sack-c0s

part of me is curious about developing for it, the other part of me wonders if there's a SNES stashed inside. think I'll wait and see where this goes...

Dammit! why didn't we think of that when we did this?

I never understood the cycle of copy protection: 1) ask people not to do it because it's illegal (copyright laws) - didn't work 2) Protect it - people cracked it, didn't work 3) Ask people not to crack it because it's illegal (DMCA) - hang on? Isn't this step 1 again?

I don't stick to a given system, but the 8/16-bit machines have a whole set of quirks, strengths and weaknesses that make each one unique to use and to code for. That makes it a bit more fun than coding for modern stuff (which I also do)

Hi folks, I just got hold of a 1040STF and an ultrasatan drive (with the 8Gb preconfigured card that Lotharek supplies). It seems to mostly work, but it's a bit of a pain to get it to boot. I have to switch the machine off/on several times to try and convince the ST to see the ultrasatan, but once it has seen it then things are fine and it will boot every time if I just press the reset button to reset. The ultrasatan itself seems to go through it's own boot sequence perfectly every time judging by the lights on the front. It also looks to be a TOS1.02 machine, and I'm seeing some of the weirdness that I've read about, such as being slow to read folders, or just showing them as empty so I get the feeling that a TOS upgrade might be needed here. Does the boot issue sound like something that could also be TOS version-related, or should I be looking somewhere else? Update: it looks like the image on the SD card got corrupted, but writing other images seems to work okay. Could the old TOS be behind this?

What? all 2 of them (0 and 1)? Everything else is just used by the kernel and the first thing anyone does is shuts that off anyway, leaving you with almost everything.

copy protection is a game to crackers, and a means of showing off their prowess. If you want to 'fuck with them' then you need to make it utterly boring, and make it so no other crackers have respect for them for releasing the game. So... I'd guess that means not putting *any* protection in

You can multiplex sprites on the C64 too, although I wish they'd gone with more (12 for the same memory bandwidth requirement) 16x16 sprites instead of 8 24x21 per line...

Reading between the lines I get the feeling the whole design was based on the fact it would end up on the C64 and the spectrum, and the playing area size along with the coarse scrolling with stopped logic is to give our rubber-keyed friend a fighting chance at pulling it off.

Commodore basic v2 was great. For me it was the best thing ever. Why? Because if they'd done a 'Proper' basic like the Acorn/BBC machines had then maybe I wouldn't have thought 'Seeing as this is just a glorified assembly language program running at a fraction of the speed I might as well learn to program properly in Assembler' and things might've been very different for me.

This year I'll actually try and get around to it. My boss is muttering something about having a product ready soon though so that might sink it... I can only try I suppose

being a brit of a certain age the game I played most in school that I *was supposed* to be playing was Grannys Garden (Sort of the british answer to the Oregon Trail - everyone knew it) Failing that if the particular teacher had a sneaky box of games stashed away it was either Hopper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMbTkLm837s or Repton Secondary school and the Archimedes era was better because there was always some kid with an Archimedes who would sneak his own game disks in. I had no problems being that kid It got you through the day, but if you wanted to play anything that was really good you just had to wait until hometime.

He also explains that if he were to demonstrate any actual music the Youtube copyright patrol would be on his back in a heartbeat. That said - I'd have thought a short section for those purposes would be considered fair use

That whole channel is really destructive for my productivity - it just draws me in and an hour can go easily.

Both - in europe it's easier to gen an Amiga though so if it's the same deal there I'd get it first to give yourself something to do until you find the ST (Still looking for an ST myself...)

Well he does claim to have been part of the design and launch of the C64DTV, although there's another name I'd have liked to have seen on the page for reasurance. I'd like one maybe if it's based on the DTV core because the the VIC-II has a few more registers that got slipped into the design, which push it towards giving the Amiga a run for it's money.

I'd assume keeping a clean seperation between logic and machine-dependent presentation/input code was the way to do it back then if you were planning a port from the beginning

They technically aren't multiformat disks are they? I assumed each side was just formatted for the system in question and kept seperate

Maybe 'graded' categories would be good. for example 'Does this easily', 'needs some simple but often-used tricks', 'someone has a theory on this, but it seems difficult' and 'theoretically possible, but unproven. Try this if you consider yourself a 6502 ninja'. The person reading it could be a general newbie, or maybe a C64 coder looking to branch out so whilst they're unfamilar with the specifics it doesn't rule out them trying something a bit more advanced to push the envelope a bit. also a project handover exchange might be good, so when life hits someone and they don't have the time they can pass it to someone who they think can drive the project on for shared credit? Even if they haven't run out of time, if it feels like a grind they could outright swap with someone for another project if the finished/unfinished parts match their strengths?

I'm british, but currently living in Scheveningen

Acorn was staffed by the same Cambridge graduates and students that gave us the ARM processor - they didn't stick a teasmaid PCB in a box and hope for the best. Ont thing about all of this though - it has been kind of inspirational in a way. I've had an old FPGA dev board sat in the cupboard for a few years with the intention of learning VHDL. When I did think it was going to linger on like a zombie corpse I did get the urge to dig it out and start to actually learn properly and see if I can bring something up. I was sure that even with my limited knowledge (which is basically 'the program controls the pin outputs', 'it's kind of asynchronous programming', and 'don't piss kevtris off because if you need help he's probably a great person to ask') I could bring something up before they did - even if it is just a massively innaccurate ZX Spectrum. When I get back from my business trip I might actually do that to satisfy my curiousity

duplicate of what someone else said...

everything gets cracked, life's too short for this. Most of the time those crackers aren't even your customers because they wouldn't have paid for the game anyway. Best copy protection I can think of is to say clearly 'I need to support this, and playing fair by buying the game does that. If you screw me over then there will be no more'. I reckon people will just get it.

I actually considered that - but I've got Big Mac running on the A8/C64 from a decompiled C16 source (Playable with heavily garbled graphics), and I should probably fix up and release that first

Might be something in the usual place in the WIP folder, but the tempo depends on what it is you're doing