[HN Gopher] Mac the Knife
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Mac the Knife
Author : ingve
Score : 83 points
Date : 2021-05-16 07:13 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (rbelmont.mameworld.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (rbelmont.mameworld.info)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I thought this article would be something interesting about the
| song "Mac the Knife."
| arubania wrote:
| The title is a reference to Mack the Knife, a playable
| character in the arcade game Captain Commando developed by
| Capcom.
|
| MAME is often used to play arcade games on PCs.
| broighbrobroigh wrote:
| Debatable. The Bobby Darrin song is a cover of the Kurt Weill
| / Bertolt Brecht song, the Capcom character is a reference to
| the Bobby Darrin song, and this article is likely punning on
| all of the above.
| markvdb wrote:
| The Weill/Brecht opera featuring the Mac the Knife song was
| a heavily modified adaptation of an 18th century opera
| itself [0]!
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beggar%27s_Opera
| singlow wrote:
| And actually Mac the Knife was a very popular gossip column
| in MacWeek magazine in the 90s which was a reference to the
| song and probably not the video game. That column was most
| likely in mind as much as the song when this was written.
| arubania wrote:
| Yeah, reading my response now, it kind of did sound as if I
| was implying that the video game character was original
| "Mac".
|
| I wanted to mention the game as a possible inspiration
| because of who the author of the article is, and the
| website. Still doesn't rule out multiple references, as you
| said.
|
| Actually I wasn't aware of the songs, so TIL, thanks!
| sampo wrote:
| Also, Mac kitchen knives are quite popular among professional
| cooks and chefs.
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is awesome and hard work. As a side note, seeing the
| screenshots made me remember how much I miss my old Handspring
| Neo PDA and it's somewhat wonky 16 tone gray screen, and the old
| PalmOS.
|
| Old computing has a certain charm to it. Is it limitations,
| aesthetic or the simplicity? I don't know.
| com2kid wrote:
| When I owned I PalmOS device I was at my most productive. One
| button access to my to-do list kept me focused and on track all
| day long.
|
| Nothing on modern smart phones can compare to less than 1
| second access to my todo list. Pull out of my pocket, press
| button, by the time my device was up to eye level the todo list
| was shown.
| bantunes wrote:
| Constraints breed elegant designs.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations" -Orson
| Welles
| jsight wrote:
| What is this about?
| kencausey wrote:
| I believe it is about drivers to allow MAME
| (https://www.mamedev.org/) to emulate a classic Macintosh
| computer.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Emulation of several old Mac hardware in MAME, and how it's
| improved in the last year with better SCSI, SuperDrive and CD-
| ROM emulation. He (or they) also improved a lot of other low
| level hardware emulation quirks in the old drivers like ADB and
| peripheral buses.
| tomxor wrote:
| I wasn't aware of this project at all. Does anyone have more
| information about the background of the development? e.g is it a
| completely fresh code base or is there any relationship to
| previous efforts such as minivmac or basilisk2/sheepshaver?
| wk_end wrote:
| MAME is an extremely long-running project to accurately
| document and emulate virtually every computer or gaming
| platform known to man (well, MAME was originally just for
| arcade machines and MESS was for everything else, but they've
| since merged).
|
| Mac emulation in MESS/MAME has a very long history, totally
| independent AFAIK from any other emulators. It's also very
| different from most other Mac emulators, which tend towards
| using various hacks and high-level emulation techniques - MAME
| aims to be very low-level and accurate. This has perks -
| theoretically higher compatibility, most importantly - but also
| downsides that make it possibly not the best choice at the
| moment: worse performance, lower compatibility while the devs
| figure out the right way to do things, and fewer "modernizing"
| features that can be hacked in: instead of emulating hardware,
| Basilisk injects new drivers into the OS so that it can do
| things like give your classic Mac absurdly high resolutions or
| mount local directories from the host PC. MAME's flexibility -
| it emulates everything - also makes it notoriously difficult to
| configure.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| " Al Kossow provided some SCSI bus snooping logs of a real Mac
| booting from a CD-ROM and I was able to modify our SCSI CD-ROM to
| comply with Apple's specifications. As a result, most of our Macs
| now can both read and boot from CD-ROMs"
|
| I love to see things like this. This hardware isn't going to last
| forever. While it lasts, you have people doing really low level
| things like this on actual hardware so it can live on in
| emulation. And this is one of the things a lot of people miss
| about MAME: it is much about documenting the hardware as
| emulating it.
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(page generated 2021-05-18 23:02 UTC)