Mastodawn

nivs

@nivrig

946 Followers

293 Following

12K Posts

Real Programmer with screwdriver. Born to nerd. Respawned 80s game developer. Tech, games, cycling, sci-fi and old computers. Contents may vary.

Web	https://nivrig.com
itch.io	https://nivrig.itch.io
SmolWeb	gemini://s73.girv.in
LinkTree	https://linktr.ee/nivrig

This is actually a great and fantastic news:

After almost 30 years, The Settlers II will finally be available on the Amiga starting October 18, 2025! Officially licensed by Ubisoft Entertainment, the Gold Edition of this legendary city-building strategy game has been faithfully and insightfully ported by Look Behind You, proving that true classics are timeless.

Please read exclusively the full press release on amiga-news.de:

https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2025-08-00050-EN.html

#Amiga #games #Settlers2 #retrogaming

amiga-news.de - Real Time Strategy: Settlers II - Gold Edition can be preordered

I wonder if there's a point in the next 18 months that Microsoft stops using github.com and redirects all URLs to new addresses at copilot.com

a stinky ox 🐂5h ago

Show us your e-bikes! Here's mine!

My TV just did a software update.

We’re at the stage where I don’t want whatever it did because it’s probably better for Sony than me.

Also, it’s not connected to a network, so WTAF?! Do I need to dig a cellular modem out of it?!

I want to bury it in concrete now. TV is haunted.

This guy GETS IT. Playing the #Atari VCS wasn’t cheerful happy cartoon time; it was interacting with a barely-digital, barely-stable alien artifact playing back unfiltered garbled inhuman programming from some other time and place. It was not made to display hew-mon text and did not build orderly graphics out of tiles.

Of course it was just a toy, but it was also seriously gritty sci-fi. Not because what you saw on your TV looked like what these things would look like in reality, but because it was as if you were operating a tactical display on an ancient derelict alien starship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7QoOYOu2tY

Here's why Atari 2600 games feel so strange

YouTube

Only decade+ old nonsense on my public GH, but some private collaboration repos that I'll have a think about. Similarly, my BitBucket has mostly ancient client websites (that can be deleted) but some current private sources. I reckon I can find a home for those elsewhere.

@Blerkotron Now I'm wondering if it WAS the same one :D

Andrew Gallagher 9h ago

There are no words. https://www.thejournal.ie/uk-government-advises-people-to-delete-old-photos-and-emails-as-england-faces-water-shortfall-6788643-Aug2025/

British government asks people to delete old emails to reduce data centres' water use

The UK government has urged people to delete old pictures and emails as ‘data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems’.

TheJournal.ie

nixCraft 🐧1d ago

Finally somebody said it better 😅🤣

Justin ⏚1d ago

https://imginn.com/p/DNI4VI2oV0q/

The future tech bros want

×

Giles Goat 1d ago

@abstractslug Sounds like an interesting challenge 😎

@abstractslug
Still remember unboxing my copy of "Elite:Frontier" many years ago and marveling at the single 3.5" disc vs the 20 or so that other games at the time required. Not just faster...

NickDrisc0ll 1d ago

@abstractslug unironically a better dev experience than UE5

Tom Forsyth 1d ago

@abstractslug Am currently wrestling with the C# GC and yes I unironically miss the days of 68k and 386 assembly (8086 segments... not so much)

Eniko Fox 1d ago

@TomF @abstractslug on a scale of 1 to 10 how close are you to going "fuck it I'm using AllocHGlobal"

@eniko @TomF @abstractslug
12

SnyperWolf 1d ago

@abstractslug Chris Sawyer regretting his decisions all the way to the bank

Chocolate-loving dog 1d ago

@abstractslug my favourite part of this is that the fps would probably just get worse

@abstractslug Sounds like a portability nightmare that wont really offer much of an advantage unless you are an assembly demon, since the compiler optimizations might actually outperform your code if you're not careful enough. Nevermimd the calls to the OpenGL library... unless you'd prefer Vulkan

swire_angry_laugh

Ian Douglas Scott 1d ago

@enigmatico @abstractslug It would be more within the spirit of assembly game development to make the game run on bare metal with your own graphics driver (in assembly). And shaders written in assembly for the GPU.

Of course the game only works one one particular model of graphics card.

Ian Douglas Scott 1d ago

@enigmatico @abstractslug (Slightly more reasonably would be to run on Linux with a standard kernel-mode driver, but implement the userspace parts yourself, with the ioctls provided by the driver. Vulkan and OpenGL implementations are just userspace libraries.)

mei | fully hingeless architecture now in production 1d ago

@enigmatico @abstractslug do consider that the meme is on top of a background of a screenshot of a game from 1999. it was kind of a different time...

@mei@donotsta.re @abstractslug Not by much though. Aside of 32-bit processors being the standard and no modern x86 extensions, it was pretty similar.

@enigmatico
@abstractslug @mei
yup. as i understand it (as it was quite a bit before my time) the implied coda of "lol rollercoaster tycoon was written in assembly" is "... quite a bit after compilers had gotten smart enough and computers had gotten performant enough to make 'writing such a game in assembly' kind of a pointless endeavor."
early 90s? yeah, you defintely had to write non-portable, highly-hardware-specific code. by 1999? generally no longer necessary for the average case.

@dizzy @abstractslug @mei@donotsta.re Not to mention that if you want to write assembly for Windows 9x, you still have to go through the Windows API you like it or not, so in the end its more of a hassle than an actual optimization since the code is going to be practically the same, but its going to take more effort for nothing.

The only performance gain, if anything, would be in some math computations, when optimized correctly. But then again, the compiler already optimizes a lot of these and if you mess up, its going to have a negative effect.

Richard Barrell 18h ago

@enigmatico @abstractslug @mei I'd say today is very different from 1999 in that we have at least 2 different CPU ISAs in very wide use on consumer's devices, and every consumer device has some kind of programmable GPU. You can't safely assume x86 but you can fairly safely assume something like OpenGL ES 2.0.

(While there were more ISAs around in 1999, x86 was vastly more popular than mips, sparc, 68k, powerpc, etc. Nowadays neither ARM or x86 can be safely ignored.)

@0x2ba22e11 @abstractslug @mei@donotsta.re If we are talking about assembly then you want to target one architecture. Thays what I meant. If you want more than one then forget about assembly. By portability I mean to other OSs. On Windows you are going to use the Windows API while on Linux you will use the kernel syscalls + something like libc or a similar library (And then the graphics API because unless you write your own driver, you wont do bare metal GPU programming).

In that regard, yes. There isnt much difference since you are most likely going to target x86, and I think at that time it had all the extensions up to MMX, maybe SSE as well. Nowadays you would make use of the 64-bit eztensions of course, as well as every other extension, but aside of that (that its already handled by either the compiler or some API/library), its the same spirit.

Richard Barrell 15h ago

@enigmatico I'm arguing that targeting assembly is a much worse idea now than it was back then. Whichever ISA you target, you are going to need to be emulated in order to run on the other one.

That and you don't want to be doing the rendering on the CPU at all any more.

Poslovitch 17h ago

@enigmatico It's Roller Coaster Tycoon tho! Nothing could have made this legend of a game more legendary than "developed by a single developer who probably spent too much time checking for op byte codes just to make guests break the benches when angry" 🥹
@abstractslug

The best part? Through use of an expansion port you could achieve complete #NintendoEntertainmentSystem compatibility. Port #RollerCoasterTycoon to #NES you cowards!

Zark Muckerburg 1d ago

@abstractslug I’ve decided going forward I’m just going to communicate in binary

@abstractslug 500000 seems like a very conservative estimate

Going T. Maine 1d ago

@abstractslug assmbl Y perfec t lang uge for put game in t\o! syntax very Soft and Comfort game run fast write gam in Assembly. Put Game In Assembly. no problems ever in assmbl y because no team for support or dependsdencies manage. Assembly Lang yes a lang for a game put game in assembly can trust assembly for running good game fast. friend assembly

@abstractslug I do wonder if the small size of the original codebase made the making of https://freerct.net easier.

FreeRCT | Home

Willow "Wolveric" Catkin 1d ago

@abstractslug
angry PirateSoftware noises

neocat_googly_woozy

Willow "Wolveric" Catkin 1d ago

@abstractslug
angry PirateSoftware noises

neocat_googly_woozy

@abstractslug you can also write bad code in asm.

Credit card 5h ago

@abstractslug the people who write apps that basically just tell you information with electron and javascript will not appreciate this

Knut 🏳️‍🌈 🇳🇴🧸4h ago

@abstractslug Oh gods. I wrote a "useless machine", one of those things that turns itself off, in assembler. You'd type an X, and it would disappear after a second. Over and over. That alone was an exercise in frustration. And to think, people used to write software that sent us to the moon in Assembler.

@abstractslug and this is why I bought roller coaster tycoon because goddamn that programmer is insane