Hacker News: chordbug

New comment by chordbug in "The Visible Zorker: Zork 1"

chordbug — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:03:15 +0000

In code, square brackets indicate comments. But inside a string literal they indicate variable interpolation or other commands.

New comment by chordbug in "Show HN: The King Wen Permutation: [52, 10, 2]"

chordbug — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:01:07 +0000

We truly live in an age where facts that are worth "maybe one sentence of space on Wikipedia" can be expanded into full-blown AI-coded interactive websites. I'm not sure how to feel about this. I think in this case it ascribes an inappropriate sense of grandeur: making a mathematical curiosity (and is the result even that surprising?) seem like some deep truth has been unveiled, or we finally found God's Number.

New comment by chordbug in "RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001)"

chordbug — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:57:54 +0000

I believe Ā is notation for "not A" and is read out loud as "A bar".

New comment by chordbug in "Zlib visualizer"

chordbug — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 22:25:30 +0000

I fixed the bug after reading the comment you replied to :) (I'm @lynn)

The LEN and NLEN items were not getting visualized.

New comment by chordbug in "The Sword of Kumdor"

chordbug — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 18:06:34 +0000

Thank you all for your comments and for reading about this weird little game :) I've disabled `-webkit-font-smoothing: none;` on the page.

New comment by chordbug in "The Sword of Kumdor"

chordbug — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 15:45:24 +0000

Hi! The "real" PC-98 font (FONT.ROM) is different from the font bitmap that often ships with emulators. Kumdor comes with its own font data, though. My patch changes its single-quote character to look more like an actual apostrophe.

The PC-98 actually comes with a "kanji ROM" chip, that you poll 16x16 characters from one at a time. FONT.ROM is the data used to emulate this chip. Loading an entire font into RAM was not practical on old Japanese PCs. The earliest models, like the MSX, had 64kB of RAM, which was no match for the 3000×16×16 bits = 96kB of font data! (On the PC-98, it's something like 282kB of font data that would eat up half the available 640kB of RAM.)

I've seen games that have their own font data for drawing stylish hiragana/katakana/Latin characters but fall back to the "kanji ROM" for kanji. Kumdor's custom font only covers Latin characters. The typing tests in the game progress from QWERTY nonsense (sdfjkl jklsdf) to little texts in English and rōmaji. My translation patch leaves them perfectly untouched :)