scott wrote:

>> Hahahaha!
>>
>> Oh dear...
> 
> :-)
> 
> You were probably using LCD too (calculator...watch?), but not in a form 
> anywhere near suitable for PC displays.  I remember when I was about 10 
> my dad brought home a laptop from work.  It had a black and white screen 
> and the refresh rate was like 2 seconds.  IIRC it ran DOS and we had 
> some Lotus equivalent of "power point" running - it was hideous to use, 
> if you moved the mouse too fast it disappeared into a sea of grey 
> blurriness!

Well, I remember using a "cutting edge" laptop that we weren't supposed 
to have from BT.

It was white, and extremely heavy. The display wasn't black and white; 
it was blue, purple and pale blue. It was impossible to complete level 9 
on Tetris because the blocks were *actually invisible*. As in, there was 
no visible evidence of their falling at all. Level 8 was only 
completable by fluke, which happened exactly once.

OTOH, it was the first time I got to play with Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5 
for DOS (which we also weren't supposed to have, and is one of the few 
illegal software products I still possess). Until then, I'd only ever 
programmed in machine code and BASIC. (Back when BASIC was BASIC... You 
know, with GOTO and line numbers and stuff!)

Also, the display "rippled" when you touched it...

And it had a chess game where if you did this certain move, the game 
somehow managed to make a *screaming* sound from the beep-speaker...! o_O

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/

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>> Intel Core2Duo T7200 @ 2 GHz
>> 2.0 GB of RAM
>> 1920x1200 display
>> Quadro FX 3D card
>>
>> It's sweet, and it lasts for like 4 or 5 hours so long as you don't run 
>> POV.
>>

>> the year :-)  I really wanted a high-res screen for CAD work, and Dell 
>> was the only place that offered it at a reasonable price.
>


Actually the Quadro card wasn't that expensive/hard to find - it was the 
1920x1200 display that really sky-rocketed the price (or wasn't even 
available) from other suppliers in a laptop that you didn't need wheels to 
move about.

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> It was white, and extremely heavy. The display wasn't black and white; it 
> was blue, purple and pale blue.

Ah yes :-)

> Until then, I'd only ever programmed in machine code and BASIC. (Back when 
> BASIC was BASIC... You know, with GOTO and line numbers and stuff!)

Hehe, although the BASIC I had (on a BBC B) also had functions and 
procedures, so you really could keep clear of the dreaded goto.

> Also, the display "rippled" when you touched it...

They still do today (although probably not as bad), try it.  Two years ago I 
built a test rig to measure the severeness of this exact phenomena - as you 
can imagine it's not exactly desired behaviour when you have a 
touch-screen...

> And it had a chess game where if you did this certain move, the game 
> somehow managed to make a *screaming* sound from the beep-speaker...! o_O

Ah yes - controlling the internal speaker directly, you can still do that on 
most PCs and laptops today, although Windows probably blocks any software in 
user mode from accessing it.

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scott wrote:
>> Until then, I'd only ever programmed in machine code and BASIC. (Back 
>> when BASIC was BASIC... You know, with GOTO and line numbers and stuff!)
> 
> Hehe, although the BASIC I had (on a BBC B) also had functions and 
> procedures, so you really could keep clear of the dreaded goto.

That's a wonderful language. I once heard it said that BBC BASIC V (the 
version that shipped with the Archimedes and its successors) was 'the 
Rolls-Royce version of BASIC'. Up till then I was always puzzled by the 
bashing that BASIC got for being unstructured and tedious.


(Sighs... built-in assembler, OS graphics library, direct memory 
addressing...)

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>>> Until then, I'd only ever programmed in machine code and BASIC. (Back 
>>> when BASIC was BASIC... You know, with GOTO and line numbers and stuff!)
>>
>> Hehe, although the BASIC I had (on a BBC B) also had functions and 
>> procedures, so you really could keep clear of the dreaded goto.
>
> That's a wonderful language. I once heard it said that BBC BASIC V (the 
> version that shipped with the Archimedes and its successors) was 'the 
> Rolls-Royce version of BASIC'. Up till then I was always puzzled by the 
> bashing that BASIC got for being unstructured and tedious.
>
>
> (Sighs... built-in assembler, OS graphics library, direct memory 
> addressing...)

Hmmm, I spent a long time writing programs with BASIC V and the assembler, a 
few of them even made it in to Acorn User magazine :-)  Oh those were the 
days, the thing that I liked best was that you could be in total control of 
the CPU, none of this having to worry about someone pressing Alt-Tab or the 
screen-saver coming on etc...

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scott wrote:
>> That's a wonderful language. I once heard it said that BBC BASIC V 
>> (the version that shipped with the Archimedes and its successors) was 
>> 'the Rolls-Royce version of BASIC'. Up till then I was always puzzled 
>> by the bashing that BASIC got for being unstructured and tedious.
>>
>>
>> (Sighs... built-in assembler, OS graphics library, direct memory 
>> addressing...)
> 
> Hmmm, I spent a long time writing programs with BASIC V and the 
> assembler, a few of them even made it in to Acorn User magazine :-)
Hmm, I might actually know your surname if I saw it, in that case. I 
still have many issues of that mag kicking around somewhere.

> those were the days, the thing that I liked best was that you could be 
> in total control of the CPU, none of this having to worry about someone 
> pressing Alt-Tab or the screen-saver coming on etc...
Yup. You could sit down, start typing, and have graphics on the screen 
inside of a minute. Impossible these days.

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> Hmm, I might actually know your surname if I saw it, in that case. I still 
> have many issues of that mag kicking around somewhere.

The surname is Boham, I think they were published around '96 - '98 but could 
be a year or two out, it's been a long time.  I still have a lot of AU 
issues back at my mum's house, I should get them out one day.  And fire up 
my old A3010, and figure out a way to get the 120 MB of data off the 
internal HD and onto my PC to run in the emulator.

> Yup. You could sit down, start typing, and have graphics on the screen 
> inside of a minute. Impossible these days.

Well with things like Visual Studio you can get a windows based application 
running in almost zero time, but direct access to the screen is much 
trickier.  I guess that's the price we have to pay for such a wide variety 
of video hardware in the market (and hence much cheaper prices).

Still, Microsoft has done a good job with DirectX recently (since version 6, 
and similar applies with OpenGL I assume) to get direct access to hardware 
independent of the make/model installed.  It's only half a dozen DirectX 
calls to setup a full screen application with access to the pixel data 
directly.  It's not the fastest ways to do things though, there's usually a 
faster alternative involving textured rectangles and/or pixel shaders.

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scott wrote:
>> Hmm, I might actually know your surname if I saw it, in that case. I 
>> still have many issues of that mag kicking around somewhere.
> 
> The surname is Boham, I think they were published around '96 - '98 but 
> could be a year or two out, it's been a long time.
Ah, doesn't ring any bells. I bet some of the programs would though, I 
used to love that section of the mag.

> fire up my old A3010, and figure out a way to get the 120 MB of data off 
> the internal HD and onto my PC to run in the emulator.
Hmm, if you still have a regular-sized parallel port on the PC you could 
   use something called ZeriLink (I think it's still downloadable). It's 
a tiny program, with a DOS app and a RISCOS app. You have to rewire a 
parallel lead too but it's pretty trivial. Then you set it copying and 
go and make a pot of tea. Or six.

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> Ah, doesn't ring any bells. I bet some of the programs would though, I 
> used to love that section of the mag.

Aww, I couldn't hope to compete with the likes of Jan Vibe and the other Jan 
whose surname I forget :-)

Oh, I just found this:

http://www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact2022.html

>> fire up my old A3010, and figure out a way to get the 120 MB of data off 
>> the internal HD and onto my PC to run in the emulator.
> Hmm, if you still have a regular-sized parallel port on the PC you could 
> use something called ZeriLink (I think it's still downloadable). It's a 
> tiny program, with a DOS app and a RISCOS app. You have to rewire a 
> parallel lead too but it's pretty trivial. Then you set it copying and go 
> and make a pot of tea. Or six.

Sounds good, I was thinking of programming something similar myself, but 
then figured it would be faster to just copy using 1.44 MB floppies 90 or so 
times.

I've bookmarked the page for ZeriLink, will give it a shot some time. 
Cheers.

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scott wrote:
> Oh, I just found this:
> 
> http://www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact2022.html
Interesting. I certainly remember most of those programs!

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