Notices by Charlie Balogh (chainq@mastodon.social)

The Apple //e is finally 99.1% together (minus a nine key, in the post already), sports the DuoDisk and its original monitor. After some cleaning, it even looks half-decent. It's a bit yellowed, but I love the patina.

My pick for a "fully retro battlestation with a CRT" would have been a Commodore PET, but as luck would have it, I ended up this thing instead, thanks to the incredible courtesy of a colleague. It's a whole new world, no regrets, would hoard it again. 😅

#appleII #retrocomputing

Remember the crazy Turbo C 2.0 bugfix adventure I spontaneously embarked on, under the bad influence of @root42 ? 😁 Well, the man was true to his word, and made the video he needed that bug fix for. It's great, check it out:
https://chaos.social/@root42/113633324844976421
#msdos #retrocomputing #development

I involuntarily (cheers @root42!) spent my Saturday on tracing down an ancient Turbo C bug. 😅

The intr() function, used to call DOS/BIOS interrupts will pass the wrong BP register value to the interrupt. BP is heavily used in stack handling, so intr() generates a BP-reload-and-INT-trampoline on the stack, but the BP reload offset it creates is off-by-four.

Fix: Look for the sequence C6 46 F4 E2 in affected binaries, and change E2 to DE.

More details in reply. 🧵

#msdos #retrocomputing

@tante There's been a steady downwards trend of software quality, driven by piling up complexity, unfixed bugs, lack of proper error handling, and non-AI based heuristics in software being just constantly wrong. Which obfuscates the fundamental problem with AI, especially for non-techies.

To them, it's just yet another case of "autocorrect being wrong on my phone", or "I had to restart Chrome again". They're used to their devices doing unexpected things, so what. AI makes little difference.

Developer feedback: "Rust is so much better in this regard, I couldn't get Free Pascal to build my old code on Linux. So I rewrote it in Rust."

Reality: Developer installed the wrong Debian package, resulting a partial Free Pascal Compiler setup, that lacked the package needed for the build.

Solution: Installed the correct package. Build is immediately fixed.

Takeaway: If you try hard enough, you can even fix missing Debian packages with Rust. But you probably shouldn't.

#sigh #developers

I've never been so insulted by something I 100% agree with.

(From X: https://x.com/forrestbrazeal/status/1797643911516786986 )

#softwaredevelopment

I picked up a couple more Videoton TVC goodies at @revisionparty. Thanks to @iszell who brought these for me all the way from Hungary 🇭🇺 .

An Amiga PowerShark-style USB-C Power Supply, to replace the bulky original brick that runs infamously hot, and a dual Floppy Disk Drive with matching controller card!

Probably I'm somewhat biased, but it's pretty cool that things like these even exist for such a niche computer.

#8bit #retrocomputing #tvc

Ok, RetroArch seems to be doing its thing, where MAME failed me. Something is happening..! Testing with an empty disk brings up some sort of prompt at least.

"I recognize some of these letters!" 😅 🇯🇵

#x68000 #m68k

Impulse Tracker on a Pentium IIII/600 and a Necroware Covox clone. The things I do for you #demoscene ... 😅 (The box has an SB Pro clone and a GUS PnP too, but that'd be boring...)