- chris_j parentIn my father's accent/dialect (South Wales), the number seven is monosyllabic: it sounds more like "sevn" (with the v pronounced quite softly). The number "eleven" is similarly monosyllabic, and sounds more like "levn". I often use this when counting to a rhythm. Shame the numbers from thirteen onwards do have more than one syllable.
- One thing that I heard from folks who do development for retro Atari platforms is that the 68k support in GCC has been getting worse as time has gone on, and it's very difficult to get the maintainers to accept patches to improve it, since 68k is not exactly widely used at this point.
Specifically, I heard that the 68k backend keeps getting worse, whilst the front-end keeps getting better. So choosing a GCC version is a case of examining the tradeoffs between getting better AST-level optimisations from a newer version, or more optimised assembly language output from an earlier version.
I imagine GCC 6.5 probably has a backend that makes better use of the 68k chip than the GCC 11.4 that ngdevkit uses (such as knowing when to use dbra) but is probably worse in other ways due to an older and less capable frontend.
- My favourite example of this sort of redundancy is the fact that there are numerous rivers in England called the River Avon. Avon is believed to come from the Proto-Brythonic word "aβon" [0], meaning "river".
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Brythoni...
- I played Ur-Quan Masters for the first time earlier this year. Despite its age, I found it to be one of the finest games that I'd ever played. The story, in particular, is just perfect, and has just the right mixture of seriousness and comedy, very much in the same style as another (even older) classic, Starflight. Being able to build the game from source and read through the code was a nice bonus.
I highly recommend checking it out; if you can get over the rather dated graphics and gameplay mechanics then you'll find this to be a real gem.
- > I look at welsh and still go wtf lol
Ironically, Welsh is a much simpler language than Irish, and easier to learn for an English speaker. Almost completely regular orthography, much simpler grammar (with no grammatical cases). But, simple or not, the grammar and orthography are very different to English.
Do you mind if I ask how you learned Irish? It's a language that I would like to learn a little of at some point, but so far I've been too daunted to attempt it.
- NEdit was my main editor for a few years after I started using UNIX in the late 90s but couldn't get the hang of vi and emacs. I have fond memories of using it and I'm pretty sad that it was so tied to Motif that it never developed further. I used it on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and even Windows (via Cygwin). I kind of miss using an editor so uncomplicated.
- On the subject of TDD, the way I've done TDD has been very similar to the technique described in the article. Work in very small increments, try to get a very thin vertical slice of functionality working through the system as soon as possible and, whatever you build, try to get it working end-to-end as soon as you can. Of course, I use tests to drive the work but I find it very helpful to use tests to drive those thin vertical slices of functionality.
The book that really helped me to start working in this way is Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce [0]. The book has been around for a few years at this point and tech has moved on since then, as have some of the techniques, but it's still a very interesting read. (Disclosure: I was lucky enough to briefly work with one of the authors a few years ago but I was a fan of the book long before then.)
- Did I hear that you're looking for an emulator? I recommend Hatari [0] if you want to run games and demos. You'll likely need a TOS ROM image [1]; Hatari comes with EmuTOS, which doesn't work with a lot of games that make assumptions about the memory layout of internal OS structures and the like.
If you want to run well written GEM applications then I recommend ARAnyM [2], which is a lot faster, due to not attempting to do a cycle-accurate emulation of all the original hardware.
And if you have any issues with the above, there are still lots of people hanging out in Atari-Forum that might be able to help [3].
[0] https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/
- I bought Amiga Forever a few years ago in order to get the Kickstart ROMs that I needed to play some games in FS-UAE on my Mac. Trying to actually get the content onto my Mac was more painful than I'd anticipated. "To install the stuff you've just bought, just double click this .msi installer". Heh, thanks.
(I can't remember what I did in the end but I did manage to get the Kickstart ROMs into my Mac.)
EDIT: typo.
- Around ten years ago, I worked for IBM as a software engineer. The dress code at work was pretty casual, so I tended to wear jeans and a t-shirt in the office. One day, I was asked to speak at an event that would be attended by a lot of our customers. I asked my mentor, "Should I dress up? Should I wear my suit for the first time in years?" His response surprised me. He said, "These customers have come here to talk to engineers. Do you want them to think we've sent a salesman to talk to them." He made it perfectly clear that I should dress like an engineer. I confess I did get rid of the t-shirt; I wore a casual shirt with my jeans that day, and the folks that I talked to went away satisfied that they had indeed spoken with an engineer.
- Apologies, I was assuming that lproven was talking about baremetalling it but apparently not.
Re endianness, I confess I hadn't even thought of that aspect of it. (I understand that Cortex-A processors can run in big-endian mode but I bet it's not that easy.) And I bet there are a million other things that would be hard to make work.
But I still wish EmuTOS/FreeMiNT could be made to run on a modern CPU. It makes me sad to think that the 680x0 architecture basically isn't going to go much further than the Apollo 68080 (or Coldfire...), whereas a modern ARM (or X86 or even RISC-V...) chip is stupendously more powerful and I'd love to be able to run those OSes on that. Oh well, I can dream I guess...