01:45 <andlabs> well I spen the past hour playing around with the DX100 and I'm actually surprised

01:45 <andlabs> hmmmmm

01:45 <andlabs> these 4-op FM voices without any filters are just... stock FM voices after all, and the magic is in the effects you add to them and the fact you're playing more than one note, and also chorusing effects and using all 8 channels for one voice instead of tryingt o shove everything onto one chip

01:45 <andlabs> also I desperately need to get back into practice

01:46 <andlabs> oh also I haven't tired switching to the second set of 96 voices I'll do that next time

01:47 <TD-Linux> Foone, I also have a chevy and it has a similar (but more usable) scroll screen. it's also QNX based. what makes you think it's running on top of linux?

01:48 <TD-Linux> oh nvm systemd lol

01:49 <TD-Linux> mine must be from before adding linux

01:56 <andlabs> and also also I still need to take it apart and signal-probe it because it uses the weird variant of the YM2151 with the extra registers and it actually uses the extra registers for somehting but I don't know what

03:15 <Lord_Nightmare> andlabs: talk to aaron giles about it (and maybe plgdavid), both have done some research on the OPZ/ym2414

03:34 <Lord_Nightmare> Foone: http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/burroughs_display/

03:34 <NiGHTS> Index of /blogfiles/burroughs_display

03:34 <Lord_Nightmare> lots of self scan stuff

03:35 <Foone> nifty. Thanks!

03:35 <Lord_Nightmare> one neat one was this thing: http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/burroughs_display/ssm%20prototype/ssm_prototype.jpg

03:36 <Lord_Nightmare> that was sitting on a shelf at a university, used as an example of old display technology

03:36 <Lord_Nightmare> probably hadn't been powered up in 40 years, and one of the sustainer flex cables had come off of the glass frit contacts

03:36 <Lord_Nightmare> kevtris was able to fix it and power it up, and the damn thing works fine

03:37 <Lord_Nightmare> it has a LOT of bad pixels though, which makes sense being an engineering prototype

03:37 <Lord_Nightmare> some stuck on some stuck off, probably a dozen or so

03:37 <Lord_Nightmare> but the self scan shifter stuff works fine

03:39 <Lord_Nightmare> I'm not sure burroughs ever officially released that device as a product

03:41 <andlabs> oh

03:41 <andlabs> there was a Burroughs B26 main unit on ebay earlier, no one took it and the seller didn't answer my prerequisite questions so I didn't take it either

03:41 <andlabs> not yet relisted

03:43 <Lord_Nightmare> http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/burroughs_display/8%20line%20ssd/8line_running_with_flash.jpg note the warning labels; these things did not run cool

03:54 <Foone> http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/burroughs_display/8%20line%20driver/IMG_4371.JPG this looks very familiar to what I've got

03:55 <andlabs> also today's soviet ZX Spectrum clone (cc Foone, Nerionaya): https://www.ebay.com/itm/154499182317 don't mind me just here rocking the exposed speaker

03:55 <Foone> completely different driver board, though

03:55 <NiGHTS> Vintage Soviet homemade computer. 1980s. Original. USSR | eBay

03:56 <andlabs> Lord_Nightmare: oh so I can't passively cool this if mounted horizontally? :U

03:56 <andlabs> wait this is a monitor?

03:56 <andlabs> in that case no tate mode for me

04:00 <Foone> yeah it's a plasma display that uses a trick with multi-phase excitement to cut down on the number of pins needed

04:05 <Foone> which mainly seems to be "how can we run an LED-matrix style display without having to stick an entire microprocessor in the display?"

04:06 <Foone> self-scan is simple enough that you can run it with some TTL logic

04:11 <andlabs> neat

04:12 <andlabs> though I'm not sure if the savings were worth if it it needed more cooling than even a pentium 4

04:12 <andlabs> =P

04:20 <Foone> it just so happens this room is annoyingly hot right now and I have a Pentium 4 AND a self-scan in it

04:20 <Foone> neither is turned on but maybe I should plug them both into each other

04:27 <andlabs> :V

04:53 <cr1901> A Pentium 4 is not going to make your room cooler

04:55 <cr1901> Welcome protosphere :D. Glad to see you

04:55 <protosphere> yes i'm back

04:55 <protosphere> just took a while to re-setup irc :p

04:55 <Lord_Nightmare> https://nc.rysk.us/s/mZmSzzLGQG29o3g I'm working on retyping H.S. Elovitz' TRANS SNOBOL4 program from 1975 to translate text into ipa or votrax phonemes.

04:55 <NiGHTS> Nextcloud

04:55 <Lord_Nightmare> and yes, i'm well aware of the name

04:56 <cr1901> We made a GAL PAL joke yesterday, I think it's all good

04:57 <Lord_Nightmare> the program listing is in https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA021929.pdf starting on PDF page 54

04:57 <cr1901> Lord_Nightmare: Do you have an acct on balrog's cloud storage service?

04:57 <Lord_Nightmare> its rather long, and followed by a dictionary exception table

04:57 <Lord_Nightmare> program called 'DICT'

04:58 <Lord_Nightmare> and i'm well aware of the humor of that name too

05:00 <Lord_Nightmare> I really wish there was a binary version of these programs already typed available somewhere. I've seen two other retypings of the basic rules

05:02 <cr1901> >According to Dave Farber,[15] he, Griswold and Polonsky "finally arrived at the name Symbolic EXpression Interpreter SEXI."

05:02 <cr1901> Of course they did

05:06 <Lord_Nightmare> H.S. Elovitz did not create the names of the two programs for the lulz, though. She did it because TRANSlate and DICTionary

05:06 <Lord_Nightmare> and because the PDP-10 i don't think allowed filenames more than 6 letters

05:07 <Lord_Nightmare> She's still alive btw, one of these days I'd love to call or email her and ask her about the creation of the NRL ruleset, and if she still has copies of the V1 and V2 rules anywhere, since the paper only published the V3 rules

05:08 <cr1901> today is "one of these days" :)

05:08 <Lord_Nightmare> its 1:08am

05:08 <cr1901> Sure, but there's 23 hours left in "today"

05:11 <Lord_Nightmare> I have no idea offhand what i'd say... "Hi, I'm a developer who does research in his spare time into the history of speech synthesis, and I know you published an IEEE paper and an NRL report in 1975-1976, do you remember anything about the history/process of creating said ruleset that isn't in the paper itself?"

05:11 <cr1901> What's wrong with that?

05:12 <cr1901> I'd elaborate a bit more, but that's looks fine to me

05:13 <Lord_Nightmare> ok...

05:13 <cr1901> Either she's gonna be happy someone reached out about her old work, or she'd rather not discuss it. I cold emailed someone who wrote a Linux driver in 1996 (for a device that's long since been removed from the tree) in early 2015.

05:13 <cr1901> Incredibly, they replied and gave me their old code and notes

05:14 <cr1901> It was a long shot that the email was even valid, but... my email been's the same for 20 years at this point

05:14 <cr1901> not unheard of

05:31 <fseidel> my few interactions with developers of really old stuff have all been really positive

05:31 <fseidel> people are usually just glad anyone cares about what they worked on years ago

05:32 <Lord_Nightmare> i wish someone had a digital copy of the snobol programs, retyping all of this will probably take several days, if not longer

05:32 <Lord_Nightmare> I'm not even done the rule arrays, which are at the very beginning

05:35 <Lord_Nightmare> the programs also do some weird stuff. I think it preprocesses something like "The answer to the question isn't correct." to "THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION ISN ' T CORRECT . " with spaces surrounding all non-letter characters, and I think the reason for this is some caveat of the way snobol works, which awk/perl/python/etc don't have a problem with.

06:16 <ValleyBell> endrift: All releases of Sonic 1 use the same samples. Even the prototype uses the same samples. It's just that they recoded the PCM playback driver and due to that some samples play at a higher pitch than in the prototype.

06:16 <ValleyBell> and this makes the drum samples sound different between proto and final

07:55 <andlabs> fseidel: "you may be the only user in history" - brain kernighan, when I asked about some chemical diagram software he wrote that I used in a high school essay

07:55 <andlabs> yeah I was that much ofa nerd back then

10:39 <Lord_Nightmare> andlabs: very cool! is that software posted somewhere?

23:19 <andlabs> relevant to Foone's twitter thread: I still want a FM TOWNS someday, if only for the ports of Galaxy Force II and Tatsujin Ou (Truxton II)

23:27 <fseidel> having played the latter on a friend's FMT, it's overhyped. Very pretty, but the scrunched aspect ratio makes an already brutal game even more brutal.

23:28 <fseidel> it's also missing a layer of parallax vs the arcade release, but that's less of a dealbreaker

23:29 <andlabs> oh

23:29 <andlabs> boo

23:29 <andlabs> I mean I just have a soft spot for those games in general but

23:30 <fseidel> can't speak for Galaxy Force, but the After Burner port has absolutely bizarre controls that were bad enough to prompt my friend to hack the joystick driver to work around them

23:34 <andlabs> lol

23:34 <fseidel> IIRC the default controls have you thrown to the edges of the screen when you hit a diretion, and releasing pulls you back to the center, so it's very hard to play

23:34 <andlabs> who made the port?

23:34 <fseidel> Dempa

23:34 <andlabs> hmmmm

23:34 <andlabs> I wonder if it's *also* meant for mouse

23:34 <fseidel> errr, sorry, CRI

23:34 <andlabs> (X68000 version)

23:34 <andlabs> oh

23:34 <andlabs> then nfi

23:36 <fseidel> looks like GF2 for FMT was also CRI, so it's likely the same, but that means his control hack might just port over :-)

23:43 <fseidel> one more fun FMT fact: the base system didn't originally ship with a keyboard, it was a paid extra. This is wild, as it's literally unusable without one and the keyboard is proprietary to that machine.

23:46 <andlabs> well huh that's strange I wonder where they got the idea from

23:46 <andlabs> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Apple_logo_black.svg

23:46 <andlabs> (only the Performas came with keyboards at that time)

23:47 <fseidel> huh, TIL.

23:47 <cr1901> andlabs: And yet you use a Macbook. I am very intelligent.

23:48 <cr1901> And yet you use a Macbook. Curious!*

23:48 <cr1901> Nevermind I screwed up the meme

23:50 <andlabs> oh man you exposed me

23:50 <andlabs> I had to pay for the bottom half of my laptop separately

23:50 <andlabs> anyway Power Computing even joked about this on Computer Chronicles during the age of the clones

23:50 <andlabs> so you can probably guess how late the practice lasted