How about trying to run it on ReactOS?
Readit Newsblippage commented on Chuck Moore: Colorforth has stopped working [video] youtube.com/watch?v=MvkGB... · Posted by u/netten
Don't forget that Aminet is still receiving regular uploads:
https://www.aminet.net/
It's amazing that a platform that's been dead since the early 90's is still getting so much love.
blippage commented on Run ancient UNIX on modern hardware github.com/felipenlunkes/... · Posted by u/doener
I can't pick up the caper (due to the customary backlog of insane projects), but IMHO someone™ should port RetroBSD¹ to more microcontrollers. There's even a C compiler² running on device!
There's a UNIX shape void in the embedded world. Todays microcontrollers routinely come with several megabytes of RAM.
1: https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd
2: https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd/tree/master/src/cmd/sma...
There's also Fuzix, which is Unix-like.
https://fuzix.org/
Supports Arm M0 (Raspberry Pi Pico), ESP32 and a variety of others, including Z80.
blippage commented on Completing a BASIC language interpreter in 2025 nanochess.org/ecs_basic_2... · Posted by u/nanochess
> a new BASIC interpreter for the 1983 Mattel ECS add-on for Intellivision
Fun fact: Hal Finney (yes, that Hal) wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Intellivision back in 1978 or so in a weekend. It was 2K of code. Mattel shipped it on a cartridge.
ROM space was so tight, the only error message it produced was:
EH?
For anyone interested there's tinybasic, which will run on something as small as an Arduino.
I did see Debian on YT being booted up on an Amiga. It was, to say the least, a painful-looking experience. It seems sacrilege in a way. If you're going to use an Amiga you might as well use AmigaOS.
Amazingly, Aminet is still up-and-running with frequent uploads.
I contributed a package to that once.
I also made an animation on the Amiga, "Sadistic Circus". A circus dog jumps through a hoop a few times, then gets set on fire. What a sick, sick little puppy I am. I submitted it to a PD disk collection one time.
The dog was an image I got off of a magazine disk, which I mucked around with to create my animation.
Pretty rubbish really, but whatever. Happy days.
Ah, nostalgia ain't what it used to be -- source contested
blippage commented on Zig breaking change – Initial Writergate github.com/ziglang/zig/pu... · Posted by u/Retro_Dev
I tried Zig some time ago to use with microcontrollers. It has a generator for the pins, which was nice. But subsequent versions broke as Zig changed syntax. So I started going down the rabbit-hole (it needed a newer version of llvm, for example) until I eventually decided that the game wasn't worth the candle.
The fact that another breaking change has been introduced confirms my suspicion that Zig is not ready for primetime.
My conclusion is to just use C. For low-level programming it's very hard to improve on C. There is not likely to be any killer feature that some other contender will allow you to write the same code in a fifth of the lines nor make the code any more understandable.
Yes, C may have its quirky behaviour that people gnash their teeth over. But ultimately, it's not that bad.
If you want to use a better C, use C++. C++ is perfectly fine for using with microcontrollers, for example. Now get back to work!
I've messed around with Forth before, and even created my own one. I could do cool things with it, and gotten a DSL-like language.
I used words like IMMEDIATE and POSTPONE to create words that create words. I quickly get lost doing that, though.
Forth is very very cool to play with. Pragmatically, virtually any other language is better.
blippage commented on As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook hamatti.org/posts/as-a-de... · Posted by u/ingve
Thanks for pointing this out. In the same vein there are so many posts about productivity systems where people put endless amount of time into crafting their gtd notebooks with tabs and lists, etc. All that time spent to be productive instead of actually being productive. Or people describing their ideal Obsidian work flows instead of actually noting anything useful down in it. People writing about how they built their own blogging engine because their particular way of blogging is so unique that they had to hand-roll something. All that time spent on building a blog rather than blogging. (I've been there too).
I love "This isn't craftsmanship cosplay, it's software engineering.". I will definitely steal this, let me put it in my notebook.
As some wag on Reddit put it, "Digital Note Taking Systems: Cutting and pasting your life away, one note at a time."
A few days ago I had the very foolish notion of trying to learn assembly for x64 Linux. It came out to 73 lines of code and weighs in at 288 bytes. It doesn't support the --help or --version arguments.
https://gitlab.com/mcturra2000/cerbo/-/blob/master/x64-asm/0...
Some people seem to revel in assembly, but I now know why C exists.
As an experiment I tried
yes | pv > /dev/null
and was getting about 5.4GiB/s
On the fasm code, I was getting a meagre 7.3MiB/s. Ouch! The non-assembly version is considerably faster. I wonder if it is because I make a syscall for every write I want to perform, whereas C uses buffering, or something.
It's possible to be semi-famous and still able to go to the grocery store and pump your own gas without getting recognized. The local sports radio guys don't need an entourage, even if they do get recognized. But as a rising artist, you hit a point where you can no longer go out in public at all. It's really shocking when it happens because it's so abrupt. My dad's famous friend was a regular at a local restaurant and wasn't bothered for a long time, even when his name/face started showing up in the media. Then one day another customer shouted his name and he got mobbed by fans, and he realized he couldn't go out to eat like a normal person anymore. I think Charli crossed that line with the success of her album Brat last year. It's the point where you start to ask yourself if it's really worth it, and maybe consider going full recluse like Thomas Pynchon. (That's not even getting into the online stan culture stuff that Charli talks about in the article.)
I also heard about Matt Lucas, of Little Britain fame. He was slowly plugging away at it, and was about to give up. At around 30 years old, he teamed up with David Walliams, describing it as the last roll of the die. Their popularity exploded.
Morgan Freeman didn't become famous until he was in his 50's. Someone asked him if he was upset that it took so long. His response was: "No, because it didn't have to happen at all."