Forum comments in chronological order

Anonymous
Thu 1-Apr-2021 06:38

Can't you eliminate ghosting in software by verifying keypresses by lighting up different parts of the matrix?

Anonymous
Thu 1-Apr-2021 09:46

I like everything about this, but I do love how you casually quoted the Amiga Basic "Music" demo in the first video :)

Anonymous
Thu 1-Apr-2021 10:42

Me too!

Anonymous
Thu 1-Apr-2021 11:02

The problem with this is the legal license.

If you buy this NFT and that means a transfer of the ownership then yes it's valuable, but that is not what you are selling is it?

Because then you would lose the legal right to "A Mind is Born" and have to remove it from csdb f.ex. (good luck with that btw, not from a it's impossible point of view but more what the community will think about it).

As the legal construct is now NFTs are only valuable if the platform is a monopoly and then we have the same problem we allready have with Facebook, Google, Apple etc.

Anonymous
Thu 1-Apr-2021 11:17

Thankyou for doing this - it's fascinating, the device really sounds like a big church organ. I've built a Z80 single board computer, and after hearing this, I want to try connecting a sound chip to it, and then tweak the output wave. I have this big Teac reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I recall creating a "reverb" affect with it by feeding playback head output back into record head. But using the electromechanical reverb unit is genius - you get a complex polyphonic sound that renders Bach very nicely. -MCL, Waterloo, Canada.

Anonymous
Thu 1-Apr-2021 12:00

This fellow actually is right. When I first encountered syntax highlighting, I thought: wow, what a fine, helpful thing! But it is just not good - your brain does not have to work so hard to scan thru the code. But honestly, if you turn off the colour, your own internal conceptual processing machinery will work a little better. You will have to invest more mental effort to "read" the code - but you will get a solid return on this extra mental investment. I find I do - I can build the internal "picture" of what the code is doing better and faster. The pretty colours are a child's distraction. And there is solid science on this. Distraction degrades critical concentration. I recall a military study that discovered that the better pilots in the Vietnam war would typically disable many of their warning systems that were meant to assist and warn the pilot - specifically when the pilots transitioned into active conflict. In order to be really sharp and survive the "dogfight", pilots learned it was helpful to dial-out the distractions that were meant to "help" them. Syntax-highlighting is a perfect example of a silly "flashy colour" phenomenon that degrades and impairs human concentration. Don't believe me? Go into *any* supermarket on this planet, and watch how *colour* is used to grab and re-direct your attention away from what is on your shopping list. - MCL, Waterloo.

Anonymous
Thu 1-Apr-2021 17:29

Very cool!!!

Anonymous
Fri 2-Apr-2021 00:31

I wonder when I'm in bash and erasing text with backspace what stops me from erasing the bash prompt at the beginning of the line?

Kodiak
Mon 5-Apr-2021 15:53

Linus,

I was wondering what you make of this "safe VSP channel": https://pastebin.com/dGFckHUb

Some have expressed disbelief at its viability, but I have not seen any cogent rebuttal or, conversely, proof of its effectiveness. I only really started looking into it today and haven't even dabbled with it myself (not wishing to leap into another detour from my main coding project, Parallaxian).

Anonymous
Mon 5-Apr-2021 21:22

I'm really impressed!
- WTE

Anonymous
Tue 6-Apr-2021 18:43

Thank you very much, Bennie, for all the additional information! ’ll check out those additional resources you recommended.

Have a good week.

Sincerely,
Mike

Anonymous
Wed 7-Apr-2021 09:08

Quote of the day:
"I didn't have a cathedral at home but I did have this spring reverb tank"

Also, it would be fun to hear the sixtyforgan without reverb tank in an actual cathedral. Maybe you should visit Reyn?

Cheers,
Pontus

Anonymous
Wed 7-Apr-2021 12:21

Definitely deserved the win. I have found a bug: if you put the teenager doll on the white table, it doesn't appear, either there or on the smooth surface (though you can pick it up again).

Anonymous
Sat 10-Apr-2021 03:12

nice

Anonymous
Sat 10-Apr-2021 16:38

as of april 10, 2021, this website is broken, i can't use the link to save my level seed

Anonymous
Sat 10-Apr-2021 16:39

I am posting here so you will see this comment. I would like to tell you that "Autosokoban" is broken. The link for level seeds no longer work, and they don't load up.

Anonymous
Sun 11-Apr-2021 01:41

I don't have anything to say that hasn't been said before... But I still feel compelled to say something. That's how good this is!

- Galileo (I'm not making an account)

Anonymous
Thu 15-Apr-2021 04:44

Brilliant work, and a most excellent write-up.

Sellam Abraham

Anonymous
Fri 16-Apr-2021 18:14

All hail the Warpfruit!

/G

Anonymous
Fri 16-Apr-2021 19:00

Music from Phasor and Craft!

Anonymous
Fri 16-Apr-2021 20:28

Well.. All of your SID tunes of course, from all demos.

But start with Craft and "Allt under himlens fäste"

- Pontus

benoitessiambre
Benoit Essiambre
Fri 16-Apr-2021 23:28

I'm still in awe at the 256 bytes that big bang into a full song and video clip.

Anonymous
Sat 17-Apr-2021 04:38

Doesn't this contradict the terms of the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license mentioned on the page for A Mind Is Born?

lft
Linus Åkesson
Sun 18-Apr-2021 09:00

There's a difference between the demo itself and the NFT. The demo (and soundtrack etc.) can be freely redistributed under CC BY-NC-SA. The NFT, which is a commemorative token, is the property of its owner.

Now, there's the matter of "exclusive right to display [the artwork in certain] virtual reality worlds". That's a reference to the following text (visible at https://opensea.io/assets/0xa7702e0769c5d408ebf2b056d7c3cc0a054fd5f7/0 and part of the NFT):

"The owner of this NFT is the only person who is able to display the real version of the artwork in any VR worlds that support the ERC721 token standard."

That seems to me like a very specific technical meaning of "display", where the act of "displaying" would be technically prevented ("is able to") as part of how such a VR world is set up. I mean, VR worlds can enforce all kinds of rules, independent of the copyright system. You can't walk into a real-world museum and hang a random CC-licensed painting on their wall—and this restriction has nothing to do with copyright.

So I can't legally stop you from trying to display A Mind Is Born on your wall in such a VR world, because you wouldn't be violating copyright law. But these VR worlds can—and will—prevent you from displaying it, in a specific technical sense. The text in the NFT informs you of that fact.

lft
Linus Åkesson
Sun 18-Apr-2021 09:07

I just changed "exclusive right" to "exclusive permission" on this page. The words are essentially synonymous, but "right" suggested that an exclusive copyright was being granted, so that was misleading.

Anonymous
Sun 18-Apr-2021 12:11

Anytime Mike :)


Eventhough it is a bit more complex (because bash works with a builtin readline library that handles backspaces) it basically boils down to this: the prompt is a simple string that gets printed before reading in your input. If for example you'd run in bash:

while true:
printf "my prompt $ "
read
done

you'd get the same situation. I guess you would not expect the 'read' command to erase the printf output string. In other words: the prompt is not part of the input buffer but a simple string that gets printed before each read call.

Bennie

ksk
Sun 18-Apr-2021 15:54

Best I can tell, the parts are as follows. Use the picture at the start of the video as a reference.

The 3-pin device on the right is a 78L05, with input at the top. The two on the left are generic NPN transistors with base in the middle, collector at the bottom. BC547 would work. The electrolytic capacitors should be fine with anything in the range 1uF to 10µF, and the white rectangular caps are 100nF. The resistor for the LED is around 220Ω, and the long resistors right next to the transistors are 100Ω. All other resistors are 1KΩ. The diode on the right is a 1N4148 or similar.

I haven't verified this in hardware but a quick simulation seems to produce the right colors. Note that the blue signal can exceed 0.7v by quite a bit with these values, this might be why some monitors reject the signal.

Anonymous
Tue 20-Apr-2021 08:00

What a strange page this is-from an old internet to the present!

Anonymous
Wed 21-Apr-2021 21:02

Thanks for the comprehensive explanation of how this works! It blew my mind.

Kodiak
Thu 22-Apr-2021 10:46

Okay, I looked into it some more and have a better understanding of it now. (Actually, considering I had zero understanding of it when I last posted, that wouldn't be too hard, but I digress).

The VSP bug is the manifestation of what mathematicians call a "complex system", i.e., something in which disparate, organically unrelated inputs can trigger identical outputs. Hence a "one size fits all" software solution is going to be challenging.

It seems that the EOR-based channel write thing looks like a way to minimise the risk of the bug being triggered without necessarily completely guaranteeing its prevention. That said, it was extremely impressive work on your part to take the issue that far.

My personal position would be to file the bug along with moody tape decks and disk drives and therefore consider it should not be consigned to the dustbin of coding history at all. At the bare minimum, games with VSP scrolling could have a "gracefully degraded" version, with no VSP, for use on crash-prone hardware, but by no means should coders be keen to dump VSP because of a bug on outlier hardware.

Anonymous
Sat 24-Apr-2021 16:43

Advent.z5 was compiled with inform 6.31

How slowly does it play, or: have you tried it?

https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5

What would it take to port this over to the Apple II?

Anonymous
Mon 26-Apr-2021 18:00

Awesome, I love it!!

Anonymous
Tue 27-Apr-2021 04:03

This just made my whole week!

Anonymous
Wed 28-Apr-2021 18:18

I am curious how to go about generating the robot voice on the PO-28. (demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KloyDjmU2dQ&t=1266s). Also do you know if this feature made it into the PO-128 that was released a few months ago?
Thank you.