Modern Day Equivalent of Byte/Compute! Magazine? 327
MochaMan writes "I grew up in the '80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line by line, and figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way. Since then, the personal computer market has obviously moved away from hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware, but I imagine there must still be a market for similar do-it-yourself articles. Perhaps the collective minds of Slashdot can divine some online sources of fun and educational mini-projects like 'write your own assembler' or 'roll your own bootloader.'"
Jarlsberg?!?! (Score:1, Interesting)
Want to beat the hackers at their own game?
* Learn how hackers find security vulnerabilities!
* Learn how hackers exploit web applications!
* Learn how to stop them!
Jarlsberg - Web Application Exploits and Defenses [appspot.com]
Let me Google that for you (Score:0, Interesting)
Want to write your own assembler? Here you go [lmgtfy.com].
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Make (Score:5, Interesting)
There's still always 2600, as limited as its scope is...
Bytes! Gazette (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem was that the BASIC program code was only run every other issue, so if you only bought a few issues from the supermarket you'd probably miss the program and waste several hours entering otherwise meaningless junk into the standard Commodore prompt
Sigh, I still kinda miss those days.
Linux magazines (Score:2, Interesting)
Creative Computing Mag was just as important! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Internet is this magazine. (Score:5, Interesting)
You need to look into websites, there is no magazine that captures the zeitgeist of the personal computer industry today:
http://www.arstechnica.com/ [arstechnica.com]
http://www.lifehacker.com/ [lifehacker.com]
http://www.tomshardware.com/ [tomshardware.com]
then there are specialty sites that focus on very particular topics, but those are some good, general sites to start with...
To get your John C. Dvorak fill, you could go here:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/ [dvorak.org]
And Jerry Pournelle is here:
http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/ [chaosmanorreviews.com]
Hope that helps
Re:CNET.com? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Make (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you serious? Make is crap! Once a month, you'll get an article about actually MAKING something. Other then that, it's 50 articles about knitting bicycle seats or turning a nerf gun "steampunk". Make has become nothing more then hipster fashion.
hackaday.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:MOD PARENT UP! (Score:1, Interesting)
Or mysterious lightbulb hack [youtube.com]???
Lol, liberal definition of """hack""" Sheesh.
Re:Make (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow... I'm going to disagree with you in a big way. The current issue (Make 22) has an in-depth article on converting your lawnmower to RC control. Circuit boards, wiring, assembly... it's a big project but with LOTS of good info to get you there. NOT an overview or a news article. The same is true for the article on hacking wireless power outlets. Then there is the Arduino-powered tweeting cat toy. The physics and construction of double pendulums. How about a sun tracker for solar projects?
There's a ridiculous amount of great material in that single issue! Not news articles but full, in-depth how-to's. There are some light mods (to borrow your phrase) as well, but many of the projects require a significant investment of time and energy.
I think Make is a great source for projects. No dumbing down that I see, at least not in the latest issue!
Re:The Internet is this magazine. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ars' Science section is great but aside from the longer technical articles, such as Siracusa's OS X reviews, I get the sense that more and more of their writers are wannabe geeks that like to write about technology but aren't real geeks themselves.
Lifehacker? Hahaha. Sorry, but I can't take a site whose 30 something founder just put together her first desktop from parts LAST YEAR as a serious tech head's site. Again, this site is about being a fan of geek/nerddom but isn't really run by real geeks and nerds. Take Lifehacker and then take a look at Hackaday. One is a hipster fansite for hacker wannabes and the other actually shows you how to do interesting hacks.
TomsHardware, don't have any opinion.
Jerry Pournelle is the shit.
John C. Dvorak IS shit.
Re:If you are intent on bit banging... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Atari VCS/2600 used a very simple chip called TIA. I forget the exact resolution but it's very low - about 50x25 - which is why it has such blocky graphics. It also has 2 sprites that create hi-res players and 2 "balls" which are used during play. It was designed with the intent of doing Pong-type games, but programmers discovered ways to create arcade games like Space Invaders or Missile Command as well. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TIA [wikipedia.org]
Jay Miner then moved from TIA to C-TIA for the Atari 400/800 computers (1979) which can generate 352x240 in 4 colors, or 80x60 in 128 colors, and several modes in between. Next he designed the Commodore Amiga (released in 1985) which did 702x480 - the maximum resolution possible in NTSC-analog television. Number of colors was 64 in that resolution, or 4100 colors in 352x240 mode.
The Amiga was famous for "flicker" which was a side effect of the interlaced nature of television (draw the odd lines first, and then the even lines).
Re:Circuit Cellar (Score:5, Interesting)
You missed a lot of pain in my opinion.
I remember spending several days typing-in RUN Magazine's "error checking" program into my C64. It ran perfectly. And then several more days typing boring hexadecimal code into that compiler, expecting to get a free word processor called RUNscript. Well the error-checking program said I had typed flawlessly, but the RUNscript still didn't work. So I waited 3 weeks for the next magazine (a long time in the life of a 13 year old), and looked diligently for typos and there were some listed in the "Ooops" column.
So I had to type in the WHOLE project another time. Several more days of my life. And it was still broke! I then reached into my measly allowance and paid $15 to get the so-called "free" RUNscript word processor on a floppy. As it turned-out it was a worthwhile investment since I used it another 2 years to do homework, until I eventually got the Mac-like GEOS system.
I learned two valuable lessons:
(1) It's easier to BUY programs than to type them in yourself (and then have them not work).
(2) Debugging hexadecimal is a bitch.
Dr. Dobbs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Circuit Cellar (Score:5, Interesting)
Regarding keying in the programs in binary, I thought that defeated one of the fundamental premises of publishing programs in magazines, which was to gain an appreciation for and learn programming, and have the ability to modify and improve the software. I learned to program when I was 10 years old by typing in COMPUTE! magazine's BASIC programs into my TI-99/4A. I couldn't even save them until we could afford a cassette recorder, so afterward I would leave my computer on for days until I tired of that program (and I think I actually shed tears over power outages more than once). I feel that is why I am a software developer today. I learned an appreciation for the power I could exert over a computer, and the nearly infinite possibilities of what could be achieved through that.
Now if I was typing in nothing but arrays of thousands of numbers, I wouldn't have learned anything. In fact I actively avoided TI programs that consisted of nothing but DATA statements of numbers.
Re:Circuit Cellar (Score:2, Interesting)
One thing I never understood is why they cling to the print edition exclusively. You'd think a hacker journal would embrace the internet with open arms. Hell, I'd gladly pay for an online subscription to 2600 if it meant there would be more timely content, and save me the lone trip to the douchey bookstore.
Re:If you are intent on bit banging... (Score:3, Interesting)
I want to know how you display images on a screen (probably best to start with an analog CRT for now).
That depends on your aim. Driving an analogue CRT has almost nothing in common with driving a digital LCD. If you've got some kind of analogue output then you can plug in an oscilloscope and draw lines on it really easily. That's state of the art for computer graphics circa 1950ish. With something like a TV screen, it's relatively easy to generate a composite video signal. The display will handle the strobing, you just need to send the colour signals with the right timing and handle the sync correctly.
If you're driving a TFT, then you will be using a frame buffer and then sending a digital signal to the display. This is much easier, but also less fun and has absolutely nothing in common with driving a CRT.
The controller used for the Atari 2600 was horrible. RAM was too expensive to have a frame buffer, so it just had a buffer for a single line. A bit of hardware looped over this buffer converting each value to an analogue signal. You had to make sure that you wrote into the buffer in front of the reader, but didn't overtake it after looping around.