cam henlin's blog|

What is it?

Dangerous Alone is an unofficial browser engine for The Legend of Zelda (NES, 1986). You drop a legally obtained USA NES dump on the window, the engine extracts the cartridge in the browser, and from there it can run the full first and second quests: overworld, labyrinths, caves, combat, items, bosses, saves, and music.

It is not a Nintendo product, it does not include Nintendo assets, and it is not an emulator wrapped in a window. Maps, graphics, and audio come from the ROM you already own. Without that ROM, the window is a dropzone.

What the engine adds is a modern play layer around the original game:

• Split-screen co-op — one to four players share the same world, each with a full NES-sized camera. Join or leave mid-session. Seats can be in different modes at...
  
  

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I had recently heard about a new product called the AnnoyingPCB. It’s essentially a small circuit board that can be programmed to emit one of several different noises, including a loud chirping noise, at random intervals between 5 and 45 minutes. I thought it would be the perfect tool to prank my spouse and kids, who had recently started sleeping through the night like clockwork.

As a young parent of several children, I had become accustomed to waking up 2 to 3 times a night to help put them back to sleep, comfort them from a bad dream, get them water, etc. But now that they were all sound sleepers, I found myself waking up alone and lonely in the middle of the night. I needed something to keep me entertained during those lonely hours.

So, I decided to put the AnnoyingPCB to use. I carefully placed it in mine and my spouse’s bedroom. I eagerly waited for her reaction.

Sure enough,...

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In this post, we’ll be using an Arduino UNO R3 to drive a 7 segment display and stepper motor as a sort of “getting started with Arduino.” We’ll also build a small sample program to make the two work together and discuss other general projects that you could build using an Arduino UNO.

Parts list

• Elegoo UNO Project Super Starter Kit

Getting started

The Elegoo UNO Project Super Starter Kit is a super fun and comprehensive kit that provides everything needed to get started with Arduino programming. The kit comes with a variety of components, including a 4-digit 7-segment display, which can be used for just about anything you’d think up. In this article, for example purposes, I’m going to use...

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Introducing FocusedEdit

What is FocusedEdit?

FocusedEdit is a new text editor for classic Macintosh computers (running System 2 through MacOS 9.2.2) and the CoprocessorJS library that allows shared bidirectional text editing with a modern computer within a web browser window.

FocusedEdit will allow you to easily work on text documents on a classic Macintosh and then instantly use them on your modern computer. For example, I’ve been typing up confluence documents, emails, slack messages, etc. for work...

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Messages for Macintosh - what is it?

Messages for Macintosh is a new software suite for classic Macintosh (System 2.0 through MacOS 9.2.2) systems to interoperate with Apple iMessages via a familiar interface, with supporting software running on a newer Mac computer.

What is the purpose of this article?

The purpose of this article is to outline how to get your classic Macintosh system set up to send and receive iMessages with a familiar interface, just like what you would get on new Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc. This article will outline the simplest path to getting up and...

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Let’s get developing

After building up lots of tooling for classic Macintosh, we can develop a full application: Messages for Macintosh.

If you’re stumbling on this article without context, you might want to start with these to get up to speed:

• A simplified guide to classic Macintosh development using Retro68 and pce-macplus
• Introducing CoprocessorJS
• Introducing Nuklear for Macintosh

The motivation

This is the developer-oriented companion article to

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Retro68 projects / cool old Macintosh projects

• https://github.com/antscode/MacPlayer
• https://github.com/antscode/MacWifi
• https://github.com/clehner/Browsy
• https://github.com/antscode/MacAuthLib
• https://github.com/cy384/ssheven
• https://github.com/clehner/Retro68Test
• https://github.com/DrJosh9000/humbletwitter – actually, hypercard + go. Still cool so I’m leaving it...
  
  

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Profiling your Retro68 application using serialperformanceanalyzer

When moving Nuklear to Macintosh, it became apparent that there would be a lot of performance optimization work necessary to provide a usable GUI experience on an 8MHz Macintosh. To make the situation worse, there is no profiling tooling available for Retro68, and no way as far as I could tell to run some kind of code profiler against the pce-macplus emulator, so I came up with a simple library for profiling code over a serial port via simple function calls.

So let’s say you’re wanting to profile a Retro68 application that you’re working on. Here’s how you might go about...

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The motivation

GUI programming on old Macs can be pretty painful.

For some background, I am relatively new to Mac programming but experienced with programming in general. I have been doing a fair amount of programming using the Retro68 console recently, but now I’m looking to create some more GUI-based applications, so they can feel more “Mac-like”.

I’ve been pouring through the books “Inside Macintosh: Macintosh Toolbox Essentials” and “Inside Macintosh: More Macintosh Toolbox” along with some other resources online, and have been playing around a bit manipulating the “MenuSample” test app from this blog post: http://www.toughdev.com/content/2018/12/developing-68k-mac-apps-with-codelite-ide-retro68-and-pce-macplus-emulator/.

I...

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Parts list

I’ve listed out everything that I used on this project on amazon.

• rs232 to rs422 converter
• usb to rs232 converter
• mini din 8 cable - this is enough to build 2 cables!
• wire cutter and stripper
• small screwdriver

Getting started

Let’s lay out everything that we need to make sure we have all the necessary tools that we need to get started first.

Again, before you get started, you should have:

• rs232 to rs422...
  
  

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The motivation – what is CoprocessorJS and what am I hoping to accomplish?

One of my interests is to make old computers more useful in modern times so that they can once again be used in our day-to-day workflows. To that end, I’ve created a modern piece of software that allows programmers on nearly any old machine to hand off work loads to a modern machine over a serial port, and get a response back that they can then interact with. This software will provide a standard interface for serial-connected devices to provide code to execute. The serial port is a great choice here because it is relatively common, even on old machines, and fast enough for most tasks if you can break them down small...

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