... the Speed Limit posted is viewed as a ‘serving suggestion’. Seriously! I knew I was back home when I was being passed like I was standing still when cruising down 101!
I’m back from Nevada, albiet with sunburn and a few days of accumulated scruff. I’m trying to get back into the swing of things, but having nearly a week off in the sweltering sub-100F weather has taken it’s toll on my brain as well as body – I’ve finally created an ‘official’ unofficial OSX package of BNBT.
When I was back in Nevada, I visited my parents. Since they were cleaning out some storage areas, I was pleasantly suprised to have stumbled upon various artifacts of my youth.
Some of these include a Trapper-Keeper with x86 assembler code dated at Feburary of 1994. Looking at it, it was apparrently my attempts at a polymorphic mutation engine to thwart debuggers from disassembling your code. My comments were fairly cryptic at the time, but at least I provided full register dumps, and an interrupt list of my hooks. Nowadays, of course, that would never work. Mutating code that hooks interrupts under Windows? Maybe in 1994. ;)
I also found my simple ‘ar’ compatible utility for DOS which created portable library archives. I forget why I initally created it, but I did create a trivial EXE header stub, and when the files were appeneded, it would chain to an embedded ‘loader.exe’, so I was able to put all files together in a single file to keep things ‘cleaner’, yet have external dependencies. This was for FAT-12/FAT-16, and I don’t think it’ll ever be tested under anything else – it was also written for DOS, entirely in assembler. The archive format was primitive and pretty stupid. I’m a bit embarassed by it, but still, it worked quite well! ;)
I also picked up my first computer that I owned. No, this isn’t the first computer I’ve used, but this was the first computer I outright owned. I picked it up in the late 80s at a garage sale for $20, complete with cassette recorder. I used to have the boxes for it, but for the short duration it resided with my grandmother, they were destroyed when some neighborhood rapscallions set her shed on fire.
This Mattel Aquarius ran a rather quirky version of BASIC produced and licensed by Microsoft, and featured 4k of RAM, with only 1.7k available for the user.
Yes, that’s 1.7k of RAM for all of your Z80 computing needs. The largest program I ever managed to write for this system was a ‘slot machine’ type of game, and that was with a few scant bytes left!
Digging further, I found that I actually still have a Walkman! I’m not sure of the date, but I’m fairly sure this is the latest ‘Walkman’ that I owned, touting not only AM and FM, but an Auto-Reverse cassette player. Dubbed the ‘WM-FX303’, it has an ‘auto level system’ to keep the volume at a tolerable level, and the cheap headphones that came with it sound better than my last digital pair – now I can finally listen to my soundtrack to ‘Fletch’!
That’s all to report, other than the subnote that I did get my old accoustic guitar back. The strings are horribly oxidized and it’s realllly out of tune. I’ll be looking to replace those and get back to remembering a few licks in due time!