Amend – A small revision control system for Macintosh (System 6) | Hacker News Reader

Amend – A small revision control system for Macintosh (System 6)

jcs.org

87 pointsbitigchi21 comments

I know there's still software (mostly games) being written for DOS and to a lesser extent win95/98. Is there a similar group for Mac system 6/7?

A few notable releases in the past year are Flappy Mac, a flappy bird clone, and ssheven, a ssh client with modern protocols for system 7 and above.

The Chicago 12pt, Geneva 9pt (plain and bold), and Monaco 9pt bitmap font glyphs are forever burned into the depths of my brain.

JCS is genius. I’m going to dig up my old Mac Plus and see if I can get this running on there. It’s a fun little machine.

I'm of two minds with such projects: on one side I'm impressed, on the other side I can't help thinking that the effort invested into such extreme "reinventing the wheel" would be better spent on something else. It's like translating all seven Harry Potter books into, say, ancient Greek or Klingon - a lot of effort if you want to do it right, and there are very few people who may actually find it useful.

I'm not sure there are many previously invented wheels/revision control systems for Mac System 6, an operating system released 33 years ago.

Did code warrior/metrowerks have something for system 6?

CodeWarrior Pro 5 (1999) was the last to run on 68k. 6 (2000) was the last to compile for 68k. Older version ran on system 7 but you could use it to target system 6 (or earlier).

Not many, but Apple had MPW Projector.

http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.06/Ve... also lists CVS, Perforce, VOODOO, Visual SourceSafe, and PVCS, but that’s from 1998. That’s Mac OS 8 territory.

The world is an amazing place because some people do things which are really useful... but also because some people do things which are wacky, unexpected, ridiculous, wasteful, pointless or stupid. When anyone shares anything at all—whether useful or useless—if it's interesting to someone, it's a potential source of joy.

From the perspective of the individual, how is this any different from time spent playing a video game? If making an RCS for System 6 is entertainment for you, do it. Do it with the same relish that someone else might get from playing a video game like Lode Runner or Dark Castle.

If you want utility, how about stories? Stories have utility. In this case, his tale of creating it is a worthy story. And like any story, his could spark someone else's imagination. Perhaps it could lead to more retro-programming which fascinates and delight us.

These are all valid points - in fact I have my own (almost-but-not-quite-finished) semi-retrocomputing project too: a cross-platform MOD (the old Amiga music format) player written in Go (https://github.com/nieware/go-modplayer). Which may not be useful to a lot of people, but at least it was useful for me getting better at Go. That's not to say all of the things I do in my spare time are useful though - most of the time I end up playing games or browsing HN, so even less useful than reimplementing version management for an ancient OS.

I took a small look at your repo and noticed a possible issue: while Gravis Ultrasound did linear interpolation of samples [1], on Amiga all sample replay was strictly non-interpolated [2] ... essentially on each display scanline the hardware would check the period down-counter and load the next sample if zero was reached.

cf:

[1] http://www.gravisultrasound.com/files/documentation/GUSFAQ.t...

[2] http://bax.comlab.uni-rostock.de/dl/Paula_SystemTheoretic.pd...

Thanks for looking at the repo and for the links! Initially I just used non-interpolated output, but it was extremely noisy. I suspected the Amiga had some additional analog hardware which avoided this, so I just added some interpolation to make it sound better. But anyway, it's far from finished, if I have the time to pick it up again someday I could make it more accurate...

Yes, it has a low-pass-filter that you can turn on or off. See

http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_gui...

and more generally:

http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_gui...

In that vein, an Ancient Greek version of Harry Potter does actually exist! I think I've seen a Latin and Scots version too.

Here are the translator's notes on making it, which provide an interesting perspective on how translation works: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/harry_potter.htm

The only person who is going to find your garden useful is you and your family who gets to eat the handful of tomatoes you grow, that doesn't mean your gardening hobby is a waste of time.

This weekend I found the dry beans from last summer's minimal harvest had grown mold, and had to dump them all in the compost. Initially I felt like it had all been a waste of time and effort, but when I thought about how much fun we had digging, planting, weeding, and picking, I didn't regret it at all. (And the compost will turn into dirt to enjoy next year!)

There is actually an ancient Greek translation of the the philosopher's stone! What's cool is they even edited the original UK cover where it says Hogwarts Express to say it in ancient Greek.

There's a Latin translation as well, which is pretty amazing.

And a Latin translation, too. “Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis”, translated by Peter Needham. I found Needham's inventiveness in expressing modern concepts in the ancient language quite enjoyable. I only ever read this version, never the English one :)

> and there are very few people who may actually find it useful.

That something I generally thought about with a number of open source and personal projects I've seen, both on HN and else where. Instead of usefulness to others, I think it's more important to viewed them in the context of what experience the authors has gained and what they've learned that can be applied elsewhere.

I might be wrong, but I believe that some of the diff code came from OpenBSD. It's not unrealistic that some of the modifications required to run the code on an old Macintosh could be upstreamed and improve the OpenBSD diff code.

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