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Comment by cbmuser | Hacker News Reader

What's even crazier is that someone vibe-coded ia64 emulation support for QEMU: https://github.com/syunnPC/qemu-system-ia64

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It's interesting to see how LLMs have definitely become a force-multiplier to motivate people into doing things they wouldn't otherwise have the time and effort to.

I have been pairing with Claude Opus and it’s quite impressive. I have explored a number of possible changes to things like VTE and the Hercules mainframe emulator.

Would be amazing to implement a JIT in hercules (would make it 10x faster potentially as fast as z/PDT which implements a JIT); good timing as IBM is retiring z/PDT!

Sweet. What changes to Hercules have you been considering? I have had a long running (and maintained!) MVS instance in Hercules for quite a few years now, just for fun.

I want a telnet port connecting directly to the Hercules console when it runs headless, as that is the way it ends up running in Docker. The Hercules console does a lot of heavy lifting that could be implemented at the terminal (as even Windows now has a proper terminal). It went as far as allowing me to connect and see the console transcript, which is pretty already.

Another thing I want that I haven't figured out is to print to my network printers - they all do lpr and ipp, but Hercules direct to socket approach didn't work for me and I need to do more research on that. Ideally, the line in the config could be a pipe command where I could turn the page into PostScript to be netcat it to the printer. or massage it through a converter that took in an IBM line printer EBCDIC stream and spat out ASCII for a "normal" printer.

Open Source and LLMs seem to be complementary technologies that have resulted in an absolute surge of productivity multipliers.

It really depends on the end goal. For personal tools that one uses, LLMs are extremely useful. But publicly used software doesn't only need to be written - it also needs to be maintained. And considering that it's extremely easy to implement features that are not used, vibe coded software tends to be, in best case, a mixed bag, and in worst (I believe typical) case, quickly abandoned.

Vibe coded software is the modern equivalent of the shovelware of the 90s.

Vibe coded software is the modern equivalent of the shovelware of the 90s.

I don't think so, especially as the latter was attempting to make a profit but this clearly wasn't done with a for-profit motive in mind.

Recently thanks to Modern Vintage Gamer on youtube, there has been a push to see if you could get Doom to run on the NeoGeo. Because of its very unique hardware (no framebuffer) it is a very unqiue and tough task.

And yet, some folks have come to the battle and have ended up extensively using LLM's to code it. It is wild to see that these things can target such an obscure platform and get some decent results in a very short amount of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPxhuKTltsk

This is something that doesn't have any real economic value but many are more than happy to see happen.

In this domain and others like it especially!

It's bone crushingly dry to try and figure this kind of shit out yourself, can do everything right according to every available reference and code comment only to get compiler and linker errors nobody has ever seen or posted about. Weeks and weeks of smashing your face against a wall until it gives. Now anyone can get twice as far in an evening. And that fuckin rules

Hard to not get a little hyperbolic about it... but I can't wait for everyone to exhaust their meme projects/ports and models to get just a bit better. Feels like we're about to have something of a golden age when everyone starts really making the stuff they've always wanted.

Plus you can point it at actual software or tests with known results and tell it to keep going until it gets it.

Well, that's one vibe coded backburner'd project I can mark off my list...though maybe it would still be helpful so I'll link it here: https://github.com/ChickenParts/qemu-ia64

It booted Linux fine, was working on booting IPF EFI firmware when I got distracted by life and other projects.

I wish this could make it to qemu's main branch; always fun to preserve new systems. I wonder if it runs openvms/ia64 too!

I think most of the machines that could run Windows could also run OpenVMS. It’s a bit unfortunate the company behind the OS needs to make money off its licenses though.

don't they still give some hobbyist licenses?

I'm still waiting on mine, I doubt I'll ever see it though...

They are in a tough spot. They have to pick between milking their legacy clients who have been running VMS workloads and don’t want to port them to anything else, and a much more risky attempt to develop a consulting ecosystem so those clients can remain on VMS indefinitely. This ecosystem would eat into their own support business at the expense of reducing incentives to migrate to different platforms.

I'll admit that "OS snob who just wants to run VMS because they once ran it on Alpha" is pretty low on the freebie list, but they didn't even say no, they just strung me along until I gave up caring.

I really wish they released it under a GPL license. Unless an event starts an adoption uptick for greenfield projects (and it'd take some time for that). I wish they had an easy way to deploy an OpenVMS instance on a cloud service the same way IBM does with their POWER and Z machines (sadly, no Linux on POWER from them).

Huh. It looks like they're actually getting rid of their as400 hosting... I wonder what that would have cost, being the only players in the game...

> Images for the Virtual Server for VPC (s390x architecture) are deprecated. Starting 28 February 2026, you can't create new instances from s390x images. Existing instances are supported until 20 February 2027. Any instances that remain after that date are deleted.

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