90s_dev

I'm aware that many people will not be happy even Hell really does exist and I go there for eternity. Many people have expressed this sentiment in the most gory terms. Those people will never be happy, and I think that's fair. I'll pray for them though that they can have a change of heart, so they can have a chance at happiness.

With regards to the law, yes. I have to pay $100 every year and tell the government all my information.

Society is not the government. Society has the opportunity to let me back in.

And it's falling back off. Expected. Thanks anyway everyone for trying. Thanks mods for letting it try.

He had a great time in school, was very popular and had lots of friends. I know what led to his violent behavior. It didn't come from imitating me. I filed with the courts to protect him from someone, and the judge agreed with me that it was alarming what he was experiencing from others. But I failed to use the courts to protect him before it was too late. I tried and I failed. That's all I can say.

From one perspective, you could say that I had a mental illness caused by a combination of issues from my childhood that caused me to have a serious problem with exhibitionism from 5 until 30 years old.

From another perspective, I was just a morally evil person for all of that time.

I think both are correct. It's more complicated. I have my own thoughts on what caused everything to happen the way it did and why I was the way I was. But what I can say is that I'm no longer that person. But that doesn't matter to most people.

Part of my just punishment is that my reputation is forever ruined. That's why I adopted this handle, 90s-dev. My plan was to use this to make money anonymously. But then at the last second I had the idea to go public and hope for a public redemption, partly because I needed money and knew that the product wouldn't sell and was running out of savings, and partly because I strongly felt like I was being deceitful, which is an awful feeling. So I revealed my identity in my Show HN post.

I suppose this is the same thing, just, using GitHub Sponsors, no? Are there significant differences?

I don't mind not getting full time payment. That's not the goal of this. The goal is to try an experimental method of funding open source projects, something we have all been thinking about for a while. This is just one variation. If it doesn't pan out to full time employment, then fine, that's expected. I'd be surprised if it did.

[Edit to clarify] I'm not trying to pressure or guilt anyone into donating for personal reasons. My only goal in this post is to propose a way to experiment with open source funding. Other details are just me answering unrelated questions.

I don't know how long it takes each person to heal. But I know healing is possible.

That is not a black and white situation, and I received only 10 days in jail because of the circumstances, despite the prosecutor asking for the full 365 days. The statues of Illinois do not permit any evidence prior to the day of the incidents to be presented. I could not provide the jury any evidence that my son was becoming a very real danger who I had to protect myself and my other children from for at least a month beforehand. I am not and have never been a violent person, so he didn't get that from me. I could not present to the jury that I had called 911 on him several times, that he threw sharp objects at me, that I did everything I could do disarm him with as least physical force. I did not know about crisis hotline and the police never told me about it or suggested it, they simply said I'd have to figure something out. All I could present to the jury was his own testimony, under oath, that he had in fact harmed me and caused me physical harm. I used as little force as necessary to restrain him from another episode of dangerous behavior. I'm not sure what I could or should have done differently. And anyone commenting this or that solution, I would just say, I agree violence is rarely the answer, but I'm not sure what you would have done differently either. He has since been arrested at least once for similar violent behavior, so I am vindicated at least somewhat, because he didn't learn that from me, and I tried everything I could to prevent and stop it for the month before my arrest, and I haven't seen him since the arrest 4 years ago. And I was never violent. He didn't learn it from me. In order to protect another person's reputation, I will not say where I think he learned it.

Have I not paid my price by going to jail? By being homeless and sleeping in my car in the cold of winter? By having people show up at my door in January trying to cause physical violence to me? Are you the same person you were 9 years ago? Would you rather my children not have food and shelter because of mistakes I made 9 years ago and paid for in abundance? Should I put up a gofundme so that they can have their needs met? I'd rather work to earn that money. But nobody will employ me. So this is all I can do. Do you have a better idea? If your best answer is "oh well, you committed an atrocity, therefore your children should suffer," then fine, that's on you. But I won't settle for that. I will do everything I can to provide for them.

That's very odd. Not sure what os/browser you're using, but I'm using standard HTMLCanvas stuff to draw them. Could you file an issue in the repo with that info? Thanks!

Oh sorry, I kind of skipped over introducing what the project is, mainly because when I wrote this, the intended audience was the people who showed support on the previous Show HN thread. But here's a better explanation of the project's purpose, the one I posted via Show HN two months ago: https://90s.dev/blog/finally-releasing-90s-dev.html

I do agree that this is a new way of using GitHub Sponsors. And I do agree that it might entirely not work out the way I'm thinking. But to my knowledge, this way of using GH Sponsors hasn't been tried before, so it's worth at least trying it once I think. Besides, there was significant interest in this project, which is what made me think of trying this at all, otherwise I would not have. Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks, that's actually my screensaver project Bubbles[1] which I created to mimic as much as possible the Windows 95 bubbles screensaver. It's a one-line include for any website, which is why I put it in this one. Maybe it'll catch on!

[1] https://github.com/sdegutis/bubbles/

Short version: I want to work on 90s.dev, but have no time to. I could do it for $25/hour, using GitHub Sponsors as a way for everyone to chip in a little towards its development. Just an idea.

The vision of 90s.dev is to be a retro os environment entirely in the web, that's suitable for making all the apps you'd need to make a game, from code editors to sprite editors to animation tools to debuggers. And it's decentralized too, so the apps don't have to be built in, you can import them from anywhere on the web, as long as the app speaks the 90s.dev API. This would recreate a retro development environment similar to what many of us grew up with in the 90s.

And no upvotes bring my comment up further. My account is permanently punished.

Wow, as soon as I post, my comment is second to the bottom.

90s.dev.

Well, kind of.

I've been working a ton on some variations and ports of it over the last couple months, but the problem is that I need funding.

So my plan is to setup github sponsors, where for each project people want me to work on, they can donate any amount, and for each $25, I'll work one hour on that project. It'll have a few related projects that all come from a unified vision I have for 90s.dev -- to be a full platform that recreates 90s-era development, from dos and qbasic, to win3 and vb3, not to mention assemblers for those who want it (see my show-hn about hram.dev).

The reason I started hram.dev was so I could have a native platform to port 90s.dev to. I love the idea of having native host for retro GUIs. But I am not a huge fan of html/css/js combo. It feels tacked on because it is. I came up with a relatively novel and I think truly innovative GUI methodology in 90s.dev that I did not know how to explain so I haven't truly shared with people how exciting it potentially is. Tomorrow I plan to put up a github-sponsors link with a few different projects, where for each $50 that I receive for a given project, I will work two hours on that project. This way the community can help sponsor me turning these things into realities.

Got one report on reddit that it's not creating the default file in appdata and just using the one in memory that it thinks it's writing. If you have the same issue, here's the whole sample asm file that you can write to appdata\hram\hsig.s before you open hram.exe:

    ; switch on arg
    cmp cl, 4
    je MouseDown
    cmp cl, 5
    je MouseUp

    ; if mouse not down then just skip
    mov al, byte [0x33000]
    test al, 1
    jz Skip

    ; draw green at mouse
    mov rax, 0
    mov rbx, 0
    mov al, [0x30007]
    mov bl, 128
    mul bl
    add al, [0x30006]
    mov byte ptr [rax+0x30100], 0x0f

    ; call blit()
    sub rsp, 24
    call [0x30030]
    add rsp, 24

    Skip:
    ret

    ; store mouse-down info

    MouseDown:
    mov byte ptr [0x33000], 1
    ret

    MouseUp:
    mov byte ptr [0x33000], 0
    ret

Fwiw I do not know assembly! This is the most complicated asm I've ever written! So if it's got dumb errors, please let me know and I'd be glad to fix them in the sample code!

Shorter description:

It's like love2d but with a pico8 style screen and the code is entirely asm.

Download at https://hram.dev/hram-110.zip for version with hot code reloading.

Write event handler function in native assembly at appdata\hram\hsig.s that interacts with keyboard/mouse and 128x72 8-bit screen (red/green only).

Uses native jit, no interpreter. So if you write bad assembly it will segfault! But it's okay, just restart hram.exe (~360 kb) and try again.

Hi again HN. You said I should release early and release often so here I am.

HRAM is a computer simulator that runs real native assembly in the context of a 128x72 pixel screen with 8-bit colors (4 bits for red, 4 for green, no blue).

The idea is that you program it using your own assembly, in the same way they might have had to 50 years ago. It's almost like love2d but with assembly. You write an asm function that responds to events like mouse/keyboard/etc.

It takes your code, located at appdata\hram\hsig.s (it creates one for you on the first run) and runs it when it loads. I plan to add hot reloading soon, maybe later today.

And it's not an interpreter! It uses asmjit under the hood to compile your code into actual assembly and then just runs it. Which means this is literally as close to the metal as you can get writing games!

This is maybe the coolest and most exciting thing I've ever built. I'm really excited to see what you all think of it!

The manual is at https://hram.dev/indexb.html and the beta download file is at https://hram.dev/hram-100.zip so please let me know what you think!

They did.

"It's only complex because it's new, it will get less complex over time."

They said the same thing about browser tech. Still not simpler under the hood.

To be fair, if you learn computer science well enough to thoroughly understand Scheme, I don't think it'll take more than a few weeks during the summer to learn Python.

I stopped caring about that question a long time ago.

Yep.

Modern programming is. But look at assembly, which is what actual machines do. And you can write assembly with tons of gotos and not a single function in sight.

It seems to me that a large percentage of jobs exist just to exist, and that they use their continued existence to justify their continued existence. I wonder how much the world would keep spinning if 90% of people were laid off. Maybe we'll find out if AI is adopted widely enough...

To be fair, the Monaco team did an amazing thing. It's not clear to me just how much of VS Code's complexity is essential to its genius, but if anyone ever creates a slim version that does 90% of the work in 10% of the code, it would forever change editing like VS Code did. It would be great if it was portable too, but it's hard to get that without pulling in HTML + JS + CSS as dependencies. Maybe as a Dear ImGui extension?

Yeah exactly, this is why I stopped liking DSLs about 15 years ago, shortly after using Ruby extensively (probably not a coincidence) and converting to Clojure, where there was a large movement away from macros despite it being lisp. They're good in very isolated situations, and only when designed very carefully. This wm is quite possibly one of them; if you need more complexity than the macros here allow, and adding/changing macros only makes it worse, just use another wm.