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sillywalkon Grand MS-DOS Gaming General MIDI Showdown

I can't remember if it had General MIDI, but I'll give a nod to the Gravis Ultrasound. I couldn't afford / justify a full one, so I got the ACE version. Of course the use of midi for games was almost gone by then.

sillywalkon A 386 PC for Your RP2350

> 16-bit x86 code dependent on interacting with real hardware under precise timing doesn't always work well in a VM.

This reminds me of the 8088mph demo - 1k colours in CGA, and a bunch of other impressive stuff.

8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators (oldskool.org)

319 points by drv on April 8, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 99 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338944

https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...

sillywalkon Apple Releases iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 with Siri AI and Liquid Glass Update

Other discussion:

iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 (apple.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49701004

Links to:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/09/major-updates-for-app...

sillywalkon Homebrew 7.0.0

https://fishshell.com/blog/rustport/

Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus (fishshell.com)

906 points by jdxcode on Dec 28, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 198 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535217

sillywalkon Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

Tunetracker[0] radio automation software (not sure what else it did/does) started on BeOS, then moved to Haiku. After 25 years(!)[1] it's on Mac now.

[0] https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/

[1] https://rbr.com/tunetracker-ditches-beos-haiku-for-mac-backb...

sillywalkon IBM Unveils Next Generation Dual-Architecture Processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE

A couple more articles on them.

https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/motorola-intel-ibm-make...

https://www.cpushack.com/2013/03/22/cpu-of-the-day-ibm-micro...

sillywalkon IBM's next-gen mainframe chip is the first to run Arm and Z workloads

"a base frequency above 5.7 GHz" and 36MB L2 caches.

Also, I'm curious if there are any other dual/multi-ISA architecture chips that are really different and not just 64 bit extensions or things like THUMB.

I found a 1994 patent[0] from Samsung for a Dual-instruction-set architecture CPU with hidden software emulation mode.

IBM developed the PowerPC 615[1] that had either had an x86 core onboard, or it could translate x86 instruction into PowerPC ones. But it wasn't released.

[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5781750A/en

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_600#PowerPC_615

sillywalkon The disjointed Prague of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

I think it looks like City 17 from Half Life 2 - which I believe was supposed to be a vaguely European City.

I think I prefer the ambience of Deus Ex: Human Revolution better.

I'd love(? fear) to see a remake of the original Deus Ex in

sillywalkon The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

I believe the original Toy Story was 'created' on SGIs, but the render farm was SPARC.

sillywalkon The world wants more Canadian-made water bombers. Can they be built fast enough?

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

First European deliveries in 2028. It's sad that the line was shutdown for years, forcing them to rebuild a supply chain. That sounds like a nightmare. Even as wildfires got worse and were and are expected to get more worse. So it goes.

sillywalkon Servers can be backdoored by exploiting buggy motherboard controll

*controllers

Too bad Oxide's non-BMC[0] service processor or something similar isn't available on all servers.

[0] https://oxide.computer/faq-friday/is-the-oxide-service-proce...

sillywalkon Twenty Years of RISC OS Open

> At that stage it shipped with Arthur because, or so we were told, the "actual" OS was still in development.

I think this was ARX[0], which was overambitious. Arthur apparently stands for A Risc by THURsday[1]

EDIT: a detailed article[2], linked from lproven's article[3], about the history of ARX / Arthur / RiscOS.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARX_(operating_system)

[1] https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/23/how-risc-os-...

[2] https://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/

[3] https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/73983.html

sillywalkon The Prospects for 128 Bit Processors ( John Mashey SGI 1995)

IBM's System/38 / AS/400 / iSeries / i5 / i has had 128bit pointers for its Technology Independent Machine Interface. The System/38 was released in 1980.

sillywalkon Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

> play Tux Racer on my very own Z17

Interesting. It looks like Debian has a Tux Racer package for Extreme Tux Racer on s390x. I guess it'd be remote graphics, and not accelerated.

sillywalkon Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

Interesting. If it's accurate, Apple sure has a nice markup.

Side note: I wished they'd chosen more distinctive colours for the charts.

sillywalkon Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

There's a good series of articles on WebForce by the person at SGI who had the idea.

Starts here:

https://therealmccrea.com/2014/01/09/january-1994-a-very-goo...

sillywalkon Musk promises purge after Grok Build caught sending repos to the cloud

"Musk promises". Sure.

"SpaceX policy regarding data retention.

It is actually helpful for debugging issues if we can retain some amount of data, so allowing this would be appreciated, but your privacy settings are always respected."[0]

[0] https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2076737992689914215

sillywalkon The art and engineering of Sega CD Silpheed

> one of the few games that supported the non-standard sound card on my parents IBM PS/1. Actually think it might have been bundled with that PS/1

It was.

https://pixelatedarcade.com/tech_attributes/overview/ibm-ps-...

sillywalkon The art and engineering of Sega CD Silpheed

> Silpheed by Sierra On-Line for the PC — ported from the Japanese PC-8801 — was similarly good, possibly the first game I played with a proper sound card.

I had a similar experience, as it came bundled[0] with the soundcard for my IBM PS/1 286, and it even had speech(!) during the introduction.

[0] https://pixelatedarcade.com/tech_attributes/overview/ibm-ps-...

sillywalkon UK has 'no future' if it fails to act on ecosystem collapse

Link to the 14 page report[0].

The fact that they refused to release the un-redacted report is troubling for many reasons. The most probable on reason they didn't was because the predictions were too dire.

Australia had a similar situation a few years ago[1], and refused to even say when the report was completed.

[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/696e0eae719d8...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/30/offic...

sillywalkon Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork

After Compaq bought Tandem, they said they were going to port NonStop from MIPS to the Alpha[0], but then cancelled that for Itanium[1]. I'm not sure if NonStop was ported/expanded from 32bit to 64bit when it was running on MIPS.

[0] https://www.scmp.com/article/256948/compaq-port-himalaya-alp...

[1] https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/compaq-to-aban...

sillywalkon Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork

As a lucky kid, I remember watching in awe, a postage stamp size video from a CD-ROM encyclopedia on my 486SX. Around the same time I got to see some Sun SPARCstations with an insane 32MB of RAM!

sillywalkon Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork

As a side-note, it's interesting that all of the released versions of NT on Alpha were 32 bit.

Raymond Chen has a blog post[0] about using Alpha to develop 64bit Windows before Itanium hardware was available.

Virtually Fun has some more excellent background on finding a compiler for 64bit Windows[1], finding a copy of Windows 2000 64bit for Alpha AXP[2], and a detailed article about making an ISO from the found copy.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...

[1] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/05/hiding-in-plain-sight-th...

[2] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/15/windows-2000-64-bit-for-...

[3] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/06/26/axp64-2210-installation-...

sillywalkon Windows CE Dreamcast Community Edition (wince-dc)

It was supposed to make porting PC games easier - Windows CE had DirectX, I'm not sure if it was a subset.

sillywalkon Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com

I ~~can't~~ won't use the new ( decade+ old? )reddit.

From the Reddit Post announcing this, :

"In case you are wondering . . .

Q: Is Reddit shutting down Old Reddit? A: Not right now! We can’t promise it will be around forever, but u/spez himself has said we’ll keep supporting it while folks are still using it. That said, it doesn’t have the same modern security tech stack reddit.com has so we need to tighten security on old reddit to keep it viable."[0]

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...

sillywalkon NUMA: Cores, memory, and the distance between them

> those big SUNs

I'm pretty sure all the big Sun boxes were SMP, not NUMA, at least during the dot-com era. Not sure about later UltraSPARC T or M Series systems.

sillywalkon One man, two kernels, and a lot of RISC-V

Previous Discussion about QSOE:

QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture (qsoe-dev.blogspot.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630085

sillywalkon Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

Nitpick: Facebook bought WhatsApp, it didn't make it.

sillywalkon All about the IBM 1130 Computing System

It's amazing how many different, incompatible computer systems IBM had back then.