2600 hacking / windows newreader?
Kirk Is
like a 1993 remix...well-night unusable, alas. So, since I can't ssh from
work anyway, maybe it's time to look into desktop NTTP clients for windows
XP.
I'd prefer tin...it's what my fingers are tuned to, plus I've really grown
to like 80x24 screenfuls at a time, and I have a perl script that finds
threads I've posted to that have unread messages. But tin on windows
seems to be a bastard child...I downloaded all of cygwin (needed for one
dang .dll for this one version) but I get a
tin: Can't get entry for TERM
tin: Screen initialization failed
Even after I do a "set TERM=vt220" in the dos prompt.
So I guess I'd be willing to use any newsreader as long as it was easy to
operate by keyboard, and could show me threads that I've posted to w/
unread messages. Any suggestions, or tips on how to get wintin working?
ObHack:
My programming project lately has been a game for the Atari 2600...no easy
feat, because my knowledge of assembly before that was a class in Sparc
back at school. And besides being 6502, the VCS was a very limited beast.
Any decent game on it involves some level of hackery...
I'm keeping a developer's journal at http://alienbill.com/joustpong/
Tonight I decided to improve it's title screen...the old one
(except for the player indicators) was
http://alienbill.com/joustpong/20030829.gif
I scaled up an old font I made for pixeltime
( http://kisrael.com/pixeltime/ ) and it was an ok placeholder.
But for the new screen, I realized by looking at other games (which might
me obvious if I was a bit more clever with the asm and 2600 coding) that
if you use Atari "playfield" graphics, the pixels do have to be wide (40
across the screen) but they can be as short as a scanline. So I figured
out a simple technique to convert other images...take an image (a bitmap
or a bitmap from text), put it to 2 color, resize it to 40 across, then
reexpand it to make sure it looks good.
The results came out really well:
http://alienbill.com/joustpong/temp/title.gif
even better on a tv:
http://alienbill.com/joustpong/20030916.jpg
(though maybe the photo of a tv wasn't as good as the raw screenshot...)
--
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"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for
that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." --Drew Carey
Yeechang Lee
> Ugh, so someone replaced my old compsci shell acounts version of tin
> with like a 1993 remix...well-night unusable, alas.
ObHack: Back in the days when I used a university shell account for
newsreading, I compiled my own version of slrn and placed it in ~/bin
and ~/lib because 1) at first the university didn't provide it and 2)
when they did they didn't update the versions as often as I
liked. Unless your quota space is absolutely minimal, I'd go this
route. (I note that the slrn on my home Linux box is <300K, and the
associated SLANG libraries--which of course you may not need to
compile yourself--are another 1MB.)
> So, since I can't ssh from work anyway, maybe it's time to look into
> desktop NTTP clients for windows XP.
Are you interested in ssh more for protecting what you do within the
shell account or just the password? I also couldn't ssh (but could
telnet, through a corporate proxy) at my last job, but for me it was
the latter situation; I didn't really mind the unlikely idea that
someone in IT was watching every keystroke I typed because it was
nothing incriminating, but I *did* mind the username and password to
my home Linux box being recorded in some keystroke database.
ObAnotherHack: I resolved the above by using a one-time password
system for telneting in. Kept a little OTP client on my Palm OS
organizer for this purpose.
> I'd prefer tin...
I'd *strongly* recommend you look at slrn. slrn is fully GNKSA
compliant and has been for years. (It looks like tin has finally
gained true references-based threading, but for years and years it
didn't while its authors claimed it did.)
> it's what my fingers are tuned to, plus I've really grown to like
> 80x24 screenfuls at a time,
It's 80x40 for me when possible, but I know exactly what you
mean. I've used slrn since 1995 and trn and nn before that. Although
I've had a home Linux box going on eight years now, my few attempts at
using a graphical newsreader have sent me right back to slrn.
Same with mail; I've used vm in Emacs since 1995, and pine before
then. Same results with attempts at graphical mail readers at home,
though of course I can't get away from such things in work
environments.
> So I guess I'd be willing to use any newsreader as long as it was
> easy to operate by keyboard,
If you like emacs you'll like slrn. (I've tried using gnus, and it's
not bad, but being elisp-based it's meaningfully slower.)
> and could show me threads that I've posted to w/ unread messages.
Is your perl script tin-dependent? If not, is it dependent on a local
newsspool, or can it work off a remote NNTP feed and a .newsrc file?
If the latter I'd love to see it myself.
--
Read my Deep Thoughts @ <URL:http://www.ylee.org/blog/> PERTH ----> *
03:14:01 up 3 days, 1:13, 14 users, load average: 1.38, 1.39, 1.26
144 processes: 139 sleeping, 3 running, 2 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 17.7% user 16.2% system 66.0% nice 0.0% iowait 0.0% idle
Kirk Is
Yeechang Lee (yl...@pobox.com) wrote:
> Kirk Israel <kis...@conbrio.cs.tufts.edu> wrote:
> Are you interested in ssh more for protecting what you do within the
> shell account or just the password? I also couldn't ssh (but could
No telnet out as far as I know.
> > I'd prefer tin...
> I'd *strongly* recommend you look at slrn. slrn is fully GNKSA
> compliant and has been for years. (It looks like tin has finally
Eh, GNKSA doesn't interest me THAT much...mostly I like arrow keys to
navigate, tab to next unread. Netscape had one that came close, but I
really prefer the modal outlook of tin.
> > So I guess I'd be willing to use any newsreader as long as it was
> > easy to operate by keyboard,
> If you like emacs you'll like slrn. (I've tried using gnus, and it's
> not bad, but being elisp-based it's meaningfully slower.)
I like emacs for editing. Well, that's not true; given my preference I'd
use something with "windows standard" keys, but on Unix I get along fine
with emacs. But if a newsreader is all meta-escape-ctrl-blahblah, forget
it.
> > and could show me threads that I've posted to w/ unread messages.
> Is your perl script tin-dependent? If not, is it dependent on a local
> newsspool, or can it work off a remote NNTP feed and a .newsrc file?
> If the latter I'd love to see it myself.
It relies on tin's local "posted" file...a flat list of date, 'f'ollwup vs
'w'hy does this stand for new post, and then the subject. But a remote
NNTP feed. Let me know if you're interested.
ObHack:
More 2600 hacking: too hard to draw a Fuji in 8 pixels for my atari game.
So I alternate pattern in different frames...
--
QUOTEBLOG: http://kisrael.com SKEPTIC MORTALITY: http://kisrael.com/mortal
Every man is working out his own way [to ordination] and nobody can be
of help except by being kind, generous, and patient. --Henry Miller
Eli the Bearded
> tin: Can't get entry for TERM
> tin: Screen initialization failed
>
> Even after I do a "set TERM=vt220" in the dos prompt.
I think that means not that TERM is defined, but that it can't find
a terminfo/termcap entry for it.
> So I guess I'd be willing to use any newsreader as long as it was easy to
> operate by keyboard, and could show me threads that I've posted to w/
> unread messages. Any suggestions, or tips on how to get wintin working?
Tweak your message IDs to have a unique format for you (eg username on
the left hand side, or your own domain on the right hand side) and then
select based on that in References:. Since References: is usually in
the overview, it is a fast header to use in kill/select files.
From a shell prompt:
nntplist overview.fmt
Will show you the system overview file format, if you have 'nntplist'
installed. Otherwise:
telnet news nntp
[server banner]
LIST overview.fmt
[output]
QUIT
ISP plug:
Panix lets you ssh in on nonstandard ports, including 80 and 443, to
help get past restrictive firewalls.
> My programming project lately has been a game for the Atari 2600...no easy
> feat, because my knowledge of assembly before that was a class in Sparc
> back at school. And besides being 6502, the VCS was a very limited beast.
> Any decent game on it involves some level of hackery...
As it should be. :^)
ObHack:
I've got myself one of those new 'disposable' digital cameras,
the $12 Ritz/Wolf version of the Dakota Digital. So far I haven't
spliced together the USB cable it needs, but I'm sure I'll get
around to that soon. Here's a good source of information on
hacking that camera, since finding it in Google is still a bit
tricky:
http://revjim.net/wiki/DakotaDigitalCamera
Elijah
------
hasn't ever tried this type of hardware hacking before