Chimeric

onechipbook wifi and GEOBENCH

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:37:56 +0200

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:

Complexity over 10000

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:41:13 +0200

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.

To the Sky and beyond

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 08:16:02 +0200

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

AI or not AI?

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 08:05:06 +0200

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.

Porting GEOBENCH to the PCW

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:02:08 +0200

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?

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 23:15:25 +0200

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?