rainwarrior

@rainwarrior@mastodon.social

A video game developer, musician and/or food builder from Ontario, Canada. Powered by burritos. Made an NES game about lizards? Sakanakao on twitch.

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Bogusmeatfactory, to random
@Bogusmeatfactory@dosgame.club avatar

On Monday, I watched 3 adults separately Google what the name is for a flock of turkeys and had to hold back cackling when it gave each of them a completely different answer. I can't believe how fucked search engines have become.

rainwarrior,

@Bogusmeatfactory I often feel like animal group names are a bit of an accidental practical joke we played on ourselves.

There are a bunch of real ones that people know and use, flock, pack, herd, swarm...

But then there's this prescriptive desire to have an official one for everything, and it just breaks down. We have to go looking for the one time someone was zany enough to invent one 200 years ago.

A clowder of cats? Get out of here.

rainwarrior, to random

After 2 years, my cast iron pan had developed some rough patches that just wouldn't go away. (There had been an incident with someone using a steel scrubber on it.) Decided to start anew. The orbital sander made pretty short work of it. Now to reseason...

rainwarrior,

After baking several coats of canola oil onto it in the oven, it feels well seasoned now. It's developed a deep golden colour, which should gradually blacken as I continue to cook with it.

rainwarrior,

Okay, we're back in action! Cast iron pan is smooth and non-sticky once again. 🍳

rainwarrior,

It's been 2 years since I got a cast iron pan. It's definitely not as easy to use as teflon, but after getting the hang of it, it's been a great pan. The best part, as I've just demonstrated, is that it's infinitely maintainable. It will never break. It can always be restored.

rainwarrior, to random

I know I usually have only bad things to say about Apple, but since replacing my Mac Mini I have to say that the M2 CPU is... actually quite good?

My usual complaints about the mini remain (unserviceable, soldered on drive, etc.) but my eyes are now open about Arm64's potential.

rainwarrior, to random

My travels finally took my near a Jollibee for the first time in years. They even had ube pies!

Bogusmeatfactory, to random
@Bogusmeatfactory@dosgame.club avatar

Man today said Dragon's Dogma 2 "issues" are worse then RE4 Remake making you unable to "complete" the game without buying microtransactions.... I can't. I just can't.

rainwarrior,

@Bogusmeatfactory RE4 does what now? O_o

rainwarrior, to random

The AI that generated the text for this YouTube video clearly has a different idea of what's "okay"... 🙄 Is this advice for how to block your drains?

eggboycolor, to random
@eggboycolor@mastodon.social avatar

I need to rewatch that one interview video between Nasir Gebelli and John Romero sometime. I remember some rather ridiculous parts going over the way Nasir would program most of his games, in a sort of "live fashion" patching over the existing program binary and then updating hex addresses for the other programmers to use, and not really having source code as such. Something to that effect, but I may be misremembering. Either way, I want to re-watch that particular clip heh.

rainwarrior,

@eggboycolor The monitor program that's part of the built in ROM is a command line prompt that can be used for debugging. It can dump or disassemble memory, and do some other stuff.

Mini assembler mode is more of a text editor. You type in a line and it gets added to the disassembly listing you're looking at. The main drawback is no labels, etc. I'd imagine a lot of note taking involved in trying to use it like this.

rainwarrior,

@eggboycolor Here's a video of someone using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNOj6GTzfGY&t=645s

If you wanted to work on a program, you could use the command prompt to load and save files to an arbitrary place in memory. Then you could list the disassembly at that location, and edit it with the mini assembler. You could even run it and inspect the memory result afterward.

It's a workflow without source code, though. No labels, relocation is hard, etc. Reasonable with notes, I think, though obviously primitive.

rainwarrior,

@eggboycolor In the earlier parts of the video he gives some good perspective though, i.e. when it launched there was no text editor and assembler software like Merlin yet. Just having the monitor and mini assembler was hugely useful, compared to e.g. flipping switches on an Altair. The introduction of BASIC to the ROM made it even more useful. You could definitely write significant software with only this.

(Still pretty surprising that Nasir hadn't moved to a source assembler tho.)

rainwarrior,

@eggboycolor May be interesting to note that editing BASIC is very similar, i.e. you display a listing, and use the prompt to add or replace lines. After parsing a line it stored bytecode instead of the actual text to make the program more compact in memory. (Spaces etc. would get omitted, unless part of a comment.)

It's almost the same concept, a "disassembly" but of BASIC bytecode, with line numbering as a virtualized substitute for hard addresses for edit insertion points.

rainwarrior,

@eggboycolor I guess it's also a simple way to allow editing of text or data, without all the code needed for moving a cursor around, scrolling, etc. Just a command line prompt, allowing random access replacement of lines of text (or bytes of data/code).

I've used the BASIC a lot more than the mini assembler, but I didn't find it took long to get fairly comfortable editing this way. (Not ideal, but still comfortable enough.)

NovaSquirrel, to random
@NovaSquirrel@chitter.xyz avatar

I tried out using the SNES's 0,1,2,3 DMA pattern to let me just blast out an arbitrary list of tilemap changes during vblank (alternating between writing the address and data registers) and it's over twice as fast as what I was doing before.

It already wasn't taking much time to do this, but saving any amount of vblank time seems helpful. And this also opens up the flexibility to queue up any other sort of tilemap changes I want instead of just 2x2 updates specifically for level blocks.

rainwarrior,

@NovaSquirrel What does 0,1,2,3 pattern mean? Organizing the channel usage so you don't need to set up as much each frame, then firing all 4 off at once?

rainwarrior, to random

Super Moose asks the important questions.

Scene from Lizard for NES. Super Moose: Do you like waffles? Nice waffles.

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Bonus panel here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/score

rainwarrior,

@ZachWeinersmith I'd never heard of the Darién Gap before, this has been an interesting topic to read about.

rainwarrior, to random

After 13 years of service I finally had to retire Windows 7 on my desktop computer.

I'll never forget this awesome tune that came in the Sample Music folder. I still use it as a sound test any time I'm setting up to stream.

Mr Scruff - Kalimba

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZHAb92E31E

rainwarrior, to random

What if 2 turned out to be 1?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhrcf0szbXg

rainwarrior, to random

Found some leftover hallowe'en candy but I'm not sure if it's safe to eat. Don't people always say not to get your snickers in a twix?

rainwarrior, to random

I've not been well, and I'm sorry to anyone that's waiting on stuff from me. It's been a hard year and it's still hard.

Don't wanna be specific here because I don't have the energy to deal with unsolicited advice, but I'm getting help (nominally). The pace is excruciatingly slow.

rainwarrior, to random

Bought a USB3 hub recently, and it seemed to be working fine with a few peripherals... but I discovered that if I plug an external hard drive into it, it silently corrupts files read from the drive! Yikes!

I was surprised that this happens without an error from the OS (both on Linux or Windows). I only discovered by analyzing file contents. I think the OS relies on the drive itself to report read errors... but the drive read was fine, it's the hub corrupting the data before relay??

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I love the idea of fantasy consoles but I can't handle the whole "you edit them from inside the 256x160 pixel fantasy OS!"

I did my time with coding on 640x480, I can't go back, I get claustrophobic.

rainwarrior,

@foone Years ago I remember discovering RHIDE's 80x50 text mode and how incredible it felt to suddenly be able to see that much code at once.

Before that I only vaguely knew of that text mode because of a rad Wolfenstein 3D map editor that used it.

rainwarrior, to random

Lizard, but with a wider perspective!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eo9J0gwQT18

NovaSquirrel, to random
@NovaSquirrel@chitter.xyz avatar

I wish buying domain names wasn't a commitment where if you decide to drop a domain and then get it again you may have to pay thousands of dollars

That's why I've just put everything on novasquirrel.com even though it could be cool to have domains for projects

rainwarrior,

@NovaSquirrel I feel like having a domain-per-product is an idea on its way out.

Having one domain is enough of a hassle, especially if I want https. (Somehow even paying someone to set up https is a hassle...)

I have lizardnes.com and another domain for a game I wanted to make... but I'm just going to let them expire eventually.

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