4 ms·
There are few things in our industry better than seeing someone pick up an old 8-bit machine and doing something amazing and cool with it, using modern processe
by fit2rule 10y ago
There are few things in our industry better than seeing someone pick up an old 8-bit machine and doing something amazing and cool with it, using modern processes and even tools. If you think you're an elite hacker but you've never written a scrap of 6502 code, you've got some distance to the end of the race yet, young 'un. Get out there and get yourself a real computer.
And remember this, always: old computers never die. Their users do!
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago>Get out there and get yourself a real computer. Ironically, this is what hackers from the world of Big Iron (MIT LCS, MIT AI, and MIT MDL (much of which would later become Infocom's Imps and hackers), most famously) said to micro users at the time. What an irony, that HN is full of kids who grew up on Micros, and yet the culture is a direct descendant of the LISP and UNIX lab cultures of old, whose hatred of micros was legendary.
- dsr_ 10y agoThese days, of course, a micro is what a CSAIL hacker of 1983 would have called an ultrasupercomputer. Even a Raspberry Pi has amazing storage, I/O and computing capabilities.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoObviously. But GP was talking about the micros of the 80s.
- fit2rule 10y agoAll the Big Iron hackers I used to know (and got my grommet wings rubbed by) are dead now. :(
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago...That's sad. I really don't know what else to say.
- fit2rule 10y agoWell, their computers are probably still out there, humming away. At least, in my mind they are.
- i336_ 10y agoYou've probably seen these but I thought I'd mention them anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1p1im_2uf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1p1im_2uf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWdG413nNkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWdG413nNkI Piece de resistance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdb3AQ14iVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdb3AQ14iVc (live cheering FTW) / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNRO7lno_DM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNRO7lno_DM (capture card copy) The credits in the 3rd video are an excellent example of using modern tooling. (How this was done has been documented online and is easy to find; it did take some cheating to do it but it's still awesome.) Hrm, the SID music in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mgtY2326Y0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mgtY2326Y0 is also amazing (this demo was on two floppies, I particularly like the music in the 2nd part which uses a distinctly different theme) and very obviously produced by modern tools too. (Note, that video is a 50fps capture and uses a real SID.)
- fit2rule 10y agoNice links, thanks for that! My favourite aspect of the modern 8-bit movement is watching the development of this Blakes 7 game for the Oric-1/Atmos games .. we Oric nerds are getting some real treats these days, which seem to really push the machine beyond what we expected in the 80's, and that is surely nice. Just check out the smooth animation and clever use of colours in this demo, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OskowiQuDzQ&t=39s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OskowiQuDzQ&t=39s Interesting note: OASIS is the game/script/content engine created for the purpose of making games like this on the Oric systems. How amazing we have such tools for such an obscure device, even today!
- i336_ 10y agoWow, 1MHz. That demo looks pretty cool and rather refined, yeah - the colors are indeed well-balanced. The galaxy sidescrolling does appear to be pushing the machine's limits; with that in mind the mouth animation is very smooth. I'd admittedly add at least one extra mouth-movement frame and randomly switch between them for more realistic lo-fi animation, I'd make the text sequences advance about 25% faster, and I'm not sure if the text was traditionally at the top but I kept looking for it at the bottom (where subtitles/closed captions usually live). OASIS sounds interesting, but I'm unsure where to find more info on it. Very amusingly, when I googled "oric-1 oasis", your comment on here was among the search results! http://i.imgur.com/4HUICdo.png http://i.imgur.com/4HUICdo.png Also, for other interesting things that fit in 1MHz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUN5CSWiLaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUN5CSWiLaw
- antod 10y agoI recently did a similar thing with a Spectrum emulator and zasm. As I kid I completely failed to teach myself Z80 machine code, but trying again now with way better tooling it was surprisingly easy and a whole lot of fun. I actually enjoyed the 8bit assembly experience. The feeling (on 8bit machines) that the whole computer is deterministically comprehendible was a change. I then started looking at what i386/AMD64 assembly looked like to teach myself that, and quickly decided to back away :)