12 January 2025
Last week a friend shared the existence of hlorenzi’s customasm, a tool that can serve as the assembler for arbitrary CPU architectures just by defining a mapping of instructions to encodings.
Hey, I made a CPU once! How hard would it be to make a customasm definition for ROSE-8? Turns out…not very! I played around with it for about two hours, and by the end of it I’d translated an entire ROSE-8 program to customasm, with most of the definition file looking basically the same as the text reference for the ISA encoding.
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Posted in Technical.
Tags:
ROSE-8,
Assembly
06 January 2025
As a kid, one of my first games was Maelstrom, a slick Asteroids clone for the Mac by Ambrosia Software (who later went on to publish the Escape Velocity series). I have childhood memories of the two-note soundtrack while playing the two simplest strategies (spin in place without accelerating, and zoom upwards in a straight line firing all the way), of the “You EEdiot” when you accidentally shot a power-up canister, and the “Pretty good, pretty good!” for when you score over 10,000 points in a single stage.
Except if I open up Maelstrom now, it says “Hot damn!” instead.
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Posted in Personal.
Tags:
Games,
Mac OS Classic
26 December 2024
I have a friend who switched to Linux because they didn’t want to pay for a new license for Windows and thereby end up running modern Windows. They’re not very computer-minded, so troubleshooting doesn’t come naturally, and anything that requires dropping down to the command line is something that has to be done by rote. And on one occasion, when I asked them to run something, they asked where to type it in.
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Posted in Technical.
Tags:
Unix,
User experience
