But there's an important difference: They run on the browser via WebAssembly, the project is in Rust. Sfotty Pie is pure TypeScript, so, hopefully, easier to hack for a greater number of people. Also harder to make performant but why do we have all this CPU power if not to emulate 1.79 MHz machines using high-level languages :)

Highlights:

* Almost every component is cycle-exact. The CPU passes the SingleStepTests/65x02 suite with a perfect score and the emulator scores 53/57 on Altirra's Acid800 suite. The biggest gap is serial I/O, which is currently emulated by trapping calls to the OS. Other than that, the emulation is pretty "literal", favoring code clarity over performance.

* It ships with open-source replacement ROMs from the Altirra and Atari++ projects, so it boots to a working machine without copyrighted Atari firmware. You can drop your own ROMs and disk images into the library. They stay entirely in your browser (IndexedDB), nothing is uploaded anywhere. It's a completely static site.

* It emulates the entire Atari 8-bit family (400/800, XL/XE, XEGS, but not 5200) with configurable RAM size. All the components (ANTIC, GTIA, POKEY, PIA) are emulated and cycle-exact. You can select between NTSC and PAL with customizable palettes for each. False colors (artifacting) are not emulated yet.

* Emulates the keyboard (BEWARE, it steals a lot of browser shortcuts), joysticks (via keyboard, gamepad, or an on-screen touch joystick for mobile), most types of cartridges, and non-copy-protected disk images (.atr, only disk 1 for now). It can also directly boot executables (.xex) by generating a boot disk on the fly.

* The UI is still rough and largely vibe-coded. It includes a command palette, custom shortcuts, and a "couch picker" to launch games from your library with a gamepad without leaving the couch.

It's MIT-licensed with all source available on GitHub.

Getting started: https://a8.aygun.me/a8/docs GitHub: https://github.com/cyco130/sfotty-pie

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48871669

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

But having built websites and apps since before jQuery times, I strongly disagree with manual DOM manipulation as an alternative. Declarative, component-based approach won for a reason. These frameworks allow you to tell how the UI should look based on the state and manages the transition (either via virtual DOM diffing or fine-grained reactivity) for you. DOM manipulation requires you to write some code for every single state transition (instead of every _state_). And, in practice, it becomes unmanageable very fast, and you give up, and start writing code like `element.innerHTML = ...`, causing problems with focus and event management. It's fine for small widgets, even enjoyable, but only until you need to manage a complex UI. Then, you end up with a mess of code that is hard to maintain and debug.

I know some still feel web is not the right platform for building complex UIs but that battle was lost more than two decades ago. Web is good. It comes with accessibility features (like zooming) and works everywhere. As someone with age-related farsightedness, I hate native apps that don't allow me to zoom in with a passion (which is, almost all of them). Of course I hate websites that don't allow me to zoom even more because they had to go out of their way to disable a basic browser feature. But getting decent accessibility is harder with native apps. You basically have to build everything yourself. Web gets you 90% there for free.

React might not be the best out there and might be, one day, replaced by one of the competitors or something new. But declarative, component-based UI development is not going anywhere.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48236239

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221711

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Hmm, are you sure about this? I thought chest voice and head voice were understood to be a single register called the modal register. And falsetto was fundamentally different.

[1] https://open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG14/www/docs/n3220.pdf section 6.7.3.2, paragraph 17.

Complex for humans: I can learn a new programming language in an afternoon and be reasonably productive in it within a week or two. I wish I could say the same for natural languages.

Complex for computers: We’ve had good compilers since the 50s. Satisfactory language models are less than five years old.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/bin2c/

There was a time when we were hoping to “make it” and we did release an album but it wasn’t very successful, of course. That band broke up a few years later but I kept going with different bands.

I can’t do it every week anymore, let alone every night. It’s very physically demanding, so once a month is plenty in my age.

But it’s still fun. A lot of fun. I can’t imagine ever stopping it until I can’t physically do it. It’s part of who I am. Long live rock’n roll \m/