Hacker News Reader

marinbalaon Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?

Yes, and don't call me Shirley!

marinbalaon Ask HN: Share your personal website

Writing about the demoscene, retro computing, comics and hackathons

marinbalaon Retro Gaming Museum in Vienna, Austria

A visit to the Retro Gaming Museum in Vienna reveals a surprisingly lively underground bunker packed with playable consoles, home computers and arcade classics. With a 90-minute "speedrun" ticket, you can blast through decades of gaming history in one concentrated hit.

marinbalaon The HTML Hobbyist

Loved the article. It inspired me to write my own related article on my website: https://marincomics.com/bringing-back-the-weird.html

Not sure my site qualifies as hobbyist enough. It is the work of an enthusiast (me) but I used Bootstrap for styling and layout. I use some JavaScript. The site also starts with an animation I made using Tumult Hype. All this is probably too much for a true hobbyist site. Still, I regard my site as my hobby.

marinbalaon Copyright and the Demoscene (Scandal Amiga Demo)

DataGubbe has slowed down publishing new articles this year, so I love it even more when he releases a new one!

marinbalaon What Does Your Drawing of a Tree Say About You? Applying Koch's Baum Test

During a psychological evaluation decades ago, I was asked to draw a tree. I later learned this seemingly innocent exercise was a gateway into the labyrinth of someone's personality. Recently, I decided to revisit that moment and draw another tree, this time with an iPad and decades of life experience in hand. Let's see how the Tree Drawing Test holds up.

marinbalaon Pilet Open Source Portable Computer

Dang... I should have checked before posting. There were quite a few people who already posted about the Pilet. But the video is new.

Here are some more infos about this: https://soulscircuit.com/pilet

marinbalaon Pilet Open Source Portable Computer

This Pilet looks interesting. Still early days though.

Probably quite useful for makers, developers, and tech enthusiasts. It has a Raspberry Pi5 or CM5 in it. Fully open source, the Pilet seems to be customizable and to be available in multiple form factors. I personally like the tablet form with the attaches keyboard beneath it (though I hope that it is nicer to type on than it looks in the pictures.

They are launching a Kickstarter soon. I'm apprehensively excited.

marinbalaon Teenage Engineering OP-XY

Another really cool but unfortunately too expensive musical toy by the wonderful folks from Teenage Engineering.

marinbalaon Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

Hi there, I'm the writer of the article. Apologies for the inconvenience. I have now replaced the image with the most naked women with a less naked one. Furthermore, I have added an NSFW badge to the top of the article (next to the date). Sorry again. It was thoughtless of me not to add some sort of label. I hope this remediates it now.

marinbalaon Want to know what it's like at a demoparty? Here's my article about Evoke 2024

The 25th edition of Evoke in Cologne just ended in August 2024. Here's what happened, which demos won the competitions and what the real magic of the demoscene is.

marinbalaon Making Compo Graphics for the Evoke 2024 Demoparty

At Evoke 2024, an awesome demoparty, I participated in three of the graphics competitions. Here is how I created my submissions and alternative graphics that taught me what I wanted to do. Tip of the hat to all the marvelous and creative folks I had the privilege to meet!

marinbalaon Love Letter to Time Bandit on the Atari ST

In the year, the Atari ST was introduced, on of the first games for it was Time Bandit, an arcade action game with puzzle and text adventureelements. This is a love letter to the colorful world of time gates, two players and surprising arcade worlds!

marinbalaon Turning a Palm and foldable keyboard into a distraction-free writing station

I took a Palm m125 and a Palm Portable Stowaway keyboard to make a great distraction-free writing tool. This helps sustain the flow state that many writers of prose and long articles seek to achieve. This epic article includes a short video and a hidden section about PalmOS Hacks.

marinbalaon Psychedelia syndrome: the pixels and code of Jeff Minter's 'Psychedelia'

This is a beautifully written book. Immersive, detailed, and well-written. Halfway through and loving it so far!

marinbalaon Monodraw

I love MonoDraw. It is a amazing tool with a great UI. Just a breeze to use!

marinbalaon How Doom didn't kill the Amiga

Loved the Amiga. Great machine.

If the argument that Doom killed the platform is valid, it can only be true for gaming (which was a very large portion of home use). After a great headstart, Amiga fell behind in many other areas: business and productivity software, networking and collaboration, multimedia and realtime-3D graphics.

And regarding gaming, let's not forget that the SNES and the Sega Megadrive/Genesis were going strong when the Amiga was fading away, and it took a while for them to get a version of Doom.

marinbalaon The relaunched and redesigned Archive of Digital Art (ADA)

How the folks at the Archive of Digital Art (ADA) describe their archive (source: https://digitalartarchive.at/archive/about/):

As a pioneer in the field of Media Arts research, the ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART (ADA) has documented the rapidly evolving field of digital art since 1999. This research-oriented overview of works at the intersection of art, science, and technology has been developed in cooperation with international media artists, researchers and institutions as a collective project.

Expanded Concept of Documentation

Since todays digital artworks are processual, ephemeral, interactive, multimedia-based, and fundamentally context dependent because of their different structure, they require a modified, or "expanded concept of documentation." We ascribe high importance to artistic inventions like innovative interfaces, displays or software.

marinbalaon Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)

Apologies, I should have read the rules. Thank you for correcting the post.

marinbalaon Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)

Apologies and many thanks. It was an honest typo, should have been 160 x 200. I've corrected it now. Appreciate the headsup.

marinbalaon Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily

Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea what the risograph process is. Amazing to learn about this.

marinbalaon Porting Stunt Car Racer to the Commodore Plus/4

This article is well-written and interesting. The port on the Plus/4 looks amazing. Great work!

marinbalaon Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands

Since th Art of Coding site is experiencing some downtime right now. Here is the official announcement on the Dutch side (in English): https://www.immaterieelerfgoed.nl/en/215e-bijschrijving-in-i...

I couldn't find it on unesco.nl because everything is in Dutch.

marinbalaon Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands

Congratulations. This is great news. I hope that the website recovers fromt he onslaught of traffic.

I've loved the demoscene on the Amiga and Atari ST sonce the 1980s and have started attending demoparties sonce last year. I have great respect for the efforts of the folks ar Art of Coding and their friends in the different countries. To achieve this sort of UNESCO legitimation is an amazing achievement that takes a lot of serious work and persuasion.

My most sincere thanks and admiration to the Art of Coding folks and to DigitalKultur.

marinbalaon Making a Choose Your Own Adventure Game Using ChatGPT

This is a short adventure in the style of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" or "Fighting Fantasy" from the 1980s. The text was mostly generated using ChatGPT. The images were created by Midjourney AI and Bing Creator.

Everything else is straightforward vanilla JavaScript.