Hacker News: ajxs

New comment by ajxs in "Casio F-B100W-1A"

ajxs — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 03:23:17 +0000

It's a really good question why Casio didn't continue making synths after the 80s. It's possible that the entire CZ-line was intended to be a one-off response to Yamaha's breakaway success with the DX7. After the CZ-line, it looks like Casio tried to keep up with Yamaha for a few years, but exited the market after Yamaha launched the SY-line. From what I understand, the CZ-series were great sellers then, but even with all of the nostalgia they'd never move large numbers now.

For what it's worth, Yamaha aren't particularly nostalgic about their cult-classic synths either. I guess that from their perspective, the DX7 and CZ-101 were already obsolete within a few short years. By 1990 the sound had already become quite dated, and technology had moved on. Now that they've become popular again as a cult-classic, the margin just isn't there anymore because of the market share of software, or cheap independent FM/PD synths.

Shameless plug, in case anyone is interested, I've done some work reverse-engineering some of these synths:

- https://github.com/ajxs/casio_cz101_rom_disassembly

- https://ajxs.me/blog/uCOM-87_The_Strangest_Architecture_Youv...

New comment by ajxs in "Recycle – Floppydisks"

ajxs — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 22:21:35 +0000

Here's an article about this: https://www.michaelgale.dev/blog/releasing-an-album-on-flopp...

New comment by ajxs in "You need a webring"

ajxs — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 22:01:15 +0000

In case you want a webring, but don't feel like setting up your own server to run it, I run a webring hosting service that you might find useful: https://webri.ng/

New comment by ajxs in "Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields"

ajxs — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 05:48:59 +0000

Thanks for sharing! What was your role at Hyde Field?

New comment by ajxs in "Running DOS on Behringers DDX3216 with a DIY x86-Bios from Scratch"

ajxs — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:02:24 +0000

The Sequential Prophet X is another modern synth with a full-blown x86 PC running inside it. You can see the mainboard in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8QDCocnt0M

New comment by ajxs in "Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs"

ajxs — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:10:47 +0000

Really awesome work! A simple OS for retro x86 hardware is a really cool project! I wish I still had some era-appropriate hardware I could test-drive it on.

New comment by ajxs in "No more JetBrains products for me"

ajxs — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:28:50 +0000

When the author says 'I tend to run older hardware', how old do they mean? I'm typing this message right now on my Thinkpad x220 from 2011, which is unfortunately too old to run Zed because its internal Intel HD graphics card doesn't support Vulkan. I'd be an everyday user if not for this.

New comment by ajxs in "I designed a nibble-oriented CPU in Verilog to build a scientific calculator"

ajxs — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:33:09 +0000

One of the coolest projects I've seen in a while! Amazing work! In case anyone missed the write-up^1, it's very well-written. I really enjoyed the chapter about designing the instruction set.

1: https://baltazarstudios.com/calculator-introduction/

New comment by ajxs in "Eight More '8-Bit Era' Microprocessors"

ajxs — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:12:52 +0000

A lot of effort goes into accurately emulating historic processors in the MAME project, as well as other vintage hardware. It's generally accurate enough that MAME is regularly used to emulate vintage hardware when reverse-engineering devices.

New comment by ajxs in "Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server"

ajxs — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:54:59 +0000

Very cool! Would you believe I was actually just listening to some of the old Ultima game soundtracks when I saw this?

I wonder if they considered writing their disassembly in the 'pre-C++98 dialect of C++' used in the original, and targeting the original compiler. I've done some disassembly of binaries which ran on vintage systems, and I would've targeted the original toolchain if I could have. It's an interesting philosophical question.

New comment by ajxs in "“Kitten Space Agency”, a Spiritual Successor to “Kerbal Space Program” (2025)"

ajxs — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:19:35 +0000

Thinking about what would be going through Bill Kerman's little head as he approaches the rocket having just seen poor Jebediah Kerman vaporised on the launch pad was pretty funny. I don't think this same gallows humour extends to kittens.

New comment by ajxs in "Tar Files Created on macOS Display Errors When Extracting on Linux (2024)"

ajxs — Mon, 04 May 2026 08:40:47 +0000

If I set a folder colour in Finder on my work MacBook, and then plug that USB drive into my personal computer which uses Thunar as a file browser on Debian, nothing would happen.

New comment by ajxs in "Tar Files Created on macOS Display Errors When Extracting on Linux (2024)"

ajxs — Mon, 04 May 2026 02:32:47 +0000

To me it seems more sensible to store information relevant only to this OS in a specific cache somewhere within that OS. It would even make cache-like functionality such as evicting old entries super easy.

New comment by ajxs in "Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy"

ajxs — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:57:15 +0000

In case anyone doesn't know, Oxyrhynchus is a major source of archaeological discoveries. Particularly ancient (Ptolemaic/Roman Egypt) papyrus fragments recovered from an ancient landfill on the outskirts of the city. Notably some of the earliest-known Christian textual artefacts were found there (the actual earliest fragments came from elsewhere in Egypt). It turns out that Egypt's hot and dry climate provides the perfect environment for their long-term preservation.

New comment by ajxs in "Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated"

ajxs — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:50:27 +0000

This isn't the kind of music I'd normally listen to, but I'm enjoying your album! Very well produced. I bought a copy. Thanks for sharing!

New comment by ajxs in "Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages"

ajxs — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:26:04 +0000

The SPARK subset of Ada^1 has a similar kind of move semantics for pointer types^2.

1: SPARK is a formally verifiable subset of Ada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)

2: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.05576

New comment by ajxs in "What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical"

ajxs — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 01:20:44 +0000

> Its unlikely that another platform would be able to reach this state...

Is this really true? The computer ecosystem is more open now than ever. The original PC BIOS (which PC-compatible manufacturers needed to implement) was never an open, documented standard. It was a proprietary, closed system made by IBM. It's pretty fair to say that IBM didn't anticipate a PC/x86 ecosystem developing around their product. They even sued companies who made their own compatible BIOSes (like Corona). Intel didn't really have much to do with the success of the product at that point in time either, much less Microsoft.

In contrast, every widely-used modern system for hardware abstraction (UEFI/ACPI/DeviceTree/OpenSBI/etc) are open, royalty-free standards that anyone can use. Their implementation in ARM is newer, and inconsistent, but that's only because of how hugely diverse the ARM ecosystem is.

New comment by ajxs in "Ada and Spark on ARM Cortex-M – A Tutorial with Arduino and Nucleo Examples"

ajxs — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:09:05 +0000

Some of my first experiments with Ada were based on this tutorial series! Great to see it on the front-page of HN.

Since this was published, it's become a lot easier to set up an ARM toolchain using Alire, Ada's package manager. AdaCore have also created some new tools for auto-generating the startup code for ARM systems: https://www.adacore.com/blog/ada-on-any-arm-cortex-m-device-...

New comment by ajxs in "Windows 3.1 tiled background .bmp archive"

ajxs — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 02:06:09 +0000

New comment by ajxs in "Ask HN: Submissions for a queer-supportive personal website ring"

ajxs — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:28:34 +0000

Hello! I don't have a website for your webring, but I do run the webri.ng service (https://webri.ng), where you can host your webring! Just thought I'd mention it in case it's useful to you.