Firehawke

Back then a lot of the time you couldn't just boot from the Windows 95 CD-ROM; a lot of BIOSes didn't support bootable CDs yet, and would have to use a boot floppy as a shim. This would necessitate booting to a MS-DOS environment.

Also, if you didn't have partitions set up, you'd need to use MS-DOS FDISK and FORMAT to get things started, too. No way you'd have enough space in RAM to decompress and cram the entire Win95 UI into RAM to run it.

All in all, it makes more sense to go with the lightweight Win 3.1 intermediary step to bootstrap to the next phase.

Wouldn't it be better to call it "compile C to Linux or BSD"?

I kid, I kid.

1440p displays should be just fine for a 2x upscale off 720p.

It handled One Must Fall 2097, which needed a high-end 486 or low-end Pentium, just fine. Wing Commander 1 and 2 should be fine. WC3 I'm not entirely sure about, though.

Not to get TOO far off topic, but you just reminded me of the 300+ line batch file I was using for my BBS back in the early 90s. Lots of errorlevel checks to handle door transitions, Fidonet, etc.

You could get some ridiculously complicated batch files if you really needed the added functionality.

Needs "do the needful" for completion's sake.

I've used something similar to get MAME's VT240 to talk to a WSL instance. Had to go dig up a forum post I wrote a few years back to find the exact commands.

On the WSL Linux side: socat -d -d exec:'bash -li',pty,stderr,setsid,sigint,sane TCP-LISTEN:11313,reuseaddr,fork

On the Windows side: .\mame.exe vt240 -window -host null_modem -bitb socket.10.0.0.2:11313

Another good reason is to prevent the accidental use of bad dumps. A number of the systems supported in MAME have been redumped multiple times as it was discovered that bitrot had set in on chips, or the dumper made mistakes, or any of a dozen other things happened.

This is also why your older dumps of e.g. Pac-Man for MAME 0.02 won't work on a modern MAME build-- we didn't have the color data PALs dumped, some of the early ROMs were later proven to be bad dumps, and so forth.

Locking it down to specific "best we know of as of this moment" prevents people from easily using materials we know to be incorrect, which in turn also prevents people from sending invalid bug reports.

I was using 300 baud back in 1986-1987 or so, though 1200 was definitely easily available by the late 80s and 2400 was cheap by 1991.

It was referred to as PSX by pretty much everyone until the launch of the DVR, y eah.

Exactly this. And it doesn't guarantee that the code he ran was a stock build of MAME, either. It could be a version with rerecording that lets you go back and fix mistakes until you get a perfect tool-assisted run.

It's more of a direct clone of Mr. Do.

Really? Because every time a new dentist office, grocery store, etc. opens up I get unsolicited mail from them to let me know they're now a thing in my neighborhood.

Does it bother me? Not in the slightest. It's a community notice, and the Brave thing would only annoy me if it hit the levels that AOL CDs were at in the 90s.

Well, IRC 3 has been in development hell longer than Duke Nukem Forever was.

As someone who was essentially constantly on IRC back in the 90s to early 2000s, IRC is just significantly less usable "out of the box" than Discord or Matrix; either is significantly easier to teach someone to use, especially multiple-device.

The ship has sailed and I don't think IRC3 will ever get traction even if it ends up actually being good.

Yeah, absolutely this. There's a bias towards the low end of the skill/intelligence curve as those guys get caught doing really stupid shit and end up in the news as a result.

I was looking over Wikipedia articles on software piracy groups of the 1980s/90s the other day and it was really interesting how many of them died to either a blatantly stupid move on the part of one of their members/leadership resulting in the whole group dropping like dominoes, or a political split when the leadership could not agree on policy (especially during a leadership changeover)

It was particularly interesting to see at least one major group collapse due to leadership getting nailed on phreaking charges, which spilled over to the entire group getting nabbed on the piracy.

A few of the brightest in the scene got out when they found an opportune time, then disappeared. At least one or two of them are CEOs in big business, if the articles are to be believed. I bet one or more are reading this now, even!

Yes. Multiple people who knew him have confirmed it a long time ago.

I think this is where I'd leave any appliances out of the build spec. Give me the outlets, but let me choose my own appliances.

Absolutely. My friends would only be pissed I got to do it before they could!

I remember reading a similar deep-dive on the rowscroll trick used in SF2's floor, but I can't seem to dig it up with Google anymore.

It's not an extremely complicated effect, but it's certainly one of the most notable early uses of the trick and very well thought-out.

It's because there are still significant issues in the average user's stack. If I enable IPv6, my ISP puts me behind a single address still and requires NAT that my router won't do.

Even if the ads weren't obnoxious and in your face, there's still the elephant in the room of malware. Every ad group has been the carrier of at least one malware ad in the last few years-- it's simply not safe to browse the web without an ad blocker.

The only way that'll change is if they go back to static images/text, and there's no way in hell the ad industry would ever allow that.

Absolutely not. MAME's primary purpose is to document the hardware and ROM revisions, and to preserve as much accurate data about the machines as possible. You can use MAME sets to actually replace damaged ROMs, and the tools that come with MAME (romcmp) can help you identify an unknown board if you pull chip data off of it.

It's not strictly intentional; it's a consequence of the strict DRM on modern consoles. Decryption keys are needed for content to be loadable and in some cases you need the actual OS the console is running, too.

Ran smoothly, but not very accurately. There are a LOT of games that do not play correctly (or in some cases, at all) on ZSNES.

It's relatively easy to get the first 90%, but each 1% after that doubles the difficulty. This is especially true on older machines where the code tended to be hand-written assembly. When working with modernish machines where there's a SDK for C/C++, high level emulation tends to be much easier to accomplish-- and this is why there wasn't anything even remotely resembling accurate for N64 until the last few years. It was only feasible recently.

Gamecube, Wii, Switch, X360, PS3, PS4 -- these are machines that will remain HLE for a long time. Cycle accuracy will be arduous and require CPU resources we likely won't have for a long while.

Exactly this. The changes were intentional malware, designed to break the usage of these two modules. GitHub is under no obligation to assist you in hosting malware. The fact that these changes were intended by the original author has no bearing in this situation.

Yeah. I'm using it right now. After doing a single-time setup and making sure that I keep a backup of the .gitconfig, etc, I haven't had any problems. I made sure to point Git specifically to the OpenSSH I provided (which I keep in c:\utils\openssh) with the following bit in the .gitconfig file:

[core] sshCommand = C:/utils/OpenSSH-Win64/ssh.exe

For GPG, the only things I've done is to use gpg-agent and set up a passthrough for gpg-agent to WSL2 for both OpenSSH and GPG via https://github.com/BlackReloaded/wsl2-ssh-pageant/ since I do development both natively on Windows and via WSL2.

Yubikey is probably the sanest cross-platform solution. Assuming you're using an updated beyond Microsoft's default version, which you'll need to get from https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/releases to have support for USB keys, of course. Hopefully MS will update their included version at some point soon.

From there, it's as simple as telling the .ssh/config file to use the key from your Yubikey and you can use the same config file on any machine you have OpenSSH.

Yeah, I've been using a Yubikey for a bit over a year and I'm already a huge fan of the way it works with SSH/Git. It's a bit more of a pain to set up with WSL2 since you need something like https://github.com/BlackReloaded/wsl2-ssh-pageant but it's absolutely worth the setup time.

Exactly this. As an additional layer of obfuscation, it's useful-- it just should never be your only defense. People take the "never do security through obscurity" thing a little too literally.

There's a fundamental mistake in this article.

I quote: "But the “phone book” mental model might make you think that if you make a DNS query for google.com, you’ll always get the same result. And that’s not true at all!"

Phone books are not a static model either. If you were to look up "Walmart" in your local phone book, you're going to get a different set of phone numbers for the Walmart stores around you as compared to five states to the West or East of where you are. As such, the mental model really is apt.