Dev journal, day 7
Posted by Trixter on May 7, 2014
And before anyone asks: This is not a bug, but an intentionally-designed profiling display.
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Dev journal, Day 1
Posted by Trixter on May 1, 2014
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The strangest kind of problem
Posted by Trixter on April 18, 2014
For @party coming up in June of this year, I thought it would be fun to revisit 8088 Corruption with a spiritual sequel. I designed two new ways to improve the tech and visual quality. I came up with a new disk I/O strategy to deal with the new tech. I built a new model of handling color for it. I’ve previewed the results for both monochrome and color test material, and I liked what I saw.
One problem: I haven’t written a single line of code yet. It’s all in my head.
At night, as I fall asleep, I “pull it out” and run it through with different test material and “watch” the results.
And with the puzzle solved, I’m “done”, and I no longer have the desire to actually write the code.
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Happy 30th Birthday, Peanut
Posted by Trixter on March 23, 2014
While the announcement for the IBM PCjr was made in November 1983, it didn’t actually show up on store shelves until March of 1984. So, I consider this week the official-unofficial 30th birthday of the IBM PCjr.
The Register agrees, and posted a very nice stripdown of the system, with sarcastic and humorous comments. The comments section for that article also has some nice observations for those who would like a trip down memory lane.
Later this year I will record the full version of my PCjr talk that I was never able to fully give last year (floods, shortened timeslots, etc.) and I’ll break it up into parts and put it on youtube. I’ll announce when that series is up.
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Mixed Feelings
Posted by Trixter on March 22, 2014
If the airlines gods shine on me next week, I will be at NVScene 2014 in San Jose Tuesday through Thursday. Co-located within the GPU Technology Conference, the entire event is looking to be the most concentrated collection of Very Intelligent People in regards to realtime computer graphics hardware and techniques.
I have mixed feelings about attending events like these, because I am so completely out of my league among these people. I understand no more than 10% of everything they present or create. I am looking forward to visiting and staying with friends, but my knowledge and accomplishments are dwarfed in orders of magnitude by every single other attendee. It’s very intimidating.
That’s all. No pithy observations or self-help advice in this post, sorry. My level of anxiety is high enough that, if I weren’t seeing some old friends there, I definitely wouldn’t be going. I have no business being there.
Posted in Demoscene | Tagged: GPU Technology Conference, realtime computer graphics hardware | 2 Comments »
Where’s Trixter?
Posted by Trixter on February 26, 2014
2013 was somewhat challenging for me, but I have great hope and plans for 2014. It’s only February and I’ve already spent some time at the ICHEG consulting for them on one of their projects — a validation of my electronic game history and preservation work, and a huge confidence booster! I can’t speak highly enough of them, but I will try to do them justice in a future post.
Where can stalkers find me this year? I’ll do my best to be at both NVScene 2014 in San Jose, CA the last week of March, and I’ll do my best to be at @party 2014 in Cambridge, MA in June. Look for the grossly overweight 6’2″ scener wearing a black T-shirt with a huge yellow Hornet target on his back.
Preservation plans this year include writing a DOS-based search-as-you-type interface for a curated collection I am involved in. Not impressive? The DOS front-end has to run on any system with a hard drive — let’s see YOU implement a realtime search-as-you-type interface on an 8088 CPU in 512K of RAM with a hard drive that can do about 6 seeks a second. I already have an idea on how I can pull it off, and if I can, it will be a huge win for enthusiasts and exhibitors with a vested interest in this material.
This year is the 10th anniversary of 8088 Corruption, which hasn’t been lost on me. Expect a future post covering 8088 Corruption in some more detail with an encoder or two leaked. Also: I’m working on the sequel. What could a sequel possibly be, since the original is a one-trick pony? Well, how about video in graphics mode, which I originally said was impossible? I think I can do it, still a on a 5MHz 8088 CPU, still a CGA card, still in color (although the initial demonstration might be in grayscale while I work out the kinks). Actually, I’m already doing it — in my head. It’s designed and tested already; I just need to convert what’s in my brain to source code.
Hobbies should always be secondary to things that really matter. Good things are happening with my family as well: My sons are improving at school (and in life in general), and life with my wonderful wife continues to improve.
Things are really looking up this year. It’s about goddamn time, too.
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Just keeping it real… like it’s 1991
Posted by Trixter on November 25, 2013
Came across a nice post from Scali with some oldskool and “midskool” analysis on demomaking for very slow PCs. Check out his production as well, which he did for the “1991” demoparty this month.
Last weekend, there was a special demoscene party, the 1991 party, with, obviously, 1991 as a theme. Well, that is just my bag, baby! The focus was mainly on C64 and Amiga, which were the most popular platforms for gaming and demoscene activity in those days. I wanted to do a small production myself as well. I decided to go with a PC production, because of my oldskool code experiments, the PC stuff was in the most mature state. And also, because the PC platforms of those early days have not been explored very much, so it’s still possible to create some refreshing things and work out interesting ideas for early PC.
PCjr
Speaking of early PCs… Because of my early PC escapades, I have come into contact with Trixter a while ago, and we started bouncing ideas back and forth. Trixter’s platform of choice is the PCjr, the…
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Oldskooler Ramblings 