8086 emulator
8086 emulator is a fun Intel 8086 emulator / vm on github. It can run most of the 8086 instruction set and provides an interactive interpreter and debugger that allows you to run programs line by line. [hackaday]
Scalable IO vs SR-IOV Virtualization
Are the days of SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) numbered? SR-IOV was originally designed for 20 or so VMs with most instances using 8 vCPUs or less. Now that we have 60-128 cores/120-256 hw threads and beyond with multiple sockets and CXL, things have changed.
Scalable IO offers better scalability, flexibility, over-provisioning, and a Scalable IO system can still support traditional SR-IOV in backwards compatibility mode.
It does this with hardware-assisted, efficient routing and has different modes for direct and intercepted path functionality. I won’t claim I fully grock all the details, but it does seem like a great way to start taking advantage of newer architecture enhancements we’re seeing in a wide variety of upcoming hardware platforms.
Give the spec a read to learn more.
Links:
- https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-scalable-io-virtualization-technical-specification-revision-1-0-version-1-3-pdf
- https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/programmable/813754/24-1-4-0-0/scalable-iov.html
- https://www.servethehome.com/microsoft-and-intel-scalable-io-virtualization-replacing-sr-iov-ocp/
Windows 11 finally gets over 50% installs, then instantly retreats
After 4 years, Windows 11 installations finally reached an adoption rate of just over 50% – likely due to dire sounding announcements about the end of Windows 10 support. And just one month later, install rate immediately starts a retreat and Windows 10 sees an increase of installs.
The OS wars are long since over, but it is obvious some folks at Microsoft clearly haven’t learned, or just don’t care, about disappointing your customers.
Links:
Go to the Video Game History library for free
The Video Game History Foundation (VHGF)’s digital archive of video game research has launched its first round of online early access to it’s library. It’s free to access anywhere in the world and intended for “anyone who wants to study video game history.”
What do they have?
- Never-before-seen game development materials.
- Artwork, press kits, and promotional materials from iconic video games.
- Over 1500 full-text searchable out-of-print video game magazines—including game industry trade magazines rarely available to the public.
- The first 100 CDs from the art and press release archives of GamePro magazine.
- Guidebooks and ephemera from video game events, including searchable directories and maps from the first 12 years of the Electronic Entertainment Expo.
- Over 100 hours of footage from the production of the Myst series
- the Mark Flitman papers
There are some caveats: There are no playable games in the archive due to copyright restrictions and VGHF said it “cannot give express permission” for users to reproduce materials in the library unless explicitly stated otherwise though researchers may be exempt under fair use cases.
Reset a forgotten Windows 7 password
https://youtu.be/RCInsJ6BLjY?si=1a2wUVjed_kpSpm0
TipsNNTricks shows how to bypass the login password without a recovery CD or without any software. It does require physical access to the system (or a way to trigger a recovery boot); but this really helps if you found an old hard drive or system and can’t remember the password from eons ago.
You first boot in recovery mode. You then gain access to the drive by opening a debug message which opens notepad. This allows you to do File…Open and look at all the files on the C drive. You rename the ‘c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe’ to something else (bak or whatever), then make a copy of cmd.exe and name it sethc.exe in the same directory as the original sethc.exe.
When windows reboots, you can then press the shift key 5 times to trigger hotkeys (sethc.exe), and it will open a cmd prompt instead. Then use net use to reset the password for your accounts and you can log in. Clever!
Stable 3D dithering
Runevision invented a form of dithering called surface-stable fractal dithering.
He released it as open source along with this video showing how it works:
Find the shader source and example project here: https://github.com/runevision/Dither3D
Lightguns for LCDs
We’ve all seen old standup arcade games that used guns – like one of the iterations of House of the Dead or VirtuaCop. At home, who didn’t play Duck Hunt on the NES?
Unfortunately, if you try those games today – they don’t work. The mechanisms they relied on only worked on old tube-type CRTs. People have tried to make alternative mechanisms – but they relied on having to attach messy sensor or light bars around the screen. Using mechanisms like sensor bars also means you must stay in the exact same spot or re-calibrate – something that is very annoying during a long gaming session. What to do?
Andrew Sinden decided to tackle the project and came up with a brilliantly simple solution. Simply render/detect the square around the border of the game being played determine your location from that rectangle. That input is converted to mouse input/direction and voila. It works on any size display, doesn’t need recalibration, and allows for multiple players. Andrew Sinden shows off how he developed it here:
He started an IndieGoGo project, and ended up raising a whopping $4.6 million of the desired $300,000 goal.
His startup project is now a full-fledged product and he sells them over at SindenShop. They make 2 guns: with and without recoil. They run about $170/$115 respectively and come in blue, red, black, and grey if you want different guns for different numbers of players. They also now make arcade-style foot pedals for games that use those.
Putting spell check in 64k of RAM
Abhinav Upadhyay walks us through a wonderful bit of computer history. He talks about how Steve Johnson at AT&T wrote one of the first spell checkers. His method could encode a word in just 14 bits of memory; so a dictionary with 30,000 entries would take up a fraction under 52 kB. This is even better compression than gzip – and it can perform fast lookups.
Once the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical. Douglas McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes , after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution. These followed a distribution that could be easily run length encoded with something called Golomb’s code.
It’s a fantastic examination of applied computer science. Definitely worth a read
Articles:
Error correction with Hamming codes
A great little video on ECC/Hamming error correcting codes by 3Blue1Brown
What the demo Scene teaches us
Plastic 195/95 is a 20mb demo made by a demo team on their picoEngine v2.1b in 2009
Not to be outdone, RGBA 195/95 is the same demo – done in 64k
These were shared in a presentation on lessons learned from Demo Scene coding: