Notices by Spindley Q Frog (spindleyq@mastodon.social), page 2

"Hey Jeremy why are you writing your own sprite editor" I mean, besides the obvious "building everything myself the hard way" reason, see this toot from February? https://mastodon.social/@SpindleyQ/101661425411468111

I realized that I was trying fruitlessly to design the finished game without drawing any more tiles or sprites because my NeoPaint workflow was so miserable. And that's ridiculous because I enjoy drawing _way_ more than writing and there were a bunch of elements I wanted to put in that I haven't drawn yet!

Been slowly poking at writing an EGA sprite / tile editor. Started writing it in Jorth using my existing graphics engine but that got complicated way too fast (partly just because EGA is complicated!) so I’m writing specialized graphics code in C again and it’s Good. Jorth still drives the high level logic because why not, that way I get a REPL.

@emptyfortress oops, I meant to reply to this! It seems fairly robust, if only because it’s still working well after >20 years when so many other mice and trackballs I’ve collected are failing. It was also apparently designed specifically for very young children, so I would assume it’s made to take a bit of a beating. https://news.microsoft.com/1996/07/01/microsoft-easyball-wins-1996-idea-gold-award-capping-year-of-widespread-critical-acclaim-for-kids-input-device/

@hellojed @joshmillard *looks at feed* yeah that checks out

@hellojed I just googled this to see if someone beat me to this joke and of course they did, but in a spectacularly baffling fashion https://web.archive.org/web/20110227001127/http://music.joshmillard.com/2010/06/04/nine-inch-niles-the-seattleward-spiral/

A sample: https://youtu.be/JR-LQy8rDyE

@hellojed Nine Inch Niles

@mobyshots ohhhh this reminds me that I really need to record a fringe.games episode about early Hungarian text adventures

@jonbro never thought I'd be nostalgic for cubicles, but then open office plans happened

@mirzaba is soulseek still good? I mean, of all of the p2p music sharing networks, it's the one I would assume is still good, but I haven't earnestly used any for a long time.

@polychrome In Photon you can literally drag a window from one computer to another. https://youtu.be/SCp3goJoQnU

@polychrome QNX may be the most clean, well-architected system I've ever worked with. The magic tricks you could pull that were just a natural consequence of good design were amazing. It's a microkernel where everything runs in its own isolated process and communicates over IPC. Turns out that tunnelling IPC over a network is trivial, so _everything_ -- filesystems! GUIs! Terminal sessions! -- is network transparent.

QNX 6 on my old laptop is stuck ATM because it doesn't seem to detect any PCMCIA cards for some reason. I KNOW at some point it worked on that laptop; not sure if it's a bug introduced in 6.3 or what. (I used to run 6.2.1.) Harumph.

Well, I was successfully able to resize my DOS partition with only a minor panic when it failed to boot after (magic incantation to fix: in the FAQ), but QNX 2 doesn't like my disk controller or my CF card or something and the install script totally fails to create the QNX partition :(

Games distributed with QNX 6.3

@thomasfuchs I'm sure it exists but I was already at dangerous levels of yak shaving

Trying to figure out if QNX supports my ethernet card on another PC and of COURSE this is the default screensaver that comes on

@gnomon oh heck I didn't even notice that

@six they don't even rise to the level of dad jokes and I love them

QNX 4's process info command is "sin", QNX 6's is "pidin". "sin" got ported to QNX 6 so I can show you all the awful easter eggs at once!

@polychrome I mean, except for a brief, beautiful period around 2000, QNX has always been pretty locked down. I think its main users these days are automotive displays. Afaik nobody uses it as a self-hosted x86 desktop OS anymore; all the latest devtools run on Windows or Linux.