Personal issues have intervened with pretty much everything. This morning, I packed as much as I could into three suitcases, bought a one-way ticket, and I’m leaving my ‘home’ behind.

While in the past I’ve taken a few months off here & there I’ve done my best the last two years to get in an update of something at least 2x a week, if not more.

However, I don’t feel that I am in any position to do so now, I don’t even have a proper place to live so the next while will be .. interesting to say the least.

If things get too crazy I’ll wind up archiving this thing in Egypt and I don’t know from there…

But at the same time, who knows the future isn’t written.

there is not fate, but what we make.

Jack Tramiel, passed away this Sunday.  For those of you who don’t know about him, he founded Commodore, and made it his mission to bring computing to the masses not the classes.  Thanks to him we had the PET, VIC and of course the beloved Commodore 64.  When things went south for him, he jumped to ATARI, after snagging it on a firesale from Warner as Jack wasn’t a guy to get put down, and helped bring the ST to the market.

Jack survived the holocaust in Poland, and left for Canada and started Commodore, originally focused on office furniture, filing cabinets and typewriters, then breaking into electronics with calculators. His leveraging of vertical businesses allowed him to bring to market products with the exact specifications that he wished.  And sometimes with unintended consequences like the file cabinet people making the seemingly indestructible PET cases.

Even though Commodore & Atari computers are no more, he has left a major mark on anyone who wanted a computer in the 1980’s who couldn’t afford a machine that cost as much as a car.

Tramiel is survived by his wife Helen, sons Gary, Sam, and Leonard.

As far as I can hope I wasn’t hit.

I hope.

Anyways, I don’t endorse any antivirus software!  Now if someone wants to pay me some $$$$$$ then, we’ll talk.

Dennis Ritchie just passed.  He was best known for the creation of the C programming language, and of course his work on Unix & Plan9.

He was 70.

Sometimes taking a binary and sending it through a text only medium (email) is a damned handy thing.  And sometimes you are dealing with old crap and being able to decode what you’ve just built would help a TONNE.

Luckily uudecode already exists.  So before I forget it, the link to a nice BSD version that’ll compile on any good UNIX and MS-DOS system is available here.

and other old kit… I came up with nothing..

Does anyone know any stores, that sell ancient stuff, like megadrives, acorns, BBC micros etc?

There must be somewhere in the British Isles….

Also I’m wondering if I should check prices for Russia in the Summer, or Japan in the Winter……

I think I need a vacation from this vacation.

Well I’ve been playing with some old MS-DOS software, and putting stuff together for it, I’ve had some MAJOR issues with SDL, between mapping my keyboard incorrectly, to the video not refreshing correctly when it’s not in focus or if another window overlapped it.

It’s a shame as DOSBox is usually pretty cool, but on my x64 system it’d been flaking out with the most annoying being the \,/,{,} & arrow keys not working right. Well for the heck of it, I downloaded & built my own SDL.dll for Qemu, and overwrote the one that comes with DOSBox… And it works PERFECTLY…..

This has been a WAY better fix, then messing around with my HID, removing drivers on EVERY reboot.