test please delete

[BrilloPad]

[NickFitz]

Afternoon Scourer

Back from foreign climes just in time to enjoy the fog?

[BrilloPad]

Afternoon Scourer

Back from foreign climes just in time to enjoy the fog?

Indeed. I managed a four hour cycle in the fog - my glasses kept misting up. It was nice to be doing some exercise again.

Back on the chain gang tomorrow.

Anything changed much round here? FRom what I can see CUK is the same? General still quoting daily mail stories as truth. And tpd remaining as a beacon of sanity?

Are you still enjoying lounging on the bench?

[NickFitz]

Indeed. I managed a four hour cycle in the fog - my glasses kept misting up. It was nice to be doing some exercise again.

Back on the chain gang tomorrow.

Anything changed much round here? FRom what I can see CUK is the same? General still quoting daily mail stories as truth. And tpd remaining as a beacon of sanity?

Are you still enjoying lounging on the bench?

Yep, still relaxing. I managed to get most of my bookcases built this past week

Next, I need to get the books on them, thereby freeing up some space for a desk so I can make use of MyCo's new computer

[zeitghost]

Well there we are then, the leaves from the apple & pear tree collected via the lawn mower.

The rambler rose out the front decimated and hacked about a bit.

Some of it appeared to have attacked the milkman last week so I thought it was time I did sommat about it.

Totally fecked now.

I have ambitions regarding repainting the doorcase but it looks like it'll have to wait until next year since I just haven't got the time or energy to cope with it.

And the front room/office clearance is on hold since it was a lovely sunny day.

[mudskipper]

... since it was a lovely sunny day.

Fog never cleared here.

Had a half hearted trip to the flat. Found yet more jewellery, including a nice Chinese character necklace that we were wondering what had happened to. Threw out two more bags of crap. Have listed the mobility scooter in freeads. Got rid of two massive boxes of card making stuff to one of the other old ladies. Found a box for a junghan's alarm clock - but no sign of the clock. No sign of the box for the watch. (It's still 11:11 - will be attempting to book a weekend in Germany for it this week).

[NickFitz]

Just succeeded in getting ACE 2 running on VirtualBox under MS-DOS 6.22. I had to slow the processor down to single-digit percentages, as it just takes as many cycles as it can get, not synchronised to the frame rate or anything (not my idea - I was new to DOS games programming at the time, and that's how the two guys I worked with who'd done one before said to do it, advice which I discarded for all future games).

A few visual glitches, unfortunately, one of which messes up the credits, meaning I can't get a screenshot of my name

Still, not bad for something I wrote in 8086 assembly language in 1987 to be running in a window on my MacBook Air

[NickFitz]

Now trying to get hold of a copy of Microsoft CodeView, the debugger I used to use, so I can step through the code and find the bit I'm looking for - I did a talk which mentioned it at BarCamp London last year, and really ought to find the actual lines of code so I can write it up properly

[NickFitz]

Found CodeView, now single-stepping through program startup

Aha - this is where we grabbed the keyboard's hardware interrupt vector. The original IBM PC BIOS didn't provide any legitimate way to get raw keyboard events, I seem to remember. So we just overwrote the interrupt vector and handled the keys ourselves.

This also prevented Ctrl-Alt-Del working, which was the kind of tulipty thing we could get away with in those days, as a good hard crash would stop that working anyway, so people were used to power-cycling when things went wrong

[NickFitz]

That's enough of that for one evening. Debugging 8086 assembly language on an 80x24 character display is a bit too tortuous for a Sunday evening