Author Archives: pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Here in the year 2025, it's not every day that a classic gaming console from the 20th century becomes playable via emulation for the first time. But that's just what happened last week with the release of Ares v146 and its first-of-its-kind support for Mega LD titles designed for the Pioneer LaserActive.

Even retro console superfans would be forgiven for not knowing about the LaserActive, a pricey LaserDisc player released in 1994 alongside swappable hardware modules that could add support for Sega Genesis and NEC TurboGrafx-16 games and controllers. Using those add-ons, you could also play a handful of games specifically designed for the LaserActive format, which combined game data and graphics with up to 60 minutes of full-screen, standard-definition analog video per side.

Mega-LD games (as the Genesis-compatible LaserActive titles were called) were, for the most part, super-sized versions of the types of games you'd find on early CD-ROM console of the era. That means a lot of edutainment titles, branching dungeon crawlers, Dragon's Lair-style animated quick-time event challenges, and rail shooters that overlayed standard Genesis or TG-16 graphics on top of elaborate animated video backgrounds (sometimes complete with filmed actors).

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Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hack a Day

You know how it goes — some gadgets stick around in your toolbox far longer than reason dictates, because maybe one day you’ll need it. How many of us held onto ISA diagnostic cards long past the death of the interface?

But unlike ISA, USB isn’t going away anytime soon. Which is exactly why this USB and more tester by [Iron Fuse] deserves a spot in your toolbox. This post is not meant to directly lure you into buying something, but seen how compact it is, it would be sad to challenge anyone to reinvent this ‘wheel’, instead of just ordering it.

So, to get into the details. This is far from the first USB tester to appear on these pages, but it is one of the most versatile ones we’ve seen so far. On the surface, it looks simple: a hand-soldered 14×17 cm PCB with twelve different connectors, all broken out to labelled test points. Hook up a dodgy cable or device, connect a known-good counterpart, and the board makes it painless to probe continuity, resistance, or those pesky shorts where D+ suddenly thinks it’s a ground line.

You’ll still need your multimeter (automation is promised for a future revision), but the convenience of not juggling probes into microscopic USB-C cavities is hard to overstate. Also, if finding out whether you have a power-only or a data cable is your goal, this might be the tool for you instead.

Source: OSNews

The following chart shows how the Adobe Reader installer has grown in size over the years. When possible, 64-bit versions of installers were used.

↫ Alexander Gromnitsky

Disk space is cheap, sure, but this is insanity.

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hack a Day

We usually at least recognize old computer hardware and software names. But [Asianmoetry] taught us a new one: Pick OS. This 1960s-era system was sort of a database and sort of an operating system for big iron used by the Army. The request was for an English-like query language, and TRW assigned two guys, Don Nelson and Dick Pick, to the job.

The planned query language would allow for things like “list the title, author, and abstract of every transportation system reference with the principal city ‘Los Angeles’.” This was GIM or generalized information management, and, in a forward-looking choice, it ran in a virtual machine.

TRW made one delivery of GIM, but the program that funded it was in trouble. Since TRW didn’t protect GIM, Dick took his program and formed a business. That business sold the rights to the software to Microdata, a minicomputer company, which used it under the name ENGLISH.

After a lawsuit with Microdata, Pick was able to keep his software, but Microdata retained its rights. Pick dabbled in making hardware, but decided to sell that part of the enterprise and focus on licensing Pick OS.

The first sale was to Honeywell. The virtual machine concept made it easy to port to new machines. Pick had a very IBM-like structured file system, where all data is a string, and dictionaries organize the underlying data.

In addition to a database, there was a programming language like BASIC, a text editor, and even a spreadsheet program. Why haven’t we heard of it? Part of the problem is that the computers using it typically renamed it and didn’t say it was Pick under the hood.

In the early 1980s, Pick’s appearance on the PC and the ability to support ten users on a single PC were notable features. The resellers didn’t appreciate the thrust to sell directly to users, and more lawsuits emerged.

Pick also struggled to get a GUI going when that was taking off. After Dick died, the system sort of coasted through several acquisitions. There are echoes of it in OpenQM, and there’s at least one fork of that on GitHub.

It is amazing how a system can utilize something like this and then become locked in, even after things change. This explains why Japan still uses floppy disks for certain things.

Source: Hack a Day

We usually at least recognize old computer hardware and software names. But [Asianmoetry] taught us a new one: Pick OS. This 1960s-era system was sort of a database and sort of an operating system for big iron used by the Army. The request was for an English-like query language, and TRW assigned two guys, Don Nelson and Dick Pick, to the job.

The planned query language would allow for things like “list the title, author, and abstract of every transportation system reference with the principal city ‘Los Angeles’.” This was GIM or generalized information management, and, in a forward-looking choice, it ran in a virtual machine.

TRW made one delivery of GIM, but the program that funded it was in trouble. Since TRW didn’t protect GIM, Dick took his program and formed a business. That business sold the rights to the software to Microdata, a minicomputer company, which used it under the name ENGLISH.

After a lawsuit with Microdata, Pick was able to keep his software, but Microdata retained its rights. Pick dabbled in making hardware, but decided to sell that part of the enterprise and focus on licensing Pick OS.

The first sale was to Honeywell. The virtual machine concept made it easy to port to new machines. Pick had a very IBM-like structured file system, where all data is a string, and dictionaries organize the underlying data.

In addition to a database, there was a programming language like BASIC, a text editor, and even a spreadsheet program. Why haven’t we heard of it? Part of the problem is that the computers using it typically renamed it and didn’t say it was Pick under the hood.

In the early 1980s, Pick’s appearance on the PC and the ability to support ten users on a single PC were notable features. The resellers didn’t appreciate the thrust to sell directly to users, and more lawsuits emerged.

Pick also struggled to get a GUI going when that was taking off. After Dick died, the system sort of coasted through several acquisitions. There are echoes of it in OpenQM, and there’s at least one fork of that on GitHub.

It is amazing how a system can utilize something like this and then become locked in, even after things change. This explains why Japan still uses floppy disks for certain things.