So exhausted from all this endless bs…. Keep releasing , this reminds me of all the .com software during that era where wow we are already at version 3.0 it’s only been 60 Days

BRING IT ON

We are so done, and are going to be forced to instead fight the rest of the world for the remaining oil left if we don’t wake up. It may even be too late.

Worry not, you can't change the US but you can leave for a developed country.

More blowing up of the bubble with anthropic essentially offering compute/LLM for below cost. Eventually the laws of physics/market will take over and look out below.

How would you know what the cost is?

I would love to see the Apple ][ source code made available for a lot of these classic games. In this case what I really want to see is the Z-Engine or interpreter itself not essentially the data files only.

The source code for most of Infocom's Z-code interpreters (including the Apple version) is available here: https://github.com/erkyrath/infocom-zcode-terps . Note that this isn't an official licensed release so it's in a legal gray area. It would be nice to see Microsoft bless these with an official license as well.

I have seen some of the interpreter source codes, but I don't know if they have been "officially" published. These also include some other things such as test files, and a picture file that I have never seen a decoder for (other than the decoder (and encoder) that I wrote myself).

Many modern implementations do not support permanent shifts in Z versions 3 and above (although all of my own implementations do, and I think all of the official implementations also do, even though Infocom never used that feature (this isn't too surprising since the algorithm they described for deciding when to use permanent shifts is worse than not using them at all; I worked with someone else to make a better algorithm for making this decision)).

Some of the official implementations check the Z version number and some don't; even some that do, do not check if it is a small-endian story file (and the ones that do will only display an error message if it is, and refuse to run it). My own implementations do check for small-endian story files (as well as the Z version number), although some will display an error message and refuse to run it in that case, some actually are able to run both big-endian and small-endian story files (as far as I know, there are no small-endian story files; Infocom never used this feature and no modern compilers support this).

Something else I might mention is that some people say that Infocom used many tricks in the programming, although I have looked at disassembled code in the debugger and found that they could be optimized a lot more (e.g. by using SET->BCOM optimization, and many other things), and the source code for the interpreters also shows some things that could be optimized much better. (Another thing revealed from the source code of the interpreters is a undocumented command-line switch for the DOS version that allows you to specify the name of the story file.)

This brings me back to the code I wrote in Paradox (an early 80s database, I used the version Borland put out just after buying the company that wrote it) for our family music shop rental billing.

For some reason my 16 year old brain thought the Dec Rainbow was a cool machine so we bought one despite the awful shopping experience that DEC provided for non large enterprises.

It was a cool machine in that it could run both CP/M (what Paradox would run on) and MS-DOS because it had a z80 as well as some early x86 variant. The drives could also read both formats too.

NEC made an enhanced clone of the 8086 called the V30 that had built-in 8080 support. It could be switched in and out of 8080 mode on the fly. This made it fairly simple to write a program that allowed CP/M programs to run natively on an MS-DOS PC with a V30. The MS-DOS API was mostly a copy of the CP/M API, so all you had to do when you got a CP/M system call was switch the CPU into 16-bit mode, do the equivalent MS-DOS system call, and switch the CPU back to 8-bit mode.

This math stuff is corrupting our youth.

Besides how can she just skip college and go right into a PhD? She hasn’t even taken intro to Sociology or poetry yet.

Something absolutely has changed in the last couple of iOS major releases. I have noticed it as well around iOS 14 or so. I also feel like Siri (voice recognition for dictation of messages, etc) has deteriorated as well. It is getting to the point where I am considering moving to Android just based on my experience with that.