I've been poking a little at a #HaikuOS VM on the side. I'd like to compile some code of my own, plus a couple dependencies. Normally, I'll generate a configure script and give it a prefix of /opt/local.
Does anyone with experience know what the Haiku equivalent of this is?
Usually Jam is used for compiling Haiku OS code. There’s also a makefile-engine you can include from your own makefile.
Also, Haikuporter is used for compiling ported code. Some of the recipes likely use configure, if the original code used it. So have a look at some recipe files if you want to go that way.
I also like using BeIDE and its projects, but that’s something from BeOS days.
I find it somewhat annoying and concerning that an essential #security tool like #fail2ban is broken on #ubuntu#linux 24.04 #noble since the end of February and there still is no update in sight.
Similar here with Fedora 39, had to manually start it with “fail2ban-client -x start”, something about an exception for a communication socket permission problem. But it’s now working again under systemd after a couple of weeks and system updates.
so I just realized I did a sizable project and never posted about it publically
last year I spent a few months on and off reverse engineering Pinball Fantasies (a 1992 video game; originally for Amiga, though I was reversing the more polished DOS port) with the intent of doing a game engine recreation, and then rewrote the logic as a Rust program
@mwk Thanks for putting your notes online. There are lots of tricks here useful for my recreational programming project, Nth Pong Wars. Also a lot of overlap with miniputt golf games!
Since I’m targeting the 1982 #NabuPC, fixed point math is essential. I was going to use 16 bits with a 6 bit fraction, but on the Z80 that involves 6 slow shift instructions to get the integer portion. At least 68000 and 8086 have shift-n-times instructions (though no barrel shifter). So putting the fraction point at a byte boundary is desirable.
Wonder why they needed 10 fractional bits. Also 3 physics frames per video frame suggests a max ball speed. I was going to try dynamic physics.
I had a productive evening and came up with lots of ideas (game and code) for my #NabuPC learning to program game. It's just the usual bouncing ball and bricks (inspired by browser version https://pong-wars.koenvangilst.nl/ in Javascript), but with N balls and N players. Possibly some network play. Hope to make it portable so it can run on other computers, but if it can do #NABU, it should work almost anywhere else.
Got a bit more work done on my #NABUPC game. This time getting a prototype of Nth Pong Wars using ncurses to work. Shows that my fixed point math is working, and I now have a testbed to write code on for the non- #NABU parts of the game (makes for easier debugging).
Read a few of the stories about #Voyager 1’s memory problems, but people don’t say how it was organized.
If the failed chip contained whole words, then just that chunk of memory would fail. If it contained one bit of many words, all those words would be affected.
That suggests a design rule for long running spacecraft - use whole word memory devices so a failure doesn’t knock out even more memory. Same for chip design, put related bits nearby on the chip. Wonder if they have this rule…
I've made some pretty good progress with the #NABUPC Adaptor reverse engineering, but I've got this unshakable feeling that I'll need to write an emulator and single-step the 6805 ROM code to see what the heck it's doing and figure out what the flags are...
Actually that’s a very well made documentary on an obscure bit of radio frequency engineering. Diagrams and a good script made it seem easy for novices like me.
Plotting the curve of increasing home broadband speeds I've had since I first got cable in 1998, I expect this to be the speed of my home hook-up some time around 2040. I wonder what I could use it for …? https://social.edu.nl/@SURF/112274114167483854
There was a time when I used to code graphics drivers. I used to love #assemblylanguage. Nowadays, I can't code my way out of a paper bag. Its been so many years and I'm just a #yaml jockey these days. I've been trying to learn #python, and while I get the basics, it just doesn't seem to gel in my head to make an app. I want to like Go, but I feel I gotta get something down like python to get to that (and to do some projects I want to do). The goal is to learn #vala, but man, I'm dying here!
I was looking at Python, Ruby and Java. Didn’t like Java’s class implementation, and liked both Ruby and Python (class mechanism closer to Smalltalk). But Python and Ruby were too similar to learn in parallel, so I went with Ruby and the Rails web framework.
Anyway, the recent project is to write a game for the 1984 NABU computer. Coding would be a mixture of C and Z80 assembler, and there are floating point and fixed point libraries. So, dot products for collisions, or something faster?
12 bits suggests this could have been used to more cheaply add multiplication to a PDP-8. Though the data sheet more sensibly says it’s for digital signal processing.
I still love traveling on our LRT, but most of my commutes are by bike. Natalie sends me short videos and pictures of her commute on those mornings she goes in, and this morning's was a masterpiece. In the trench, out of the trench, the sound ascending and descending, the station announcement, the reflection of the train's interior in the window. This had it all. It's like I was there.
I can tell from the sound track lacking horrible screeching noises that no curves were traversed.
Compare that with line 2 trains, or Via Rail leaving Tremblay station to Toronto, where its curve is inside the line 1 track curve. Heavy rail is very quiet, in comparison. Wonder what the difference is in the hardware.