Two years ago I talked about a spherical chess variant. Now, I want to mention real time chess, where players can move their pieces at will, with the only limit being once a piece is moved, you can't move it for five seconds. And there's no check or checkmate-you win by capturing the opponent's king.

The problem with real time chess is that you ( Read more... )

For the past few days just as I'm falling alseep, I think, yes, I could make a post about that, only to completely forget about the next day. I finally remembered what I wanted to post about-NaNoGenMo. Or rather, how I completely forgot about it this year (and kept forgetting to write about it-sheesh).

And last year.

And the year before.

And the ( Read more... )

I have another data point for receiving email for other people named “Sean Conner.” This time, I received an email from a auto repair shop in Wimauma, Florida, detailing work on my 2014 XXXXXXXXXXXXX with VIN XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and the Florida plate of XXXXXX with XXXXXX miles on the odometer for a total amount of $XXXXXX. If that level of detail ( Read more... )

And in keeping with documenting 40 year old technology, I'm documenting how to call assembly language subroutines for Extended Color BASIC.

One major difference between Color BASIC and Extended Color BASIC is how to define the address to call. No longer do you have to poke the address into memory, but use the BASIC command DEFUSRn (where n is ( Read more... )

There's nothing quite like documenting 40 year old technology, but hey, retro-computing is now popular, so why not?

Anyway, since I've modified my assembler to make it easier to write assembly subroutines for Color BASIC, I've been doing a deep dive into the nuances of doing so. This post will cover the method for plain Color BASIC; Extended Color ( Read more... )

A typical way to extend Color BASIC is to write some assembly:

INTCVT equ $B3ED ; put argument into D GIVABF equ $B4F4 ; return D to BASIC org $7F00 swapbyte jsr INTCVT ; get argument exg a,b ; swap bytes jmp GIVABF ; return it to BASIC end
Then assemble the code, transcribe the resulting object code into DATA statements in a BASIC ( Read more... )

I learned on Monday that my friend Duke Parrish died from catching up on his wife's MyInstaTikFaceLinkedMePinBookSpaceTokInGramWeTrest feed. He died on October 31st. Hallowe'en.

He was five days younger than I.

It wasn't a sudden accident or the result of a horrible crime. No. He had a genetic disorder diagnosed way too late and it caught up to him ( Read more... )

I'm posting my previous entry to LinkedIn when this time I'm asked “You're one of the few experts invited to answer: Your team is hesitant about new web app technologies. How can you overcome their resistance to change?” And the first response from one of the “experts” that answered is: “Threaten to fire them.”

Wow!

And to think I was scared to ( Read more... )

I've made some major changes to my 6809 assembler, mostly to how the unit testing works. The first change was to assemble the test code elsewhere far in memory from the code being tested (there's a default value that can be changed via an .OPT directive). This separation makes it easier to keep the test code out of the final assembled artifact. The ( Read more... )