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Apple out here making it easy to buy nothing. I'd like to make the desktop apps I'm working on available for Mac, but this is so hateful.

Holy shit, the SSD is also soldered in and not upgradable? Against the wall with them. That's criminal. It never even crossed my mind they'd fuck their customers to that degree.

Apple still screwing people on RAM, huh? Oh, you want a reasonable amount of RAM to accommodate the outrageous growth of software in recent years? No problem, that'll be three thousand dollars, please.

And, none of them are upgradable, right? I can't just buy a Mini with 16GB and shove a reasonably sized module in there?

#Apple

Important message from the brands this holiday season.

New Stranger Things is kinda bad, huh?

Ooh, Slint can have almost automatic native look and feel via a build time option and light/dark modes (if you do things right in terms of styling custom components, which I mostly did not, but I can fix it pretty easily). Cupertino (Apple) style doesn't work for some reason...text is invisible. But, I don't have a Mac to build on, anyway, so that's a problem for another day.

Also, what's the deal with Oscar64? Seems like a bunch of nice looking and fast games have been made with it. Is it really able to compile C to efficient 6502? https://github.com/drmortalwombat/oscar64

@branch300bpm oh, but you lose information in doing it that way, unless you make each frame of an animation its own file with a naming convention for the metadata. I'm labeling and commenting the sprites in an animation sequence with the sprite name, frame number, and shared colors needed to render it.

I can't think of a good way to deal with all that metadata in a .prg, since we don't have comments or labels anymore, once it's binary.

@branch300bpm ah, that's a good idea. I'll do that.

@colin_mcmillen that one's easy, just need to use a different comment syntax, as it also supports `.byte`. I kinda suspect most assemblers will look more like ca65 than KickAssembler (which has weird for asm C/C++ single-line style comments).

Folks programming games for Commodore 64/128/etc., what assembler(s) are you using? Anyone using C? Which compiler(s)?

I'm building a sprite editor, and I've added export in KickAssembler .byte format, but adding other formats is trivial, I just don't know what folks are using, and there are a lot of options. (I also want to know what folks like, because maybe I'll like it better than Kick, who knows.)

#Commodore64 #retroComputing

This works better than I could have ever hoped. It can now import quite complicated images, optimally split colors across two sprites, detect borders and fine details and try to put them in the high res overlay sprite. I was expecting to need to do a lot more cleanup on imported assets, but it sometimes works optimally (or at least as good as I could do by hand) right off with no tweaks.

@SwiftOnSecurity I got my first real job at 19 at least partly because I solved a database problem for the manager who was interviewing me. It was a database that I'd never seen or heard of before, but I said, "Sure, I can take a look".

This was at a TV station, and I was interviewing for a job in the tape/editing room, not a computer job. Everybody else they hired for the position had a bachelor's degree in broadcasting or similar.

You could really just do shit in the 90s.

Overlay feature is back, and can also be previewed in the animation player. I'm running out of things to fix, I think I'm going to have to release it at some point.

Other fixes: Transparency in the editor canvas has been fixed so it's a checkerboard again (as it was in the Qt version), changed the UI elements that didn't match to custom versions (they didn't match because Slint doesn't allow directly styling Checkbox and select).

@chrisnelsonsdog also, I just looked up how long Fritos last unopened, and it's not long enough to add them to my emergency food box (it's ~six months). It would be nice to have some good snacks during the apocalypse or whatever. Do they make freeze-dried Fritos?

@chrisnelsonsdog not me eating the emergency calories and fire starter before even starting the hike.

@futurebird I think a lot of folks like talking to the LLMs because they're programmed to gaslight you into thinking you're a genius.

@avon_deer almost everything is worse now, anyway. Less reliable because of all the shitty software that depends on shitty software in the cloud. Less repairable, both by design and because it's more complex and because of all the proprietary shitty software. My mom's been through three refrigerators in her kitchen while the one in her basement that she brought with her when she moved in twenty years ago, and was already ten+ years old, just keeps going. Don't get me started on furniture.

@yonder yeah, I remain surprised by how successful it's been. I like it less than several of its contemporary competitors (I prefer Perl or Ruby, for example, if we're talking language in the same category). I don't hate the language, but I have begun to hate the ecosystem. The constant churn in stuff that really should really be stable (building, packaging, distribution, dependency handling, in particular) makes it so unpleasant to be a maintainer on a bunch of Python projects.

95% of the time was spent finding thread/state bugs. I should have written this thing in Rust. (Admittedly, a skill issue. I'm definitely not good at C++.)