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  I got a second Number Smasher 860 card so I’ve busted out the 286. The toolchain itself runs on the i860 so the host CPU being a potato doesn’t really affect it. The problem I ran into before was that the 32-bit tools were linked against an ancient version of Phar Lap that refused to run on my DECpc 486. This at least solves *that.* Unforunately, the GREX graphics library needs a 386, and all my 386s are either laptops or Micro Channel. Hm. I guess I need to bum a 386DX-40 off someone.

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  I am working on converting these IBM software directories to a searchable database with the power of OCR and Microsoft Excel. I have 1986, 1989, and 1990. Fortunately they are all big 132-column tables in Courier. I want to keep track of what I own and what I don’t so I can archive stuff without accidentally ending up with two copies of Pascal Compiler 2.00.

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  my 286 has evolved into an adorable 386

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  Oh, that explains why the i860 toolchain hates my 486. It’s an early protected-mode program that’s using VCPI instead of DPMI. VCPI is the early DOS extender spec that was quickly abandoned in favor of DPMI for compatibility and ease of use problems. DPMI can use a resident server while VCPI doesn’t work under HIMEM.SYS.

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  there I finally got the i860 card sending data to my desktop PC via RS-232. now I can debug graphics-mode programs and also go to bed.

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  I’m still looking for any copies of the NDP Intel 860 compilers. I have version 4.1a for DOS and am looking for any other version or language (Fortran or Pascal).

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  since I have a C++ compiler for the i860 i dug out the repository for this C++ 3D engine I made forever ago and I’m porting the model and transformation stuff to it. the problem of course is the rendering code targets Glide and this is a 386 with a RISC vector processor and a Mach64

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  Problem: Tyrian background tiles are 24x28px and Atari tilemaps are 8x8px. I can’t display .5 of a tile. Solution: Treat two 24x28 tiles as one 24x56 tile. Now I can use a tool to turn each unique 24x56 combo in use into 3x7=24 8x8px tiles and build a graphics bank for my tilemap hardware.

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  I added an IFF -> tilemapped playfield conversion to my Atari graphics tools. Now I have scrolling backgrounds and I am liberated from manually punching in tile indexes!

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  this is ARM64. keep up the good work

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  Writing a ResEdit equivalent for my Atari 68K arcade assets here

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  While writing this ResEdit clone, I came up with the namespaces ASI (Atari System I) and ARK (Atari Resource Kit) so I could make bad puns with the binary export system.

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  of course I had to add Amiga ILBM support to the Irix image format tools

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  @wohali if it’s good enough for Elvis it’s good enough for me

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  yay. i can now type `make assets` and it automatically runs any conversions i need it to, going from .IFF graphics file to Atari bitplanes which can then be combined into a graphics ROM

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  today’s adventure is “how to allocate motion objects to actors out of an object pool while being able to sort them by Z ordering as a background task” 64 actors, 64 sprites, one actor can be made up of multiple sprites, at least I have a lot of RAM to keep track of it all on my cartridge

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  anyway I found some more Atari arcade source code and found out that the 68K sprite engine I thought I extremely overengineered is… actually very similar to what they were using in 1989 and I feel better about my version now no I didn’t expect Atari to have a bytecode scripting system for sprites, I thought I was being clever

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  Something is wrong with my DECpc that I wasn’t able to figure out and made me frustrated with crashing and memory errors so I switched back to the big boi I finally got my hands on a working P90 CPU card and we’re PS/2ing it SO HARD