Threads for cjb
-
Interesting, I was building one too, can you give some thoughts about Node’s capability in term of networking performance? for the two games you mentioned, what is the peak CCU it can handle before it start running into lagging problem?
-
Hey, cool project! The two games I built (generals.io and geoarena.io) are a little different in the sense that they aren’t one big arena for all the players. Because of that, the performance characteristics will look a bit different, so my experiences might not be as useful to you. FWIW, on the day generals.io hit #1 on Hacker News, the game had 50k users playing over that 24 hour period and my Node.js server running on a $20 DigitalOcean droplet did okay, but not great. There was definitely some lag, but everyone could play!
-
-
-
I’m thinking about starting a variant of Iron Blogger. In normal Iron Blogger, each week where you fail to blog you throw $5 in to the pot and every month or two there’s a big party paid for with the proceeds. In this variant (Coding Iron Blogger?) instead of paying $5 each week if you fail to blog, you’d have to open a pull request against a repo owned by another of the Iron Bloggers. :-)
I think it should work if there are enough bloggers to ensure a wide array of github repos owned by the bloggers, and if there’s some social pressure to have bugs tagged “easy” that can be accomplished by someone without previous exposure to the codebase. (And maybe some requested documentation; contributions don’t always have to be code.)
It might even help people to understand that programming in a language you don’t know yet isn’t always a scary thing to be avoided. What do you think – would you join, if invited?
-
This is SO COOL!
Just curious, you cite using it for writing and other ‘creative tasks’ in the article, but other than writing what are you using it for?
I have a deep abiding love for DeluxePaint :) I could play with multicycle brushes like, forever :)
Ok, I have a ton of stuff lined up for this, but phase 1 is backing up all of my still-working disks with old code, music, art and writing and possibly finishing stuff off. I’ve learned a lot about those things in the last couple of decades, so remixing some of the content and putting it out there in the modern world is high on my agenda.
I’m still building out the box. I have coming down the pipeline for hardware:
All of the older stuff I’m buying needs to be recapped, so I’m going to look into doing that myself. The Amiga doesn’t do APM or ACPI, so I’m going to build my own device to monitor temperatures and shut the Amiga down if it gets too hot.
I’m going to use it for:
One of the 3d world generation tools I want to use, Vista Pro has problems opening up on my RTG workbench, so I’m using that as an excuse to learn a disassembler/debugger called ReSource. I know how to fix the binary, but I want to understand why the fix works.
Basically I’ve spent nearly 20 years away from the Amiga, in which time I’ve developed (relatively) god-like reverse engineering and hardware hacking powers compared to my teenage self, so I want to put them to good use and have a go at all of the things. Hopefully it’ll give me something fun to do for the next 20 years.
I remember Vista Pro!!! I could never figure out how to use it fully but it was amazing for its time.
Remember Director? The 2D animation DSL? I used that a lot and did a Media internship project in it for college.
Thinking about this stuff makes me realize how much of the software that made the Amiga great really was way ahead of its time and still has things to teach us today. There are many lessons that breakthrough software can teach us.
You should totally document this project to the nines as you go!
Sadly, no. I never used it. I used Scala, but not Director.
Having said that, if you’re interested, there’s an ADF for use in WinUAE, along with the manual in case you’re feeling rusty.
I’ve made a note to check it out and spend some time with it though. Might be a while before I get to it.
The main thing I took away from reading about the Amiga was that it (IIRC) used a mix of software and hardware offloading. Our smartphones are doing that now. You could say its legacy lives on in that way. Just too ahead of its time.
That’s one piece of it, but it’s far far more than that. AmigaOS had pre-emptive multitasking way before any other non UNIX desktop OS did, and it had a message passing ‘exec’ (Most would call it a micro-kernel these days).
And yes it had an awesome graphics coprocessor (Coppper) and a bit blit transfer coprocessor (Blitter) which all had rich support in the API (Intiution).
The whole thing was written with a sense of humor and had an … elegance? To it that’s hard to describe in the here and now.
It also had a full user / application scripting enviornment, ARexx, so you could have scripts that ADRESSed running applications and sent them commands that they exported.
So you could have a script that had your Telecom program download a ZOO file full of images, tell your unarchiver to unarchive them, and then tell DeluxePaint to load and transform them, saving them back out, and then have your mail program mail them to you.
The other thing to know about Amiga is that a TON of incredibly ground breaking software was originally developed on that platform. Lightwave 3D started out there for example.
Also - the games were amazeballs for their time. So yeah, if you were into computing at that time and didn’t have access to super high end workstations, it was basically magic :)
Thanks for the details! I’m slowly trying to piece the picture together one article and conversation at a time. You’re the first to tell me about the scripting stuff. It definitely sounds better than my DOS with graphic shell experience. ;) I think modern audiences could get an appreciation for it today if it was presented comparatively to a system, apps, and games of that time. Not a rigged demo by zealots: someone highlighting realistic use of good apps on both platforms in a way that shows Amiga’s advantage as a side effect.
I heard about Lightwave. Closer to home was that the Preview Channel ran on Amiga. Means I used Amiga without knowing it for a decent chunk of my life.
Kinda not surprised. They’re tucked away in some surprising places. There was one that was still running a school’s HVAC in a closet for YEARS:
Amazing. Reminds me of this advertisement about an AS/400 doing something similar. People used to lose VMS servers, esp pizza boxes, too. This kind of thing probably happens way more than we hear about it. The ones that ran for years seem to be on specific OS’s and hardware that aren’t mainstream, though. I still think high-reliability deployments that don’t need raw speed should consider leveraging such technologies where possible.
I also speculate that the physics of modern, process nodes that breaks chips means using oldest ones available will always have advantages. The used Amiga you bought on eBay might outlast your brand-new, high-reliability chip from 28nm fab. There’s you a business justification for loading up on them for critical services. :)
I used to love Vista as a teen and had totally forgotten about it until this comment :) Deluxe Paint IV, too.
How’s emulation lately? I guess ROMs are difficult to find. Presumably the hardware can be emulated at native speed though?
You can purchase the full ROM set as well as super easy to use software at http://www.amigaforever.com - emulation is startlingly good on quite a number of platforms.
I’ve been playing with getting UAE running on my Clockwork Pi - handheld Shadow of the Beast!!! :)