Thinking of a physical media kit (for download & self-recording)… Also, I've now a PETSCII-to-SVG renderer!

The total lack of rotational symmetry of the human body is truly appalling to the more mindful in the universe… (This is why they never show up here. If you see any UFOs, these are actually some of their early AI governed crafts hallucinating a location in the more decent sectors of the universe.)

I think, I've found a way how we may all profit from the AI revolution: Make AI companies keep track of references and award a penalty for each factual error or misrepresentation payable to the author. E.g., this summary of www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20... is worth 15 credits for 15 severe errors:

Finally: "PET Invaders" - Public Beta! My personal take on Space Invaders for the Commodre PET. Link to online-emulation: masswerk.at/pet/prgs/#pe... Beta testers and feedback welcome! #commodore #petscii #mos6502

Thinking about an AI startup utilizing a cheaper, but viable and more sustainable alternative to GPUs…

BTW, quite impressed by Google AI Overview: every sentence and every half-sentence of this summary is utterly wrong and completely misses the mark and sense of that short piece, and is factually wrong. – Clearly, this is the future! Compare: www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20...

Just in time for Halloween, I'm hoping to finish sound for my PET port of the original Space Horror Survival Game today. Enjoy a pseudo matrix printer hardcopy of the game play:

Ok, so I kind of know now why I find programming sound so tedious: I knew that I've an aphantastic condition, but I had no idea that this can extend to sound, as well. Compare: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

He, he… (Mind the font!)

Spectacular progress: added another sound… 😀 (But I also experimented with a background sound engine, which should be convenient for playing the saucer sounds.) Meanwhile, enjoy a fake matrix printer hardcopy:

I've just spent more than an hour on 4 diatonic sounds on the PET (for the Space Invaders move sound). I never enjoyed programming sound – and I have no idea why this is. (If it had been about visual feedback, it would have been a blast.)

Is it just me or does the recent update of YouTube player icons feel somewhat childish? The look and feel for the AI Age, I guess…

Slightly amused by learning that the Royal Navy had a vessel named HMS Grampus (which may be an dolphin/orca or an alternative spelling of Krampus). Indeed, it brought you all the bad presents, if hadn't been nice. I.e., a minelaying submarine. youtu.be/0eKQhHJm2h8?...

The most alarming thing about "AI" is that it's left to "engineers", who are too lazy to inform themselves on the very matter, they're dealing with. For years, they had belittled the idea that quasi-autonomous productions could arise from a semantic field and its internal structure, AKA text theory.

Updated "The Abominable iPhone Zombies", the original PETSCII Horror Doom Scroller for the Commodore PET (any 40-cols PET, 8K min RAM). (Now featuring reliable keyboard detection. Also prepared for sound, which, eventually…) Download and online emulation link: masswerk.at/pet/prgs/#ip...

So, I managed to solve this: instead of checking magic numbers, I'm now "parsing" the PET editor ROM (at $E000-$E7FF) as a more general approach to detecting the keyboard type. And this seems to work.

Trying to find out what PETSCII #133 ($85) may be on the Commodore PET, Google AI Overview provided the following "helpful" "information" (see image). Fun fact: "cursor down" is PETSCII #17 ($11). PETSCII #133 is "F1" on the later 8-bits, like the VIC, C64, C128, C16, etc.

Finally tested the "PET Invaders" on VICE (xpet), which offers some broader hardware suport than my own PET 2001 emulator. – Turns out that the PET 4016/4032 hangs on the "score advance table screen", where we identify any joysticks. And it's only with the graphics keyboard, business is fine!

And here is a blog post on the matter of the PET keyboard test program (includes #mos6502 code): www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20...

I wrote a little tool for testing and exploring the keyboard matrix of Commodore PETs. (E.g., what are the row and column values for use in any games?) Download and online emulation link here: www.masswerk.at/pet/prgs/#ke... (Supports both the graphics and the business keyboard.)

When PETSCII isn't PETSCII Just tested the PET Invaders with the C64 character ROM (in emulation). Well… [1] green: 40 columns PET [2] white #1: C64 character ROM, as-is [3] white #2: C64 character ROM, title adjusted for line weights There's only one true #PETSCII!

"PET Invaders" progress report: Game play seems to be finished, now "just" the sound is left to do… #petscii #commodore #mos6502

Looking for a somewhat unusual arcade game to port to your home computer? Or just looking for inspiration? Have a look at "Spiders", a rather rare British arcade game by Sigma Enterprises Inc., 1981, featuring some unique game mechanics and interesting visuals. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCCP...

For all connoisseur of A.I. achievements: Google's "AI Overview" on the matter of extra ships or extra lives in Space Invaders, depending on how the query is formed exactly. Fun fact: extra ships are awarded every 1000 or 1500 points, depending on a DIP switch setting (compare the source code).

For a bit of Space Invaders theory: Enemy missiles are handled in a round-robin manner at a mid-screen interrupt. There are 3 slots for missiles, each dedicated to a specific type. The first, the "rolling shot", targets the player. The second and third type are based on an offset index. 1/5

While porting Space Invaders (here to Commodore PET): The funny thing is, there is just a single variable that controls the game difficulty, namely the enemy missile reload time. 1/4

I haven't posted an update on "PET Invaders" (WIP) for quite a while. State of affairs: basic gameplay is finished, any progressions based on shot count are still missing, as is sound. But we're getting there… #petscii #mos6502

If you believe in those things and the Book of Revelation in particular, the appearance of the antichrist is part of the second advent of Christ. – So is Thiel a self-identifying Christian who tries to prevent the foretold second coming and final unity in Christ? (Sounds more anti than pro to me.)

‪So, Arditi del Popolo, the first antifascist organisation, was founded in 1921. As Arditi del Popolo was co-founded by Giuseppe Mingrino, Argo Secondari and Gino Lucetti, we can only guess whose girlfriend's remains were exhumed and incarcerated…

Robin @8bitshowandtell.bsky.social celebrates 50 years of 6502 by a list of the top 50 (out of 56) 6502 instrctions: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lIc... I want to complement this by my top-two list of missing 6502 instructions: STX absolute,Y STY absolute,X Anyhow, happy birthday!

Just a quick reminder, it's just 2.5 years to dig the Sea of Zürich! Back in Sep. 2017, Musk published the BFR Point-to-Point video and in Feb. 2018, Gwynne Shotwell ("space leader", i.e. president and COO of SpaceX) asserted at a TED Talk that this was to become real "within a decade".

Who is going to pay for "A.I."? This year, it will be $700 bon plus that have been invested into LLM technology over just 3 years, more than has been invested into the whole of Silicon Valley since 1956, – and investments are expected to double next year. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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.