Firehawke

This just wrecked my trust in KeePassXC. Time to go see if anyone's going to continue this from a fork where they aren't setting themselves up for a massive security failure of some variety.

That seems very likely. One of the first things I'd noticed back in the early 90s when I got my shell account and used Pico for the first time was that the UI was similar (not exact copy, mind you) of how Wordstar was, with some basic guidance at the bottom to get you started.

Also kind of reminds me of the old Telix terminal software for MS-DOS, with the bottom status bar. Not exactly the same, but again quite similar in the approach to have you just quick glance at the bottom of your screen for a HUD.

Same. My first internet access was a BSD shell account back in 1993; I had Pine and Pico on there. Coming from a world of MS-DOS BBSes (I ran one myself!) it wasn't that hard to take QEdit skills and move that over to using Pine and Pico-- it was quite comfortable.

I still tend to muscle memory my way through using Nano when I need to do quick file edits on Linux.

Something like that happened to me in first grade. I was trying to go down a slide and a friend decided to climb the slide itself. He ended up launching me off the side of the slide. It was maybe a five or six foot slide, and I remember going over the side in slow motion, grabbing for the rim of the slide but being at least 6" away from reaching it, and then suddenly.. sharp pain and pitch black as I landed on my back.

I was conscious again about 10-15 seconds later. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you your whole life. It probably wasn't close to life threatening, but the combination of adrenaline, sharp pain, and brief unconsciousness definitely leaves an imprint in your memory.

It's also how easy the userland can break things. Windows backwards compatibility tends (even if it's not 100% successful on this) to stay relatively stable. It's kind of funny that the most compatible way to distribute Linux binaries for games is to target Proton/Wine.

This is exactly the same for me. I definitely like being able to switch between a tablet/e-reader for regular reading and using my phone when I'm stuck waiting in line or transport.

I don't specifically need the physical book; space-wise it'd be difficult to keep all of the books I'd like to own. Just not enough space. That means that DRM becomes a major concern; I have absolutely no issue with stripping DRM for my own use whether it's a game, movie, music, or book.

I never said cognitive, just dissonance.

A tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements.

Yeah, that's a pretty big case of dissonance there. While I agree with large parts of the article in general, the bit about getting yourself fired is just completely out of touch with reality in a job market trying to replace engineers with shitty AI.

Not much in the way of WYSIWYG, unfortunately. There've been some VSCode extensions in the past to simplify editing but that's about as good as it gets.

MAME's documentation was moved to Sphinx (and thus RST) a number of years ago. I headed up that project, in fact.

There was a significant learning curve getting good output when converting some of the old ASCII charts out of .txt files, but once settled it makes for a much better user experience and it auto-compiles to HTML, PDF, and even EPUB with zero additional effort.

I would definitely not want to go to Markdown from RST for technical documentation that's more complex than a Github readme.

DJGPP was the primary development platform for MAME when it was limited to MS-DOS. It certainly got the job done.

I've been mulling over the concept of a codec designed for streaming NES video. Stream the VRAM tiles and the RAM data needed to reconstruct the output locally, which could be done in a shader along with CRT simulation if desired.

Very much a one-trick pony, but probably considerably less bandwidth-intensive than even the original resolution (320x224) under nearly any acceptable bitrate.

Hey, you go and stop every DDOSing asshole out there and I'll be glad to express that cloudflare should go away. Otherwise, those paying per-byte on bandwidth overage are more than glad to have a safety layer.

Then why even have a HDR display as the handheld screen itself?

Come ON.

It means that Microsoft won't suddenly disable your Windows 11 install's ability to update. Microsoft has already, on at least one occasion, disabled further updates for computers that don't meet their specified requirements in regards to processor and TPM.

A lot of the users of 10 we're talking about wouldn't know how to get Windows 11 working again after updates were stripped again.

Right. You're not going to use V-size and H-size to remove the borders because that screws with literally every other use of the TV (other computers, TV shows, etc)..

About the only way to properly calibrate what the borders "should" be is to calibrate the TV to what would be a reasonable approximation for SD TV signals, and POSSIBLY make small adjustments after that point if the computer looks wrong.

Even then, every TV is going to be somewhat different and so there's a huge amount of variance on how it's going to look in the end. Same applies for computer monitors back then, though calibration of an RGB monitor is going to be even harder than composite since you can't easily run a VCR over it to try to get SD TV calibration.

Problem with this theory is that it's not taking into account what the artists were designing their art to be. Not every circle is meant to be a proper circle in the end-- sometimes there's a mix of PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio) art and 4:3 in the same SCENE much less the same game: For instance, Chrono Trigger has mostly 4:3 artwork, but the moon seen behind Magus's Tower is actually 8:7 PAR.

I'd argue that in the end the whole game was meant to be seen by players on a 4:3 display, and thus 4:3 is "always" the correct answer for NES/SNES.. but your mileage may vary considerably.

I think the one thing I CAN have a hardline stance on is that stretching out 4:3 to 16:9 completely and absolutely distorts the intended look of the4 game and is ill-advised.

That said, there's one fly in the ointment. Systems like the TRS-80 Color Computer had a massive block of overscan that's visible by default on all displays. How MUCH of that overscan is visible depends on the display you're using (different TV plus different H/V size knob settings) and so actually working out what the correct display is and should be.. is a LOT harder and will vary a lot across different software on the same system. I'm not sure that just picking an aspect ratio per-game is correct; most users didn't exactly go and recalibrate their TV for each game they were playing, they'd pick a good baseline and live with it unless something was offscreen and thus required adjustment.

Yeah, no, you need to run the community patch. As noted before in the article, it's being actively maintained by the community. You wouldn't expect a 1.0 launch version to run well in 2025.

Dreamcast didn't have game patches over the internet. That wasn't a thing until the Xbox. You could, in rare occasions, download additional content (e.g. PSO had downloadable quests) but the vast majority of games were standalone.

Completely wrong.

You can play it offline one player or split-screen with just the disc. You can play it online with the disc and a minimal amount of extra work. https://sylverant.net for instance is a PSO server that supports Dreamcast v1, v2, GameCube v3, Xbox v3, and PSO Episode 3 on GameCube.

I'm normally not one to attack the messenger and just attack the message, but lay off the crack.

99% of users don't want anything even remotely like this. The thought of a single database (even encrypted) that could contain random login/password information, personal information, etc. and easily exfiltrated by whatever new zero-day of the week is NOT pleasant in the slightest.

How long ago did you try that?

I use WSL2 to handle Linux (and Windows cross-) compilation regularly, along with running a number of native tools that are specific to Linux.

I've never had any issues with that, even to the point that I've been able to run MAME natively from Linux and have it show up like any other windowed app.

I'm shocked. They were adamant it wasn't going to happen for a long long time.

Regulation. The cost of regulation compliance and tracking that you're in full compliance, and the lawyers needed to keep all of that in line.

As of 24H2, you can just "wsl install" from the commandline and it'll do all necessary setup to get you up and running, including installation of Hyper-V components if needed.

It's a bit more than just some candy, there's substantial glue on both the Linux/Windows sides to get Plan9, WSLG, and the other components to work.

That said, the kernel they distribute is open source and you're not limited to just the distros they're working with directly. There are a number of third party (e.g. there's no Arch from Arch or Microsoft, but there's a completely compatible third party package that gives you Arch in WSL2)

Nope, it's been available in the Steam client beta since 2016, and somewhere around 2017 it went into the mainline client.

Microsoft really should go back and look into open sourcing more of their really old tools. Get versions of MASM, QuickBasic, VisualBasic (the DOS version, of course), and so forth out there.

There's a lot to learn from these old tools and it'd be nice to have this stuff opened up for tinkerers on ancient platforms. It's not like MS is going to make any money off any of this anymore, nor is it viable for use on a modern platform even with substantial effort.

Installing WSL2 as of the latest versions of Windows is as simple as "wsl --install" to get a basic Ubuntu install set up. It'll do all the steps, including turning on all necessary Windows features, in a single command.

Hard disagree. Accessibility matters, and some of us are photosensitive to large amounts of bright white. Design your CSS to not completely break with a forced dark theme and this won't be a problem.