jimsmart

15 ms·

91.
by jimsmart 4y ago
Indeed, I totally agree on all points :)
92.
by jimsmart 4y ago
But the overheads of tracking which characters might have been changed here completely outweighed simply scrolling / updating the whole thing. The code becomes too involved in tracking changes, and fudging about with- / rewriting-
93.
by jimsmart 4y ago
That's a nice little trick, cheers for sharing. (Not that I'll get a chance to use it these days, but still)
94.
by jimsmart 4y ago
No, but that's an easy enough mistake to make :) — It's called 38-column mode, and when enabled the VIC shrinks both borders in by 8 pixels, and then offsets the screen according to the x-scroll register bits. [Edit: another sourc
95.
by jimsmart 4y ago
> Not that the C64 SID chip was even remotely intended to be able to play sampled audio in the first place! I don't recall how SAM did it, but sample playing on the C64 SID chip was indeed a nice trick — it was actually done by modu
96.
by jimsmart 4y ago
You generally don't handle that case! :) — Instead you let the player move within a rectangular area onscreen, and decide on which way you are going to scroll the screen in advance (or rather: after the fact, depending on how one looks
97.
by jimsmart 4y ago
Here's a link to info about the PDS kit, in case anyone is interested: https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/PDS_development_system
98.
by jimsmart 4y ago
Yeah, we all used PDS too, although not originally. Pretty good system, particularly for that era, and cost/capability-wise (though they weren't that cheap, and folk eventually started cloning the boards for them, IIRC). I remembe
99.
by jimsmart 4y ago
Ex C64-games coder here! — If your sprite multiplexer was taking most of CPU during the screen draw time, then honestly it was not a particularly great multiplexer! ;) Most decent multiplexers took just a scanline or two/three, multipl
100.
by jimsmart 4y ago
Ex-C64 games coder here: you are are correct - no, you couldn't relocate/page-flip the colour map, like you could the character map. So you had to update it all somehow on the required frame. The fastest technique I saw for updati
101.
by jimsmart 4y ago
Another examples of a popular modern confidence scams is the refund scammers. They pretend to be from Amazon, McAfee, Norton, Microsoft, etc., and tell you that a charge has been made, offering a refund. Or they claim hackers are on your co
102.
by jimsmart 4y ago
There's lots of good advice in other replies re getting up to speed on various CS stuff. But I suspect that it might be the lack of an 'overarching framework' that is perhaps more problematic here? Lots of folk make their own
103.
by jimsmart 4y ago
It's perhaps worth noting that it took Microsoft a long time to make Windows into a gaming platform. Their initial release of GameSDK (which they later renamed to DirectX) was pretty lame. As were early versions of DirectX. They also d
104.
by jimsmart 4y ago
Did the hacker(s) bypass 2FA here? Or was it not set up on this account? If 2FA wasn't in use, then maybe the account was hit with a password brute-force attack.
105.
by jimsmart 5y ago
Most likely: Journeys Out Of The Body, and/or Far Journeys, both by Robert Monroe. I recall borrowing both from the library and reading them when I was in my late teens or early twenties, found them utterly fascinating. The Monroe Inst
106.
by jimsmart 5y ago
Anyone got a link that bypasses the paywall, please?
107.
by jimsmart 5y ago
I learnt a lot from the book 'Writing Compilers and Interpreters' by Ronald Mak. I have the original edition of the book, which is C++ based (building a language that compiles to x86 assembly), but I see on googling that there is
108.
by jimsmart 5y ago
Furthermore, you might find the following four part article to be of interest - there’s plenty of other info easily googled, whether on the background history, or the specifics. https://gardenculturemagazine.com/history-of-h
109.
by jimsmart 5y ago
Welcome to hydroponics, specifically water culture growing! It’s quite complicated, a whole science itself perhaps, but the idea is simple: grow a plant/plants in a soilless or liquid medium. It’s complicated because plants require cer
110.
by jimsmart 5y ago
Rosetta 2 kicks in, performs a JIT/AOT translation of the x86 instructions to ARM instructions, executes those, and caches the resulting ARM binary for later use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)
111.
by jimsmart 5y ago
Slightly different but similar thing: SublimeText and a few other modern editors allow one to open multiple side by side views, which may allow you to achieve similar. Most of them can do this with distinct source files, but I know Sublime
112.
by jimsmart 5y ago
This article is from mid June (2021) — the NFT was actually sold on the 30th of June, fetching $5.43m.
113.
by jimsmart 5y ago
Current sources [0] put the (final) flooding of Doggerland as late as 6500–6200 BCE (based, in part, upon the dating of archaeological finds from the region) — which is much later than the Younger Dryas — with suggestions that its submergen
114.
by jimsmart 5y ago
Article is from early 2020 - would be nice if the year was in the HN title here.
115.
by jimsmart 5y ago
I'm still seeing seek bars on videos on my main feed, so I wonder if this is some kind of A/B testing that only some people can see? — Or whether this is just being rolled out in stages, and my feed has yet to receive this update?
116.
by jimsmart 5y ago
I would appreciate a reply instead of downvotes, but hey. The OP asks "why are people doing it? [using GH]", and I answered — including addressing their question as to whether it might be age related.
117.
by jimsmart 5y ago
^^ this. I've open-sourced some subcomponents of other (closed source) projects — sometimes they've been personal projects, sometimes projects for clients (either way, usually hosted as a private project on GH) — because I figured
118.
by jimsmart 5y ago
FWIW: Go's switch statements are break by default, with an explicit 'fallthrough' keyword if one wishes to override that behaviour.
119.
by jimsmart 5y ago
It has received quite some criticism, as this article from 2019 outlines. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/15/boris-johnso...
120.
by jimsmart 5y ago
In the case of his Beeb project, the 'interpreter' you speak of here is in fact a fairly full featured emulator. Although yes, the z-machine (Zork) is an interpreter of sorts. But all of his other games - including the clones of a

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