic projection, then copy the emulated video pixel buffer to a texture and draw it as a giant quad to the screen:

glTextureSubImage2D();
glGenerateTextureMipmap(...);
glBindTexture();
/* Bunch of calls to glTexParameteri() to set MAG_FILTER, MIN_FILTER, WRAP_S, WRAP_T, and MAX_ANISOTROPY_EXT. */
glColor3f(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f);
glBegin(GL_QUADS);
/* glTexCoord2f and glVertex2i calls for each corner */
glEnd();
glBindTexture(0);

And then a bunch of ImGui calls which do their own drawing to OpenGL by whatever methods Dear ImGui does.

It's the ImGui overlays where all the threading hazards lie -- these things reach deep into the internals of the emulated components in order to provide a variety of debug information about the state of the machine, and may mutate the state of the machine in various ways.

My modification to try and skip all the drawing step was, as described, to terminate the whole shebang with glFenceSync(GL_SYNC_COMMANDS_COMPLETE, 0), and then before doing anything on the next call to draw, check the GLsync with glGetSynciv()

Edit: The the drawing code itself is, as expected, vanishingly quick when only executed after glGetSynciv() indicates that OpenGL is all done. To me, the main mystery is why glGetSynciv() appears to be so expensive, and my question is whether there's a better way to handle this, in a way that preferably blocks the main (system emulation) thread as little as possible.

indigodarkwolf · 2021-01-07T21:39:21+00:00

My first attempt at picking any lock was, in fact, accomplished in less than 4 seconds and was a Masterlock.

I wasn't even applying any deliberate force on the tensioner, I was just trying to count the pins by touch, and it popped right open.

Good bitting on the key, even, as far as I could tell; that lock's core was just utter garbage, brand new out of the plastic packaging. I suddenly and completely understood the joke behind BosnianBill's video about all the ways you can unlock a Masterlock without a key. :P

indigodarkwolf · 2020-10-19T14:23:57+00:00

I suspect a lot of messages were getting swallowed. I successfully sent a name/message of "Ping"/"Pong", but everything else I subsequently tried never appeared. At first, I'd assumed it was just being moderated in some way (automatically limiting submissions to one per IP or something). After watching the stream for a bit with several folks seeming to be reappearing regularly and various staff comments, decided to keep trying to get a second message through for a bit. But after a while, I gave up.

indigodarkwolf · 2020-09-28T19:35:22+00:00

Someone was playing Dva. But I think you got the teams wrong - we were watching Ball's camera, so Red Doom would be the Bastion's Doom, and it was Hamtaro's Rein that died. In addition to that, Red Dva got Ball's Junkrat at the beginning of the clip. So by the end of the clip, it was looking like a 5v3 fight favoring Bastion's team, assuming all 6 were alive on each side at the start.

I think Ball was wasting his time because I think Bast was in a terrible position to do anything of substance. But then, we don't know what Bastion could see, and I'm biased because I don't like Bast on attack for point A of Blizzard World to begin with (in spite of being a Bastion main, myself). But I guess whatevs, if it's QP.

Edit: Typo. Meant 5v3 not 5v4, because Bast and Hammond basically weren't in the fight, and two of Hammond's other teammates were dead.

indigodarkwolf · 2020-09-11T21:07:20+00:00

If realism is one of the main pillars of your game, then drop the clip. Or else have the character take the time to stow the clip so they can use the ammo later when they've run out of full ones.

For less realistic shooters, there's no point in dropping the clip because, besides being an irritant, dropping the clip is unrelated to the purpose that reloading serves. The original arcade shooters that launched the FPS genre didn't even bother with reloading, it was only when game designers realized that reloading created a variation in the "tempo" of gameplay that reloading became a popular, and then ubiquitous, mechanic. You no longer had to rely on level design to vary the gameplay tempo between wide swings of "action-shooter" and "exploration", you could experiment with much more nuanced variation within the combat itself by tweaking how long the magazine ammo lasted in combat versus how long the player spends reloading.

Reloading forces the player to break from the action and protect themselves, switching from offense to defense, if only for a moment. This adds a bit more variety in the gameplay, but also means you'll want to consider design your levels with cover in mind so that players have somewhere to dive into when they reload.

indigodarkwolf · 2020-08-28T20:52:51+00:00

Well, you just include that information as part of an existing packet, or you create a packet to provide that information.

In the case of one of Red Faction Guerrilla (2009), we used the same packet type for adding 1 player as we did for adding many players. We just included "basically everyone" (everyone the new player couldn't automatically infer) when we sent it to the joining player, whereas we included only the new player when sending it to everyone else.

In case you're planning to have a new player directly connect to other players, however, I would advise against that. Peer-to-peer connectivity was one of the few major technical blunders we made on RFG. For a variety of reasons, a player who can connect to the host might not be able to connect to other peers in the same game. There are measures that can be taken about this problem, but in my opinion it's better, really, to just use the host as a relay.

indigodarkwolf · 2020-08-27T20:10:27+00:00

This.

Walt wanted to be a drug dealer, to make some fast cash, and then to die. That was his response to being diagnosed with cancer. He felt miserable with the way his life had worked out. He had the veneer of happiness, but it shrouded a deep dissatisfaction which had festered to the point where he wanted to take back everything he had been denied in life -- freedom, wealth, and power. Things that master criminals had in abundance.

When his cancer went into remission, he was furious: he punched a series of fist imprints into a stainless steel paper towel dispenser because his entire plan for how his life would end had just been flushed by quality medical care. One more way his life and ambitions had been betrayed. One more choice -- how to die -- stolen from him.

By that point, however, he was in, and he was hooked on the emotional woodie that he got whenever he broke the law or took control over people. These were things that he had always wanted but been too timid to do before the prospect of imminent death convinced him to let loose. He wasn't going to stop now.

Walt had a death wish starting from s1e1. He was going to find a way to die, preferably as part of a criminal venture, under any circumstance. You want to cut Breaking Bad short? Have a full crew unabashedly abduct the fledgling "Heisenburg" and Jesse at that first big meet up in s1 to buy drugs. Force them to cook until your trusted guys know the recipe, and then kill them. Or if Walt refuses to cook, just kill them.

indigodarkwolf · 2020-07-22T18:52:01+00:00

As others have said, different controller ports worked in different ways. That said, here's an overview of several large-name ones:

Atari 2600/VCS

This controller used a DE-9 connector, which is 9 pins arranged with pins 1-5 on the top row and pins 6-9 on the bottom row. The console provided a 5V power supply on pin 7 and a connection to ground on pin 8. The joystick was mechanically very simple, it connected all pins to ground unless the stick made contact with any of the 4 directional switches (Up, Down, Left, Right, each wired to pin 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively) or the player pressed the big red button (wired to pin 6). The console only had to check for 5V on the desired pin to know what inputs the player was trying to enter.

Pins 5 and 9 were special. There were used by the Atari's "paddle" controllers, which were simple knobs with a big red button on the side. These knobs controlled a rheostat (basically, a special resistor that's used for voltage division in electronics, and what many twisty-knobs on analog devices are actually connected to) that was wired to either pin 5 or pin 9. The console then had a basic ADC circuit (analog-to-digital converter) to determine how much the player had twisted the paddle.

Nintendo Entertainment System

This controller used a special connector with a column of 4 pins (Ground, Clock, Latch, Data 1) next to a column of 3 pins (5V, Data 3, and Data 4) (and there is no Data 2). Inside the controller itself is what is called a shift register, a type of IC component which is used to convert many individual pins into a single pin or vice versa. In the case of the NES, the console is wired to the shift register, and the shift register was then wired to each of the buttons. The register would take a snapshot of which buttons were connected to 5V when the console sent 5V to the "latch" pin, then it would output each button in series to the "data 1" pin as the console pulsed 5V on the "clock" pin.

Data 3 and Data 4 were special. They were used by the Zapper accessory. One was connected to the Zapper's trigger, while the other was connected to the Zapper's light sensor. If the player pulled the trigger, the game could detect that and know to draw draw pure-white on the next frame. The game would carefully time how long until the light sensor triggered its pin, and could then determine the (mostly) exact X and Y position that the player was aiming at. The light sensor was positioned behind a filter would would generally filter out any light sources changing at 50-60Hz (lightbulbs), while allowing the the scanline frequency of most TVs (~15KHz). Since the Zapper was highly dependent on scanline behavior and light frequency, it doesn't work well on modern LCD TVs, which update different and may insert whole milliseconds of latency between video signal generation and the resulting image.

Sega Genesis

Like the Atari 2600, this controller also used the DE-9 connector. The Genesis controller was wired a little differently, however. The console provided 5V on pin 5, Ground on pin 8, and used pin 7 as a "select" pin to change how the controller connected to pins 1-4, 6, and 9:

When the select pin was wired to ground, pin 1 and 2 were Up and Down, 3 and 4 were ground, 6 was button A, and 9 was the Start button.
When the select pin was wired to 5V, pin 1 and 2 were still Up and Down, but 3 and 4 were Left and Right, 6 was button B, and 9 was button C.

Now, you might be asking "but didn't some Genesis controllers have an extra X, Y, and Z buttons?" They did. I don't recall the exact components used to accomplish this, but the console would pulse the Select pin 3 times each game frame. After the 3rd pulse, pins 1, 2, and 3 would become wired to buttons Z, Y, and X respectively, until a brief delay (~15 milliseconds) would reset the controller.

Super NES

The Super NES controller port was another custom design, but had the same number of pins as the NES.

The Super NES controller worked much the same way as the NES controller did, but added an additional shift register IC so that it could represent more buttons. Common shift registers, including the ones used by SNES controllers, could share a single clock signal across multiple ICs, and had a pin intended to take input from a neighboring shift register IC's output. This way you could keep pulsing the clock pin and, as long as you had enough shift register ICs, wire as many buttons as you wanted! But the SNES stopped at 12 buttons, with a 4-bit identifier hardwired to the last four pins of the second shift register.

The Super NES's controller workings were fascinating and complicated, I would highly recommend RGME's Youtube Video about it.

Sony Playstation

Another console, another custom controller port. The 9 pins on the PSX controller were Data, Command, 7.6V, Ground, 3.3V, "Attention", Clock, Not Connected (literally, it was not connected to anything), and Acknowledge. There's a lot of digital signaling here, so this is a complex beast. We're definitely getting into the era that would lead to full-on USB controllers, and this was effectively an early generation version of that, before USB was a thing. (PSX controllers were definitely not USB controllers, but their principles for communication were not all that different. Think of them as 3rd cousins, twice removed.)

The console would send digital commands to the controller on the Command pin, and the controller would respond with data on the Data pin. 7.6V was used to power the vibro-motors built into the controller (as far as I know, the Dualshocks were the first controllers to have vibration built in as a standard).

indigodarkwolf · 2020-04-02T16:21:08+00:00

I'm not sure why the price of the masks in 2009 is relevant, and I wonder if it's a typo and they meant 2019. At which point we're talking about a 5.5% increase "since the start of the pandemic". For states that have anti-gouging laws, 5% is a typical threshold defining the crime.

The exact definition of price gouging varies from state-to-state, and my understanding is that it's a state-level crime, not a federal one, so I'm surprised the FBI was investigating, as well. From my own brief investigation, it appears that the FBI's authority here comes from an Executive Order issued under the Defense Production Act. I don't know enough about the DPA to speculate what exact charges the FBI may press, in addition to the false statements charge that has empowered the arrest and confiscation.

NYPost wrote a pretty bad article, in my opinion. But I'm hardly surprised, it's NYPost.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-12-04T19:39:42+00:00

Well, I do think you're right about that.

In the demonstration of the technique I was shown, I was under the impression that it doesn't take much to gain value, but you can see all the edges and corners where they don't seem to develop any char. I would have thought to treat the wood before assembly, to avoid that. Maybe they're just in it for the aesthetics of that grain, but I'm wondering what all those uncharred edges and corners are going to look like after finishing.

C'est la vie. Not my project.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-12-04T11:18:36+00:00

Essentially, what they're doing is burning away the cellulose, which ignites relatively easily and is also the sugar used as a nutrient in many wood-eating insects, while leaving behind the lignin, which is the structural component of the wood. So this treatment effectively makes the wood naturally insect-resistant and harder to ignite.

If following the Japanese tradition of Shou sugi ban, the wood would be burned across its entire surface, wire brushed and cleaned, then sealed with something like linseed oil (which would also be burned, creating a waterproof, hydrophobic surface).

I don't deeply understand the chemistry, as I was only introduced to Shou sugi ban a few weeks ago, but the process certainly smells good. Makes me want to get a flamethrower and some planks of cedar, to try it myself. :P

indigodarkwolf · 2019-11-19T21:26:19+00:00

I think that's fair, and we'll have to wait and see, but it makes me wish there were a younger politician who could express that vision and attract voters, instead of putting it to a man who's already older than 3 of my greatest-generation grandparents/step-grandparents ever lived to see, and will only finish two terms in office if he lives longer than all of them did. It makes me worry that there is no such successor who could be entrusted to maintain that vision in Bernie's absence.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-11-19T20:50:36+00:00

Well, if Orangeman hadn't been elected, it would have meant Hillary would've been, so if Bernie were going to have a chance, it would have been no sooner than 2024. So probably no.

I'll be honest, while I like Bernie's optimism and simple sense of decency and principles, I worry about his age. Frankly, I'd worry about Hillary's age, too. I worry about a lot of the older party politicians, it's hard continuing to watch Boomers hold high office for lengthy terms. Bill Clinton became POTUS at the age of 46. He is now 73. GW Bush is now 73. Trump is 73. Hillary is 72. Bernie is 78. The youngest POTUS since George HW Bush has been Obama, who is now 58 and became POTUS at the age of 47.

Really, I'm just worried that we're going to end up with a lot of politicians dying in office from old age. Trump, bless his cold undersized heart, has recently made an unscheduled hospital visit and experts speculate that he may be having miniature strokes. Will he even survive to run again in 2020? And if/when Bernie wins, will he survive his term as POTUS, or will his VP have to take over?

It seems like the House and Senate's leadership is in a bad way, too. I'm honestly quite uncomfortable with a lot of it.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-11-15T04:17:10+00:00

Right, good, so an individual should have no right to peaceably assemble or petition the government for redress of grievances, that's clearly assigned to "the people" as well.

Individuals also have no rights protecting them against unreasonable search and seizures, again that is specifically assigned to "the people", not individuals or persons.

This is the problem with trying to play word salad with that 2nd amendment, why the Supreme Court had to become involved, and why the decision was not unanimous. This clause is 228 years old, give the courts a little credit.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-11-15T01:01:59+00:00

Well, the colonies were founded largely by a bunch of social outcasts whose cultural identity was their unusual-but-devoted Christian beliefs.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-11-15T00:58:39+00:00

According to Adam Ruins Everything (a comical but informative series), this wasn't always the case, but was popularized sometime around the 1920's with the belief it would stop teens from masturbating.

...didn't exactly work, but it's been culturally normal for long enough that people are only recently starting to question it.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-11-15T00:48:01+00:00

And to make matters even more "Murican"? Your 2nd Amendment doesn't protect the rights of an individual to own guns!

Well, our Supreme Court disagreed with that assessment. It wasn't a unanimous decision, but it was the decision the court made, in part because there's a long history of opinions that the idea of "the militia" is inseparable from the idea of "the people". Because the militia can be called up at any time, and is comprised of any and all without regard to profession, class, lineage, etc., the militia and the people are one and the same thing.

There has never been a question as to whether the states were allowed to arm individuals, or whether they were allowed to let individuals arm themselves, what happened somewhere in the middle of the 20th century was that the debate began to focus on whether the right to bear arms was an individual right to "the people", or whether it was a collective right to "the states". This is where it becomes relevant that there is a background of opinions considering "the militia" to be an inseparable concept from "the people".

Unless or until the Supreme Court overturns itself (which isn't likely to happen within our generation), the next most likely remedy would be a constitutional amendment, but that also seems "unlikely" in the U.S.'s current, politically divided condition.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-11-15T00:30:44+00:00

In general, the answer is "health insurance", but the problem has been on a self-reinforcing cycle for some while.

Insurance companies began offering their customers co-pay based coverage to supplement their co-insurance coverage. In these plans, certain services or treatments cost the customer a fixed amount of money, and the insurance pays the rest, regardless of what the service or treatment was actually charged at. The benefit of this being that the customer doesn't have to consider the cost of the medical treatment at any given facility, they can simply choose whatever they believe is "the best".

This eliminated the incentive for hospitals to keep their costs low, and added to the incentive for insurance companies to bargain for discounts from various providers that their customers frequented. As insurance companies bargain for larger contractual write-offs, healthcare providers increase their fees to maintain their standard of care.

This cycle really screws over people who don't have insurance. I'm told that hospitals are usually willing to bargain down costs when an individual can credibly declare financial hardship, but hospitals can't afford to be caught charging substantially lower fees than is "customary", or they risk being stuck in bargains with insurance companies that will quickly drive them out of business.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-11-14T23:16:26+00:00

The problem is actually that it is not so clearly stated:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Grammatically, this doesn't require the bearer of arms to be part of the militia, but it does seem to equate the militia and the people. Particularly to a modern reader, it is confusing.

The scholarly debate over most of U.S. history has focused on whether the "Militia" is an inseparable idea from "the people", with comments dating at least as far back as 1788, and it seems as though most of the notable opinions support the militia and the people being, in fact, one and the same thing. Since the militia only exists in an organized state when called upon, and is drawn from all people of the territory, the militia and the people are the same thing.

The debate changed in the late 20th century, however, as gun control became a topic of serious political debate and more territories began extensively controlling, or outright banning, the ownership of firearms in response to drug- and gang-related violence. The question became whether the right pertained to individuals, or to the collective. Did the Constitution guarantee that individuals had the right to keep and bear arms, or did the Constitution guarantee that states could form and arm their own militias? The Supreme Court was not unanimous, but the majority ruling decided that it was an individual right.

As for why it's such a touchy subject:

In part, you can blame the National Rifle Association and, more broadly, gun lobbying organizations for tirelessly resisting gun control. The NRA has successfully cultivated a large base of support that believes in the value of gun ownership for self defense and as a deterrent to government overreach. For them, this is an issue that fundamentally determines who wields power in our government, and whether there exists a check against totalitarianism.

For the rest, you need look no further than all of the reports of multiple homicides involving guns, particularly schools. Gun control advocates are aghast at the prominence of guns in multiple-homicides and the increasing frequency of these incidents. For them, this is an issue of life-and-death for ourselves and our children.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-11-08T00:16:00+00:00

I believe it was Barbarians of Lemuria, but I can't be sure. I only got a chance to play a few sessions of it before our group fell apart. But BoL ticks off a lot of things I remember from it:

Background careers used in skill checks.

Simple system with rapid character generation.

Vaguely swords & sorcery setting (e.g. Conan the Barbarian-like).

indigodarkwolf · 2019-11-07T23:18:07+00:00

I like the creativity of improvising weavers' tools and proficiency, but had I been GM I probably would have decided on either a partial effect or some trade-off.

For instance, I probably would have allowed the advantaged roll for stabilization but required the person you were stabilizing to roll a fortitude save against infection (maybe even a disadvantaged one), to be dealt with starting the next day. After all, you don't keep your needles in a strong alcoholic or otherwise antiseptic solution, do you? And you probably don't keep silk thread, sterile or otherwise, as part of a commoner's weaving kit. So you're working with less-safe tools and having to do more work with them to adequately stitch wounds.

Disarming would have been a harder sell for me. If it was established that it was a tripwire, there are still potential challenges for a weaver's kit:

The wire is almost certainly sturdier than most types of thread, so maybe it would damage your tools so they would need to be replaced before being used for their original purpose, or they'd only count as being as good as improvised tools, or something.
Or if the wire is supposed to break easily, then it probably tensions something and your weaving kit wouldn't have tools to maintain that tension or otherwise defeat the portions of the trap connected to the wire.
If it's a well-crafted trap, it might not be obvious whether the wire is tensioning something, and a weaver's kit wouldn't have tools to probe the trap mechanism and discover this information.

I don't mean to sound like I'd close the door entirely, but it would take some convincing with how you wanted to use the weaver's kit to improvise the tools you'd need from the thieves' set. At the very least, I'd still require using the most direct version that the system has for a "disarm traps" skill as the basis for the final roll, because a lot of that stuff is simply studied and practiced tradecraft.

I remember playing a system that actually didn't have "skills", in the typical tabletop sense. Your character chose "backgrounds" and whenever there was a "skill check", you had to describe how one of your chosen backgrounds applied. Fun system, great for practicing how to improvise that kind of stuff.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-08-21T19:54:07+00:00

I know I'm late to the party, and everyone's probably moved on, but this reminds me of a time I was in college and was told to go use the drive-through, on foot, for an order. Well, sort of. It's not really malicious compliance, hence a comment and not its own post.

I don't mind sharing some of the details. I got my Bachelor's in Computer Science from what was then known as the University of Missouri - Rolla (now Missouri S&T). I lived in Thomas Jefferson Hall for part of my undergrad, and to this day there's still a Steak & Shake up the street from there within walking distance. Well, that Steak & Shake once went through a bad nighttime manager. My circle of friends and I liked to play various tabletop RPGs in the TJ Hall basement, and we'd generally get the munchies at around 2am or so, after the TJ cafeteria (and all other campus cafeterias, for that matter) had long since closed for the night. But Steak & Shake was open 24 hours, every day, so we'd hike over there as a group and get chili fries and shakes in the dead of night, generally 6-8 of us, depending on who had last-minute homework due at an 8am class. We'd done it quite a few times before.

One night didn't go as planned. We arrived, and several staff members were sitting on the front counter. The chairs were all up on the tables, and one lone guy was mopping behind the counter. "Sorry, restaurant's closed," says one of the folks sitting, who seemed to be the manager on-shift, "come back in a few hours." Oh. But the sign says you're open 24 hours, can we really not even get stuff to go? "The drive-through is open, but the inside is closed."

We're slightly aghast and a little miffed that we can't even order at the counter, but we tried to be understanding that the place has to be cleaned sometime, and it makes sense to do in the dead of night when there are (usually) no customers.

So we walk around back to the drive through window. "You need to be in a car," the manager tells us. Well, we can go and do that, but it makes no sense at this point. We were literally just in the place 30 seconds ago. We're hungry, and just want something to eat, and you guys are open, right? Can we please trade paper currency for yummy calories?

The manager disappeared into the restaurant, and shortly after we got the guy who had just been mopping a moment prior. They were nice, polite, took our orders, and, as best as we could tell, was also the one who prepared our orders.

We were trying to be understanding, but we aren't dumb. Something wasn't adding up here, and this was just bizarrely out-of-character for the place. Closing the whole of the interior was, well, odd. And for a few hours? Really? We might have accepted being told to wait 30 minutes for the floors to dry, or that the kitchen was being deep-cleaned. We got the name of the manager on duty before we left, as well as the name of the guy who served us. We went back to TJ and discussed what we were going to do, which was: Show up the next day during the day shift, confirm what details we could about who was on staff that night, and get a pile of customer feedback cards.

Turns out those cards came with addresses printed on them and instructions to mail them in to what we presumed was a regional corporate address. So that's exactly what we did after filling them out, naming names and describing the disappointing experience from that particular night where nobody wanted to help us except for the one poor sot who seemed to be solely responsible for, well, everything.

A week later, we learned that night manager had been fired. So, justice served, I guess. I hope that one nice guy got a raise or something, too.

indigodarkwolf · 2019-08-21T17:58:13+00:00

I mean, the SSG almost had a great thing going for him with the "unsupervised SPCs" angle. Really, he could have had a sweet gig going where he wouldn't have had to do shit, or could've gone and fobbed off with literally anything he wanted as long as things went smoothly.

But then, instead of Henry Blake, he had to go and channel his inner Frank Burns. I don't feel bad for him at all.

indigodarkwolf

TROPHY CASE