Hacker News: 1313ed01

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Classic PC demoscene productions running natively in the browser"

1313ed01 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:59:35 +0000

Lots of talk of DOS, but both games that are described (Panzer General II and Imperialism II) were only released for Windows?

If the games had been for DOS, it would probably have made more sense to just run the original binaries in DOSBox-X or some other emulator. I think there is already some debug API that can be enabled. Or adding MCP or something similar to DOSBox(-X) would probably be a lot less work than to reimplement the games.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Usenet rewind archive search engine"

1313ed01 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:38:17 +0000

Do those services have many more posts than what can be downloaded from archive.org and searched locally?

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly"

1313ed01 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 07:27:31 +0000

Porting to DOS sounds like a great plan for retro games, to only have to do the port once and know there are stable emulators to run it in, as opposed to porting to some modern OS and then have to port the game again and again to keep up with API changes.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them"

1313ed01 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:07:31 +0000

If you use Kagi Assistant, you can pick one of your lenses (i.e. lists of domains to restrict searches to) in chats. Not sure if their API has that as well or some other way to restrict searches. Also not sure if the Assistant (or API) respects blocked domains when searching.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)"

1313ed01 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 10:43:45 +0000

But what would flat-earthers consider the longest possible paths to be? Not the ones shown in the article, presumably?

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Show HN: OpenTIE and OpenXWA, Modern Ports of Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance"

1313ed01 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:41:26 +0000

I think it is the exact opposite. Keep remakes running in DOS instead, and they will run everywhere that DOSBox runs, which is pretty much everywhere, and also everywhere that you can boot up FreeDOS (including in QEMU), plus in other emulators, almost guaranteeing that the executable will keep working somewhere for a very, very long time. Versus a port to some modern system that will then require constant updates and ports forever to keep it running, and as soon as no one is around to maintain the project it will be a pain to get it to run anywhere.

It is always good to see open source reimplementations of old games, but sad to see almost none of them keep MS-DOS support. It's easily the most portable and future-safe of all virtual machines you can run games in.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "I built a browser-native SysEx librarian for 80s/90s synthesizers"

1313ed01 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:15:28 +0000

Almost 30 years ago when I wanted to backup my synth, its complete MIDI spec was in the printed user manual. Saving all sysex was just a matter of writing a short C program to send a few bytes to the ALSA MIDI device and then read the response back and save to disk.

No longer own that synth, but I still have my backups. No reason to believe the raw files would not still work. No dependency on any special software.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory"

1313ed01 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:04:31 +0000

PC was a clear winner for RPGs, adventure games, and wargames/strategy, even in the early days of PC/XT. Anything that could make use of more RAM and disk, while also not demanding too much of graphics or audio, was great on PC.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory"

1313ed01 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:47:54 +0000

Even as someone that grew up with GW-BASIC and had moved on to Turbo Pascal by the time qbasic came out, I must say you have a point. I think however that the more traditional BASIC "IDE" with line numbers etc, used in GW-BASIC, has its charm and is still fun to play with. It's quite unlike any modern IDE, but there is some logic to it and with some practice it isn't bad for what it needed to do.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory"

1313ed01 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:34:56 +0000

There is this fork that is easy to build:

https://codeberg.org/tkchia/GW-BASIC

There are some binary releases there from 2022, but I did not try those. The binary I built from source has worked very well.

Never tried to build the DOS source, but I really enjoyed playing with the toolchain they included with the MS-DOS 4 source code release. It's pretty much a complete, MIT-licensed (but binary only) Microsoft toolchain (msc, masm, make, link, etc) from ~1988. For some of my recent hobby projects I put that toolchain in my git repos, to have everything self-contained, with DOSBox as a virtual machine both for building and running, and no other dependencies. So I am happy Microsoft released the DOS code, even if I did not look much at the code itself.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory"

1313ed01 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:21:03 +0000

Sounds like pcbasic, that implements GW-BASIC in python, both with a SDL GUI and a TUI, and it contains a partial PC emulator to make it possible to peek and poke some addresses and such. Impressive project, well documented and seems stable and nothing obvious is missing.

https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/download.html

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium"

1313ed01 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:29:49 +0000

I wonder if the title was meant to say Sweden, as the text mentions Sweden and Belgium?

The map at the bottom correctly excludes Switzerland. It does however include Norway and Iceland.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Dates That Don't Exist (2015)"

1313ed01 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:54:34 +0000

I wonder how many libraries correctly handles the date 1712-02-30 in the Swedish calendar (according to Wikipedia the only official 30th of February in history)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates#Feb...

Tried using ncal like in the examples in that blog post, but it did not work correctly using either Julian or Gregorian. Of course the Swedish calendar from 1700-1712 was neither, but somewhere in-between, because of the (failed) attempt to gradually move from one to the other.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "CP/M-386 – CP/M for 386 protected mode, derived from CP/M‑68K"

1313ed01 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:03:47 +0000

At first Windows 95 was not great for games, so at least through 1996-97 many games were still released for MS-DOS and often only for MS-DOS, or only had Windows ports later.

Looking back from now, I wish that era could have continued much longer, as running MS-DOS games in emulators is so much easier and more stable than to run old Windows games.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop"

1313ed01 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:51:03 +0000

Krita, not GIMP, has been the FOSS flagship 2D bitmap editor for many years, the way Blender is for 3D. Can't remember when I last used GIMP for anything.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Sam Neill has died"

1313ed01 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:44:02 +0000

RIP. Here in Sweden the headlines mention primarily his role in Ivanhoe, a movie that has aired on Swedish TV almost every New Years for over 40 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhoe_(1982_film)

He posted this video message to the Swedish people for New Years 2023: https://www.svt.se/kultur/ivanhoe-skadespelarens-nyarshalsni...

Great movie.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "Leaking YouTube creators' private videos"

1313ed01 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 16:10:16 +0000

I worked for several American companies in Sweden an all of them insisted on calling us engineers. Many I work with happen to be engineers, but I dropped out before getting my (computer) engineering degree. It's embarrassing. I would never call myself a software engineer or any other kind of engineer (or a doctor or lawyer or anything else I am not).

New comment by 1313ed01 in "The case for physical media ownership"

1313ed01 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:36:24 +0000

It bothers me that my large collection of legally bought, drm-free, works (ebooks and digital games, mostly) will basically transform into illegal warez for my heirs, as I understand the law. They can still legally watch my DVDs, read my printed books, but my collection of tabletop RPG PDFs, GOG games, etc, they may as well have downloaded from some shady torrent site? That does not feel right.

Especially not since many things I bought, like from Humble Bundles, have not been available drm-free since, and may never be, so all legal drm-free copies will expire as the generation that bought them passes away?

New comment by 1313ed01 in "The case for physical media ownership"

1313ed01 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:12:59 +0000

My understanding is the laws you describe are mostly limited to a few European countries, while most of the rest of the world are more restrictive?

Also, with with the limited right to make copies like that comes quite high fees on recordable media that is paid to the music and movie industries as compensation through organizations like CopySwede here in Sweden.

New comment by 1313ed01 in "The US Army Issued Ocarinas to Soldiers in World War II"

1313ed01 — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:52:46 +0000

I like this boardgame kit that the Germans printed for their soldiers:

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30082557