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sehuggon Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers

I recall the turning point was when id used the Watcom compiler for DOOM. Watcom had the 32-bit flat model DOS extender and were starting to add the difficult optimizations. Turbo/Borland Pascal was built for compile and link speed, not even getting a real -O option until Delphi (except for turning off range and stack checking)

sehuggon Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived

Clarion and Paradox thought one of them was going to win the tontine.

sehuggon SDCC – Small Device C Compiler

I initially added the MOS 6502 support by hacking the HC08 backend. It was awful, someone else (Gabriele Gorla) cleaned it up and got it merged to the mainline. There are other options these days for optimized 6502, like llvm-mos or Oscar64.

sehuggon North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes

Dibs on Otisburg.

sehuggon The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities

$80/month that becomes $120/month and then $200/month within a year or two, and they mail you a postcard to tell you about it. I guess that's another nice perk of the business.

sehuggon Alan's Random Insult Generator (1999)

I wrote a conversational insult generator in AppleSoft BASIC, inspired by a program called "Abuse" that I saw advertised in a magazine, and of course by Eliza.

sehuggon ZX Spectrum: Experimenting with 1-Bit Sound

I did a PWM demo on the Apple II using a format similar to the DPCM samples on the NES. Those samples have a pretty simple format: a 1 bit raises the amplitude, a 0 bit lowers it. So you're kinda approximating the waveform with a bunch of triangles.

The NES has a 7-bit DAC, but since we're bit-banging with the CPU we only have enough time between samples for about 13 levels. Each level has its own toggle-wait-toggle-wait routine, and then we shift another bit and decide whether to branch to the next (level+1) routine or the previous (level-1) routine.

https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.12.1/?platform=apple2&file=delta...

sehuggon GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

And also the hamster has two mouths

sehuggon WebFPGA (2019)

The CE40-HX1K iCEstick has inexplicably increased to $158 on the Lattice Store. Pretty spendy for 1280 LUTs. The Olimex Ltd. ICE40HX1K-EVB might be a good substitute at $21.

sehuggon Captain Zilog

Compile this, GOTO breath!

sehuggon Show HN: I mapped every US golf course

Are you planning to feed the info back into OSM?

sehuggon Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

Windows 95 was hamstrung by DOS compatibility. If you installed OS/2, you could have butter-smooth mouse cursor movement even while formatting a floppy disk and running a DOS (or even Windows!) VM in another window. And if you had a XGA card (which no one did) you had a hardware mouse cursor sprite, just like the Amiga (except only one boring sprite and no cool audio/video tricks)

sehuggon Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code for command and lunar modules

The LM landing algorithm was also based on a polynomial, with "time-to-go" as the variable. Problems would occur if that variable went negative.

sehuggon Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark

Well except for Jungle King

sehuggon RISCBoy is an open-source portable games console, designed from scratch

The programmable scanline-buffer-based rendering pipeline described in the PDF is worth a read for fans of such things.

sehuggon Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

And relativity describes the orbit of the quick-moving planet Mercury which shares its name with the quick-flowing element. What a world.

sehuggon Organic Maps

Also current place names. You can sometimes find a business on OSM that has correct metadata, but in many areas the majority are missing or stale (like, closed 10+ years ago.) Solving this is an "interesting" problem to say the least when many businesses these days have nothing more than an Instagram/Whatsapp handle.

sehuggon Loreline – Tools for writing interactive fiction

It's in the uncanny valley, that's for sure. I never had much luck with it because you have to memorize a ton of specific English phrase templates and remember how they are injected into the game logic, and you often have to escape into regular old procedural logic.

But it's an ambitious experiment, and the docs are worth reading through. Every now and again I give it another try :^P

sehuggon Show HN: We built an 8-bit CPU as 2nd year EE students

The dual phase clocking is perhaps inspired by the 6502.

sehuggon Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

FYI Berke Breathed (Bill's contemporary, occasional collaborator and pen-pal) is still posting new Bloom County comics on his Patreon.

sehuggon I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory

I think your beef is not with Meshtastic, but with the distro/compiler, and I am going to bet you're compiling C++ with clang.

sehuggon Saying goodbye to asm.js

Hmmm, need a asm.js -> WASM transpiler maybe.

(compiling legacy code with legacy versions of Emscripten is quite frustrating, almost as bad as updating your JS code to be compatible with accumulated changes in the Emscripten ABI)

sehuggon Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

I sometimes wonder what "Turbo Ada" would have looked like, but I think it would have probably looked like later versions of Borland Pascal. Things like generics and exceptions would have taken some of the "turbo" out of the compiler and runtime -- the code generator didn't even get a non-peephole optimizer until 32-bit Delphi, it would have been too slow.

It might be nice to have Ada's tasks driven by DOS interrupts, though. I think GNAT did this.

sehuggon Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

I'm guessing Apple had stopped putting board schematics and ROM listings in their reference manuals by the time the ACE came out, or perhaps soon afterwards.

sehuggon Oracle slashes 30k jobs

IIRC they also had the first native (100% Java) JDBC driver, so you could run from any platform and without weird JNI locking issues when using threads.

sehuggon OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1

I really prefer the 2D pixel graphics of the original Civ. But the middle game can be a slog due to micromanagement, e.g. loading units onto boats. I would love to see a few tweaks, fixing bugs like disappearing units, and a stronger AI that doesn't have to cheat :)

sehuggon What came after the 486?

I had one of those 133 MHz 486 chips, think it was AMD. Nice DOS gaming machine.

sehuggon Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

That's hilarious. I've been following Mario since his work on libGDX and RoboVM.

His blog post on pi is here: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/

sehuggon The pleasures of poor product design

You can see some of these objects at Musée des Arts et Métiers: https://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee/les-objets-inconfortab...

sehuggon RISC-V Is Sloooow

It's not the wrong design; RISC-V is designed around extensions, and they left room in the instruction encoding for them. They don't have a 800-lb gorilla like Intel shoving the ISA down customers' throats (Canonical is the closet thing) so there is some debate on which combination of extensions are needed for desktop apps.