maple "mavica" syrup [6502] @mavica_again@computerfairi.es

as a non-USAian, can someone explain why mail-in rebates were so much of a thing in your country? what were companies getting out of paying each individual upwards of USD$30 on an electronics product in the 2000s, their personal information? and nowadays you give it out for free? am i missing something?

i'm releasing microDrummo into the wild after abandoning it for a year and running out of interest due to memory limitations of the M5 Cardputer

https://github.com/Lana-chan/microdrummo

the future comes so slowly and the past distances itself so quickly

is it autistic misophonia or am i just an asshole crank? the drinking party game

little red riding hood mouse

after fixing a couple more typos, it seems the game is playable

but i'm rubbish at it 😅

i'll take a break for today, i've taken down notes on what i found interesting about this experience to write a blog post on later

oh nevermind!

went to check on a dumped BBC copy of the game (it has a fancy title screen, perhaps usborne published it as a disk at some point, or a superfan made a very fancy version?) and the behaviour i thought was a parser bug is there just as on my conversion

well, time to test play it through then :)

fwiw the parser on this is equal parts extremely clever and extremely jank - only the first 3 letters of a command are parsed

yes part of the typos keeping it from working were here 😅

i think it's mostly working... but i think something on the parser is still wrong

on top of some typos i made, i've had to make quite a few modifications as the book doesn't recognize IBM/GW-BASIC as one of the languages the game is ported to

well... i'm done typing!

only one more page to go!

i'm half way through 🙂

the software i'm using by the way is PC-BASIC which i found out about yesterday

it's a modern recreation of GW-BASIC, BASICA et al, simulating many video modes including Hercules and even Tandy 3-channel sound

https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/

the book targets C64, TRS-80, Spectrum and Apple, so we'll find out what bugs arise and need to be fixed only once i'm done typing and try to run it

the book tells you when to take a break from typing. it's cute

it is 2025 and i am manually typing a 446-line basic game from a book

if all ALL you ever do is browse the web and edit libreoffice files then you will have no problem at all and ABSOLUTELY those people could and should switch to linux (and even then i fear they may run into more issues than if they were using windows)

but to say that linux is a fits-all solution to people who don't want to poke under the hood on a daily basis to get their daily driver merely working, is fucking annoying