richardjdare

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91.
by richardjdare 10y ago
The Genera terminal, or "listener" was a real eye opener for me the first time I used it. It can display rich text and images, has mouseable elements like buttons and editable forms, and has a powerful incremental online help syst
92.
by richardjdare 10y ago
I play Elite Dangerous on my DK2 all the time. It's so immersive, I wouldn't want to play it on a normal screen. Been thinking about getting a consumer Rift but I'm not sure yet. I've also been doing some vr experiments
93.
by richardjdare 10y ago
I think what Kyriakos means is, the Basic environment was how you operated the machine. On my Amstrad CPC, if I wanted to see what was on a disc, I'd use the Basic command CAT. I wouldn't type "dir" or "ls" int
94.
by richardjdare 10y ago
Didn't 17bit run a PD library as well as a disk magazine? Back in the day, if you wanted free software or shareware you ordered it by post from a Public Domain library. They used to advertise in the Amiga magazines. I was a Blitz Basic
95.
by richardjdare 10y ago
I am currently reading "The Glass Bees", Ernst Junger's scifi novel from 1957. It's about a former cavalryman fallen on hard times who goes for a shady job interview with a technology mogul. Its kind of an extended medit
96.
by richardjdare 10y ago
One of the most impressive things I saw for the 8-bit Atari is Chris Hutt's 2011 conversion of Space Harrier. It's probably the best home conversion of the game this side of the Sharp X68000. https://www.youtube.com&#x2
97.
by richardjdare 11y ago
This really nails the psychological atmosphere of my late 70s-early 80s British childhood. I remember being terrified of rabies thanks to films and posters like the one in the article, and believing that I would one day have to fight the So
98.
by richardjdare 11y ago
Carrier Command (Rainbird 1988) had a great tape soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUYKauCcutw I remember the (terrible) home computer conversions of Outrun came with a tape of the arcade music, which was some con
99.
by richardjdare 11y ago
When I worked in crap jobs, smoke breaks were a life saver. I worked at one place (a growers in rural England) where we only had 15 minutes for lunch (probably illegal) but we could take smoke breaks if we wanted. Everyone smoked super king
100.
by richardjdare 11y ago
I loved Blitz Basic. It was great how it gave you access to the whole Amiga. You could use the built-in commands, write inline assembly, and easily use operating system functions/structures. Modern "game BASICs", even the lat
101.
by richardjdare 11y ago
When I needed to create some pixel art for my last game, Antigen, I used DPaint 4 running on an emulator. I still hit DPaint keyboard shortcuts by accident in Photoshop.
102.
by richardjdare 11y ago
An important thing about the Amiga demo scene was that those constraints were also the edge of what was possible in home computing. So they were approached in a different spirit from say, someone writing a 64k demo on a pc with 8gigs of ram
103.
by richardjdare 11y ago
I'm British, so the word "engineer" makes me think of someone in an oil-stained boiler suit toiling away in the bowels of a factory or a 1970s bus depot :) The word feels dreary and uncreative. (I know its inaccurate - "
104.
by richardjdare 11y ago
When I was a kid I had the Graphic Adventure Creator for the Amstrad CPC which used the Lenslok anti piracy system. Lenslok was a kind of prism thing inside a plastic holder that you held against the screen in order to read an otherwise gar
105.
by richardjdare 11y ago
I've always found 'declarativism' in general to be very hard to understand. I was terrible at maths until I became a programmer and was able to concretely explore the mechanics of number using imperative programming languages
106.
by richardjdare 11y ago
That's interesting, because I did! When I read the word "democracy" I started thinking about the concept, and my mind delivered pictures (or really, scenes) to me, The White House, scenes of the UK Parliament, diagrams repres
107.
by richardjdare 11y ago
Sure, I meant in the sense that its seen as really obscure and hard to learn. A lot of people see vim in the same way.
108.
by richardjdare 11y ago
It would be nice if there was something like DrRacket[1] for Common Lisp, or maybe something like Haskell for Mac[2] that was on HN yesterday[3]. You could package it with SBCL and a link to "Practical Common Lisp" and newcomers c
109.
by richardjdare 11y ago
It's interesting how the colour palettes of those old computers went a long way to define their character. I was an Amstrad CPC owner, and its games tended to have a bright, saturated look whereas C64 games always looked a bit brown an
110.
by richardjdare 11y ago
If I had time for a project of no consequence I would write an Amiga game in 68000 assembly, just to say I finally did it. I loved the Amiga as a teenager, but I couldn't afford all the books and development tools I needed. I had a fru
111.
by richardjdare 11y ago
In the mid-nineties, I discovered "Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge" by chance in a discount bookshop. At the time I was a teenager in working class rural England. I was working menial jobs while teaching myself to
112.
by richardjdare 11y ago
The thing is, you can interact with a game world without knowing what those rules are. You can chase definite goals using means that you do not fully understand. We do that all the time in ordinary life. I think that the mystification of
113.
by richardjdare 12y ago
The problem was that stock Amigas and older PCs didn't have true colour, they mostly had index-colour modes where each pixel was a lookup into a table of usually up to 256 colours, rather than a direct RGB value. Doing photo manipulati
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by richardjdare 12y ago
To me, Linux lacked a lot of the aesthetic aspects of the Amiga. It had no games scene, the culture was older, more academic or "heavy industry" and didn't have multimedia in its blood like the Amiga scene did. One thing that
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by richardjdare 12y ago
I was a huge Amiga fan as a teen, but I can still remember the moment I saw that PC gaming was where the action was going to be. It was ACE Magazine issue 35, August 1990.[1] When I saw the previews of Wing Commander (Called "Wingleade
116.
by richardjdare 12y ago
That would be a ~70 hour download through my rural UK broadband connection! It would be quicker for me to fly to the USA, visit the devs in person and ask them to copy it to an external drive. I understand why games are getting bigger, but
117.
by richardjdare 12y ago
The youtube vid was an old demonstration of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad software. I will try and find another version. I'm not sure if there will be an android port of Antigen. The mobile gaming scene is not very conducive to indi
118.
by richardjdare 12y ago
I am currently working on the prototype of such an application :) I had a similar idea after getting frustrated with Photoshop scripting for my last game project[1]. I'm not ready to show anything yet though, very early days... [1] htt
119.
by richardjdare 12y ago
Photoshop does have a Javascript scripting system and IDE (ExtendScript Toolkit) that exposes many of its features. Unfortunately its pretty slow and clunky, and it doesn't let you draw programmatically or anything like that. I used it
120.
by richardjdare 12y ago
That's a very interesting question. I'd guess that the technical decisions that differentiated early unix from the lisp machines etc. were based on hardware and cost limitations.(the development of unix is something I'd be in

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