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Too many hours without any message .... Smile | :)

'Just because nobody complains doesn't mean all parachutes are perfect.'
Benny Hill

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Answer from 127.0.0.1 bytes=404 time=404ms
Packages: Sent = 4 Recieved = 1

Pong

To let your post not be alone.

Nuts, I was going type that! Smile | :)

--- was that you?

Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...

We should all chip in and buy him a spacesuit.

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

No such host is known

In Word you can only store 2 bytes. That is why I use Writer.

Now that I'm at home, i finally have time to do some game programming, oldschool style. Well, actually far more comfortable than oldschool ever was. I have a crossassembler which is called with a makefile. Visual Studio is my source editor and I have an emulator to run the program. I even have an old debugger, the first program I ever bought, which runs in the emulator and allows me to debug my program in its native environment.

The emulator emulates an old COSMAC Elf (or Elf II) with a CDP1861 graphics chip and a whopping expanded RAM of 4k. The graphics resolution is 64 x 64 (monochrome). This is a computer from 1976 and it would have cost you 200$ worth of parts back then, including the RAM expansion. A working computer at that price was a bargain back then and any graphics capability at all was still uncommon.

And yes, you had to solder it together yourself and printed circuit boards still were an expensive luxury.

Here is a small screenshot from one of the first game screens: 'Your mission:'[^].

The graphics chip only generates an image of 64 x 64 pixels, nothing more. Before beginning with the game, I first had to set up an interrupt routine that feeds the graphics data to the video chip, a subroutine that draws software sprites, a subroutine that extracts the bit pattern of a character from a 96 character font and draws it as a sprite at any position, a subroutine that draws a zero terminated string, a subroutine that converts a byte to a decimal string and a random number generator. All that in about 600 bytes.

You can see how all that works in the screenshot above. I would never have thought that lower case would actually work at such a low resolution. In the old days they always used all upper case fonts, especially to save 1/3 of the memory used for the font.

Here [^] are my new Klingons and Romulans, taking Griff's modifications, doubled resolution and drawn with the CPallini method. Thanks for the help, the Klingon now looks great, the Romulan still like some killer flounder. Smile | :)

The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here

This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.

"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."

If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.

modified 6-Dec-16 16:25pm.

The Klingon looks pretty damned good!

Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...

And the Romulan just stays a little too plain. Probably even the model for the old TV episode was done in a hurry. I just watched it with one eye while programming. The old episodes look good when you can watch them with a projector. Now I'm at the next episode on the DVD, The Galileo Seven.

The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here

This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.

"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."

If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.

I seem to remember that at certain times in the series the Romulans had the same ship design as the Klingons.

They did. The true reason for that was that they did not have enough models of Romulan ships.

The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here

This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.

"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."

If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.

Not sure games didn't use lower case fonts to reduce memory, probably more that they couldn't get them looking good. If the computer supports ASCII then it has memory allocation for all 256 characters whether you use them or not.

The computer has no ROM at all. No OS, no framework or runtime library. They did everything to encode the characters so that they need as little memory as possible, including simply leaving away unneeded characters.

I have encoded each character with only three bytes each, or better six bytes for two characters. With a fixed width for the characters I could bring this down to 2.5 bytes per character (actually 5 bytes for two characters).

The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here

This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.

"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."

If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.

Quote:
I have encoded each character with only three bytes each, or better six bytes for two characters. With a fixed width for the characters I could bring this down to 2.5 bytes per character (actually 5 bytes for two characters).

Now, that is 'to the metal'. Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

I want to get the program running in 4k memory, otherwise I can't transfer it from the emulator to the real computer anymore. I want to leave it in its original state, without modern upgrades.

The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here

This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.

"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."

If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.

Quote:
System requirements: Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2

Damn!

I've got some of those installed on machines, but I don't have a machine with more than one, let alone all of them.

I guess it's time to put my feet up, whilst someone else sorts it out.

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

Dun worry, the vs installer will get whatever else it needs,

... plus as a bonus a whole bunch of [often useless] crap ms thinks you need.

<i>But seriously ms products are mostly quite good (with the exception of OS's after 7),
installation is usually quite painless (given decent internet connection to download other req)
but unlike other products it's the after-install removing crap and setting useful/normal/intelligent preferences that takes a lot of time and energy.</i>

If you have to uninstall something as invasive as VS and need to ensure all the leftovers are gone, you really need to use VMs instead and stop worrying about trying to keep your "good" machine(s) clean.

I agree. Plus you can backup/snapshot the VM before major updates / code changes.

- Pete

Adequate performance will always require more than you have now.

«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008

If you talk to my wife again, there'll be trouble!

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

When you are dead, you won't even know that you are dead. It's a pain only felt by others.

Same thing when you are stupid.

modified 19-Nov-21 21:01pm.

Now that is an excellent riposte Smile | :)

May the man with the most ram win ?

touché, Bill

«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008

So that's what those pills are for...

Software Zen: delete this;

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