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@a2_4am@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06I live on track $00. he/him
2999 Followers
89 Following
50 Posts
Joined June 13, 2022
archive.org:
Codeberg:
GitHub:
Total Replay v6.1 is out. It features 519 Apple II games, all playable from a single bootable 32MB hard disk image. This version primarily fixes several crashes discovered by our new automated testing framework.
https://archive.org/details/TotalReplay
Code & changelog: https://github.com/a2-4am/4cade/releases/tag/v6.1
No LLMs. We tested every game, we squashed every bug, we sweated every pixel, for 7 years.
Thanks to @a2_qkumba@mastodon.social, @txgx42@mastodon.social, @helix_nrg@mastodon.social, @Roughana@oldbytes.space, Frank M, and everyone else who contributed.
Mini Replay v1.0 is out. It features 8 Apple II games on a single floppy disk, complete with game help, loading progress bars, and selectable "infinite lives" hacks. All games are fully playable with only a keyboard.
Mini Replay runs on any 48K Apple II. 64K machines also get a bonus screensaver mode that cycles through self-running demos of each game.
It is not copy protected.
https://archive.org/details/MiniReplay
Thanks to @a2_qkumba@mastodon.social for everything.
#AppleII #retrocomputing
"How's your new project?"
"I can launch the conformance checker without crashing."
"Does it pass?"
"Let's not get caught up in irrelevant details."
RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@pikhq/116925935790526727
Its darkly funny that Microsoft spent 25 years and billions of dollars fighting the Free Software movement in general and Linux in particular and the thing that's actually going to destroy them is an ELIZA script that starts every paragraph with "you're absolutely right!"
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You know something? The reason so many developers have gotten taken completely in by LLMs is actually the same reason so many CEOs have: LLMs flatter the ever-loving shit out of you, and a lot of software engineers have egos the size of a planet.
That's it. The robotic yes man is a highly addictive drug to people who are wanting to be told they're smart and clever and right about everything.
Open quoted postSci-Fi Author: In my book I invented Dr. Flattery The Always-Wrong Chat Box as a cautionary tale.
Mini Replay v1.1 is out. It features 8 Apple II games on a single floppy disk, complete with game help, loading progress bars, and selectable "infinite lives" hacks. All games are fully playable with only a keyboard.
Mini Replay runs on any 48K Apple II. 64K machines also get a bonus screensaver mode that cycles through self-running demos of each game.
v1.1 fixes a crash in Spy Hunter reported by @_the_cloud@mastodon.socialhttps://archive.org/details/MiniReplay
#AppleII #retrocomputing
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This quote has been circulating recently, from a 1985 paper that was part of a conversation at the time about what a computer program *is*. Is it the source code? Or the final executable binary? Or the sum of its versions? Or the people who wrote it?
I've been programming for over 40 years, and I can tell you with great confidence that Naur was right. When I'm building software, first and foremost what I'm building is me.
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...which is a roundabout way of saying that, obviously, I did not use any so-called "AI" products in this project, for the same reason you don't take a forklift to the gym to lift weights for you.
The effort is the point.
Milo, who is not guilty of anything, why would you even think that, has calculated that you owe him 1.5 trillion blueberries
#DogsOfMastodon
Zara, who did nothing wrong, would like one (1) blueberry.
#DogsOfMastodon
[deleted a negative thread because who gives a shit, I'll revisit the topic when I have something positive to report on the topic]
I was trying to find the Copilot "user" on Github so I could preemptively block it (like Claude, so repos that use it will show "a user you've blocked has contributed to this repo") and instead of showing me a user page Github redirected me to a settings page for signing up for Copilot and I touched absolutely nothing on that page and immediately closed the tab and then they sent me an email congratulating me for signing up for Copilot Free so yeah I gotta get off Github man Jesus Christ
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Funny story: last year at INIT HELLO, Stavros sat down next to me and casually said "I have the source code to Copy II Plus on this laptop; would you like it?"
I don't remember every line in Ghostbusters, when someone asks you if you want the source code to Copy II Plus, you say yes.
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So I've spent the past year poring through the Copy II Plus source code. Like all mature products created by multiple people over the course of a decade, the code is battle-scarred and disheveled and occasionally hilarious.
It has a fatal error routine named OUCH.
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Let's get right to it: I have the Copy II Plus 8.4 source code, and so do you.
https://archive.org/details/copy-ii-plus-8.4-source-code
You may have heard stories about Tony Diaz (may he rest in peace) salvaging source code off a hard drive in 2010. Those stories are true. This is that.
Wizard Replay lets you play Wizardry 1-3 and several unauthorized third-party scenarios on your Apple ][, all from the comfort of your ProDOS hard drive.
Version 2.1 upgrades scenarios to Snafaru's "Proving Grounds 3.2" game engine. It fixes the random number generator, restores spells after leaving a "spells fizzle out" area, adds a delay after entering a chute, and improves display of poisoned characters.
https://archive.org/details/WizardReplay
Thanks to @a2_qkumba@mastodon.social for everything.
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Many, many, many people have "made a games disk," of course. There were many games cracked and reduced to files for the express purpose of collating them with other games and slapping a menu program in front of them, and on the high end there were maker programs for making custom bootloaders with graphical menus and animation and sound (Beautiful Boot, rest in peace Mini Appler, who chose the name "Mini Appler" because he was from Minneapolis, I still think about that at least once a week)
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But of course I have advantages that hackers 40 years ago did not, chief among them (1) a supercomputer on my lap, and (2) @a2_qkumba@mastodon.social. And with our experience making Total Replay, I decided that what the world really needed was a games disk like we could do a games disk, and the result was Mini Replay. It's a carefully curated collection of 8 great classic games (FULL games, nothing stripped out), each of which are fully playable on any 48K Apple II with no joystick required.
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All 8 games, plus the graphical menu shown at the top of this thread, fit on a single 5.25-inch floppy disk.
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So what we have, after 40 years, is a pile of source code. Which is amazing -- for 99% of programs we don't even have that. But if a program is a living thing in the minds of the people who make it, then we don't have that.
Could we recreate it?
Current status: "Track 0 has 5 bytes free. They are not consecutive."
#AppleII #retrocomputing
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This idea first germinated from a conversation at INIT HELLO about welcoming newcomers into retrocomputing, and the barriers they face as a byproduct of the community focusing most of our ongoing attention on new hardware/peripherals (costs $$) or large software packs (require mass storage device, costs $$). Then I fell ill and isolated in the hotel for the rest of the conference, but somewhere in my fever-induced delirium I formed this idea and I came home and said "I should make a games disk."
Name this album, wrong answers only
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There is also an attract mode. It features self-running demos of all 8 games, including one game (Mario Bros.) that did not originally have a self-running demo, and also title screens from all 8 games shown with 8 different graphical effects.
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But as with many things, the real gold is in the comments. By 1989, Copy II Plus was a world-class, mature product that was used everywhere and therefore had to deal with everything. Hardware bugs, software bugs, cosmic rays, you name it. One common problem on the Apple II was hardware drivers using addresses in main memory for their own purposes, sometimes even assuming their values were persistent. Hilarity did not ensue.
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The routine to launch the separate bit copy program is named MIKE, presumably after Michael Brown, the founder of Central Point Software and the original author of the bit copy program.
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The IIgs was very backward-compatible. Couple of edge cases, probably nothing to worry about. Unless you're Copy II Plus and need to worry about everything.
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Each game displays documentation and a progress bar while loading.
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I think "enhanced //c" here means the ones with the Zip Chip accelerator built-in. We had similar problems in Total Replay.
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@davidgerard@circumstances.run @dysfun@social.treehouse.systems Fedora (which I am not involved with, beyond using it on a single laptop) appears to have no problem with it. v3.4.3 was automatically pushed to FC45 and is in process of being pushed to FC44 and FC43. I don't see any objections coming from inside the project.
RE: https://mas.to/@zzt/116881735266013762
The best community moderation hack I've ever heard is "put a big NO FASCISTS sign at the entrance and block anyone who tries to argue about it" and by an amazing coincidence the same hack also works for "NO AI"
Quoting
besides everything else, a ban on LLM code is a ban on low-quality code
the sealions doing their work yet again to DARVO us about an LLM ban can’t process that, because they think LLM code is good
we don’t in fact have to accept low-quality trash
we don’t have to accept good code from dickheads either
LLM slop happens to be both very bad and contributed by someone you really don’t want as part of your community
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@brouhaha@mastodon.social @glyph@mastodon.social okay this thread inspired me to look at modernizing the wozardry code with decorators and hints and apparently there are properties now? I found mypy and am learning by doing, but ngl it's kind of brutal. Is there like a Dive Into Modern Python book or something?
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@glyph@mastodon.social @cthos@mastodon.cthos.dev I have been daily driving Asahi Fedora Remix (43, now 44) on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) for about six weeks, and I concur with basically everything here. Power consumption is great while you're using it, bad when it's "sleeping." I have a real HDMI port and plugging an external monitor into that worked right away, and KDE offered all the mirror/extend/ignore options you would expect. I'm often on virtual meetups and Bluetooth headphones and mic work.
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@brouhaha@mastodon.social @glyph@mastodon.social Thanks. It looks like the last Python project I started (wozardry) was in spring of 2018 so Python 3.6 was the latest (3.7 was just around the corner), but I don't remember knowing anything about annotations at the time and I guess I didn't know to look. Looking through the rest of @glyph@mastodon.social 's code, um, wow. Annotations and data classes and enums. I barely recognize this language at all.
Zara, who did nothing wrong, would like one (1) blueberry.
#DogsOfMastodon
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@treyhunner@mastodon.social @glyph@mastodon.social @brouhaha@mastodon.social @AlSweigart@mastodon.social that's exactly the problem, I see all this stuff I don't recognize and I'm like "oh is that important?" I understood the appeal of format strings immediately because I remember how Python used to do that, and f"" is obviously better. But reading through changelogs or the entire standard library docs is just overwhelming because everything is flat, equally well-documented, no sense of "hey you should really look at this in particular."
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@treyhunner@mastodon.social @glyph@mastodon.social @brouhaha@mastodon.social @AlSweigart@mastodon.social I grew up on Python 2 then transitioned to 3 then kind of stopped paying attention. I do know about format strings but apparently there are now also template strings? Like I thought I "knew" Python but now I feel like I know Old English and am trying to interpret Gen Z slang.
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@hoserama99@mastodon.gamedev.place this never bothered me and now it will, so thanks for that
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@glyph@mastodon.social well this is a really basic question but when did Python gain all this types information, like a function or method is defined as returning a certain type
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@Gmatom@mastodon.social @hoserama99@mastodon.gamedev.place fun(*) fact: in version 1.3 they rearranged the main menu options to put File first and Edit second, even though "File" runs the filer which has nothing to do with what belongs in a File menu, and "Edit" runs the editor which has nothing to do with what belongs in an Edit menu.
(*) not guaranteed, actual fun may vary
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@glyph@mastodon.social @brouhaha@mastodon.social I guess I'm not really a Python programmer anymore.
What are all the L{} and C{} things inside docstrings? Some sort of xref system for building documentation?