Becky

Interested in retro computing, music, and philosophy. Happily living as the real me.

If you have no posts and no avatar, don't bother trying to follow, thanks.

Also, I block reply guys. Get over yourselves.

Minors DNI. I’ll block you if I have to.

#nobot
#nobridge

trans rights: are human rights
is a bear?: possibly, but probably not

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Last Notes

2024-10-01 18:23:54

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We’d first have to get all of the talking heads in the media to stop repeating the BS.
Even someone going on the air and saying, “more people trust Republicans than Democrats on the economy” cements the idea in people’s heads.

2024-10-01 18:09:48

You can tell how old a programmer is by mentioning “68k assembly” and seeing if they get all misty eyed.

2024-08-31 16:34:04

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and who in the world wants negative comments anyway?

2024-08-31 00:25:36

Just finished watching The Acolyte, or as I like to call it, Law and Order: Coruscant.
The visuals were amazing, some of the fight scenes were amazing. But plot-wise, it was a huge mess.
I wish Disney did better on this one, the actors deserved better, honestly. And it’s sad too, because it ends more or less on a cliffhanger, and there will be no resolution.
I’m kind of tired of the “The Jedi are bad, actually”, takes too. It’s actually ok for someone to be good without having a secret bad side.
Overall, I really think Paramount does better with Star Trek than Disney has ever done with Star Wars.

2024-08-30 13:30:14

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That’s fair. I was mostly referring to people who insist that something needs to be written in the new hot language simply because it exists now.
Actual reasons for doing something on the other hand, are actual reasons.

2024-08-29 20:05:21

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That’s pretty awful, but I’ve seen it so many times now. Back when J2EE was the new hotness, there were a bunch of engineers who had to use every damn feature of it, no matter how stupid the result was.
And there’s no damn reason to write a micro service in Rust, especially when python and JS are already there.

2024-08-28 20:29:31

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Could definitely be worse.

2024-08-26 18:48:15

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I *love* Canada, honestly. The Toronto area is like a second home to me. If it were completely up to me, I’d be living there already.

2024-08-26 18:42:29

#toronto question…. If you’re staying at a hotel near the airport, is there a train that can take you to downtown?
(A couple of trains is ok, too. Just trying to avoid busses / driving.)

2024-08-25 01:21:23

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Ok, I'm sold. I've seen the bread you make.

2024-08-25 01:10:57

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Nice- I’ve always wanted a small orchard with a cider bar right there on the property.

2024-08-25 01:04:04

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Indeed. Write some music, maybe make a compiler. Could be nice.

2024-08-24 01:58:38

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My goal is to make effect loops for two of my guitar amps without actually modifying them.
If I can make a decent drawing, suppose you could mock something up that I can print at the library?

2024-08-20 21:04:18

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Um, Corey looks like he might be naked.

2024-07-09 17:49:52

[@mos_8502](https://studio8502.ca/@mos_8502 ) Have you ever seen this?
http://www.6502.org/users/andre/osa/index.html

2024-07-08 19:03:14

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It’s weird just how often Ohio gets hit by tropical storms / hurricanes.
By the time it gets here, it will just be a nice rain, but it’s still weird to see it.

2024-07-08 02:14:53

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Once in a generation, a champion is given unto us.

2024-07-07 20:11:37

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Exactly. I kind of think the ‘816 is even better suited for Pascal than C, but there’s no free Pascal compiler that targets it either.
*TRSE is “Pascal” only in a if you squint really hard kind of way.
Someone needs to bring Action! back.

2024-07-07 20:06:15

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I’ve looked at this a few times, but the biggest problem is that it’s mainly 6502-based. The 65816 is different enough than the 6502 that adding support is a huge undertaking. (I’ve looked into updating cc65 for this, too.)
The 65816 is really a whole different architecture than the 6502 that just happens to have a 6502 emulation mode tacked on to it.
I know they’re looking at it, but I doubt they’ll get anywhere we’d need it anytime soon.

2024-07-07 19:11:22

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This is fine, you should definitely use what you’re familiar with.
I wish we had an open source C compiler, but we don’t.

2024-07-07 17:40:58

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He really just needs to pull himself by the bootstraps.

2024-07-07 17:34:52

Does anyone know if it's safe for a #trans woman to travel to #Italy?
My daughter had a medical emergency while on a trip over there, and I might need to go be with her / get her and bring her home.
I would only be there for a couple of days. I’m mostly interested in knowing if it’s illegal there to use public restrooms, that sort of thing. (I know the government is right wing, I’m just interested in immediate threats.)
Please boost.
Thank you.

2024-07-06 22:19:38

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The time that my mother always referred to as “the butt crack of dawn.”

2024-07-06 14:16:15

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anything before 8:30 is early

2024-07-05 20:51:12

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Ah, ok, that’s cool. I guess I thought that console_print would be called from the terminal emulation code.

2024-07-05 20:38:29

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I didn’t know that’s how cooked mode worked. Good to know.
[@mos_8502](https://studio8502.ca/@mos_8502 ) Do we even have a raw vs. cooked mode? I’m not totally sure it’s necessary, but I guess lower level stuff might need ‘raw’ behavior while higher level stuff might need ‘cooked’.
This is one of those places where straddling the 8-bit/more serious computer line is a bit awkward. I don’t remember what a C64 does when CHROUT gets a CR.

2024-07-05 19:43:15

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end of line w/o newline should wrap to next line.
I don’t know if generating a cr/lf is necessary, although once we wrap, we’d most likely reset the ‘current column’ variable.
Anyone know what MS-DOS does here?

2024-07-05 17:56:07

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tbh, that kind of bit shifting is kind of painful on a 65xx anyway.

2024-07-05 17:52:16

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That’s kind of what I was thinking too. Even trying to fit more than 80 columns into a line of 640 pixels is kind of a bad idea anyway.

2024-07-05 17:37:21

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Ah, ok. Yeah, I think what you’re looking at is probably the best way to go unless you want to get tricky and use bits instead.
The only thing I can see wrong with your idea is that it kind of hard codes things to 80 columns. Not sure that’s a problem though.
Where does the tab stop table live in memory?

2024-07-05 17:28:17

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Are you basically making programmable tab stops? Otherwise, I’d think just doing some sort of modulo logic based on the tab size would work.

2024-07-04 20:24:28

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That looks really good.

2024-07-04 18:29:23

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Darth Bortles

2024-07-03 19:38:22

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No worries, you're really good about that sort of thing.

2024-07-03 19:34:26

So, I'm back, kinda... I needed to take a couple days away because of all of the political posts were sending my anxiety to really high levels.
I'm going to curate my feed a bit more. I've added some filters, but I'm going to start aggressively muting/blocking people who post on politics w/o CW's.
We'll see how this goes, I guess.

2024-06-30 18:08:46

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Yeah, I think I just never connected with video games in general… I mean, I liked Galaga, Defender, Tron, even Track n’ Field, but anything that I can’t just play for like 5 minutes and move on is too much.

2024-06-30 16:04:05

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I probably missed it due to age…. I never got into PC gaming or any consoles past the Atari 2600.
I just thought it was funny because I kept seeing trans women talking about it on BlueSky and Twitter.

2024-06-30 03:03:05

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You’ll have a community to guide.

2024-06-30 02:20:27

The New York Times is the journalistic equivalent of a 1972 Ford Pinto.

2024-06-29 00:56:31

What is it with #trans women and ChronoTrigger? Did I miss an important memo or something?

2024-06-26 19:08:54

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There is plenty of software you just can’t get on a Mac or on Linux. Games being one, FPGA suites being another.

2024-06-26 18:38:56

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Sure, but that’s how you end up with software that only supports Windows. Neither Linux or macOS are worth the cost otherwise.

2024-06-26 18:36:40

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To be fair, cross platform GUIs are hard and companies are cheap.
I wish Sun didn’t fuck up with Java so badly, but Microsoft certainly “helped” with that.

2024-06-26 18:32:58

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So docker is just insane, but are flatpak/snap worse than macOS app bundles?

2024-06-26 18:30:55

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Unfortunately, this and Electron both exist.

2024-06-25 19:17:15

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So, basically, interfacing directly with the bus?

2024-06-25 18:37:02

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Do you think the clock port could provide an interface to an ESP32-based wifi adapter? (Or would it be limited to 9600 baud?)

2024-06-25 18:33:53

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Yeah, I figure someone will eventually make a ESP32-based wifi/internet adapter for it.
We easily have enough horsepower to hit text-based BBSs, for one thing. Hitting http-based services isn’t too out of the question, although a web browser would be.

2024-06-25 18:30:52

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Sounds good to me. What key would you use for compose? Maybe right-alt or right-super?

2024-06-25 18:10:15

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Yeah, I think supporting that level of Pascal (which I think it what you’re getting at) is definitely possible.
Turbo Pascal is famously compiled to native code though, so would it still be worth it?
note: I’d still want to support calling out to assembly from within Pascal or BASIC. There’s nothing about byte code that would preclude that.
I don’t know that I would expect to just recompile TP CP/M programs directly, however. I wouldn’t want that to be the success criteria.

2024-06-25 17:53:20

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Here's the real question though:
What I’m proposing is a lot of work. Maybe a few months worth. If I built such a thing, would anyone use it? I’m not sure how people will use the Sentinel yet. If the main use ends up being for games written in assembly or C, then that’s a lot of work to go through.
Anyway, ideas/comments/etc. welcomed.
(3/3)

2024-06-25 17:53:19

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The ability to bootstrap on another machine would come in handy, because you could build the compiler on the other machine in the target language itself, compile it, and run it both on the bootstrapping machine or the Sentinel itself.
Since we’re planning on ANSI control codes, the editor would be usable on the bootstrapping machine too.
The ultimate goal would be to have the ability to program the Sentinel on the Sentinel. All the source code would also be available, so you can enhance the BASIC compiler, for example, and rebuild it right on the machine.
There’s another nice thing the p-system could do for us: abstract the sort-of banked memory away from the high-level compiler. You’d have the stack and direct page things in bank 0, but any program you’d write could be anywhere in memory.
(2/3)

2024-06-25 17:53:18

@npub1qnu…hzwk @npub1kz8…j78f @npub1wm7…mk4m
So I'd like to brainstorm a bit about an on-device programming environment for #sentinel65x…
Apple Pascal used UCSD p-code, and although I wouldn’t want to port that to the ‘816 for a lot of reasons, a new p-code environment could be really useful. (So when I say “p-code”, I am not at all implying UCSD p-code, just byte code.)
What I’m thinking:
Build the p-code interpreter (“p-system”) into the system ROM. That would make it always available on the machine, and something people could expect to have. It wouldn’t run quite as fast as native code, but my bet is that it could be really close to running as quickly as say, code generated by cc65.
The p-system could be easily bootstrapped on another machine. Ultimately, it could be used to build a text editor and a BASIC/Pascal/COMAL/etc compiler. You could even build a decent 65816 assembler right there. (1/3)

2024-06-25 16:12:32

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I’m still toying with the idea of a non-line number basic, similar to FastBASIC or BASICXL.
At that rate, we’re talking actually building an AST instead of line-by-line interpretation, which I think would work better with the way the 65816 segments things.
The big question to answer then becomes one of interpretation vs. p-code vs. native code.

2024-06-25 14:57:01

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Putting the interpreter in a different bank is easy. Splitting up the different data types into different banks gets really complicated. Performance would be impacted by having to switch back and forth between data banks.
Imagine what the interpreter would have to do in order to deal with:
let a = myVar + val(myStringVar$)
A BASIC interpreter only deals with the byte it needs at a time, so you have to switch banks for the ‘let’, then the ‘a’, then back to get the name of myVar, then to the integer bank to get the value of myVar, then back to read the ‘val’, etc.
That’s why I think you’d have to more or less rewrite the thing, because once you bring dealing with separate banks into things, you might as well rewrite it to use 24-bit pointers.

2024-06-25 14:15:23

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That all being said, looking at the code, it’s well done and would be a great starting point. The MIT license is nice too.
I’ve looked at porting EhBasic before, and it’s a lot more complicated plus has license problems.

2024-06-25 14:13:25

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There’s like 3 ways to go about porting it:
1) Just change the origin, and reassemble. This won’t take advantage of any 65816 features including the extra memory. (You’d also have to update any system calls the code does.)
2) Update it enough to hardcode the program bank and data bank registers to different banks. This makes sure you have a whole 64k for BASIC programs, but can’t say, split BASIC programs and data into separate banks or take advantage of any other features. (This may be good enough. A more than 64k BASIC program is going to be a bit unwieldily anyway.)
3) More or less rewrite the code to really take advantage of the ‘816. This is doable, but when you’re done, you could probably just started from scratch.
Any of the 3 can take advantage of the sound & graphics capabilities of the Sentinel. It’s just the extended memory that’s hard to access.
@npub1qnu…hzwk

2024-06-24 16:13:00

So in other words, if a bunch of volunteers built a hospital, but after 9 years, the building was completely inaccessible to disabled people, it would be wrong to complain about it, and the person making the complaint was the real problem.
From: @npub1p09…m5vl
https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/112667452867970538

2024-06-23 02:27:13

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I’d very much prefer a sane character set where ‘A’ is decimal 65 as opposed to one where it’s 193.

2024-06-21 20:06:12

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What fucking standing does the POS AG of Missouri have to sue New York?

2024-06-21 15:55:35

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I wish I was up to the task of writing a C compiler, but C is just over my head for that sort of thing.
I still want to write a Pascal compiler, but parsing C has complexities that I’m just not into dealing with.

2024-06-21 15:45:31

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Nope. He’s been patching lcc lately, I think, but I have my doubts on how good of a compiler it actually is.
I’ve looked at cc65’s source code before, and it’s pretty clean, but really, modifying a 6502 code generator to take advantage of the ‘816 is a much bigger undertaking than it sounds. It’s not just a fancy 6502.

2024-06-21 13:08:33

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There is a 65816 port, but it’s limited to bank 0, mostly because it relies on cc65.

2024-06-21 02:14:07

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Yeah- use it as a sort of integer math co-processor.
I don’t remember… Are you planning to use the SPI capabilities on that thing? If not, there’s two registers you could repurpose.
Anyway- just a weird idea.

2024-06-21 02:01:59

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I’ve had the same idea.
Of course, I’ve also had weird ideas about wondering what it would take to offload this sort of thing to VERA.

2024-06-20 20:54:50

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Anything special about the beans and rice besides the two obvious ingredients?
(Trying to take my rice game up a notch)

2024-06-20 02:52:26

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The “architect” at my old job kept getting pissy because I kept using them in React-based code.
Kind of stupid on his part, but he was very interested in preserving his Authoritiah, if you know what I mean.

2024-06-20 02:50:08

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If you get bored and want to throw yourself at it before I can get to it, please just let me know. I don’t want to hold anything up.
Otherwise, I’ll let you know once I start working on it.

2024-06-20 02:48:09

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Yeah, that’s a really nice mode, especially with 16-bit index registers.
The stack relative modes are pretty interesting too.

2024-06-20 02:45:26

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That sounds really straight forward.

2024-06-20 02:40:39

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I want to, yeah. I just haven’t had time to work on it yet, beyond thinking about how it should work.
When I get a chance, I’m going to grab your console code & go from there. It really shouldn’t be too hard.
Hmmm…. MS-DOS was open sourced, I wonder if ANSI.SYS is part of that? Wrong architecture, but the techniques should be informative.

2024-06-20 02:29:58

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Thanks, I appreciate that.

2024-06-20 02:26:49

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That’s awesome! I’m a little burnt from work right now, but I hope to do some more coding soon. I have to get the chip-select stuff working in the emulator.

2024-06-20 01:02:47

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*looks at temperature*… I’m not sure climate change is really having a hard getting in the news right now.

2024-06-19 02:05:29

You ever get a reply guy that seems a bit strange, so you look at their post history and Holy Moly are they ever out there?

2024-06-18 17:55:07

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So, the driver is almost the same thing as ‘raw’ mode for a TTY, I think.
Just so we’re on the same page, when you say ‘cursor positioning’, what exactly are you thinking? If you mean providing a gotoxy() routine, then yeah, I think that’s good for the driver. On the other hand, if you mean advancing the cursor after printing a character, then I think we should probably wrap that in with the ANSI code.
I think the driver should be there to handle the ugly stuff like:<li>set/get a character or color attribute from the text buffer.</li><li>scroll the text buffer (whether or not the buffer size matches the visible screen)</li><li>own the irqHandler that rebuilds Vera’s copy of the text.</li><li>(possibly) provide a sprite based cursor and a routine to position it / turn it on or off.</li><li>provide a kprint(x, y, message) type of routine that can fling a string at the screen for debugging purposes.</li>
(1/2)

2024-06-18 14:10:40

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I think it’s definitely a good idea to have some sort of text output available as soon as the machine boots up.
I also really like the shadow text buffer idea you were working on. It takes care of a few problems, especially if we would want to have a C64 or Atari 800 built-in editor, which I think would be pretty awesome.
What if we split the text output into two: (a) a driver that includes a basic CHROUT kind of thing plus the vblank-driven redisplay of the buffer. Part (b) would be to implement ANSI control codes.
‘A’ would also need a driver-level way of moving the cursor and setting the current text attribute, but at this level, that should be routines we can JSR to, not interpreting control codes.
If you’re still ok doing ‘a’, then I can code up ‘b’. (I’d have to wait until your driver is done though.)

2024-06-18 02:56:25

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Was thinking the same thing.

2024-06-17 23:19:28

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Well, if nothing else, that would make scrolling a heck of a lot easier, probably quicker, too.