The chickens are definitely ready for spring. They’ve been coming outside for a few weeks now, even a little in the snow, but they couldn’t have been finding much to eat in the frozen ground. Now they’re on the roam all day. They especially like the spot where firewood was stacked last year, so they couldn’t get to it until now. I don’t know why the picture quality in this video is so bad.
Started writing routines to drive the 80-column display. I’m hoping to use these in the Farm game, but they’ll be generally useful for any program that uses the RGBi display. Next time I’ll get into the graphical bitmap, which few programs explored for that display.
A friend linked to a thing today that’s pretty cool: the Deep Dream Generator. It’s a computer program that will take two photos and try to redraw one in the style of the other one. I gave it a picture of my mug and had it use a line drawing of a face as the style, and got the result below. They call it AI. I don’t know about that. To me, AI would be a program that is self-aware and goes beyond its programming in unpredictable ways.
Here’s a whiteboard tutorial on programming the 80-column screen on the Commodore 128. It’s very different from the 40-column VIC display, since you have no direct access to 80-column screen memory and have to program it indirectly by reading and writing to the VDC’s registers, which requires a handshaking process through a pair of registers at $D600 and $D601 in the C128’s I/O block. There will be another video soon demonstrating how to use the little routines here to do actual work.
Interesting article here on America’s continued rejection of the metric system. I didn’t know it was pushed by the French Revolution, but I’m not surprised. The same people are still pushing it today. One of my earliest school memories is of watching a filmstrip about the metric system. It had a scene where a driver got a speeding ticket because he saw a sign that said 95 kilometers per hour and assumed it meant 95 miles per hour.
Continuing on with the sha256 hash calculator, we create some of the intermediate functions that use the boolean and bit-shifting routines we wrote in the last session.
No coding in this one, just introducing a new project: a game in the spirit of Stardew Valley. I say “in the spirit of” because it would be impossible to duplicate the game on an 8-bit system, even if copyright weren’t an issue. But I think it’ll be a good challenge to see how much of it can be done, with expectations scaled back drastically in terms of graphics and sound.
This always seems to me like the time of year when you’re just trying to get through. The sun is getting higher in the sky and the days are longer, so it feels like you should be outside doing things. But it’s 26 degrees. That’s not brutal or anything, but it means the ground is still frozen. Too soon to start working the soil, or digging up plants to move, or anything like that.
Started programming on the sha256 program. So far, the easy parts have been fairly easy, creating routines to do boolean operations and bit-shifts on 32-bit values. I think it’ll get tougher as we start putting those pieces together to form the various formulas, but it should keep coming together piece by piece. I realized as I was watching it to check the recording quality that I could simplify the first couple routines a lot and lose the INX/DEX stuff, so that’ll be first on the agenda for next time.
Now that the Worm program is finished, I’m starting two new projects to work on in parallel. The other one will be a game, once I work out some details. This one should be easier. It’s a 6502 implementation of a SHA-256 hash calculator. I thought it’d be interesting to see how well an 8-bit system could handle calculations that were designed for 32-bit (or more) processors, and how difficult it would be to implement.