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Firewall? Ports? Communication proxy? It has 64K 16-bit words. What exactly are you expecting the default software to do that opens it up to viruses?

by nknight 15y ago

ajuc 15y ago
Someone should port http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki for this :)
jiggy2011 15y ago
Who knows. Assuming there is some way for players to transfer stuff between their computers and therefor address spaces all you need is one rogue jmp instruction. Not to mention the usual social engineering stuff. "Hey install this great program, it'll make your guns 200% more powerful"
jerf 15y ago
Do not underestimate those old computers. When you remove audio, visual, and textual data from your programs, remove all the code for handling those and slinging them about and processing them, when you remove the textual file formats and replace them with hand-optimized binary, when you give up on any form of structured modern programming and just hand-compile custom assembler, when your opcodes aren't 64-bits wide, and so on and so on, you can get a lot done in 128KB of code. Obligatory (but illustrative of my point): http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html
- stephengillie 15y ago
  Exactly. Remember the 64kb video demos from 2004? http://www.theproduct.de/ http://www.theproduct.de/
  - jlawer 15y ago
    Problem was most of the demos used many many megs of ram as they procedurally generated objects and stored them in memory. The 64k demos were disk size. Assuming memory mapping is used for displays the (128k of ram (64k of words)) is also needed to hold your display buffer. Assuming a mere 320 x 200 x 8 screen will use 1/2 of your entire virtual memory space. Look for demos of what people do on C64 demos for a better idea. Yes you can run a UNIX, yes you can talk TCP... but its going to chew up a lot of the capacity for that infrastructure. I expect very light weight protocols, TCP/IP is likely too heavy weight.
wglb 15y ago
Wow, like if you are programming assembly, that is a pretty huge space. One example of what can be done in 128k bytes is http://www.ciexinc.com/telemed/index.html http://www.ciexinc.com/telemed/index.html.

Firewall? Ports? Communication proxy? It has 64K 16-bit words. What exactly are you expecting the default software to do that opens it up to viruses?

by nknight 15y ago

Firewall? Ports? Communication proxy? It has 64K 16-bit words. What exactly are you expecting the default software to do that opens it up to viruses?

ajuc 15y ago

Someone should port http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki for this :)

jiggy2011 15y ago

Who knows. Assuming there is some way for players to transfer stuff between their computers and therefor address spaces all you need is one rogue jmp instruction. Not to mention the usual social engineering stuff. "Hey install this great program, it'll make your guns 200% more powerful"

jerf 15y ago

Do not underestimate those old computers. When you remove audio, visual, and textual data from your programs, remove all the code for handling those and slinging them about and processing them, when you remove the textual file formats and replace them with hand-optimized binary, when you give up on any form of structured modern programming and just hand-compile custom assembler, when your opcodes aren't 64-bits wide, and so on and so on, you can get a lot done in 128KB of code. Obligatory (but illustrative of my point): http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html

stephengillie 15y ago
Exactly. Remember the 64kb video demos from 2004? http://www.theproduct.de/ http://www.theproduct.de/
- jlawer 15y ago
  Problem was most of the demos used many many megs of ram as they procedurally generated objects and stored them in memory. The 64k demos were disk size. Assuming memory mapping is used for displays the (128k of ram (64k of words)) is also needed to hold your display buffer. Assuming a mere 320 x 200 x 8 screen will use 1/2 of your entire virtual memory space. Look for demos of what people do on C64 demos for a better idea. Yes you can run a UNIX, yes you can talk TCP... but its going to chew up a lot of the capacity for that infrastructure. I expect very light weight protocols, TCP/IP is likely too heavy weight.

wglb 15y ago

Wow, like if you are programming assembly, that is a pretty huge space. One example of what can be done in 128k bytes is http://www.ciexinc.com/telemed/index.html http://www.ciexinc.com/telemed/index.html.