Back in my day, trolling meant nothing!

Twenty plus years ago, I used to hang out on alt.religion.kibology, where trolling was invented. Someone would post bait (hence the word troll derived from "trolling for newbies") to a newsgroup, adding an "audience" group such as alt.religion.kibology to the newsgroups header line. Stuff like mentioning "Majel Barrett Shatner" on a star-trek group, or intentional misspellings of whatever the group was obsessed with. Then you just sit back and enjoy your popcorn while you watch all the threads from one place. It wasn't even about annoying people as much as it was about what you could get with really pathetic "bait".

Later, cross-group trolling was added, where a message would be posted to two or more groups plus the audience group. If you picked your groups right, they would flame each other quite nicely, and it would be time to get another bag of marshmallows.

But yes, today's meaning of "troll" has shifted to what used to be just plain flames or flame-baiting.

I can sort of see near-UV as well. When I look at a prismatic spectrum, there is a bit of gray after the deep violet. I wouldn't be surprised to find this normal but that most people just don't notice it, since UV reflectivity is what makes "whiter whites" in your laundry.

I also happen to have partial color-blindness (not sure whether prot- or deuter- anomaly, but I can't distinguish some brownish colors), but that's clearly unrelated, since my UV vision is clearly from the rods, not the cones.

Right now, smoke from fires (whether wild or due to slash-and-burn agriculture I do not know) in southern Mexico is drifting up through Texas, and expected to last a month or so until rains can put them out. But I guess the smoke qualifies as an "immigrant", so it is probably okay with Obama.

But of course Texas is still expected to maintain air quality by having "ozone action days" and such, even when the problem comes from outside its borders.

The 8085 actually had an undocumented instruction to add a constant value to SP and put the result in DE. But apparently all this was happening roughly at the time the 8088 was coming out, and one of their advertised "advantages" was being able to cross-assemble 8080 code to the 8086, so they memory-holed those instructions. Most 8085 clone cores had them though. And yes, I have also seen the result of trying to compile C for the Z-80, and it isn't pretty.

You should look into the 6809 to see what you get when the instruction set isn't chosen "completely at random". It was really nice, and I even got paid to do it for a few years. The only real trouble I had was feeling like I needed just one more register, but you could always cheat by putting stuff on the stack at the cost of cycles.

Back in the mid '90s, I think everyone was surprised to find that you needed at least a 486DX-25 to emulate the Atari 2600. It was because the 2600 required cycle-accurate timing to emulate it properly. You could, and everyone did, do stuff with the Stella chip (which I call a "1-D" graphics chip) in the middle of a scan line, sometimes abusing its counter registers in interesting ways.

The N64 was a different beast with emulation. I think the biggest problem was needing a lot of RAM to emulate it properly on the Xbox, and I think RAM was also the problem on PSP. But at some level it abstracted the 3-D hardware such that you could usually emulate it with better looking graphics than the original hardware.

And yeah, then there's the sound hardware. That was a big problem for SNES emulators, because there was so much that the sound CPU could do. You either make it work for most cases, or you eat up a lot more CPU time emulating it properly.

A while back I found a Heathkit ET-3400 at a thrift store. I tried writing a simple program for it when I realized that holy shit, the original 6800 doesn't even have the ABX instruction, that was in the 6801/6803 core. I mean, I knew all those other instructions like ADDD and MUL wouldn't be there, but I didn't know ABX would be missing too. And I was doubly annoyed because I had done a lot of 6809 programming so I already knew I was going to miss a lot of things.

And the 6809 was the most superior 8-bit CPU when it came to string processing.

I started on the Z-80 and later had 6809, so I never could find much love for the 6502. But it started a revolution by being designed for high yield, and initially sold for $20 each quantity one when the 6800/8080/Z-80 processors were more like $200 each Q1.

I once got to use an Ohio Scientific Challenger III. It had 3 processors, 6502, 6800, and Z-80, but the people who owned it only ever used the 6502 with a version of Microsoft BASIC. It supported multi-user by having a 48K RAM card for each user at 0000-BFFF. That's one way to get an extra zero page.

The 6809 had a direct page register to select which page was the "zero" page, and the 65816 did as well. Then each independent task could have its own zero page, though you would have to use up entire 256 byte chunks for each task's data area to do that.