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@murbs@mastodon.world I don't think I've ever seen this...!
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Blerkotron
@Blerkotron@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06User Blerk - gamer, retro gamer, coder, writer, ZX Spectrum fanboy, miserable old git. Best before 1990. May contain nuts.
304 Followers
169 Following
40 Posts
Joined November 13, 2017
Blerkotronic Software:
Codeberg:
Jesus. Well, that's the end of that, then. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/electronic-arts-ea-officially-sold-off-to-saudi-arabias-public-investment-fund-jared-kushner-and-others/
Okay, this is a brilliant site. Chiptunes on demand, lightweight DOS-like interface. Two thumbs up! https://chiptune.app/browse
My company is now pursuing a fully-agentic AI workflow. AI decides what features we need, how they should work, specs them, codes them, tests them, documents them, builds and releases them, and does the marketing and sales pitches and communications in order to sell them. At every step, professional people with actual.skills are being told they are not required for anything other than babysitting the AI. I wonder how many employees will actually remain in a year's time? Or customers, tbf.
Oh, hi @robdaemon@hachyderm.io - long time no see! Hope you're well!
Happy 44th birthday to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the little machine that changed my entire life, and is still a big part of it to this very day. :-)
Oh, God. This is so on the nose I'm almost nauseous. If you only read one "this is how AI is fucking everything up" article make it this one. This is my day to day now.
Crap, that's me with dozens of 7-Zip installations to update on Monday, then. :-(
I have been outside. It was too hot. Didn't like it. Came back inside to hide until the winter.
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Thunder is almost constant, it's quite unusual. Just keeps rumbling on and on and on.
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@toonie@meow.social I wonder if anyone's tried it on real hardware? I'll check the forums...!
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Downloads etc. so you can try it on your own machine or emulator. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=106106
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That's 4K as in "4 kilobytes of code", incidentally. Not a display resolution. Just in case there are any youngsters reading. :-D
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@toonie@meow.social Funnily enough, it seems like a very "these days" practise rather than a "back then" one. Ahead of their time!
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For people who don't know, there's a bug in the original release whereby when you enter a room called 'The Attic' an arrow fires but doesn't terminate properly, and this corrupts the memory for some of the other screens. This means that when you enter those screens later, even on subsequent games, you die immediately and lose all of your lives. You have to reload the game entirely to fix this.
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As I go through the mags it'll be interesting to see how long they keep this pretence up before admitting that yes, it is actually a bug.
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A fantastic run-through of all the bugs in Jet Set Willy (and their official and unofficial fixes) is available here: https://skoolkid.github.io/jetsetwilly/reference/bugs.html
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@peejmaybe Oh, if only! They do seem a bit quieter of late over here, but I'm not getting my hopes up just yet. Fingers crossed for you, though!
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@emkingma@mstdn.social I wish the streaming platforms hadn't slipped back into the "one episode a week" rut. It was great when an entire season dropped at once, now I'm twiddling my thumbs until mid-May waiting for them to get the whole thing up there.
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@murbs@mastodon.world And I concur - it's pretty good! Don't think I've listened to them since the 90s but they definitely still have it!
Had a weird problem the last few weeks where my Xbox Series X controller shows up as *two* controllers on the Steam Deck, so every button I press counts as a double -tap. Internet said to update the firmware to begin with and... there's really no way to update the firmware in those controllers other than using an Xbox or a Windows PC? :-(
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Reddit people really do not like the remasters at all, it would seem! :-D
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Storage not particularly important, especially if it'll take an SD card.
Dug the Xbox out, had to update the damn thing(!), updated the controller firmware and... No change. Steam Deck still sees it as two controllers. Anyone got any ideas? The internet seems to be full of pages telling me to turn off options that don't exist - surmising they're all AI slop.
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Although I've just realised my washing was still outside. Oh well, drying that again, I guess!
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At some point later on Software Projects does actually acknowledge this, and provides a simple patch (one POKE, added to the game's loader program) which can be applied to rectify the problem.