Five monitors on a Commodore 128 [video]

EvanAnderson•about 3 hours ago

Spoilers:

The trick was pretty easy to guess but still a lot of fun to see put into practice. The EGA monitor bits, and more broadly just the idea of trading color bit depth to multiplex signals for multiple monitors into a single framebuffer and physical output is pretty cool. The Windows display driver idea actually implemented on real hardware would be tons of fun. I could have seen products actually doing this "back in the day" to do multi-head setups. I'm kinda surprised examples don't exist.

jchw•about 3 hours ago

Since everyone is vibe coding everything anyway I fully expect there to be a Windows 3.x display driver that works this way soon. I'm sure people in the retro computing hobby feel a certain way about this, but it's definitely also hard to deny the amount of "Project Structure" in README and "// ---- Input Handling ---------------------------------------------" snippets I've been seeing lately in a lot of new homebrew and other projects. (Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them. I'm sure humans do this too, but AI does it more.) I don't really care that much personally although it's silly that people kind of have to be wink-wink-nudge-nudge about it for the foreseeable future.

TacticalCoder•about 2 hours ago

Yes what's with that in LLM output?

It used to be a big thing in the nineties: I've got old .asm source code of mine where I used to do that.

But somehow LLMs love to insert dashes everywhere: dashes in source code an em-dashes in prose. Just why?

Did they parse lots of early code and thought it was cool to insert, in modern programming languages, comment lines full of dashes?

> Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them.

Oh yes, all the time. And besides the fact that there are the off-by-ones errors, it of course looks horrible in Claude Code CLI seen that what you see is not what the LLM did output (because they vibe-coded their "real time game engine" that changes characters, for no reason, on the fly).

It's 2026 and we've got "intelligent" machines doing this:

    //  -------------------------
    // ------------------------
    // ----- Input Handling ----
    //  ------------------------
    //  |--------------+-------+------|
    //  | Potentiometer |  Min | Max | 
    //  |--------------+-------+------|

Which they'll probably "fix" by adding the following vibe-coded tool, of course hidden in their pipeline:

    ascii_table_to_unicode_mismatch_alignment_fixer(...);

What an era.

jchw•26 minutes ago

My guess is that the humans they had in the loop for RLHF just simply preferred the code because it looked superficially tidier. I have the strangest feeling that they didn't always have top notch engineers in the loop at all steps.

I suspect this is also how LLM prose gets so utterly bad.

Of course, for indentation and ASCII graphics, it would be less prone to breaking constantly in this way if it were not a next-token predictor.

trollbridge•about 2 hours ago

Yes, they’re trained in lots of old code.

badc0ffee•about 3 hours ago

I think it's just that monitors were so much more expensive then, especially those capable of the 350-line EGA mode.

EvanAnderson•about 3 hours ago

I'm sure that was a factor. As much as certain job roles today love multi-head (I'm particularly thinking head spreadsheet users) I could still have seen it being a possibility. Certainly, multi-head for AutoCAD was "a thing" pretty early, albeit the paradigm there was one monitor for graphics and another for text.

genxy•about 3 hours ago

Multihead for debugging full screen apps is/was pretty sweet. Now we just use ssh or a remote debugger. I haven't finished the video, fingers crossed that he hooked 4 joysticks for multiplayer pong.

Didn't realize how wholesome 8bit guy is, great channel.

utopcell•about 1 hour ago

"Every mathematician wants to discover a mathematician's lemma."

It might have been easy to guess, but you didn't really think of it in the past 51 years since the Commodore 128 was introduced, did you?

econ•about 2 hours ago

Could you accomplish something similar with just colored foil? Like, red foil makes red and white look the same.

Five monitors on a Commodore 128 [video]

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