Hacker News: fredoralive

New comment by fredoralive in "The scourge of x86 emulation"

fredoralive — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:01:25 +0000

If you squint a bit (well, a lot really), Win32S on 3.1 and Windows 95’s Win32 implementation are Windows NT emulators running on top of 16 bit Windows.

New comment by fredoralive in "The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)"

fredoralive — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:46:50 +0000

The bit about how the AMD Athlon (K7) uses the same bus, and how they planned to make Slot A Alphas where the only adjustment an Althon motherboard would need is a different BIOS. Imagine what might have been, especially as Alpha Windows 2000 had a built in FX!32. Cheap Alpha systems with a good x86 compatibility story, it could've been a contender.

(Yeah, I know, several stars would've had to align for it to actually work).

New comment by fredoralive in "Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port"

fredoralive — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 13:21:16 +0000

I'm pretty sure it was an opt-in thing for individual programs, if an app didn't intentionally use it they kept the old look.

I've always thought that it's a bit of an undocumented and slightly forgotten bit of Windows 3.1, most things on the internet only show the flat style. I guess people doing retro things often only mess around a bit with the base OS, and don't really install things like Office 4.x on top of it.

New comment by fredoralive in "Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port"

fredoralive — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 13:07:02 +0000

I think it's just that 16x16 icons didn't become a thing in Windows until Windows 95, and so older apps don't supply one. Windows will then scale down the 32x32 icon instead, and it's never really done it that attractively, and I suspect the black and white nature of this icon really suffers.

New comment by fredoralive in "The most official water costs $120k a gallon"

fredoralive — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 11:03:52 +0000

1 gallon is 0.832674 gallons. Or 1 gallon is 1.20095 gallons.

New comment by fredoralive in "Amiga Graphics Archive"

fredoralive — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:32:40 +0000

There are some per-model stats from Germany issued at the end of 1993 (so a few months before Commodore went tits up)[1], and they have ~1 million A500s, and ~100 thousand A1200s (plus circa 10k A4000s). So there's a fair few out there, but in the greater scheme of things, they're massively outnumbered by the original models (and, seemingly even the A600 outsold the A1200, at least at that point).

The A1200 was only released about a year and a half before the end of Commodore, and I doubt that there was a massive sales boost in the last few months, or the Escom phase of zombie-Amiga, so AGA is a smallish minority of Amiga in general.

[1] http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/sales.html

New comment by fredoralive in "Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time"

fredoralive — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:27:27 +0000

That’s because with most modern MacBook touchpads (bar the Neo) the touchpad never really moves much. It’s all force detection and a haptic feedback thingy. If the system crashes, it stops triggering the feedback.

New comment by fredoralive in "Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time"

fredoralive — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:21:49 +0000

Implementing mouse cursors as a hardware sprite isn’t that uncommon for 2D accelerated graphics, albeit later than on the Amiga. Something like an ATI Mach32 has one for example. About 15 years ago I had a crappy Dell whose Radeon card would randomly glitch the cursor, so it survived at least until then in newer systems. The extra responsiveness is more of an Amiga thing though.

New comment by fredoralive in "The art and engineering of Sega CD Silpheed"

fredoralive — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:38:29 +0000

I think the article is sorta wrong about the sound setup, the Mega Drive I does have a sound input on the expansion port, and mixes it into its sound output. Otherwise stuff like RF cables wouldn't get Mega CD based audio (and you can do silly stuff like a Mega Drive II, which doesn't have a headphone port, with a Mega CD I).

I was going to say the patch cable setup was just a passive aid to take the Mega Drive I's minijack stereo output (the big DIN AV connector on the rear only does mono) to a more serious two RCA jack setup. But looking at a schematic to check, it does do more stuff, and apparently connecting the patch cable will reroute stuff so the sound mixing is done on the Mega CD side, not the Mega Drive side (early Mega Drive revisions are somewhat infamous for showing that Sega hadn’t quite mastered the dark arts of analogue sound circuitry).

(I would double check some of this, but my Mega Drive / Mega CD setup isn't to hand, and the CD drive is broken anyway, although I understand the JP/PAL piano tune on the logo screen is all from the Mega CD side?).

New comment by fredoralive in "A Special Wireless-Free Nikon Camera Is Publicly Available for the First Time"

fredoralive — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 08:00:12 +0000

Looking at pictures, it appears cameraless iPhones tend to have backs without camera holes / lumps, so some custom work is involved beyond just removing the module. Though there’s going to be a degree of “the government can afford it” in the pricing.

Drilling has some obvious issues, most notable if you go too deep you’re going to hit the screen.

New comment by fredoralive in "Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation"

fredoralive — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:04:30 +0000

I’m not sure if Sony has been pushing their video disc formats with PlayStations for a while. PS4 Pro was the “4K” upgrade over PS4, but didn’t support UHD Blu-Ray. And there’s been a disc drive-less PS5 since launch.

Stuff like Blu-Ray seems to be becoming a Laserdisc like enthusiasts niche system, I don’t think it’s been a big thing for Sony for a while.

New comment by fredoralive in "Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation"

fredoralive — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:52:06 +0000

Closing the online store for older systems simultaneously with announcing the dropping of physical media leaves an interesting question for the future. Even if you’ve never bought an online PS3 or Vita game, you’ll still be able to use the systems for physical games. Presumably once the PS6 store is gone, any console is just an ornament if you don’t have access to an account with games already purchased (and how long will the download servers stay up anyway? What is the foreseeable future?).

New comment by fredoralive in "Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation"

fredoralive — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:45:39 +0000

Well, I guess that answers the question of whether the PS6 will have an awkward snap on disc drive.

New comment by fredoralive in "IBM MCGA Gate Array Reverse Engineering"

fredoralive — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 11:58:34 +0000

Seiko can cover a fairly large group of companies, Seiko Epson is a particular subgroup of it (now somewhat detached from the main group).

New comment by fredoralive in "Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off"

fredoralive — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 10:19:00 +0000

Bit of hindsight bias there, DAB was first developed in the mid 1990s, ubiquitous fast wireless IP in everyone’s pockets is at least a decade, perhaps nearer to 20 years in the future. There are quite a few transitionary technologies that we needn’t have developed had we just waited for something better to come along (but without the R&D into some of them…).

(Also doesn’t analogue FM also kinda cut off fairly abruptly?)

New comment by fredoralive in "Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off"

fredoralive — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 10:10:15 +0000

Doesn’t RDS mostly solve that for the most common case where frequency changes becomes an issue (car radios).

New comment by fredoralive in "Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off"

fredoralive — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 09:45:09 +0000

As far as I know the medium wave services aren’t transmitted from the same antenna as Radio 4 LW, they have separate antenna, albeit with one of them (5 Live) doubling up as one of the support towers for the large long wave T antenna slung between the two large towers on site. Although I suspect the plan would be to move 5 Live to the currently unused Absolute / Virgin antenna eventually so they can demolish the long wave setup.

New comment by fredoralive in "IBM MCGA Gate Array Reverse Engineering"

fredoralive — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 07:07:18 +0000

It’s interesting that the gate arrays are supplied by Seiko, and the only known MCGA systems apart from IBM are from Epson. The bit of Seiko that made the gate arrays appears to be… Seiko Epson. So is it a coincidence? Sub-licensing? Skullduggery?

New comment by fredoralive in "IBM MCGA Gate Array Reverse Engineering"

fredoralive — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 06:52:06 +0000

The article mentions that it is brought out to the connector, multiplexed with the monitor ID pins.

New comment by fredoralive in "Advanced Nintendo Entertainment System (ANES) – NES Modded to Use 2 PPUs"

fredoralive — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:45:12 +0000

The Disk System RAM Adapter plugged into the cartridge port on a Famicom. The Famicom 15 pin expansion port is just a fancy joystick port (the console is otherwise limited to a pair of hardwired joypads).

The NES expansion port on its own doesn’t seem to have enough lines to support the disk drive, notably it doesn’t have any address lines (CPU or PPU) at all, or the PPU data bus. It seems a bit weird frankly with the choices they made, I’m not sure what it’s actually for, apart from breaking the idea of extra sound chips in cartridges.