I hate to ask this...
but I'm not at all well...
I live up north...
It's getting cold...
I've got an abysmal amount of everything to do...
I'm trying to get caught up on 20 years...
of compiler development...
last I did assembly...
was line-drawing routines...
on my 386-33...
in Borland C...
(that's C, not C+, or C++)
for those fancy new 256 color videocards...
because there were no .h libraries for them yet.
Could someone be so kind as to compile that Skeinminer stand-alone for me?
In return I'll tell you how to crack Wolfenstein.
That's the Apple ][+ version of Wolfenstein.
Good God I'm old.
Yep, any day now!
Ha ha Wolfenstein.
I still haven't made it through the last level of Heretic.
Heretic? Never heard of it. Looked it up though and OH MY BRAIN! Nightmare! Weird stuff extruded into some strange extra dimension that looked like it might come out of the screen, if that were at all possible. No, the Wolfenstein I'm talking about is this one...
Wanna learn to write tight code? Learn assembly on a 64k 6502 with no mult or div instruction. But Bill (you know which one) managed to write the first vector-based 3D flight simulator on one and I wrote a track-sector editor/disassembler in under 2K. Used it to crack Wolfenstein thusly...
See that staircase at the top of the screen there (yes, it's a staircase)? If you flipped the drive door open when you went up it, let it recalibrate the drive twice, and then flipped the door back down, the program would crash straight to command prompt. From there it was pretty simple to check the memory and find out that they'd formatted the disk in 13 rather than 16 sectors and moved the catalog track from $11 to $09.
It won't take that long to get back up to some sort of speed (probably a slow shuffle) and winter is on the way, but man, Visual Studio looks like a 747 cockpit and my brain hurts. Basically I'm starting from scratch, but with knowledge-base and experience.
Yeah... I can't do it for you either, but I did want to ask about your 386-33 - DX or SX? I actually started with a Tandy TRS-80 with an 8bit processor, and 16k RAM... I may be older. Great.
Ah shit, looks like we're headed for an old-fashioned geezer-off!
The trash-80 was a great machine! Had the first real dos, later cp/m and still later Dos-dos, same thing different werds, we didn't have to learn a thing when we stepped into XT-land. 16k is a bit crowded though, once you've put some basic rom in there there's not much room to turn around. We had 16k Commodore Pets in the senior high where I kinda went sometimes. Bit better than the punch-card machine upstairs that fed stuff to this mainframe downtown. Learned Fortran on that! But then we got the Apples... JOY!!! Yep, the four years I spent in grade 10 and a bit of 11 were not too bad I must say.
As for the 386-33, more than DX, I had a 387 co-pro on that sucker! It was supposed to be for Autocad, and it was, but it also made Fractint run really really really fast and made DKB-Raytrace actually useable. The 386 was so so... needed!!! If you ever want to cultivate migrane headaches, try doing M.L. with the pseudo-16 bit addressing modes of the earlier x86's. Raytracing on a 386... I'd like to re-learn how to program POV-ray with all it's nice new goodies, run it on a
real machine.
Speaking of real machines... Power8 processor... 65CM die size says... much! And did I read something about them packing FPGA's into that thing? Only read about that, some indeterminate time ago but wow, what else could have it "50-1000x as fast for certain operations"? I love living in the world of the future. Now upload me damnit, before I rot!