Forum comments in chronological order

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for what people (other than myself) write in the forums. Please report any abuse, such as insults, slander, spam and illegal material, and I will take appropriate actions. Don't feed the trolls.

Jag tar inget ansvar för det som skrivs i forumet, förutom mina egna inlägg. Vänligen rapportera alla inlägg som bryter mot reglerna, så ska jag se vad jag kan göra. Som regelbrott räknas till exempel förolämpningar, förtal, spam och olagligt material. Mata inte trålarna.

Jun 2016

A Computer In My Backpack (And A Chiptune In My Heart)

Anonymous
Wed 1-Jun-2016 13:28
Awesome song! I love it.
Could this be implemented on a microcontroller (without SID)?
Would you open the source code?

Henrik
(Germany)

Craft

Seyedof
Ali Seyedof
Thu 2-Jun-2016 22:52

lft wrote:

Hi, i have a little problem here with craft. some colours doesn't seem to be the correct ones, cyan is missing in the plasma (showing another shade of blue instead) or the first tunnel isn't coloured red and white (it's purple and violet) for an example. any idea? i checked the hardware a few times and it looks ok.

Did you connect AVcc? In the original design, AVcc was left floating (by mistake), and this probably affects the amount of current that can be sourced from PORTC. Otherwise I really don't know.

Is AVcc mandatory while you are using PORTC for digital IO, not the ADC functionality? I guess AVcc is needed for A/D conversion and you don't need them while using PORTC as digital IO (which is the case with your impressive demo).
I'm trying to implement your demo on ATtiny13 as an even cheaper version, but with less color depth and no music:)
Great work dude

The remote control project

Eqwipman
Sun 5-Jun-2016 08:44
in the post "Producing a volume signal" i want to know where i can buy the digital pot shown in the picture. not the IC but the part with the knob attached.
Thanks,

A case against syntax highlighting

Anonymous
Tue 7-Jun-2016 22:23

lft wrote:

Developing software is complex and error-prone, so people need to be thinking when doing it. And yeah, I realize that these opinions are controversial to some.

I agree. However, I don't see how syntax highlighting necessarily makes reasoning code easier or harder. I don't know if the arguments are specious, but I think and feel that much of the arguments here are weak and unconvincing.

You have already dismissed (without examination) the strongest argument for syntax highlighting: aesthetics. There are whole philosophies of aesthetics that makes a lot of sense, but only when we go beyond the mere results of the programming. The aesthetic argument for syntax highlighting isn't for the sake of the quality of the resulting program but rather, the quality of the experience for the programmer. That in and of itself is underestimated by a fixation on the resulting code.

There are philosophies that precisely define aesthetics, but these are generally in the non-dual philosophies, not the dualist philosophies. As soon as you have a dualist philosophy, you set up an opposition between privileging objective over subjective, or subjective over objective, and it resolves nothing. Non-dual philosophies do not privilege objective over subjective, or subjective over objective, and have a lot of useful, testable (empirical, experienceable) things to say about aesthetics.

Aesthetics bring a human perspective to the technology and reminds us that, however efficient a technology is, it shapes and is in turn shaped by our experiences as human beings.

Ho-Sheng Hsiao

Kernighan's lever

Anonymous
Tue 7-Jun-2016 22:26
3 aphorisms (aphorisi?), all related, that i've collected over the long, arduous years of prof s/w, all a testament to BK's thesis:

1. if builders built buildings the way programmers build programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

2. nelson's law: the better the four-wheel drive vehicle, the farther away from civilization you'll be when it breaks down.

and 3, the corollary: the probability that a bug exists is directly proportional to the programmer's insistence that it does not.

thank you for a great article (and the accompanying apropos pic of archimedes)

A case against syntax highlighting

Anonymous
Tue 7-Jun-2016 22:45

lft wrote:

Exactly. And making changes in code that one doesn't fully understand is bad, dangerous behaviour.

But what about code you do understand? I don't want to wade through hundreds of lines of code because there is no syntax highlighting when I could have skimmed it to get to the part I wanted to. Even for code that I didn't write syntax highlighting helps in figuring out a lot of things like whether a piece of code is is working with properties vs. static classes vs. interfaces without jumping to the definitions to figure it out.


You don't dislike syntax highlighting because it makes it too easy for you to code, instead, you dislike it because you find your editor's fruit salad syntax highlighting distracting enough that it makes it _harder_.

lft wrote:

But my point is that syntax highlighting makes it easier for us to dive in and fix the code before we understand it, because it encourages us to skim through the code on a superficial level. The syntax highlighting distracts us from seeing the forest by making it easier to see the trees.

This is exactly what I want to do because I am a seasoned programmer who can understand highlighted code by skimming it to get to the gist of the issue. I can understand that as a novice you might take more time trying to understand the code but for seasoned programmers skimming works with highlighted code.

A Chipful of Love For You

pik33
Fri 10-Jun-2016 10:48
I wrote the sid player for the raspberry pi(still in alpha state but it works and it can play most of PSID files.

https://github.com/pik33/Retromachine-SID-player

When I tried to play this tune I got only silence.

"A_Chipful_of_Love_For_You.sid" outputs the silence too...

So now I have to find a bug in my player...

...but I have a question: is there something not typical in these .sid files (SID registers not at D400 for example?)
pik33
Fri 10-Jun-2016 12:03

pik33 wrote:

I wrote the sid player for the raspberry pi(still in alpha state but it works and it can play most of PSID files.

https://github.com/pik33/Retromachine-SID-player

When I tried to play this tune I got only silence.

"A_Chipful_of_Love_For_You.sid" outputs the silence too...

So now I have to find a bug in my player...

...but I have a question: is there something not typical in these .sid files (SID registers not at D400 for example?)

Oops.. This comment had to be placed in "A computer in my backpack". This file outputs silence, too
lft
Linus Åkesson
Wed 15-Jun-2016 21:43

pik33 wrote:

...but I have a question: is there something not typical in these .sid files (SID registers not at D400 for example?)

One thing I can think of is that I use so called illegal opcodes. These were undocumented and generally considered unreliable back in the day, but they work perfectly fine on any C64. But they're not used in older playroutines, and perhaps your 6502 emulator doesn't support them.

A case against syntax highlighting

Anonymous
Wed 15-Jun-2016 23:30
Maybe we got used to.

I open a code file with plain notepad. My brain has a hard time.
I open it with notepad++, it's so much easier to separate keywords.
But there is a difference of course. The colors are not as glaring as in the screenshot.

But there should be a time where I never had such luxury when coding. I just don't remember it. Or maybe the fonts on the notepad and the white background are not helping. Maybe I should try some DOS compiler with blue background and proper easily readable fonts.

It's like I got used and can't look code without color intentation. Light colors, not glaring. I could say the same about autocomplete. I got used.

People tell me the same, how the hell can I code without double screens. I still have a single screen at my home. Maybe I'll get used to two screens some time and then it's hard to get back.
Anonymous
Wed 15-Jun-2016 23:43
I am wondering actually how this works in code.
There was this video where there is simple questions where you could fall in a trap if you are too fast to answer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-aCSFD3xro
In that experiment, they discovered that if they used a much harder to read font, students would struggle but then have much higher success percentage.

So, the idea is, would it be possible that looking at code that is not as easy to read, would have different effects in problem solving? Not tabs would be a problem. But no color highlighting could be okayish, because once upon a time we didn't need it and code wasn't that bad.

Just an idea, because my instinct says it helps, but what if in specific cases, pushing a bit the brain to understand text will lead to better understanding of code or problem solving?

A Chipful of Love For You

Anonymous
Tue 21-Jun-2016 09:15
I have illegal opcodes in my 6502. Maybe not all of them. The 6502 emulator implements all 65C02 opcodes, so if an illegal opcode uses the place of legal 65C02 opcode, 65C02 instruction will be executed. The illegals were left @ x3,x7,xB and xF

Maybe this can cause silence. 65C02 opcode executed instead of illegal 6502 opcode. I have to compare the opcode table.

The 6502 is doing something, I got finite time of jsr play so it does something and returns, but there is no sound from emulated SID as if no valid values are stored into SID registers

The TTY demystified

Anonymous
Thu 23-Jun-2016 20:00
Best article regarding this mess!