| --- Log opened Wed Feb 01 00:00:23 2023 |
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| 03:23 | <&McMartin> | It Begins (tm). https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2023/02/01/classic-mac-development-adventures-in-period-tooling/ |
| 04:56 | <@celticminstrel> | Whee, MPW. |
| 05:01 | <@celticminstrel> | That code looks more or less like the sort of thing I had to look at when porting OBoE… tho someone else had already carbonized it so I think it was a little bit different. |
| 05:03 | <@celticminstrel> | I think I remember reading Inside Macintosh. Probably a pirated copy but still. |
| 05:04 | <@celticminstrel> | (Oh, to be clear, it was in digital format; I don’t remember exactly what.) |
| 05:18 | <@celticminstrel> | Huh, that game is as old as I am. |
| 05:18 | <@celticminstrel> | Also, I’ve never heard of it. |
| 05:29 | <&McMartin> | ... System's Twilight? |
| 05:29 | <&McMartin> | It is, in an odd sort of way, a fangame of two much more influential games, and it got a fangame of its own decades later. |
| 05:29 | <@celticminstrel> | No, not that. Where did that even come from. |
| 05:29 | <&McMartin> | It's hiding in the screenshots in the article you discussed :D |
| 05:29 | <@celticminstrel> | Ah, I was talking about the one you linked to. |
| 05:30 | <@celticminstrel> | I didn’t even notice that icon on the desktop. |
| 05:30 | <&McMartin> | Oh, The Fool's Errand |
| 05:30 | <&McMartin> | Yeah, the link is to the games that System's Twilight was a fangame of :D |
| 05:31 | <&McMartin> | I heartily recommend The Fool's Errand, and *mostly* heartily recommend 3 in Three, System's Twilight, and the modern System Syzygy. |
| 05:31 | <&McMartin> | There are many ways in which The Fool's Errand is worse than the games that came after... but there was also some lightning in the first game that never struck twice. |
| 05:32 | <&McMartin> | I'm avoiding Carbon for these projects, even though it does turn out, with a version of MPW this late, that it is actually an option |
| 05:35 | <&McMartin> | Anyway, Apple put all their old stuff up on public FTP servers for like 10-15 years, so it's entirely possible that you had officially sanctioned archives and not pirated versions |
| 05:35 | <&McMartin> | Especially if your version of Inside Macintosh was a billion tiny documents instead of Six Books. |
| 05:35 | <@celticminstrel> | This was in like, 1999 or so. |
| 05:35 | <&McMartin> | It is entirely possible that this was the "free docs" era. |
| 05:35 | <&McMartin> | Also the Six Books presented the API in chronological order because they just kept publishing independent supplements as new hardware came out |
| 05:35 | <&McMartin> | This... was not a great move |
| 05:36 | <&McMartin> | The shattering of the docs happened in '94, IIRC. |
| 05:36 | <@celticminstrel> | Well, I don’t know for sure, because it (along with MPW itself) ended up on the computer without my input. |
| 05:36 | <@celticminstrel> | (At least, IIRC.) |
| 05:36 | <&McMartin> | MPW was *definitely* "leech it off their FTP sites, mirror it wherever you can" |
| 05:36 | <@celticminstrel> | (Occasionally my father would use the computer and futz around.) |
| 05:36 | <&McMartin> | It's abandonware now, I guess, but it was a free download before it was abandoned |
| 05:36 | <@celticminstrel> | So I remember it was there but have no idea where it came from. |
| 05:37 | <@celticminstrel> | IIRC it was some form of PDF-like document (but not actually a PDF, I think this actually predates PDFs, or at least predates them being widespread). |
| 05:38 | <&McMartin> | PDFs are older than you think. I have Acrobat Reader 3.0 in that simulated System 7 environment. :D |
| 05:39 | <@celticminstrel> | Sure. Even so, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a PDF, just something kinda similar. |
| 05:39 | <@celticminstrel> | I want to say… DocBook…? |
| 05:39 | <@celticminstrel> | Not sure if that’s right tho. |
| 05:39 | <&McMartin> | I know of DocBook as being a weird HTMLy thing |
| 05:42 | <@celticminstrel> | Yeah, I don’t remember exactly what it was. Probably don’t have it anymore either… |
| 05:42 | <&McMartin> | My PDFs are "clean" enough that I'm pretty sure they were formally prepared and weren't just book scans... |
| 05:43 | <&McMartin> | ... though my professional Mac career starts around the PPC->Intel shift, and at *that* point all of Apple's OSX docs were this very 1994-Inside-Macintosh-Like pile of miscellaneous PDFs of wildly varying lengths and coherence |
| 05:43 | <@celticminstrel> | Oh, ISTR that they were also written for Pascal. |
| 05:44 | <@celticminstrel> | Like, any code examples were in Pascal. |
| 05:44 | <&McMartin> | Yeah, C is a latecomer |
| 05:45 | <&McMartin> | So that doesn't narrow it down, I don't think. |
| 05:46 | <&McMartin> | (also goddamn the Pascal ABI is ugly as hell -_-) |
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| 09:44 | | * Kizor readsup |
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| 10:00 | < Kizor> | celticminstrel: IIRC the way I learned to make pdf files was to take a file, move it into my VM running system 7, use PrintToPDF there, take the pdf out again, then toss this whole thing for being way too daft and just put up with learning to save to pdf already, geez. |
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| 13:19 | <@celticminstrel> | XD |
| 16:50 | < Emmy> | Chookitty pok. |
| 18:26 | <&ToxicFrog> | McMartin: re "worksheets", I first encountered that concept in NEdit on SCO Unix and made very heavy use of it. |
| 18:37 | <&ToxicFrog> | Also, catching up on some of your writeups on the 6502 -- three registers? luxury! |
| 19:18 | | * McMartin handwaves a little |
| 19:19 | <&McMartin> | The luxury compared to contemporary chips is that it has functioning memory modes |
| 19:19 | <&McMartin> | And contemporary chips would often argue, not without merit, that it only has one (since the index registers cannot participate in any math operations beyond incrementing and decrementing themselves) |
| 19:25 | <&ToxicFrog> | I have of late being doing nandgame, which gives you only two registers to work with, each with their own restrictions (in particular the A register is the only one you can load immediate into and also the only one you can use as a pointer into memory) |
| 19:25 | <&ToxicFrog> | (and like, we had three whole unused bits in the instruction format, we could have fit LOADS more registers into this thing) |
| 19:34 | <&McMartin> | Ah, I see. I was thinking more Zachtronics CPUs, which tend to also be two-register units. |
| 19:35 | <&McMartin> | rereading the article I think you were catching up on; oh yeah, I forgot about the part where stashing any variable other than the accumulator trashes the accumulator |
| 19:37 | <&ToxicFrog> | Yeah, you can't load anything into D without also trashing A on this arch, and when implementing a stack machine on it the only operation that doesn't nuke both registers is POP A |
| 19:38 | <&ToxicFrog> | It is I think slightly less limited than a TIS-100 execution node. |
| 19:39 | <&ToxicFrog> | (but of course, a TIS-100 EN is not meant to operate on its own) |
| 19:40 | <&McMartin> | Likewise for EXAs, though ISTR that the T register is a bit more freely usable. |
| 19:40 | <&ToxicFrog> | I haven't played exapunks yet. |
| 19:41 | <&McMartin> | Exapunks turns out to be the game that I wanted both TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O to be, on multiple different axes |
| 19:41 | <&ToxicFrog> | But yeah, with three unused bits + three bits each for source and destination, we could have seven registers plus the ability to read and write memory with any instruction, at the cost of giving up the ability to write to A, D, and memory all at once, a capability I have not once found a use for |
| 19:41 | <&McMartin> | (Of particular note is that individual EXAs *do not have instruction limits* -- when limits exist at all they are global and are tuned to prevent 'just unroll all your loops' from winning every speed edition) |
| 19:42 | <&ToxicFrog> | Or four registers plus the ability to use any register as a pointer...or eight, with four of them usable as pointers and four as math-only. |
| 19:42 | <&McMartin> | You are rapidly reinventing the MC68000 ISA |
| 19:43 | <&ToxicFrog> | Sadly it won't let me go back to the hardware design levels and make those changes, so I'm stuck with two registers. |
| 19:43 | <&ToxicFrog> | I mean, mostly I'm reinventing the CPU I built in university, which was noticeably 68k-inspired, yes |
| 19:45 | <&ToxicFrog> | (but much simpler, and had a strict separation between memory<->register operations and register<->register ops which I don't remember the 68k having, although possibly it existed and the assembler we used just masked that; it has been over 20 years since I worked with that arch) |
| 19:50 | <&McMartin> | 68k assemblers tend to be extremely creative about interpretation of your instructions, yeah |
| 19:51 | <&McMartin> | There's going to be some plot twists on that point once I start tearing apart how Mac executables actually work >_> |
| 19:51 | <&McMartin> | One of the plot twists turns out to be "congratulations, you just reinvented DOS but worse", but it wouldn't be Apple if we weren't being awful and pretending this made us the best thing ever |
| 19:52 | <&McMartin> | But, as the Space Marine said about the Xenomorph, this is a place where I can admire its purity |
| 19:53 | <&McMartin> | (And in particular, it means that unlike the Amiga and the Atari ST, it might actually be feasible to make a demo program that is "manually linked") |
| 21:10 | < gizmore|2> | LDA 7 |
| 21:10 | < gizmore|2> | STA 1024 |
| 21:10 | | gizmore|2 is now known as gizmore |
| 21:11 | < gizmore> | LDA 9 |
| 21:11 | < gizmore> | STA 1025 |
| 21:11 | < gizmore> | LDA 26 |
| 21:11 | < gizmore> | STA 1026 |
| 21:29 | <@macdjord> | gizmore: ? |
| 21:45 | <~Vornicus> | 7 = g 9 = i 26 = z |
| 22:33 | < abudhabi_> | https://twitter.com/bonkey_bong/status/1620452573106040832 |
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| --- Log closed Thu Feb 02 00:00:25 2023 |