Classic99 Updates

[+OLD CS1]

9 hours ago, RXB said:

Still waiting for RXB 2023 to be included into Classic99?

Is that a question?

[RXB]

1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

Is that a question?

Yes as Classic99 only has RXB 2022D currently.

 

RXB 2022G.zip

[RXB]

8 hours ago, Tursi said:

Sorry about that Rich, yes you are. Please post the current version for me here, and I'll push that out tomorrow?

 

Here you go Tursi:

 

 

RXB 2023.zip

[+OLD CS1]

30 minutes ago, RXB said:

Yes as Classic99 only has RXB 2022D currently.

My bad.  It was phrased as a declarative rather than an interrogative, so I was confused.

[Tursi]

It has been pushed and is now available. It may take a day for my webpage to update, but downloads will always pull the latest anyway.

 

399.064a

- replaced RXB2022D with RXB2023

 

http://harmlesslion.com/software/classic99

 

[RXB]

Thank you very much for your time.

 

[Tursi]

19 hours ago, jenorton said:

Classic99 is, by far, the easiest way for someone to jump in and really experience the TI 99/4A on their own system.  Just start it up, and boom! it works.

I appreciate that this is true, but this is more a side effect of using my own software than ease of use being a specific goal. In fact, if you dig deep enough back, you'll see I specifically disclaimed usability as a goal -- Classic99 is a developers tool. The fact that it's nice if developer tools include a number of useful features is just a bonus.

 

When I first reached out to TI, I just wanted to include the ROMs. I added the games too, because they said any TI software for the 4A was okay, so what the hell! Beyond that, I've not really implemented much consideration to the average user who just wants to play a game. Give TI some credit too - if they had said no, I probably would have dumped Classic99 long before it became useful.

 

I sometimes get annoyed with the "MAME is more accurate" rhetoric because there have been numerous times that has been patently untrue, and that line cost me hours of work proving it when people brought "MAME does it differently" to me as a Classic99 bug. Classic99 had mid-frame VDP updates long before MAME did. Classic99 fixed a couple of very obscure CPU operations before MAME did -- and I shared the results of that to make sure MAME got them too, if you'll recall. Classic99's SN sound was IMO superior to MAME for a while, too. This is not dissing MAME - every emulator has bugs! (That CPU bug affected /all/ the major emulators... which I found impressive cause we all misinterpreted the documentation the same way ). But sometimes Classic99 can move faster cause I own all the parts, and because I tested all my theories in detail against real hardware, I sometimes found behaviors first. You can find a lot of notes in the Classic99 source about these tests (and some I still need to run.)

 

But I'll be very honest and say there's not any area /today/ that I think Classic99 tops MAME in terms of running the console, and MAME does support more accessories (because I'm really only interested in supporting hardware that sees active software development, and MAME is interested in running existing software). I'll also admit MAME is currently more flexible in terms of configuring your machine - that just got away from me.  But I /like/ Windows and I like that Classic99 is much more a Windows application.

 

There's a lot I want to improve. But Classic99v4, while the architecture did at least prove to work, is just such a massive step backwards that I lost heart. It was neat to see it start up on a Raspberry PI, but I don't want to reimplement the debugging system using cross-platform widgets that I honestly can't stand using, and without the debugging system I don't have a need for Classic99. And many of the other functions that make Classic99 special (and, to me, useful) are Windows specific as well, and making them cross platform is going to be difficult. Worse than that, I lose control of the low level interfaces due to the need to use these cross platform widgets, and that sort of thing has forever been a thorn in my side professionally.

 

Ultimately, it makes me wonder what the point of a cross platform Classic99 even is, if all the functions that /make/ it Classic99 are lost or crippled.

 

[+OLD CS1]

31 minutes ago, Tursi said:

Ultimately, it makes me wonder what the point of a cross platform Classic99 even is, if all the functions that /make/ it Classic99 are lost or crippled.

IIRC, Classic99 can be run in Wine for anyone who wants run on Linux, and I suspect there is something similar to Mac^*.  Of course, why anyone would want to run a Mac is just beyond me.  Seems akin to waterboarding, if you ask me.  Which no one did, but I said it anyway.

 

Anyway, my point is your program will run on a multitude of platforms without any extra work, headache, or effort on your part, so no reason not to stay the course.

 

* Apparently, yes: Wineskin.

[pjduplooy]

While slightly off topic, I feel that it is worth a mention.  I owned a TI in the early 90's, and have sold it off in the late 90's, I have been looking for a real machine since then.  Importing one into South Africa is very prohibitive, and they are scarce as hen's teeth here....

 

I stumbled on this forum by chance, and my first emulator was Win994a.  My second one was Classic99.  I have since purchased PC99, for the Cyc.

 

I have no preference when it comes to emulators, and I think we are really spoilt for choice.  However, I regularly find myself going back to Classic99.

 

Tursi, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for helping me rediscover my love for a machine that I thought was forgotten to me/

[jrhodes]

1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

... Seems akin to waterboarding, if you ask me.  Which no one did, but I said it anyway.

⬆️ @OLD CS1's current permanent mood

[SteveB]

2 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

Of course, why anyone would want to run a Mac is just beyond me.

A wise man once said : "If I wanted to spend my life fighting an OS, I would be using VMS..." 

[+OLD CS1]

3 hours ago, SteveB said:

A wise man once said : "If I wanted to spend my life fighting an OS, I would be using VMS..." 

I cut my teeth on VAX/VMS back in 1990, programming Fortran77 on a Cray Y-MP/2E with connection machine.  Anyone feeling homesick can try out OpenVMS, which was recently released in a community edition for x64, free for personal/educational use.

[InfiniteTape]

1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

I cut my teeth on VAX/VMS back in 1990, programming Fortran77 on a Cray Y-MP/2E with connection machine.  Anyone feeling homesick can try out OpenVMS, which was recently released in a community edition for x64, free for personal/educational use.

I had to learn data structures in Ada on a DEC Alpha running VMS in 1997. So much dead end tech. Kinda sad for VMS, but I'll never feel any nostalgia for Ada.

[jenorton]

What can I say? Choice is always a great thing!

 

We are blessed with the various emulation choices for the TI.

 

Whether it's Tursi's work on Classic99, Michael Zapf and others on the MAME emulation, Mike Wright and others of CADD for PC99, the Cyc, and other CADD products, not to mention others I don't know about, these are all labors of love.  We in the community have benefitted greatly from all of them.

Thanks to all of you for keeping the TI alive and well!

[RXB]

19 hours ago, SteveB said:

A wise man once said : "If I wanted to spend my life fighting an OS, I would be using VMS..." 

Though I no longer have a Mac anymore, I have learned the Microsoft Windows is total crap OS compared to Unix or Linux.

The Windows Registry is a laughable mess most of the time, so much bloatware and spyware it cuts the Windows OS performance.

The ease to crack open the Windows OS to be taken over is a 30 year joke for security as there are so many holes in this OS.

 

Overall Unix and little brother Linux is still a much better more secure OS by a mile. 

But like the "Peoples Car" after WW2 the VW Bug was the most popular which has never ever meant the best!

Popular<=>Best

[jenorton]

hey, my daughter wants a VW Bug <grin>.

 

The motor's not in the back anymore, is it?

 

Sorry, this is off-topic

[+OLD CS1]

38 minutes ago, RXB said:

Overall Unix and little brother Linux is still a much better more secure OS by a mile. 

Yeah.

[GDMike]

Windows is part of the "social media" technology.

Where everything you have should and will be shareable by the world.

[Tursi]

12 hours ago, RXB said:

Though I no longer have a Mac anymore, I have learned the Microsoft Windows is total crap OS compared to Unix or Linux.

The Windows Registry is a laughable mess most of the time, so much bloatware and spyware it cuts the Windows OS performance.

The ease to crack open the Windows OS to be taken over is a 30 year joke for security as there are so many holes in this OS.

It's off topic, but I don't mind for a little bit (as long as we all stay civil, hehe). But my professional experience after 20+ years of software development on both Linux and Windows is the complete opposite.

 

First off, Microsoft finally started taking security seriously about 20 years ago, and it marked a massive improvement in the software. Linux security continues to be managed largely by a committee of volunteers that only look hard at the parts they find interesting. The results of that are evidenced in sources like the list that OLD CS1 posted. Linux has had multiple wild exploits in PING that were out there for decades because nobody really cared enough to go over the source code. There was a new one just 4 months ago that offers privilege escalation, even though there was a massive push ten years ago to audit it because of its ability to leak kernel memory that in turn had been in there for over a decade. Ping is not a large piece of code! (Though, looks like that might be FreeBSD, so not a great example. Anyway.) Most Microsoft exploits are (finally) not so old, but an effect of the new directions they are trying to push.

 

Second, development between Linux and Windows is night and day. Windows APIs are substantially more mature and much more likely to work across the board than Linux APIs. In addition, they don't require you to go on a Sierra-style quest to locate all the other libraries that you need to locate in order to compile the API you want to use. I haven't had to use the MSDN system for about ten years, but ten years ago when you had an MSDN subscription and asked Microsoft a programming question - THEY ANSWERED IT. I was diving deep enough to reveal deficiencies in the NT kernel design for dialup, and they found the people who knew that system to verify the findings. Just look at Stack Overflow to see how much useless information is fired back about Linux questions. I experienced a lot of this when doing professional Linux development, and expect to continue to have to do so.

 

Third, backwards compatibility on Windows is second to none. In fact, due to consumer pressure, Microsoft has often doubled down on remaining backwards compatible. We only lost the ability to run 16 bit Windows apps when the 64-bit OS version became dominant. Software written for 32-bit Windows 95 will still run on 64-bit Windows 11 - 28 years later. This is completely impossible on Linux - your libraries will be incompatible and the APIs will have changed (not just been superseded, but actually CHANGED.)  There are workarounds, of course, such as containers, but that's still not "just works".

 

That's enough, for me. My preference is set in stone, and it's 180 degrees from my attitude 28 years ago which was "anything but". You mention the registry - but so what? It's just a database. Software is not /required/ to use it and Microsoft has been discouraging using it for more than a decade. It still has its place -- configuration data needs to go somewhere! But some variants of Linux are also adopting this concept of a hidden database of settings used across multiple applications. In fact, there are a ton of Linux features that started first in Windows.

 

It isn't even "us vs them" anymore. All the major software developers - Apple and Microsoft included - support and contribute to Linux as well as pulling parts of Linux into their own systems. Hell, Windows 10/11 lets you install Ubuntu (or other distributions) to run side-by-side with the Windows kernel. It works pretty well for what it is, and I use it a lot.  (I even tested that Classic99v4 runs in that mode - Classic99v4 for Windows Subsystem for Linux works, if you have an X Server ).

 

It's all personal preference these days. There's a way to run almost any software on almost any platform now, they're just that powerful. And tastes change, too. More and more I dislike the direction that Windows' UI is going. 10 and 11 annoy me... to the point that I replaced Windows Explorer with Directory Opus. (Plus, I like supporting software I loved on the Amiga). The fact that it's trying to be more tablet-y and the push to look like Mac frustrates me, since I hated my two years with the Mac. So I'm /pretty close/ to changing my desktop to Linux, where I will probably run HotDog Linux to take me back to the Amiga days . But the above points are really hard to beat for me.

 

[RXB]

Yea well Microsoft has never had a original idea ever, it copied Unix OS X and copies Linux concepts.

[GDMike]

But...rumors of MS and apple both dropping an OS is looking real.

First the death of HDD, https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsofts-reportedly-trying-to-kill-hdd-boot-drives-for-windows-11-pcs-by-2023

then they will slowly brick to booting over internet is my guess.

Edited May 10, 2023 by GDMike

[Tursi]

3 hours ago, RXB said:

Yea well Microsoft has never had a original idea ever, it copied Unix OS X and copies Linux concepts.

Microsoft developed the Start button that everyone else copied.

 

[GDMike]

And of course, MS office really made the grade for the consumer and corporations. Hands down

[+mizapf]

I'm tired about discussing operating systems. I know which one is best for me.

[RXB]

Boot Drives without user input seems very archaic which is why I loved SOB that allowed you to select drive and cartridge used.