Only tangentially related (but hey, it's HN) - I'm so happy about the support/requirements for trailing commas in the modern language syntax:
x = [
123,
456,
789,
];
It makes editing such a list so much easier. Also, the commit diffs are cleaner (you don't need to add comma to the last element when appending a new one).
The oxford comma debate is so annoying because it clearly has nothing but advantages. Removing commas from a delimited list does nothing to resolve ambiguity, whether lexicographically or syntactically.
It's so useful as a delimiter and anti-ambiguity machine, that you don't even need spaces for it to work! See CSV or Japanese.
Essentially, there are 4 channels, each providing a number 0-15 on every tick. Emulator should mix them together (arithmetic average), scale up to 0-255 and feed to the sound buffer, adjusting the tick rate (4.19MHz) to the sound output rate (e.g.: 22 kHz) - taking every ~190 value (4.19MHz / 22 kHz) is a good start.
Now the 0..15 value that should be produced by each channel depends on its characteristics, but it's well documented:
Channels 1 and 2 produce square waves, so a bunch of low (0) and high (15) values, with optional volume envelope (gradually going down from 15 to 0 on the "high" part of the square) and frequency sweep (alternating 0s and 15s slower or faster).
Channel 3 allows an arbitrary waveform, read from the memory.
Channel 4 is a random noise, generated by the LSFR.
The article doesn't mention the recent development in Amiga extension cards - PiStorm is an easy (and affordable) way to max out the specs of any Amiga, A600 included.
I think MNT / mntre also have some Amiga expansion cards for graphics and sound. For me I'll keep my memories for fear of being disappointed. Maybe if the mini had included shadow of the beast, lemmings, bubble bobble, great ghiana sisters, I might have been more tempted. But then I would have wanted devpac and a true 680n0 chip + the fun chiplets to play with.
I never heard of a graphics card for the Amiga until a decade later. In 92 I bought a IBM clone that cost 1/2 the price of an Amiga. One of my roommates had an Amiga 1000, and he got another 600 when it came out. In 96, I got one in trade for a Macintosh, while the roommate and I both got Lucas Acellerators and IDE interfaces for pennies on the dollar. We played games that used the serial ports. We had 1mb of chip ram and 2 mb of fast ram, the price of which was falling fast.
I think the lucas boards were 25mhz MC68030,and within a few weeks,we had gotten 33mhz parts w/ FPUs and soldered on new crystals. Such an incredible source of cheap fun, while the I world was struggling with widows 1,2,3. The Amiga was, as was claimed, head and hands above the PC until the 486s became cheap 8~10 years later. Amigas ruled. Too bad commodore were such schmucks.
I've always seen A600 more like a budget version of A1200 rather than a new variant of A500: better graphics chip, IDE port, PCMCIA and new look-and-feel of the Workbench 2.04 (at the first sight hardly distinguishable from the Workbench 3.0) gave a taste of something new.
I feel that "budget A1200" is a misnomer. The IDE port was its strongest addition, but internally it's still just an A500 with ECS instead of OCS, and that never really panned out as leverage. Not even the additional 512KB of chipmem made a splash. No more than a handful of titles, productivity and games alike, took any advantage of it. Incomparable to the upgrade seen with AGA and a 14 MHz 020.
Sure, in terms of hardware, it was a slightly better A500, and you could plug it into better monitors than the A1080, and you could finally get "normal" IDE HDDs which were a fraction of the cost of SCSI HDDs with some expensive third party adapter.
But also, Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 was a million miles better than 1.3, and it opened access to a lot of very cool software. Even though the A1200 and A4000 got KS/WB 3.0, most new software remained compatible with 2.0, and only used 3.0's APIs for bonus functionality... the big leap was from 1.3 to 2.0
(of course, if you were purely game-brained, you'd probably be complaining that your A500+ or A600 didn't run KS1.3... bleh, you had enough RAM to softkick it if you wanted)
Indeed, it is a shame that the A600 didn't come with Kickstart/Workbench 3.x.
It had other improvements than just support for the AGA chipset's video modes.
"Datatypes" were pretty neat. Thanks to it, the Amiga got PNG support in all web browsers before many other platforms got it at all.
It was made of an old HTC Magic phone, acting as camera+wifi transmitter, connected to Arduino via its serial port and level shifter, to control the servo and a RGB LED. I had a lot of fan with that, even if the connection wasn't really to stable.
Thanks for sharing, maybe it's time to revive the project with the next generation of the microcontroller.
Yes, the liar have some hats. There are two ways how to conclude this:
1. If they don't have any hats, then any sentence about them would be truth.
2. The negation of the sentence, which must be truth, is "not all my hats are green". For this to be true, there must be some hats that are not green, so there must be some hats in general.
Programming a chess program was an important challenge for the "first generation of hackers" working on the mainframe machines like TX-0 and PDP-1 in '50 and '60, as described in "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy. I highly recommend this book, I think a lot of people here can recognize their own passion and interests in the stories described there.
Not even 1024 bytes. There were 1024 bytes available to the computer, but some of that was required to store what was displayed on the screen. Exactly how much depended on how much of the screen was used(!).
I love the slow pace of the video, including a few minutes presentation of all available programs. And indeed, there are programs to test dice and coin bias:
* A quadratic formula program, which outputs the number of roots and the x-intercepts upon the user inputting the values of A, B, and C.
* A fighting game, with health, a store, different enemies, weapons, armor, etc, with graphics and animation.