Toots for deater78@mastodon.social account

Written by deater on 2024-12-21 at 20:26

It's Apple II Christmas Demo time! This one is a bit brief this year as I'm way behind on grading final projects :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WDgtWZFfVk

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Written by deater on 2024-12-17 at 01:22

I know there are a lot of weird parenting milestones, but "kid submits a github pull request to a project you maintain" caught me a bit off guard

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Written by deater on 2024-11-28 at 04:31

exploring what an Apple II port of the Videlectrix game "Snake Boxer 5" would look like.

The double-hires version of the title screen looks so much better than the plain hi-res one

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Written by deater on 2024-11-23 at 18:50

now that demosplash is over I guess I can go back to porting random Videlectrix games.

I actually got to meet Videlectrix #1 and #2 when I was in Atlanta for SC'24 last week.

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Written by deater on 2024-11-17 at 22:54

so somewhat against my better judgement I'm in Atlanta for Supercomputing 2024.

In case any of my followers is actually a HPC person, I'll be presenting "Performance Measurement on Heterogeneous Processors with PAPI" at the partools workshop Monday morning. I'll also be at the poster session Tuesday, with a poster whose name I can never remember because for some reason we didn't put PAPI in the title.

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Written by deater on 2024-11-17 at 01:22

Today I released "Driven", a Riven inspired Apple IIe demoscene demo at Demosplash 2024.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6I0-FSVzBE

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Written by deater on 2024-11-16 at 03:49

with absolutely no encouragement from me the one kid spends most of his time these days trying to install Linux on random devices. I didn't realize that was somehow a genetic trait.

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Written by deater on 2024-11-11 at 19:14

various people: why don't you target the Apple IIe for a demo, think of all the extra things you can do!

me, later, trying to figure out how to access the 16k of AUX language card memory while trying to simultaneously play interrupt-driven mockingboard music from MAIN language card: :'(

don't even get me started about how accessing AUX language card area ($D000-$FFFF) is apparently secret forbidden knowledge

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Written by deater on 2024-11-10 at 04:21

which Apple II Atrus would you trust most when he tells you how to get home?

4000, 3104, 5106 and 9365 bytes respectively with ZX02 compression, and in this case I'm extremely RAM constrained

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Written by deater on 2024-11-05 at 15:04

sort of the less said about the election the better, but the one bright spot this year has been the effort people have put into designing the "I Voted" stickers

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Written by deater on 2024-11-03 at 05:21

Finally put together a good smooth vertical scroll routine for Apple II that uses page flipping and is fast enough to also draw a few sprites. All of you with hardware scroll on your retro systems are spoiled.

Somehow it turned into this

(Rather Dashing from Peasant's Quest covers the song `Still Alive')

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvBei3CZaw

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Written by deater on 2024-10-31 at 03:34

testing to see if I can get some TotalReplay wipe effects to work standalone

turns out there's a lot going on there, though most of my problems were converting macros to run in ca65 and then trying to load things as one solid blob with DOS3.3 which eats way too much memory (MAXFILES 1 saves the day)

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Written by deater on 2024-10-18 at 22:22

the students in the Advanced Microprocessors class were willing to believe in branch prediction, caches, speculative execution, hardware prefetch, and hardware threading. When I tried to teach Virtual Memory today is when they finally decided I had to be making things up.

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Written by deater on 2024-10-16 at 04:20

achievement unlocked: can now get turned into Ron Cumberdale in Apple II Peasant's Quest

there's a lot going on in this last room, which is why I guess it got left to last. Complex conversations, animations, and 3 costume changes

A lot of sprite flicker, not sure I can free up the extra 8k needed to enable page flipping

sound effects still need work too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H26Pxo44V3o

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Written by deater on 2024-10-13 at 20:18

after years and years of service, finally had to retire the WRT54GL (running openwrt Linux of course). It started needing to be rebooted once a day, and I suppose now the kids won't grumble at me that their school macs think our wifi is insecure.

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Written by deater on 2024-10-11 at 13:11

I should clarify that perhaps there is nothing they could realistically do to make things safer, but if the conference is as risky as this document makes it seem, the responsible thing to do would just not have it (or have it online) and not try to weasel out by having people sign things like this.

instead if you are presenting you are required to do so in person. and from what I understand there's a push to be in person because conferences often depend on hotel kickbacks for their budget

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Written by deater on 2024-10-11 at 00:17

so as always ACM/IEEE apparently don't think they have the resources (despite charging you $1000) to offer a safe conference experience, but they apparently do have the resources to hire lawyers to draft up a document saying attending is a death wish and your heirs and next of kin are just gonna have to move on with their lives.

This is actually why I didn't go last year, but unfortunately it's hard to keep doing my current job without attending eventually.

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Written by deater on 2024-10-09 at 22:55

so the powers-that-be wanted a slide about my research to put on the display TVs they have in the halls

I wasted a lot of time fighting google slides, but after giving it to them they completely re-wrote things (with minor grammar errors) and also replaced my picture with the ugliest possible headshot of me (not pictured)

the one redeeming thing is they left in the rickroll

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Written by deater on 2024-10-06 at 23:25

I'm old enough this just reminds me of this incident

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Written by deater on 2024-10-06 at 23:23

Previously unpreserved Apple II edutainment game "Trogdor: Let's Burninate Phonics" by Videlectrix, 1983

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