WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
So I'm continuing my journey through assembly programming and 8088/DOS programming specifically.
I wrote a pretty simple ascii object dodging game. I did it first using all standard DOS or BIOS interrupt calls for all the drawing. Then I did it again just directly accessing the memory for the screen, and writing my own interrupt handlers for system ticks and keyboard interrupts. It's been a fun proof of concept.
Next up, I'm going to try to dive into the vagaries of EGA, and replace all the ascii stuff with actual graphics. And probably tune the difficulty more as well. I haven't delved much into the nuts and bolts of how you write to the screen with EGA. I saw that supposedly there is a vertical retrace interrupt, which for the most part you should never use because not all EGA cards, and especially most VGA cards, actually implemented it. Apparently it's even a discrete pin on the ISA slot that you can check whether it was even wired or not? Also the specific hardware IRQ for it got reused a bunch later, so you can't even be certain the IRQ you are services is the vertical retrace? So there is a register you can poll instead, if the vertical retrace interval is important to you.
Aside from that, apparently EGA works by having 4 different bit planes overlapping the same memory space. By default the bit planes correspond to red, green, blue and intensity. I'm under the impression very few games bothered to change these defaults. Each bit is one pixel. So to write anything other than white to the screen, you need to set the plane masks and the bit masks to registers for the EGA card. I haven't delved into the nuts and bolts of implementation yet. They crow about how it allows you to more efficiently write to the screen with few calls, and that seems possible in theory. But for any image of any color complexity, I wonder if the overhead of constantly changed masks registers eats severely into that. We shall see.
Maybe at the end of this I'll start uploading all my shitty ASM to github or something for people to gawk at. But it's mostly practice for a retro style RPG I'm always planning on making using OSRIC, since it's open source and basically AD&D, my favorite rpg system of all time. And I'm not creative enough to come up with an RPG system from scratch, much as I want to create my own CRPG. At least not out the gate. Training wheels first.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
I don't know about common in absolute terms. And I'm also no country music connoisseur. But I have memories of Dolly Parton writing a lot of love songs about men from a woman's perspective. And Dolly Parton was (is?) a pretty big deal.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
It's on my to play list as well. Have a hard copy and a stable of vintage machines that could run it. Trying not to distract myself from Xenoblade Chronicles 3 yet though. I really want to try to finish that game before I let my attention wonder.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
I may, but my target platform is a NuXT, which is basically a slightly suped up IBM XT SBC. Because of the Trident 9000I VGA chip they chose, it's technically capable of VGA. But from everything I've seen, the CPU really can't push the pixels for it. So I want to stick to EGA at least for now.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
cultural vandalism
I love seeing this phrase more.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
What a difference geography makes.
In my part of the world, I've never seen a home without a heat pump. My childhood home in the 80's had one. In the 80's it fucking sucked. My dad cursed it every winter when it would struggle to get the house above 60 degrees. Thing was probably struggling greatly, and way past it's lifespan in the late 90's when I have the clearest memories of it's horribleness.
These days they're pretty sweet. Every unit I've ever rented had one. Even units which had natural gas for stoves. The home I bought has one, that the HVAC guys who service it tell me is pretty good. When it gets below freezing it kicks on auxiliary electric heat which spikes my power bill something fierce. But outside of a few prolonged cold snaps in January through March, I can't really complain.
In fact, there are hookups in my basement for when the house used to have gas heating. At some point that got torn out and replaced with the current heat pump system.
There are downsides to the heatpump. We were investigating getting some form of backup power, and the amps required to start a heat pump can be a challenge for most generator or battery systems. You basically need to invest in special, low start versions of that equipment if that is ever a thing you have in mind.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
Middle of the east coast, United States.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
I'm married. When I met my wife, she was "liberal" in the sense that she voted for Obama and was prochoice. Being prochoice hasn't changed. But she's abjectly horrified at trans children, BLM riots and the assault on free speech by progressives in Silicon Valley.
Lately she's been pretty depressed because it's like we're getting the worst of both worlds. Her prochoice preferences are being threatened, and schools are doubling or tripling down on secretly transitioning the children we are legally obligated to entrust to them. We're probably going to end up homeschooling ours.
Our governor recently said schools are no longer allowed to transition children in secret, and the usual chorus of the mentally ill cried out in outrage. Pretty sure schools are just gonna keep doing it anyways, and eat whatever lawsuits come out of it until a different governor switches things back. Same as colleges did with Title IX over reach. It's not their money they lose, it's ours anyways. So it's nice having a wife willing to make homeschooling her job.
I can't imagine how painful our lives would be if we didn't agree on not encouraging our child to mutilate herself. I hear about divorces where that's in contention from time to time, and I don't understand how every single one of those stories doesn't end in murder.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
"How do you know Roe v Wade is a human rights issue?"
I have never, ever, gotten either of those responses. I mostly get screeched at in sputtered syllables. Then when they are capable of speech again, they say something like "I can't even", "How dare you", "This is why nobody loves you" or "This is why everybody hates you". Then for as long as I know them, they mostly avoid me, and spread rumors about me.
No minds are ever "blown" except cognitive dissonance exploding into blind rage. No arguments are ever provided.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
I like Jimmy Dore. He has heterodox takes. He calls out the left for TDS from the left.
He's also been thoroughly excommunicated from the The Party. He's no longer the party member in good standing which he was when he was at The Young Turks. So Jimmy Dore noticing isn't really indicative of much.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
This is a publicity stunt, and a dumb one too. It will go nowhere.
Tell that to Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
Please don't treat feminist definitions with the same seriousness as math theorems.
A rectangle is a parallelogram containing a right angle, because if it has one, it has four. This isn't a made up arbitrary distinction. You could spend the rest of your life trying to come up with a parallelogram with only a single right angle, and you couldn't.
Claims like "rape is about power" are easily disprovable. I mean, sometimes, sure. But not always, with abundant examples. You don't get to take a thing that has existed more or less since before our ancestors were sapient and notions of consent even existed, and redefine it. Then use clever word games to say "Well if it's nonconsensual sex and it's not about power, then it's not rape". Like you've discovered some immutable truth in the same vein as a parallelogram with one right angle must have four right angles.
Feminist definitions are just clever word games and political slogans. They carry little to no truth value what so ever, neither predictive or descriptive. Unlike your definition of a parallelogram.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
This week I spent a lot of time on EGA. Namely, putting a lot of the stuff I read last week into practice this week.
It took me a while to fully grock the different EGA write modes and register settings. And then there were the memory latches! Jeeze! I guess I should start at the beginning.
There are 4 bitplanes in EGA that overlap in memory space. One bit out of each of the 4 bitplanes combines to determine the color of 1 pixel on the screen. There are also 4 bytes of latches in EGA that correspond to each of the 4 bitplanes. These latches get loaded when you try to read EGA memory space, and some of it ends up in whatever register you read it to. Then when you write back to EGA memory space, the contents of the latches form the basis of what gets written back, modified in all manner of ways by the write mode and the registers set.
So far as I figure, write mode 0 is the most complex. In write mode 0, many registers effect what gets written to EGA memory. You have the bitmask, which determines which bits of the latches get overwritten by whatever byte you are writing to memory. You have the bitplane masks, which determines which bitplane latches get overwritten by the byte you are writing. You have the function/rotate register which sets if the bits get overwriten, or'ed, anded or xor'ed with the latches, and how far bits get rotated. And then you have the set/reset value/enable registers, which can override certain bitplanes to be set low or high regardless of the byte you are writing to memory says.
Mode 1 just dumps withever is in the latches. You mostly use it for dumb copying from EGA memory space to another spot in EGA memory space.
Mode 2 only uses the bitmask, and the lower nibble of the byte being written corresponds to what gets written to the bitplanes. So basically you can write colors to the screen without having to fuck with bitplane masks or the set/reset registers. I'm told it's good for plotting arbitrary pixels on the screen.
Anyways, as proof of concept I wrote a program to draw 16x16 sprites in a memory format that can easily be written to the screen in EGA. All in assembly, also in EGA screen mode 0x0d. I plan on using it to create artwork I can then load into other games.
Fun things I've found out. Using the mouse when you draw to the screen fucks up your drawing. The mouse stomps all over the EGA registers when you move it. So you either need to set the registers using an overly complicated API in the mouse drivers, so that it can restore them properly when it exits it's interrupts. Or you hide the mouse while you are drawing. Something I swear I remember the old Sierra adventures games like Space Quest III doing.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
The heart wants what the heart wants.
Also, i strongly feel modern computing stands on the shoulders of giants. I get curious about what those giants were.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
Short term you appear to be correct, to my great surprise. I honestly don't understand how we got here, except that somehow our enemies were even more grossly incompetent than ourselves. I guess that is often how war goes. it still makes me profoundly nervous. I'm also not sure how sustainable it is.
We've severely depleted our reserves of strategic resources in an effort by buy the Ukrainians time? What happens if/when China calls our bluff and finally invades Taiwan? Will we have blown our load too early?
The success of Ukraine against Russia on the field looks good for Ukraine, and great for the profound levels of financial and arms support we've given them. But what if it doesn't last with this Russian mobilization? What happens when the US is forced to partially mobilize it's economy in order to keep the aid up? It could be good for jobs and the economy. It could also be another corrupt clusterfuck that sends most of the money to our other strategic rivals overseas, China.
In order to best capitalize on Europe's great power demands, the US needs to be stepping up it's energy production. But decades of neoliberal policy treating energy companies as The Great Satan have made them too nervous. They think the football is going to be pulled away from them again, and so are content to make up for the losses they previously endured thanks to previous administrations lawfare against them. Ultimately we will fail to solidify this opportunity, and probably will allow it to slip away to the benefit of our strategic rivals.
In terms of US culture "successfully" fusing neoliberalism and leftism in a way that "works", I don't even know where to start. Whatever successes we've enjoyed on the world stage can hardly be attributed to that, and will likely be undermined by the schizophrenic priorities is forces on us. Like the above example of us squandering our opportunity to take a huge share of the world's energy market.
The deep state apparently still has enough institutional competence to fuck up the world, and leave the US as king shit of turd mountain. But our culture is too dysfunctional to actually build anything back up from there.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
The general consensus was that production lines would take 12-24 months to scale up
A lot can happen in 12-24 months, as the last 6 months shows. And generally, it's much harder to retake territory than to defend it in the first place. Recent successes for Ukraine not withstanding. I believe taking islands, such as Taiwan, present even greater challenges.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
Man, I really don't know where I fall on that. On the one hand, it reads like a copy-pasta or meme. But more boomerish. Like that "300 confirmed kills" one.
On the other hand, it also pretty accurately describes a lot of insecure, vindictive, attention seeking women I've known or seen. Only in the real world they lack the self awareness or courage to ever write a letter like that.
Which raises a fascinating question. How do you meme the meme-sex?
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
My plain reading of the phrase is that it centers women's "agreeableness". But contextualizes it in terms of women deeply internalizing social narratives. It's tangential to the NPC meme, but less about mindlessly repeating whatever CNN is telling you, and more about how susceptible women are to all info hazards.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
Would you consider Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage a point of evidence? Where she digs into how the infohazard of gender identity is convincing the same cohort of young girls and women who easily socialize to eating disorders, cutting, etc to now socialize towards a trans identity?
Or how it's well known among professionals that you need to separate these women from each other on a ward to rehabilitate them? Because if you leave them among themselves, they just socialize around their self harm identity too much.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
Yeah, left leaning communities do not ban slurs. They only ban the slurs against their patron groups.
I think the saddest, for me personally at least, community that went hard and hatefully left has been the Penny Arcade forums. Officially, there is a rule. The only insult you are allowed to use is "silly goose". In practice? That only applies in one direction.
They have rules against hateful content. But people openly saying a lot of white people need to be murdered in a revolution don't get moderated. Suggesting that Kyle Rittenhouse, in their Rittenhouse trial thread, was correctly found innocent? You get banned for hateful content.
It was not always this way. I'm not sure when the moderation began moderating hard left. I think it might have started after the Dickwolves controversy, and as a sign of good faith they brought on some "friendlier" moderators to "educate" the community.
Many discords I'm on for hobbies have a "no politics" rule, to keep things friendly and inclusive. In practice this means no bringing up conservative politics. Everyone is free to root for Biden, and complain about Republican politicians, talk about how enthusiastic they are for liberal or progressive policies, etc. It only becomes "politics" when someone disagrees, and then they get banned.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
It only takes one “KKKILL_ALL_*******” or fedposter to make a lot of people nope out. Not dealing with that, going to hang out somewhere with fewer witches, etc.
Am I the only one who remembers when it was trending on Twitter, to seemingly no problem what so ever, to cheer all the old white men dying after the last census? To signal, crassly, how truly enthusiastic you were, and how much better you thought the world was, with more dead white people?
Left leaning spaces, if you take for granted that Twitter and Reddit are left leaning, absolutely support "KILL ALL ******" posts, so long as you are talking about Republicans, or suspected Republicans. If you don't nope out of that just as hard as when you see someone "just asking questions" about the "Jewish Question", it's because you take it totally for granted.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
Image you lived in a society that forgot how electricity worked. You still have all this stuff that uses electricity, and you have some memorized rituals around how to get the lights to turn on. But the rituals are... weird. They've drifted away from the mechanical acts of completing circuits, and become quasi-religious as to the spiritual significance of bringing light into this world. And nobody understands any longer which parts of the "turn on the lights" ritual are load barring or not. They mostly just blame the person for being immoral if the lights don't turn on for them.
This is more or less how I perceive the state of the media right now. They have no concept of the human condition. Of theming. Of universal human truths. They have no capacity to actually imagine a character's inner world. These are dead and hollow things writing about other dead and hollow things. What does an NPC know of the human condition? They aren't human.
So these projects lose money. Everyone hates them. The non-creative executives want to fix it. But they can't. We're 2, maybe 3 generations into the wanton destruction of our culture. It's dead and hollow things all the way down!
Every now and again they can rustle out a boomer to churn out one last, heartfelt, comprehensible script. Apparently the Top Gun sequel wasn't totally shit? And Tom Cruise actually cared about it a lot, worked really hard to have it made, and infused a ton of heart and sincerity into it? Plus real planes, really flying, giving the movie a feeling of, I donno, being real?
As an aside, Tom Cruise might be weird as fuck, but that mother fucker knows how to make a fucking movie. Sure, he's no Stanly Kubrick. But in a world of complete and utter drek, someone autistically repeating the steps movies used to take to be good, whether he understands what he's doing or not, comes off like a savant.
From time to time you'd read about some college stripping more and more of the western canon out of their liberal arts programs. And where they lead, everything else followed. It's dead and hollow things, studying the narcissistic pabulum written by dead and hollow things, churning out their own shallow nonsensical dead and hollow scripts. There is no path back anymore. It could take 30 or 40 years to reverse course if we began seriously focusing on rebuilding our culture today. We won't.
That reminds me of when GOG released the Gold Box games, based pretty strictly on AD&D 1e. An annoying facet of this edition, is that elves, dwarves and halflings had some pretty annoying level caps in most classes. I think thief was the only class they could advance in unlimited.
Of course, this is an obnoxious rule, and it's the modern age. So hacks exist which remove those caps. Except somehow, this weird little quirk of Gygax's couldn't be left alone. Some fucking lunatic was, and probably still is, spamming the GOG communities forums about how racist it is. With a moralizing passion.
Naturally, this was put in play for game balance reason, and it's hard for me to say Gygax's predictions didn't come true. At least in the last few groups I played it.
Perhaps it's me being reactionary, but I always just pick human, and get creative with my play to make it work.
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