This is really confusing brand/product combination. Who is it trying to appeal to?
I'm pretty sure the people who have fond memories of growing up with a C64 or watching ToS are of an entirely different generation than those with fond memories of flip phones and cyber/color-puke ads for transparent plastic gadgets.
> BASIC Beige Edition
There's a missed opportunity for a better ToS joke here: "Beige... the final frontier"
> A flip phone with the apps you need: WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram. Music, podcasts, maps
Honestly, that sounds appealing to me at least. Those are the only communication channels I have, so it suits. Maps if I get lost somewhere. And some spotify. I pretty much have that now, but just with constant privacy breaches and issues I need to stay on top of.
> There's a missed opportunity for a better ToS joke here: "Beige... the final frontier"
I don't think this product will actually ever launch, but if it does, it absolutely MUST have a beige model.
In October of 2013, Ross Scott did a review of Test Driver III in one of the early "Ross' Game Dungeon" episodes[1]. IIRC in the video, he mentioned that he's fascinated by game maps to the degree of a slight obsession, and would absolutely love if someone could reverse engineer the game assets and extract the maps.
Someone later went on to do just that and responded in the Accursed farms forum, Ross mentioned that in his July 2015 follow up video[2]. In the video he showed some map screen shots from the forum, including a surprisingly intricate map that was apparently only used for the the spinning car menu screen. IIRC the reverse engineering project was not quite complete at the time, since the README doesn't mention any of this, I assume this project is unrelated?
That said, it would be amazing to eventually get the extracted maps integrated into noclip.website[3].
Author here. The Ross’s Game Dungeon video was, to some degree, a motivation for me to start the reverse-engineering process, just for fun. The analysis took place over many years, and I figured out 95% of the format myself. AI helped me then with the coloring, which is pretty complex. I have read the Accursed Farms forum, of course. But it didn't help much.
The map mentioned there can be found as “Unknown Map” in the dropdown. However, I haven’t yet connected that map to the menu screen. It might be called “Tom’s Test Track,” because that string appears in the disassembly.
Integration into noclip might be easy, because I also have the geometry as a standalone .obj file.
I wonder how many of those are actually still out there. According to Wikipedia, Intel kept making replacement parts (386 and 486) until September 2007, but personally, I have never come across one in actual use. My own career in this field began with an internship in 2008. My day job includes working on a PLC runtime with a code base older than myself, originally written for DOS, but every industrial PC (or other x86 based embedded device) I have ever got to play around with had at the very least a Pentium class CPU in it.
As for the Windows 3.x based industrial equipment: Some industrial devices I have worked on in the past turned out to actually be ARM based, running Linux, but the software went a long way to convincingly fake old Windows style UI or emulate a DOS prompt. I was once tasked to extend such a UI library to faithfully reproduce Windows 98 style color gradient borders.
Only once have I seen an actual embedded 486SX with my own eyes, but not in active use anymore. Last year, someone dragged a dusty, old, weirdo Siemens telephony box to the the local Hackerspace. The box itself had a design language that screamed "Star Trek: Voyager". I found a UART, it was running "On Time RTOS-32" which, according to the German Wikipedia, was an RTOS with a Windows API compatible userspace, developed by a German company in 1996 and discontinued in 2023.
> Some industrial devices I have worked on in the past turned out to actually be ARM based, running Linux, but the software went a long way to convincingly fake old Windows style UI or emulate a DOS prompt. I was once tasked to extend such a UI library to faithfully reproduce Windows 98 style color gradient borders.
IBM mainframes have an embedded PC (the "Support Element") used to manage the hardware configuration and diagnostics. Originally, it ran OS/2. In 2005, IBM replaced it with Linux–running a UI which looked like OS/2. (At some point more recently, they refreshed the visual look so it doesn't look like OS/2 any more, although I'm not sure when they did that.)
Actual context: Linux 7.1-rc4 release, Linus remarked on a specific documentation change.
The Register somehow turned this into an "article" that says a lot less with roughly the same number of words, and provides "context" by linking to a number of unrelated articles.
I think people are used to bias in mainstream media, but theregister seems to show it to computer/tech folks. I don't mind, I like opinionated stuff and can make up my own mind, but I wonder what folks with less context/experience think when they read some of their articles.
(and at least weird isn't like uncanny-valley-ai-written-weird)
> LLMs actually makes retrocomputing a lot more "fun" because you can slop out things that would take way too long to do by hand for pure art and exploration.
Doesn't that kind of completely miss the entire point of the hobby? Like attending an online language class in your spare time and then just using deepl in a separate tab?
Depends what you are trying to do and what is fun to you. Artisanal assembly on an 8-bitter can be therapeutic. I'm quite happy to let Claude rip through radare2 and ghidra de-compilations without understanding the intermediate steps.
> ...powered through emulation under a modern CI server...
I have a 486 PC sitting in my living room. For shits and giggles, I've cobbled together a FAT12 boot loader that runs a program directly off a floppy and played around from there.
And even by that little that I played around so far, I managed to run into more than one issue where something would work perfectly fine in Qemu, but not on the real hardware. Bochs appears to be more faithful, but also not 100% exact.
Btw. did you know that Windows 9x has an interesting TLB invalidation bug that apparently went unnoticed for decades and now triggers in KVM on AMD Zen 2 and newer CPUs? (see: https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x)
AFAIK, part of the reason Linux no longer supports i486 is that it made CMPXCHG8B a hard requirement (and also RDTSC). You would need to maintain a completely separate implementation of a bunch of low-level locking primitives. I'm somewhat skeptical how well that will work when your testing relies entirely on emulation.
I'm pretty sure the people who have fond memories of growing up with a C64 or watching ToS are of an entirely different generation than those with fond memories of flip phones and cyber/color-puke ads for transparent plastic gadgets.
> BASIC Beige Edition
There's a missed opportunity for a better ToS joke here: "Beige... the final frontier"
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