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O huh. I just learned that SHADOWFIRE on the C64 is able to simulate 50 different characters, by only updating one of them per frame. So the limit is 50 to fit the refresh rate of a PAL TV.

https://gamesexplained.com/c64/shadowfire/#people

If you're interested in this, we're systemically porting the whole 8-bit game catalog to JavaScript over at https://gamesexplained.com/

and the OSS kit to do it is https://github.com/gamesexplained/gamesexplained/tree/main/k...

The first complete interactive breakdown of the whole game – see the Maps tab to explore every tile in every map. Fun bugs: did you know you can kill anything in the game with the throwing knife, if your LUCK is low enough?

I've made a skill to automate reverse engineering and to look for interesting bugs. Opus 5.5 picked up on this one. Source at https://github.com/gamesexplained/gamesexplained/tree/main/k...

100 paces NW of the starting position is an invisible patch of grass where the author forgot to include a height check. Press E and you teleport to the Colony Craft, far above you. This bug has gone unnoticed for 41 years!

O cool! This approach was used in WASTELAND too, on four floppies (the progenitor of the FALLOUT series).

If you are a small personal site, you can request a free upgrade to the Plus version (which can remove ads) by emailing [email protected] and asking. I did this in late 2023 and got a response in two days. This does remain an absolutely horrific business practice.

This. The 'black circle' in the tutorial is no good, maybe a dotted circle instead to make it clear you're supposed to be tapping empty space and not a black bubble.

Paul Graham's essay today: "We should have a conscious bias against defining new forms of heresy. Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong. Only our initial assumption of course. If they can prove we should stop saying it, then we should. But the burden of proof is on them."

Another approach using spreadsheets: https://aaronbell.substack.com/p/visualize-your-life-the-eas...

My side project was to remake the Commodore 64 game, ENCOUNTER from scratch in three.js, adapted for both mobile and desktop. I got pretty far.

Then in 2017 I interviewed for an Engineering Manager role at Facebook (now Meta). The role was with a web performance team. I'd barely had time to prepare - at most a week - and my coding interview was not amazing.

In the final interview segment we were discussing web performance and I mentioned the ENCOUNTER project as running at 60fps. We pulled up the game on the interviewer's random Android phone and it worked well! It turned out the interviewer was a fellow C64 nerd and we bonded over shared memories.

I learned later that the project code was used as a tiebreaker to get signal on my coding ability. I'm working at Meta to this day!

Check it out at https://github.com/air/encounter

The writer & comedian Richard Herring devised a fairly complete set of rules for this, calling it Consecutive Number Plate Spotting (CNPS). It's amusing, https://www.richardherring.com/cnps

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross used a SID (in an Elektron Sidstation) on the soundtrack for THE SOCIAL NETWORK, https://reverbmachine.com/blog/trent-reznor-social-network-s...

You can convert a cheap USB floppy drive into one that reads Amiga disks using a Drawbridge from https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ - I've done this and it works. Notice Amiga Forever 10 adds direct support for this setup, so the emulator can read from that drive plugged into your PC.

I recently did this and found pretty much everything still worked. The creator of AMOS is still around at https://www.aoz.studio and their Discord will help you with any AMOS issues!

Wow this has a ton in common with my port of the C64 game ENCOUNTER, https://github.com/air/encounter

Look for the Play link in the README.

Great job on the aesthetics!

It's really excellent as an emulation machine for retro gaming. I have an X-Arcade dual arcade controller attached.

It's great because 1. there's a compact keyboard built in, and 2. the 400 comes with a giant heat sink and I can overclock it >10% higher than base rate with no issues.

Fun fact: the Minecraft client has for years supported SRV to discover the server port number. Thanks Notch.

Update from Google status page:

We're still actively working to resolve issues with Identity/Authentication. Future updates will follow when there is significant progress to report.

To summarize; some long-lived OAuth tokens have inadvertently been invalidated. This may affect the following Cloud services and will manifest as authentication errors:

Cloud APIs using OAuth tokens, and related services that use them

gcloud SDK

Cloud Storage gsutil

Cloud Dataflow

Note: not all customers are affected by this.

OAuth tokens may be recreated by running the following commands:

$ gcloud auth application-default login

$ gcloud auth login

https://status.cloud.google.com/

Why use Gallium over crouton?

I've used crouton/XUbuntu as my main laptop OS for a couple of years. I've pushed it pretty far, running Steam with a removable SD card to play things like DotA 2 - http://www.aaronbell.com/how-to-run-dota-on-a-chromebook/

Chromebooks are amazingly capable once you add a little storage and update the video drivers.

Absolutely! We're actively working on this here at Mesosphere, in partnership with Google. You can check out the project at https://github.com/mesosphere/kubernetes-mesos

You might also be interested in a talk I gave at the Kubernetes launch in August about our work coming the two: https://youtu.be/aXcdHwQ5GgQ

Hi, Chronos Product Manager here ('air' on github). Status: Having fun creating issues in the wake of the Jepsen post : )

I can say that Mesosphere is 100% committed to both Marathon and Chronos. You're right that Marathon gets more attention for the moment, but we have grand plans for both.

A strength of Mesos is that it's an open platform. If Chronos isn't right for you, there are solid alternatives. I'd appreciate if you raise issues against Chronos though so we can improve it : )

Excuse the plug, but if you'd like to help us improve these widely-used frameworks we'd love to hear from you: https://mesosphere.com/careers/