Meanwhile, sports in Vienna: www.railwaygazette.com/light-rail-a... (Others may reign in football, cricket, or tennis, we do trams. 😀 But, I hear, Melbourne will have a take on this, too…)

"When it comes to simple video games, all the simple ideas and mechanics have been explored." Well, you may have a look at ironicsans.ghost.io/doomscrollin... (In other words, there's still plenty left to explore, just think outside the box.) Via HN, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4520...

What's the opposite of a 404 error page? Well, a service lurking at some known-unknown paths… 😀

Drones and airships in outer space? Satellites out of orbit (i.e., in outer space)? – Is IEEE Spectrum going flat Earth? Popular science communication has been on a downhill ride since the days of the acclaimed Hyperloop, but, as it seems, we haven't reached the bottom, yet.

Not-so-serious video games nomenclature: - to zap is to shoot air targets - to blast is to shoot ground targets As we learn from this 1982 Atari film promoting Xevious (at 1:20): youtu.be/JRN6HSlSM7I?...

Apropos #sharptember, here's my lovely MZ-80K, imported from the UK. It had the usual bruises below the space bar, but my colour matching still holds up, ten years later. Also, this photo documents my inability to hit the SHIFT key on this keyboard, so there's this "Z" where there should be a "!". 😀

So, I think I have found the origin of the notion that sprites must be always implemented in hardware: It's probably Commodore marketing in 1982, which used the term as a name (with upper-case initial) as in "Commodore Sprites" or "Sprites" in the pamphlets announcing the C64 and the Commodore Max.

As it is already clear that the monetization of syntax errors will be the next big thing after the burst of the AI bubble, we're busily working on POC prototypes… POC #1 … vibes for coders POC #2 … after vibe coding

At the time of the dot-com bubble™, we were trying to make services a product. Then, we tried to make products a service. Now, we're trying to make factual errors a service, while others have made their factual errors their trademark product.

So, Pac-Man is just the reverse of Ballyhoo, where you flip pallets into the mouse of a circular yellow thing?

Something that fascinated in ethnology is the ingenious, well-integrated use of technology by some "indigenous" peoples. Take for instance the method of traveling South (when winter comes) allegedly used by the Inuit people: 1/4

Still looking for "sustainable abundance"? The cool kids have long moved on to "exhaustible infinity" – don't be left behind! /s

You can never have too few scrollbars… Oriel GUI of the 42-nix OS for the UK Whitechapel Computer Works MG-1 workstation, 1984 (the same year, the Apple Macintosh was announced). For more, see mg-1.uk#42nix_media

So, in the Space Invaders arcade game, enemy shots normally drop at a speed of 4px per iteration, but, if there are just 9 or less invaders left, this speeds up to 5px per iteration. This is so that shots dropped by a top-row invaders may still pass an invader in the very bottom row! 1/5

Artifizielles Selfie-Nirvana: Wie's scheint, im Tod blicken wir alle mit ovalem Gesicht und geradem Blick versonnen in die große Kamera…

You may have seen that "hilarious faux-pas" by the BBC prop department. This was really @nostalgianerd.com 's ambient installation, showing Win95 in the context of what came before (DOS 6), what inspired it (the Mac), what came with this (keyboards with a Windows key), … youtu.be/zZcbu7vPXAo?...

Well, "abundance" has always been another word for the empty promises made by questionable individuals cosplaying as cornucopia.

One of the weirder aspects of #macos is that you can't clear any file associations (just override them by an association to another application). As Apple isn't going it to fix this, we may need a do-nothing app, which just associates a default document icon to any files and does nothing on run.

Tja, so geht's, wenn man Anspruch und Targeting (hinsichtlich ihrer Partikularität) verwechselt. Was dann schon irgendwie die Schürftiefe des Feuilletons veranschaulicht.

BYTE introducing the mouse by a common culttural reference… ("The Lisa Computer System" in: BYTE, Feb. 1983 Vol. 8, No. 2)

This is actually a fairly good article on the topic (still a bit anthropomorphic, though) and an important piece of education. Every news outlet should publish some version of this. ASAP. arstechnica.com/information-...

Any of this has to be strictly opt-in, on a case-to-case basis. And, of course, creators must have at least a veto in this. The entire way this is handled and forced onto the world as the "new order of reality" is analogous to fascism. arstechnica.com/google/2025/...

Now as a proper blog post: "How to Get Rid of Google AI Overview in Firefox" www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20...

So… I just got rid of AI Overview in Firefox! Here's a how-to (Follow only, if you know what this is about. There may be side-effects to other google pages. In brief, we set up a local rule to suppress the display of any division element with a certain attribute on `google.com`.)

So, every administration bowing to Trumps will and engaging into a treaty is committing treason, by definition?

Busy bee…

Muss wohl eines dieser Reality-TV-Formate sein (Big Brother auf Ibiza oder sowas…). Werd's wohl eher nicht anschauen…

So I did a tiny test… (Is it still worth writing anything, given that next to nobody will read the actual text?)

This is really some! (More in this thread…)

Sprite controversy solved. Definition in the TMS9918A datasheet: "Sprite: An object whose pattern is relative to a specified X, Y coordinate and whose position can therefore be controlled by that coordinate with a positional resolution of one pixel."

Flexible definitions… "…allows you to own an Altair mainframe…" Altair ad, Feb. 1977 (in Kilobaud Magazine, Issue #2 1977)

Interestingly, the original Space Invaders game seems to suffer from a similar hit problem, like I've been struggling with. Here, an invader is hit on the very left tentacle and the explosion is subsequently misplaced, much like it been misidentified for the one currently involved in a drop.

I finall managed to capture a fault with a debugging display, I built for this! R and C give the row and col into the rack, X & Y the offset into the sprite, the sole character is the index (as screen code). Last is what's in the intersection sprite/shot. Screenshots: #1: normal, #2: fail

Annoying and puzzling bug in "PET Invaders", which should be impossible, to begin with: In this exact configuration, and in this config only, a shot may "hang" as a rendering artifact, actually a hit detection problem. (Should be pixel perfect!) It's actually a left-over from XOR-erase… {mumble}

In other computer news, Trump and Tim Apple are working hard on bringing production to the developing world. (Coincidentally, domestic mass manufacturers like Apple will enjoy special exemptions from the newly announced 100% tariffs on chips.)

I found an interesting Asteroids variant for the Sharp MZ computers, "Astro-Blaster" by J.A. Gladman (1984), rendering in fat pixels/quarter-blocks, like in a close-up. Couldn't resist starting a PET port. Here's the splash screen (my art) as a teaser…

The most scifi script line (at that time), I've ever heard: "Take a video unit. I want everything recorded, everything!" from "Moon Base 3", UK, 1973.

Yay, on Hacker News: (No discussion – as of writing – at news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4476... )

As it's summer time, it's also the time for summer reading. So, here's an old blog post (2021) for that: www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20...

Now as a blog post (incl. binary read-outs): www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20...

Commodore PET screen code charts. (An update to my latest blog post.)

Devastating news: I've written another blog post. 😀 This time, it's about high-res graphics on the Commodore PET 2001, which should be rather impossible. www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20...

We need a new video game myth! So what was the game, the "E.T." of 2020, that caused the great PC crash of that year? Suggestions are welcome.

I wrote a blog post, I wrote a blog post! (🐓) This time, it's about computed GOTO in MS BASIC and similar #BASIC dialects. www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20...

I've had a few very strange (work related) email exchanges, lately. And there is pattern to it: I would deliver some work or information and the reply was uttermost flattering, praising the competency and how useful everything is (a paragraph/sentence per bit delivered).

Today I learned, there's a thing called smuggling. (The cornucopia of wonders that is this world never ceases to surprise.) arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/n...

Some #BASIC fun (Commodore PET): Algorithmic GOTO (with a bit of self-modification)

It really is just a clever Ouija board.

Updated the "QBASIC to BASIC Transformer". What this little utility does: it transforms QB-style BASIC text (i.e., with labels and without line numbers) to regular BASIC. masswerk.at/pet/qb-trans... This now preserves numeric jump targets to line relations for numbered lines in mixed content.

Brilliant, hilarious! When we thought that life was writing the best satire, we were utterly wrong: rather, it's "A.I." plunged into real life. Oh, the vibes…