andrewf

I've a retrocomputing project which has been gathering dust since before I used an LLM. The idea is to render an isometric view with Quake-style lightmaps; if scrolling is slow enough I only need to render a small slice of the screen each time. I got as far as a proof of concept on a simulated 286 which indicates the pixels-per-second I can achieve is fast enough. Testing on a real 286 would be the next step.

All the assembly code, and the C harness which loads the textures etc, was hand done by me, and period correct. That's where the fun is!

Outside of that, there are so many anachronisms. I actually built the test geometry as a quake map, and processed it using Quake's BSP/lightmap tools. That's 1996 vintage.. except I'm using a newer Quake editor (Trenchbroom, 2013) and modern forks of the tools. All natively on a modern system with a 4K monitor. Building and non-performance testing of the DOS code happens in a Windows XP (2001) VirtualBox (2007) using its' Shared Folder feature.

I might have time to pick this up again soon. My post-processing of the Quake .bsp presently only handles axis-aligned 64x64 surfaces with some hardcoded texturing assumptions. I'll want a full .bsp-to-isometric-data "renderer" - either written from scratch or somehow derived from Quake's source. But this is all just to enable the 286 assembly code noodling, which is what I want to spend time on!

So I'll probably use Claude to assist with the tooling side. By "assist" I mean "do as much as possible to produce the file format I specify". It doesn't seem much worse to me than all the other modernisms I'm already relying on outside of the core task.

I knew very little of this. I know about the Inns of Court, but I didn't know this was such an Inn; I know what a chancery court is (Delaware has them!) but similarly not that it applied in this case. I've no idea what Michaelmas is, but like Christmas, I assume it's an event and/or season which occurs periodically.

I could still read the text! And it's useful to read texts and understand 95%, or 80%, or even 50%! IMO "fully understand what you're reading" versus "can't understand what you're reading" is a harmfully discouraging dichotomy. You can often gloss over such things rather than struggle with them.

It strikes me as like setting up an IDE. People have preferences, switching is possible, but there are advantages to saying "we are a Visual Studio + Resharper shop" or "everyone uses IntelliJ to work on this project".

Browser behavior like mixed content warnings (and a clear slide towards discouraging all non-HTTPS traffic) was the impetus for us at Twitch to TLS all our video in the mid-2010s. Mixed content delivery on a website would, I think, also fall below the bar for doing certain kinds of commerce, and ejecting people from your webapp to a separate payment flow discourages spending.

I wonder if anyone ever tried to make the Clipper 5 pre-processor spit out Delphi..

> Bizarrely, to protect dBase, there was no compatible Turbo C++ objects integration in dBase (you could import OBJ files from Microsoft C++). There was no way to natively use dBase from Turbo C++ or TurboPascal.

I'm guessing dBase was itself built using Microsoft's compilers, so pulling in other code from the same compiler was plausible. Not a product choice re: the Turbo compilers, just a disjoint path dependency between two acquired product lines (Ashton-Tate's dBase, and Wizard C).

This is the reason that Clipper, a third-party dBase compiler, could only link against .OBJs from particular versions of Microsoft C. Clipper compiles to p-code whose interpreter is implemented in Microsoft C; "linking" a Clipper program is actually linking a Microsoft C program with a static array comprising the Clipper compiler's output. So you can mix in a .OBJ expecting that version of the Microsoft C runtime library. Not a .OBJ expecting the Turbo C++ runtime library.

I find the constant use of punchy style tiring.

Sometimes a "punch in the face" is useful. Makes you re-evaluate things. Being punched in the face all day, every day, is just tiring.

OS/2 1.0 and the first edition of the CUA were both released in December 1987 according to Wikipedia; Raymond's story isn't dated but could've happened before this. (If I had to make a wild guess, I could imagine this request was a side effect of some internal IBM battle about what the CUA should dictate).

Some keyboard enthusiasts obtain lighter keypresses by adding weight to the underside of the keys.