Currently converting several Playstation 2's to HDMI while i listen to/watch this. Part of my weekend podcast catch up. 150 shows and yet it seems like you only started a couple of months ago! lol. How time flies!
It is great that you've reached 150! Congratulations! I've been here for every episode, and I'm planning to keep watching as long as you are willing and able to make them. Thank you very much for the entertainment, and here's to 150 more!
Enjoy watching & listening to the show, while I cleaned-up several DEC VT100, 102, & 131 Dumb Terminals. Keep up the good work guys. Merry Christmas! :)
There was a video on RU-vid years ago that's been removed of someone who made a Sega "Fusion" that was a Mega Drive, Mega CD and 32x all inside a Sega Saturn case. No idea why the video was taken down, I would love to watch it again.
The article on AI and COBOL has me thinking. My first 2 programming jobs were programming COBOL with punch cards in the mid 1970's. I spent about 4 years at it. Maybe I should shelve my retirement and do a few more years as a jet setting COBOL fixer.
Regarding COBOL, I had exactly the same experience learning Computer Science at Trent Poly around '89: Cobol and Pascal and also Assembly and then moving on to C, all on VAX/VMS mainframes.
Veronica Explains has a video, maybe only a month ago, about the ups and downs of cobol and legacy systems and why she's had enough of it. Its an interesting channel in general but that video was extra relatable.
I had a COBOL programming job in the 2000s, though I wasn't paid a lot. It was running the production lines for a large car manufacturer. I liked COBOL.
I kept looking at the DIY Neptune project and thinking that what it really needs is for another big enthusiast to design a new PCB so that everything is on a single board [edit: through PCBWay, of course!], and it can be replicated easily in much bigger numbers. My pipedream: Tectoy starts pumping them out from the factory and Sega's cool with it.
I miss cheat codes in games. Not just for the casual playing, but just to have great stupid and silly fun. Especially in like fps games. These days cheat codes aren't really that common anymore.
Hearing people say "Porch" instead of "Porsche" breaks my heart :D There are some things that deserve a native pronunciation, and Porsche is one of them :D
I recently ended up with a ZX81 thanks to an accidental ebay purchase. Can't complaing though, it's in really good condition, just needs a composite mod and a RAM pack.
Some games, like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Days Gone, after so many failures it would give the player the option to move on with the penalty of not getting full credit for completing a mission. Others like in Call of Duty WW2 edition close to the beginning I was fighting a German soldier with a knife and had to use a combination of controller movement and pushing buttons. I knew what to do but just didnt have the coordination to do it. Game sat for 3 months until one day a friend with good hand eye coordination was able to complete the mission for me. After that I was able to finish the game on my own but still feel guilty about not doing it ALL on my own! 😌
@@Lordborak316 The only one I sorta skipped was the ole quick draw "shootout". After many tries I finally did complete it! However, about 15 minutes later I was disconnected from the server and when I got back on I was returned to the beginning of the shootout like Id never completed it!!! Frsutrated I just skipped it.
I'm going to have to maintain a COBOL system next year after the sole contractor that has kept it going for aroud 30 years is retiring. Nobody has mentioned any more money, and I'm not looking forward to it. Before the training I've recently had the only exposure I had was programming this at college. A lot of busineses just seem to forget that it's there.
I would have expected an news item in this week in Retro about MSX 40 year aniversary and the info about the MSX3 at the GOTO40-event in Amsterdam. As well as the MSX0 (stack) both systems based on Xilinx Zynq FPGA-chips with Arm Cortex-A9-processorkernen. Just as the MiSTer FPGA DE-10, these MSX FPGA-products will also be able to emulate other computers and consoles hardware including the Neo/Geo and the PlayStation 2. The cards could be stacked up-to 16 ones for greater abilities. If all goes according to play the first products should be available around spring/summer 2024
I wish more games mad better use of the Sega CD's features, it really was a significant upgrade to the original hardware... but everyone just used it for music of FMV. Sage
If they want to replace it with java, for example, they could implement COBOL in java. Then everything would run as before. Then they could slowly replace all the code.
On the topic of having AI do the coding for people, I think the biggest problem isn't what the AI can do, it's getting someone who isn't already a programmer to correctly, accurately, and definitively describe the problem they're trying to solve with code. Syntax is not what makes programming hard. It's collecting all the paths that the processing will take, and shoring up the "what do you do in this case" loose ends. Otherwise, AI will make perfectly valid code that burns the place down as soon as you find someone who uses commas as a decimal separator instead of periods, or simply continues a transaction if the disk I/O fails, or ....
I also cheated on Riven. Played it to the end, opened up the orb, looked at the blank board and thought... WTF am I supposed to do with this thing?? haha Looked up a guide, and even looking at the answer, still couldn't figure out how to relate that to anything I had seen in the game. But my most brazen cheat? Starcraft. I play through the single-player campaign every few years. Once I get to a certain point, I have zero shame about turning on invincibility until I've built and upgraded all of my structures and units. I'll engage with the enemy when I'm good and ready, and have no problem adding another 1000 resources to my coffer, because some of those maps throw you into the fray with nothing, and practically nothing to mine, and somehow expect you to live through it. haha I have absolutely no idea how.
If a human makes a mistake you can hold them accountable. Who will be accountable for the AI's errors. It's creators? No insurance will back that. So yeah. AI has to be flawless.
Notice how Chris doesn't sound entirely well? Waste water testing here in Perth shows that covid is rampant, but people aren't getting tested (plus a gastro bug has also been tearing its way across Australia). I didn't think it was worth the risk this time, especially as it ended at 9 pm. If it had ended at 10 however...
It's an interesting question the one about cheating. I never liked those black isle games because of the prerendered backgrounds, however, planescape: torment was just very good because of the different story. Once you've played ultima prerendered just seems like cheating from the software developers side.
I'm not even sure I'd call it cheating but I'm a total abuser of quicksave and quickload. I use both to pre-explore and dry run dangerous or enemy laden areas of games before committing to a final run that has me take no/as little damage as possible.
