pulkomandy

pulkomandy, 10 months ago to random

I remember playing various edutainment videogames as a kid, they seem not very well archived. Things like Tim 7 (a kid who had his brain erased by a mad scientist and had to relearn French and Math and stuff), Lecture Enjeu (some kind of interactive fiction, several adventures, one of them involved breaking into the school during the weekend to recover a forgotten pair of glasses)

Was this only a French thing? Did you have any similar things? Anyone taking care of archiving these?

pulkomandy, 11 months ago to random

Ok let's port #binutils to the unsp CPU used in the #VTech #VSmile !
Apparently this starts by building a version of autoconf from 11 years ago, otherwise you can't regenerate the configure scripts (which need to be modified to add a new target)

pulkomandy, 9 months ago to random

I'd say this worked better than I'd expected! The form factor for this system-on-module is a bit stupid but I made it work! I can do some minor adjustments but this should be fully workable!

Viewed from the other side, components on the back of the system-on-module fit in the baseboard hole, some of them including an unused connector unreasonably close to the edges

pulkomandy, 1 year ago to random

TODO list cleaning continues today…

• Figured out what was broken with Neko the Replicat on my machine. In the end no code changes were needed. Made a Git repository with the sources for all 4 unown versions, and my cleanup changes added
• Sent my patches to the vbcc compiler adding an u'nSP CPU backend (for the VTech VSmile to the main developer
• Updated Haiku package of SDCC to the latest version and now recompiling fatfs with it for the UNIDOS FAT driver

pulkomandy, 9 months ago to random

I have just realized a very annoying thing: the "Austr-" in "Austria" means East, from German Öster. The "Austr-" in "Australia", on the other hand, means South, from Latin Australis.

Thank you, have a nice day.

pulkomandy, 3 months ago to random

For a project idea I will probably not start for a few years: do you know about Little Smalltalk? Is there one version of it that would work well on a 8-bit CPU? Not necessarily run super fast (think of replacing/complementing BASIC), but would it fit in just a few kilobytes of RAM? Which of the many forks would have best chances of working in that context? (some of them I think replaced 16-bit values with 32-bit ones?)

pulkomandy, 9 months ago to random

I found a cheap online storage plan to use as remote backup (I already have local backups). This means:

• updating Debian on my server to finally use systemd, so that I can run the provided backup tools (it was still on sysvinit because this is a very old debian unstable I never took the time to switch - in the end it was super easy)
• looking into my collections of CDs and dumping them, scanning the booklets, and the first CD case I open also contains a DVD full of videoclips…

pulkomandy, 3 months ago to random French

It looks like Intel shuffled registers around again somewhere between skylake (2016) and tigerlake (2020), and the haiku drivers only works by pure luck (reading and writing nonexisting registers, and relying on the bios to setup most things, I guess). So that's yet another thing to fix on the todo list...

pulkomandy, 2 months ago to random

I'm on a train trip so here are some unsollicited train and train station pictures. There will be more as I get to the next stations...
We start in Colmar!

A maintenance train (with onboard crane), tracks going into the d=stance and passing under a metallic bridge
The main building of the Colmar train station, it has a relatively high clock tower, with a copper clad roof, contrasting with the red bricks of the building
The underpass under the tracks has nice tilework (beige and dark green checkerboard on the ground, beige with green lines on the walls). The roof is open between the track, and someone is parking their bike and attaching it to the siderails on the platform above

pulkomandy, 7 months ago to random

Current status: frankeinsteining a github to csv tool (removing the csv part) with a mantis to trac tool (removing the mantis part) to write a github to Trac issue importer. Not helped by the fact that one of them was in Python 2 and targetting Trac 0.11 or earlier (but 2to3 and Trac docs helped with that)

Going ok so far, the issues are imported, now I have to do the comments and milestones and understand why Trac will only render a white page when trying to view issues details.

pulkomandy, 9 months ago to random French

Mais vous êtes sérieux la SNCF?! 😭
Du coup la réduction aller-retour de la carte avantage, j'imagine qu'elle ne s'applique pas? Ah ben oui c'est écrit aussi...

(for non-French readers: it is not possible to buy a round-trip from SNCF with a TGV in one direction and a night train in the other. You have to book the two legs separately, the app will not say it to you but just mark all return trains as "not available" when you try to do it, and so will Trainline and I guess other apps)

Conditions d'utilisation de la carte Avantage indiquant aussi qu'on ne peut pas mélanger les types de trains

pulkomandy, 1 month ago to pixelart

I have just relased a new version 2.9 of GrafX2, "the ultimate 256-color painting program".
Binaries are available for Haiku, Gamepark Holdings GP2x, Nintendo Switch, Atari Mint and Windows (yes, our build automation somehow focuses only on the most ridiculous platforms). For Linux it should hopefully be updated in your favorite distribution soon.
Not a lot of changes in this version, many bugfixes and more fileformats supported (Apple IIgs, C64, CPC, Atari TT...)
#GrafX2 #PixelArt

The palette window in grafx2, it has several buttons at the top, 256 color swatches in a 16x16 grid, an area showing a gradient from currently selected colors, and 3 RGB sliders. The user interface uses a monospace 8x8 font and only 4 colors (black, white, and two grayscales)
Screenshot showing a picture by jok and the "copy to spare page" window with buttons allowing to copy the pixels, or the palette, or only some colors into another image
Screenshot of GrafX2 with a picture by Tomic (that you can barely see, as there is a window above it). The window shows the "smooth" effect configuration where several 3x3 blur matrices can be selected, or custom valaes can beentered manually

pulkomandy, 1 year ago to random

I ordered some chip and PCBs to build more Gemini boards (in case you want to extend your Amstrad CPC 6128 or Plus to 2MB of RAM) and an adapter to use Amstrad PCW keyboards as USB HID keyboards.

(yes, it's TODO list cleaning weekend today!)

pulkomandy, 2 months ago to random

This weekend progress on porting little #SmallTalk to the #AmstradCPC

I have hacked the source to add an indirection table that all object references go through. The indirection contains a pointer and a bank number. "dereferencing" an indirection maps the corresponding bank.

The loading of the initial images goes through, and I can execute 3 bytecode opcodes before it crashes! But this is really a tight fit in the rom, and I quickly ran out of space after adding some debug traces.

pulkomandy, 7 months ago to random

Today I added a mistery switch to my TV!

This TV (which I bought in 2009 or so) is surprisingly good, it does Teletext, it will handle every video signal I throw at it, including 18kHz MDA/Hercules on the VGA port.

However, there was one problem with it: the only way to set the scart input to RGB is through the SCART connector itself. Unfortunately, some of my machines don't have a 5V output at the video output hort to achieve that…

pulkomandy, 1 month ago to random French

Ok, who had the idea to do this with an if and dangling else instead of a do {} while(0) ? Was that not yet invented in 1987?

I guess that works... until you forget a ; and then it compiles fine but the next line is never executed?

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/38807.38839

pulkomandy, 7 months ago to random French

Bon alors yahoo search me glisse dans les résultats de recherche (sur une qustion à propos de systemd) des sites qui référencent des restaurants près de chez moi. Va falloir que je mette un autre moteur de recherche par défaut sur ce PC…

pulkomandy, 1 month ago to random French

I have not done any serious development in #GrafX2 in... I don't remember, 10 years at least? But I managed toget back into it and somewhat remember how it works. Today I added a new window when loading a .scr (Amstrad CPC) file without a known palette or loader (basically just a dump of screen memory). You can select the videomode and width/height in that case.

pulkomandy, 3 months ago to random French

I thought my gbs8200 scart to rgb converter board was not working anymore so I ordered another one. Turns out the gbs8200 was not at fault. So, flaky connector now glued in place inmy vga display, and I guess I have a spare gbs8200 now, so I may resume my plans on writing a custom firmware for it?

pulkomandy, 8 months ago to random French

Current status: trying really hard to not start yet another project: making a videocard for 8 bit computers based on the Thomson EF9366 video controller.

pulkomandy, 3 months ago to random

Porting #Smalltalk to the #AmstradCPC : a failed experiment
https://pulkomandy.tk/_/_Development/_Porting%20Smalltalk%20to%20the%20Amstrad%20CPC:%20a%20failed%20experiment

pulkomandy, 3 months ago to random

I have just received my copy of @mwichary 's Shift Happens! Now I can read it and learn a lot more things about keyboards :)

Same thing from another angle, showing the orange book spines with the volume numbers on them.

pulkomandy, 2 months ago to random

Mh, so the discussion on use of automatic code formatting in Haiku went from "automatic code formatting is bad, I want to format my code manually" to "-Werror is bad because it may break the build on unsupported compilers"

So let's continue ignoring compiler warnings and spending hours making potential and current contributors exhausted by having a dozen back and forths in code reviews just on fixing coding style problemsthat could be entirely automated. Cool.

😭

pulkomandy, 10 months ago to random French

Et bien je ne m'attendais pas à lire une citation de Victor Hugo dans un article expliquant quelques détails électroniques sur le fonctionnement de l'USB...

https://www.astuces-pratiques.fr/informatique/usb-otg-broche-id-et-cable

pulkomandy, 2 days ago to random French

Un montage photo de qualité.