Checkpoint

A quick summary of a bunch of stuff I’ve done lately.

• Developed a new special interest: the LGP-21. A real physical one was just recently revived by Usagi Electric, and his watchers have created a simulator and toolchain for this remarkable old machine — remarkable in that despite its relative primitiveness, the programmers for that machine back in 1963 created some impressive software for it.
  • Wrote some extensions for the lgp21-tools assembler: a test suite, and a macro facility (which may not get merged, but I can use it im my copy)
  • Ported a couple of BASIC computer games to the LGP-21, including good old WUMPUS, BAGELS, and an implementation of Steve Jackson Games’s Zombie Dice.
  • Translated the German LGP-21 Subroutine Manual (nowadays we’d call it the Software Library or somesuch) into English in LaTeX markup. (Learned a fair amount of LaTeX in the process. Like it!)
• Continued working with the timed-voiding app. Working pretty well now, with over a month of data recorded. Added data export today (working) so it can be analyzed by the LLM of your choice, and currently continuing to refine it. It may make it to the App Store sooner or later.
• sd1diskutil continues to evolve; between Sojus and I, we may have killed the final bug in the library, and it looks like it fully supports all file types.
• Car research tabled for the moment.
• Felt a little uncomfortable implementing Zombie Dice for the LGP-21. Admittedly we have an installed physical user base of exactly one machine, and maybe a half-dozen people who might try running it on the simulator, but it’s still a registered trademark of SJG. So I thought up a new game altogether that turned into a combination bidding war and Zombie-dice-like press-your-luck game. Rules complete and a tentative deck of cards made up, but I need to playtest it to see if it’s actually anything before trying to program it. It reminds me a LOT of the Cheapass games of yore.
• Surgically removed the Chrome 4GB model download.
• Big data storage cleanup, still ongoing.
• Found out I’m still missing a bunch of music from my iTunes library. May re-up the iCloud Music library to recover it. Which will mean Yet Another iTunes library Merge. Song Sergeant does a great job cleaning up after one of those.
• Did a lot of spreadsheets for changing investments in the current economic situation. Too specific to post about.

Probably more, but that’s what I remember.