Hacker News: jbanes

New comment by jbanes in "Htmx 4.0, the first JavaScript library to release exclusively on the Game Boy"

jbanes — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:12:30 +0000

That’s my doing. I already had a pipeline of contacts for manufacturing GameBoy games at various levels of quality and cost. Being involved from the beginning, I was able to influence development to ensure we could produce the lowest cost product that met the quality levels needed to blow up everyone’s collective minds.

New comment by jbanes in "Htmx 4.0, the first JavaScript library to release exclusively on the Game Boy"

jbanes — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:24:11 +0000

I didn’t do the art, but I did do the graphic design/layout of the box. I can assure you there was no AI used on the box. (Well, except for the CRT effect on the screenshots. ChatGPT helped out there.) I did the work in PhotoPea using the artist’s original work as a base.

New comment by jbanes in "Show HN: The Montana MiniComputer"

jbanes — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 19:01:55 +0000

We’re definitely hoping that happens at some point! One of my goals is to ensure the specs stay within the bounds of realistic hardware.

New comment by jbanes in "Show HN: The Montana MiniComputer"

jbanes — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 18:28:40 +0000

Ted! We met years ago when you visited Truven for a MapR sale. Really awesome to see you here. :)

Many of the issues you're bringing up popped into my head when I started working with Carson on the project. But they've ended up being not a big deal. The machine is more than powerful enough to get through the lower level CS courses while being simple enough to be blindly obvious about how it all works.

We're also cheating in a few areas like compiling graphics to a separate ROM space to keep the memory usage down.

Carson and I have already chatted about eventually needing an MTMC-32 for Operating System Design classes. That would be the computer where Interrupts, TLBs, cache levels, pipelining, MMIO, block devices, etc, etc, etc would make sense. They'll be able tp build the Operating System themselves and figure out how to make it all work. And ideally share software with each other that they can compiler for their OS. (Like a TinyGo :))

IMHO, this is an important step toward a suite of educational tools for the future.

New comment by jbanes in "Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)"

jbanes — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 17:54:26 +0000

Did anyone notice this announcement was from 16 years ago? I very much doubt this is the current state of the MIT coursework.

New comment by jbanes in "Show HN: The Montana MiniComputer"

jbanes — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 17:01:33 +0000

There’s a built-in assembly editor with highlighting and intellisense autocomplete. Super easy to get started with coding assembly. AND you can run assembly directly from the command line. e.g. Type in “li t0 42” and 42 will be loaded into the t0 register.

Just pull up the Machine Specification for the full list of instructions and try it out!

New comment by jbanes in "Show HN: The Montana MiniComputer"

jbanes — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:54:39 +0000

The title itself is the link. But here it is again:

https://mtmc.cs.montana.edu/

We made sure it was HTML3 compliant for shits and giggles

New comment by jbanes in "Show HN: The Montana MiniComputer"

jbanes — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:32:22 +0000

Fun Fact: You can pass your starting patterns into the Life program. There are a bunch in /data. And you can make your own as long as they end in .cells

My favorite is: life /data/galaxy.cells