Lmst

@bagelcollie The #TurboPascal versions with the odd numbers were the good ones.

I took a first stab at isometric maps on a 386. The new direction definitely makes things more challenging... and I'm not sure yet if I can pull it off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JZ35t_8q1A

#gamedev #retrogamedev #retrocomputing #retrogaming #msdos #indiedev #devlog #pascal #turbopascal

👾 The IDEs we had 30 years ago... and we lost // Julio Merino

｢ This time around, I want to look at the pure text-based IDEs that we had in that era before Windows eclipsed the PC industry. I want to do this because those IDEs had little to envy from the IDEs of today—yet it feels as if we went through a dark era where we lost most of those features for years and they are only resurfacing now ｣

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/the-ides-we-had-30-years-ago-and

#IDE #retro #retrocomputing #turbopascal #turbocpp

I've now also completed part 2 of "Factory" - Day 10 of #AdventOfCode in #TurboPascal on the #Xi8088 !

It takes about 25 minutes to run and was quite the challenge to write, I had to learn more than I was prepared to.

But with it, that's all 12 days completed, all in #Pascal, all on the #i8088.

What a journey! Thank you so much, @ericwastl

Oh, and I'm never doing Advent of Code in Pascal again! That was really a dumb idea 😅

#Retrocomputing #DOScember

The monitor of the Xi8088 showing info and the end result of the second part of Advent of code day 10 part 2

I just completed "Christmas Tree Farm" - Day 12 of #AdventOfCode in #TurboPascal. Only in #DOSBox for now, until I get back home and run it on the real #Xi8088 hardware.

I can already tell that parsing the input file will take a lot longer than solving!

(No spoiler in the picture)

#Retrocomputing #Pascal #DOScember

Screen capture of DOSBox showing a small section of the Turbo Pascal code I used for the input parsing of today's Advent of Code puzzle.

Looks like I have a solution in #python for the second part of day 10.

The code is very much NOT-pythonesque, as I have tried to prepare it for the translation to #TurboPascal. This solution also shouldn't need much memory space at all.

It remains to be seen how long the 8088 will need to solve the few systems with a very large amount of combinations of free variables. But that will be for the weekend.

#AdventOfCode

I just completed "Reactor" - Day 11 of #AdventOfCode in #TurboPascal on the #Xi8088

Thankfully, the problem is constrained enough that the memoization cache is actually very small. This is a good thing for our little 8088.

Both parts solve really fast, but the first version of my input parsing procedure was taking a whopping 42 seconds 😅 I just couldn't leave it like that.

#Retrocomputing #Pascal #DOScember

Screen of the Xi8088 computer showing today's Advent of Code puzzle solutions.

Look, ma! No recursion! But no part 2 yet either...

I completed part 1 of "Factory" - Day 10 of #AdventOfCode in #TurboPascal on the #Xi8088

I'm pleased with my solution, where parsing the input file takes longer than solving (12.30 vs 10.39 sec).
It's built around a short but non-trivial procedure written with the help of a StackOverflow post. Spoiler in picture.

Now, it looks like I have a few things to learn before I can attempt to solve part 2...

#Retrocomputing #Pascal #DOScember

An old LCD monitor displaying the code for today's Advent of Code in the Turbo Pascal IDE. The view is centered on a procedure named 'HammingNext'.

I just completed "Movie Theater" - Day 9 of #AdventOfCode in #TurboPascal on the #Xi8088 and I'm quite proud of my solution!

I got the logic right for part 2 nearly immediately but plain brute force was way too slow: I had to crank up the CPU speed in #DOSbox quite a bit just to test it.

Doing some precalc (likely not the same as what other people did 😉) on the input and re-thinking data structure helped a huge lot, going from 1 hour to less than 4 minutes!

#Retrocomputing #Pascal #DOScember

Advent of Code solutions for day 9 shown on an old LCD monitor.
An Xi8088 computer is visible.

Oh my goodness, I did it. What a day!

I spent the entire day to solve "Playground" - Day 8 of AdventOfCode in #TurboPascal on the #Xi8088 and I had a blast!

I got all the logic right on first try for both parts, but the big question was: How do you sort up to a million entries on a machine that can't even store ten times less in memory, in a language where your arrays are less than 64KiB ? 🤯

Obvious answer is "you don't", but then what? 😅

So happy!

#Retrocomputing #Pascal #DOScember

Closeup of the screen showing the end result of the second part of today's Advent of Code.

I just completed "Laboratories" - Day 7 of #AdventOfCode in #TurboPascal on the #Xi8088 computer.

Part 2 fits inside the same loop as part 1 with very few modifications.

Then I could make it read the file line by line as it goes, instead of building the entire map in memory.

By keeping track of the left and right limits of potential change, I could also reduce the memory accesses.

With 1.3 second of total runtime, I'm very happy with my solution today !

#Retrocomputing #Pascal #DOScember

The turbo Pascal IDE showing the 'Compilation successful' dialog box in front of the code of today's Advent of Code problem.

Yay, I'm home!

It's not often that we have a first part that takes so much longer than the second one, but today I also wanted to show how long loading the input file took.

Who'd have thought that reading and parsing this very simple file from the Compact Flash would take more than two seconds ?

#AdventOfCode #Retrocomputing #TurboPascal #DOScember

Monitor showing the solution to today's Advent of Code challenges.

I just completed "Cafeteria" - Day 5 of #AdventOfCode in #TurboPascal, but only in #dosbox for the moment, not on the #Xi8088 because I'm at work 😅

Again, 8087 to the rescue!

I can't wait to see how long it will take on the real hardware, probably only a few seconds.

Did you know that #Pascal does not provide any procedure to sort the content of an array? Turbo Pascal did come with a very helpful example of a #QuickSort implementation as a reference, though.

#Retrocomputing #DOScember

Error message shown in the Turbo Pascal IDE telling that the code can only be compiled for the 8087, there's no software emulation provided for it.

Screenshot of a DosBox window running the Turbo Pascal IDE showing the first lines of today's Advent of Code solution.

I just completed "Printing Department" - Day 4 of #AdventOfCode in #TurboPascal on the #Xi8088

I have to confess that I abused the structure of strings in #Pascal to keep my indexes in range...

I was afraid it would be unbearably slow due to all the memory accesses, but I managed to make part 2 run in 45 seconds. For reference, the same code takes only half a second on the 486. Caches do help, I suppose...

#Retrocomputing #DOScember

Picture of the monitor showing the result of today's Advent of Code solution.
The Xi8088 computer is still visible in the back.

There WAS a better way of doing it, of course.

Part 2 now finishes in 3.02 seconds!

#AdventOfCode #Retrocomputing #TurboPascal

I just completed "Lobby" - Day 3 of #AdventOfCode and I'm still doing it in #TurboPascal on the #Xi8088 computer!

The solve was reasonably straightforward today, with no limitations coming from the language itself. The generalized solution even fits nicely in a single 50 lines screen.

Part 1 is pretty much instant, but part 2 takes about 7 seconds to finish. That's how slow memory access is on this CPU.

#retrocomputing #pascal #DOScember

The Turbo Pascal IDE is visible on an old LCD monitor. The source code is partially hidden by a message box titled "Compiling". On the back, the Xi8088 computer is partially visible, sitting on the desk.

Yet, today's part 2 runs in less than 10 seconds on the 486. I guess my code is OK, it's really the 8088 CPU that's slow!

#adventOfCode #turbopascal

I just finished "Gift Shop" - Day 2 of #AdventOfCode in #TurboPascal on my #Xi8088.

An input file with lines longer than 255 characters, numbers too big to fit even in a LongInt, no regexps, no arbitrary large sets, these were all challenges posed by Turbo Pascal in addition to the slow 8088 CPU.

Part 1 finishes in 1 second but part 2 takes about 7 minutes...

#pascal #retrocomputing #DOScember