Good question! I used an open chess database of a few million games, then filtered for master level play with both players >2000 elo. These get stripped for middle game positions, so after move ~12 and while there’s enough material left on the board. Stockfish is then used with a high multi-pv to calculate move quality for all available moves.
Stockfish is run in two passes, one fast and one slow. The fast one gets rid of positions unlikely to make good puzzles (only one good move, one side clearly winning, etc.) while the slow one calculates move quality more accurately. Moves are rated relative to the best move in the position, with loss scored in centipawns (1/100th of a pawn). So, losing a pawn for nothing would be ~100 centipawns of loss. Anything over 300 centipawns lost is a blunder, and all blunder moves are scored equally bad.
Each puzzle takes a strong computer ~10 seconds to generate, but I managed to compile about 30,000 for the site. I plan to add more in the future for specific players/tournaments/openings!
I agree with Andrew, side projects are a great way to rediscover joy. From my own experience:
- Decompress and seek fun, instead of aiming to "get a project done". Follow whatever excites you. If nothing excites you, step away from the keyboard. Go for a walk, bring a notebook.
Be aware it is extremely god-based in an unnerving way if you're not into religion. There are many alternatives if you don't want to go through a faith-based reboot.
You’re right, being able to hold the music is nice. PDF liner notes aren’t the same. For your next release you might be interested in the cassette label run by a friend of mine: helloamericalit.com
> When a BART car runs into trouble, Shawn Stange steps back in time. He pops open a circa-2000 IBM Thinkpad running Windows 98 and opens a portal into the train’s brain — the Automated Train Control system — through the DOS computer language.
> Stacks of vintage laptop carcasses are common at BART warehouses. The train software is so old it won’t work on modern computers.
Reminds me of the software archeology in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky.
I wonder if the software would run on WINE. When they say “it won’t run on modern computers” I feel like what they mean is that you can’t buy a Windows 11 laptop from Best Buy and then run Windows 98 software as if it was a modern windows binary. But any modern computer can emulate a computer from the 1990’s one way or another. (Yes I know WINE is not an emulator but you get my meaning)
Sometimes you really need the old hardware. A few years ago I was called in to help out a company that couldn't get 30 year old embedded code for an industrial PC platform running on modern replacement hardware. With my trusty old MS-DOS V2.11 version of DEBUG.COM I eventually managed to break into the hard loop I suspected the code was stuck in, to trace and disassemble it. It was communications code to talk to OG PC Uart hardware. For reasons best known to God or at least someone who probably retired 20 years ago they were using a scratchpad register in one of the chips instead of a byte of RAM to hold a timing variable to implement a delay/timeout. The modern [ASIC/FPGA/System on a chip/I don't know what] that was emulating the collection of OG PC hardware chips didn't bother providing that scratchpad register. A little big of creative assembly language rework and voila, the system worked like a charm. I really felt like invoicing for $10,000 or something ridiculous instead of 4 hours at my usual very reasonable hourly rate :-)
Ha ha, I don't think there's much of a career to be had in being able to keep 16 bit MS-DOS software binaries with no source code running unfortunately:-)
There are some things Wine doesn't do. Last time I checked, it didn't fully implement DCOM, so it couldn't be used for OPC (OLE for Process Control) and similar. And the use case in the parent comment might need Windows 98 because (other than Windows ME which everyone pretends didn't exist) it was the last DOS-based version of Windows; AFAIK, Wine does have some MS-DOS emulation, but it's limited to what some Windows 3.x software might need.
The computer that connects to the train system needs certification for its OS? I can understand the onboard controller needing certification, but a remote machine just connecting to it for configuration?
We know WINE is janky enough to be unlikely, "certification" is hand-waving in the general direction of "thankfully, there's opportunities for people outside an impulsive individual contributor to step in front of that"
These kinds of computers usually have customized ISA boards that aren't even PnP compatible. Software for that kind of hardware doesn't use drivers. Hardware is directly accessed from software, like you would do on a bare-metal microcontroller. Modern OSs like Linux and anything WinNT/2000/+ won't allow this, but Win311 in real mode does.
First, WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator. And it's not an emulator, the PE code runs directly on the host CPU. All you really need to implement is the OS API (on Windows the official API is with DLLs, such as KERNEL32.DLL, which in turn issue syscalls, and you're not generally supposed to do syscalls yourself).
KERNEL32 is mainly implemented through calls to NTDLL. NTDLL is the one that triggers the actual system calls or thunks, the actual implementation is in NTOSKRNL.exe
Meanwhile USER32 used to do system calls to Win32k, but then they changed it to call Win32U, and have Win32U be all system calls to Win32k.
No it doesn't. 16-bit protected mode code will run natively even on 64-bit kernels - and there is a system call that can create the segment descriptors needed for that: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/modify_ldt.2.html
Missed the point. Wine runs Win16 binaries on 32- and 64-bit hosts, effectively by rethunking them to run in 32-bit mode. This can be viewed as a form of emulation.
Wine 9.0 can likewise rethunk 32-bit applications to run in 64-bit mode, but this is only the default on Mac OS X (where Apple removed 32-bit support), because it still introduces more compatibility problems on Linux than just running 32-bit code natively. (And thunking Win16 to 64-bit mode is not yet done.)
I'm not familiar with what exactly Wine does to run 32-bit code under OS X, but it would already have to do emulation / binary translation. Because some opcodes have been repurposed for the REX prefix in 64-bit mode, and any absolute 32-bit address would be interpreted as relative to RIP instead.
And 16-bit would be completely impossible, first there's the default operand size and then the completely different encoding for memory addressing.
I don’t know about the German windows 3.11 thing, but Bart uses ancient Siemens PLCs if I remember correctly.
I doubt there is any logic running in windows 98, but there will be PLCs that interface to old laptops for updating the logic of control systems, probably with proprietary dongles and licenses tied to specific laptops. Can you technically get that stuff working in wine? Probably. Can you do it legally, responsibly and without assuming a lot of liability? Probably not.
Even if the trains have been upgraded, there will be a ton of tendrils reaching into old PLCs from other equipment like train washes, maintenance equipment, etc that interface to the overall system somehow and it would be forbidden and unwise for any individual to start inventing new ways to update the software without an actual project in place to replace the PLC of whatever you’re working on.
At this point I believe all the original 50-yr old rolling stock has been retired and only the new cars are operating. It would surprise me if the news ones have the win98 dependency.
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