I'm doing something similar for DOS SDL ports. Repo isn't public yet, but idea is to have a repo with a knowledge base, skills and patches agents can use when porting to avoid having to bootstrap everything from scratch.
Porting to DOS sounds like a great plan for retro games, to only have to do the port once and know there are stable emulators to run it in, as opposed to porting to some modern OS and then have to port the game again and again to keep up with API changes.
I'm assuming they mean SDL ports of DOS games. SDL is actually one of the most stable libraries that a native game can use. They make breaking changes to the API once every 10-15 years, and they write a compatibility layer that implements the previous version's API using the current version's API as a backend. This has happened twice so far, so there's an SDL 1.2 implementation that uses SDL 2 and an SDL 2 implementation that uses SDL 3. These can be chained together, so for example you can run an SDL 1.2 game from the early 2000s on a modern Linux system and it'll have native Wayland and Pipewire support thanks to using SDL 3 behind the scenes.
I knew of GPG key signing parties, but never anything at this scale or impact. Might try booting the "Signing Computer Operating System Image Release coen-2.0.1" ISO in a VM and checking it out.
A calorie tracker for iPhone/Watch/iPad, no subscriptions, no ads, integrates with Apple Health and fully open source. Includes optional AI features, either using on-device Apple Intelligence or BYO with Anthropic, OpenAI and OpenAI compatible services (eg self-hosted).
Still tuning it, but over the last month I've used it to lose around 10lbs.
I'm planning to put it in Testflight to avoid the 7 day signing expiration and improve iCloud integration, but don't have any plans to put it in the App Store. Developed with Claude Code and Axiom skills [2].
The hippie copy mentioned was the ad my dad bought our first PC from. He was coming back from a business trip and asked the company computer guy to help him choose one for our family. We ended up with the 486DX2-50MHz "Integrated VESA System" [1].
Calling the Gateway 2000 customer support 800 number was my introduction to understanding computers and I am grateful to their staff for being patient with a 12 year old.
We got rid of it in the early aughts, but I kept the CPU all these years. Recently I found a similar Gateway slimline desktop (badged a 486DX2-66MHz) and have been using Claude to port things to DOS on it, like Cave Story [2][3]. The original 50MHz CPU still works.
For a while in the 90's, I did Gateway 2000 tech support. It's nice to hear you had a good experience :) The mandate was to move quickly while also solving the customer's problem (which is harder than it sounds over the phone).
I was very young and I tried to upgrade the RAM on our gateway computer. I used the wrong type of RAM and fried (or broke) the motherboard. When I talked to gateway support, I think the person on the other end could tell what happened but took pity on me and allowed us to get a new motherboard under warranty. I had completely forgot that story until your comment here, thanks for the reminder on why I double check all the specs before rummaging around in there.
That's great they replaced it under warranty. I thought I broke the IDE connector once on the motherboard when re-connecting the cable because a pin was missing. The Gateway support rep calmed me down on the phone and that's how I learned about cable keying.
>Calling the Gateway 2000 customer support 800 number was my introduction to understanding computers and I am grateful to their staff for being patient with a 12 year old.
You had a better experience than I had. Bought a Gateway, the cheap hard disk in it went back within a few weeks. Took two calls to support (each putting me on hold for maybe 45 minutes) to get them to admit the hard disk was bad and each call was quite long I remember.
They sent out a raw hard disk and I had to install Windows and all the drivers by hand over the weekend because of course it is my fault they used the cheapest drives they could find.
I think they charged me for the new drive and said they would rebate it if they got the old drive back within a month. I think I was able to use the package they sent the replacement in to mail the disk back, but I had to pay the postage.
I had a similar experience in the plentiful 4 era but they were nice and gave me an hard drive and the reinstall cd. It was really nice of them, the computer was probably not in warranty or barely was with a few days or weeks left and they really were nice to teenage me. This was a 40gb seagate hdd and windows xp pre sp2 to date myself lol
I've am working my way through benchmarking it on a few different CPUS [1]. A Pentium Overdrive 83MHz gets around 30fps, and the 486DX2-66MHz around 20fps. Because the 50MHz will use a bus speed to 25MHz I am expecting it to be 10-15fps.
Even with a lower frame rate gameplay is relatively smooth with having a fixed-timestamp mode [2].
The biggest difference in performance is the sound backend [3]. Gravis Ultrasound and Adlib for some reason halve the framerate on all cpus and it's the next challenge to point Claude at.
I have a PicoGUS and have had a lot of fun futzing around with Claude and porting Cave Story to DOS [1] the last couple of months after SDL announced DOS support.
Originally I was just using it as a Soundblaster, but in the last few weeks added Waveblaster, Adlib, and Gravis Ultrasound support. It's been a lot of fun learning how the GUS works and hearing how distinctively different it is from other sound hardware of that era.
Semi-related, since SDL added support for DOS a few weeks ago I've worked with Claude to port Cave Story to DOS [1].
On a Pentium 75 it can get 30fps and with decoupling the frame timer it plays at the same speed as the original. The port offloads the Organya synth soundtrack to MIDI to improve performance, and also sounds amazing.
Still working on a few bug fixes, performance tweaks, and Waveblaster support, but it's playable.
Why is Soundblaster 16 a minimum requirement? I'm asking because there are lots of cards, including the very popular OPL3SA2, that only emulate SB Pro.
The Verge has an on-going series Where's the Trump Phone? [1] with updates every week. They even managed to get an interview with one of the execs a few months back.
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