Photos

GEOBENCH browser

GEOBENCH telnet

I recently updated the ESP-01S Wi-Fi module inside my OneChipBook. The firmware and tools I used came from the links in Oduvaldo Pavan Junior’s YouTube video:

• Oduvaldo Pavan Junior’s OneChipBook ESP8266 video

The package included Espressif’s Windows Flash Download Tool, but I did not use it in the end. The current .exe did not run correctly on my Windows 7 machine, so I flashed the ESP-01S directly from Linux using Espressif’s command-line tool, esptool.py. You will also need the correct firmware from here, as the one in the video has a problem where it won’t save the WiFi settings:

Dealing with my new pet project ‘NixBench’ a sort of Wayland-based desktop for NetBSD (probably portable to other platforms as well). The level of layering and complexity modern *nix desktops have reached due to historical reasons is ridiculous. For every application you need to take into account the native layer, the GTK compatibility one the X.org/Xwayland one. When there is an issue and things don’t work as expected is usually a problem of plumbing between all these layers.

Half jokingly I started the endeavour of having a proper browser running under GEOBENCH and ta-da it’s ready!!! Hammering down some issues here and there, properly caching HTML is not an easy task on an 8-bitter and hopefully it will work well with retro proxies too. Half jokingly I thought this would be the first browser to run on the PCW proper. Will the world ever notice? haha

• Hey , you know, you can ask an AI agent to take over this stuff and it will help you rebuild or port it over to your target architecture very quickly! -
• I don’t use AI. LOL -

This is the kind of reaction most people in the development community still has about using the AI tools to do their work. I think it is a decision I can respect but , in my opinion, is not a decision that has been thought through and through. It is, so to speak, a knee-jerk reaction and I can totally understand why. Let’s say you have spent a good chunk of your life doing development in , say, assembler or C or even something more obscure like Delphi or Pascal you probably will feel disoriented right now. The world has changed and it has changed fast. Knowledge has changed too.

I have though long and hard wether it would be worth porting GEOBENCH to a new architecture/computer and realized that the perfect platform for that would be the Amstrad PCW , provided that you add some ‘modern’ hardware such as a DK’sound card [ DK’sound clone ] (https://pcwwiki2.com/doku.php?id=hardware:perifericos:dksound) (Mostly for the joystick/mouse capabilities) and a PerryFi wifi modem to use telnet and BBSes. Another thing that would make it perfect is the fact that, in fact, we have a simil-CGA mode that can use up to 4 different colors (Again using an external card). Challenge accepted

What is Chimeric Software?

Chimeric software is a concept born from the retrocomputing community that embraces the capabilities of modern software engineering while asking a simple but fascinating question:

What if?

What if a particular piece of software had existed decades earlier? What if it had been designed to run on the computers of the 8-bit and 16-bit era? What would it have looked like, how would it have behaved, and what compromises or innovations would its creators have made?