msarnoff

13 ms·

91.
by msarnoff 9y ago
Seems like a good time to mention The Cutting Room Floor, an excellent wiki that catalogs cut/unused content, debug features, and secret messages left in video games. The page for Gex [1] describes a good portion of the cut assets and
92.
by msarnoff 9y ago
Eudora was my first introduction to email! This would have been around 1994 or 1995, on Macintosh System 7. When you had new mail, a dialog popped up with a picture of a rooster holding a letter in its beak. If you checked your mail and did
93.
by msarnoff 9y ago
"The language doesn't come with [a hash table implementation] included" The standard library does come with a half-baked hash table implementation[1] (hcreate/hdestroy/hsearch) that only allows creation of _one_ glo
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by msarnoff 9y ago
Seconded. I swore by Inconsolata for the better part of a decade but within days of installing Iosevka I had it set up in every editor or terminal on all of my computers. And it supports programming ligatures!
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by msarnoff 9y ago
Recently I've been doing a lot of low-level work with ARMv7-M microcontrollers (specifically, NXP's Kinetis Cortex-M4 chips) and was quite pleased to find out that they are pretty lenient about unaligned accesses. To quote from th
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by msarnoff 9y ago
The same chip family included the TMS9918 Video Display Processor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9918 The TMS9918 was the first chip to refer to overlaid graphical objects as "sprites." I
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by msarnoff 9y ago
That's so amazing to hear! It pretty much flew under the company radar--most people didn't find out about it until the first reviews of the Lion beta came out. I don't think it was very common at Apple for an individual engin
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by msarnoff 9y ago
I worked on Preview at Apple from 2008-2011 and created the signature capture feature. It's always cool to hear people talk about it!
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by msarnoff 11y ago
SDCC is the only FOSS compiler for PIC microcontrollers. Microchip's XC8 compiler has a free version that's deliberately crippled (optimizations disabled, garbage instructions added to slow your code down) and a license for the fu
100.
by msarnoff 11y ago
I worked with John Calhoun (the author) for a few years some time ago. Great guy. Glider was one of my favorite games as a kid, so I was a bit starstruck the first time I met him. He actually had the source code to Glider Pro printed and bo
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by msarnoff 11y ago
The video was posted by an awesome demoscene dude named viznut. Check out the rest of his channel. Experimental music from very short C programs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtQdIYUtAHg Robotic Liberation (VIC-20 demo):
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by msarnoff 11y ago
I second this recommendation, especially Chamberlin's discussion of filters. He provides an implementation of a state-variable filter (low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, and notch) in, if I recall correctly, four lines of BASIC. I wrote a
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by msarnoff 12y ago
I wonder if this could be modified to control actual hardware? It looks the `\write18` command can be used to execute shell commands if LaTeX is run with the `--shell-escape` option. So in theory you could intercept all writes to the GPIO c
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by msarnoff 12y ago
In addition, there are numerous games that shipped with random plain text (including uncompiled source code) in their binary images: http://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_uncompiled_source_code http://www.pagetable
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by msarnoff 12y ago
I'm a little disappointed with the scope of this writeup. I just finished my first full Swift app this weekend, and by far, the most bothersome part was interacting with the C APIs (CoreMedia, ImageIO, etc.) I would have loved to see m
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by msarnoff 13y ago
The documentation link on that site isn't working, but it can be found here: http://jeffshrager.org/llisp/ The last chapter is particularly interesting, as it describes the inner workings of the interpreter.
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by msarnoff 13y ago
If you do decide to build this app, I would highly recommend making it open-source. Properly building a custom-skinned OS X app is not easy. Compared to UIKit on iOS, which was built from the ground up to support animation and appearance cu
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by msarnoff 13y ago
Damn, that looks costly. Each one of those tubes goes for at least $40-$60 on eBay, and the socket/driver boards are another $5 each. I like the acrylic base and standoffs--well done!
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by msarnoff 14y ago
On a similar note, if you just want to open a new Finder window to the current working directory (instead of using an existing Finder window), just use open . The 'open' command has tons of uses (open a file with a specific applicati
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by msarnoff 14y ago
Since it includes what seems to be a full Emacs distribution, Mac OS X also contains a few "easter eggs" in /usr/share/emacs/22.1/etc:[1] - What is claimed to be the Mrs. Fields cookie recipe - How to say hello in many languages - An interv
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by msarnoff 14y ago
Evernote for Mac has had word count for several months now. Click the "i" button, the popover shows the size of a note, and its word and character counts.
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by msarnoff 14y ago
I hide/show my desktop icons with a couple of aliases in my .zshrc: alias dihide="defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool NO && killall Finder" alias dishow="defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool YES
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by msarnoff 14y ago
To be more specific: the CPU has circuitry that, upon power-up, either a) sets the program counter to a specific initial address (like all zeros), or b) fetches a word from a specific location in read-only memory (the "reset vector") and lo
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by msarnoff 14y ago
In C, a "null pointer" (NULL, (void *)0, etc.) does not necessarily correspond to an address with all bits zero.[1] The compiler translates any pointer constants with a value of 0 to an invalid address appropriate for that machine. I haven'
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by msarnoff 15y ago
Nice! I'm going to start porting some of my AVR and 6809 assembly routines to the DCPU, and of course I'll host them on GitHub.
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by msarnoff 15y ago
Just whipped up a syntax highlighting definition for Vim: https://github.com/74hc595/dcpu16-vim-syntax
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by msarnoff 15y ago
> It's a pretty simple CPU 16-bit address and data buses? Hardware multiplier, divider, and barrel shifter? I wouldn't exactly call it simple. The cost to build one out of discrete logic probably approaches the quadruple digits. Magic-1
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by msarnoff 15y ago
AVR behaves similarly. Branch instructions take 1 cycle if the condition is false, and 2 if the condition is true.
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by msarnoff 15y ago
Interesting C++ tidbit: the ternary operator can yield an lvalue, like so: int foo = 0, bar = 0; (cond ? foo : bar) = 8; This doesn't work in plain C.
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by msarnoff 15y ago
AVR assembly is one of my favorites. Compared to 6502, Z80, and x86, there is a relative plethora of registers (32 of them!) and, if your application is simple enough, you can write code that doesn't use any RAM at all. In fact, some of the

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