MartyPC is a cross-platform emulator of early PCs written in Rust
127 points by boilerupnc 9 hours ago | 42 comments

pjmlp 5 hours ago
Adlib support! At least someone else remembers it wasn't only Soundblaster.
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_flux 2 hours ago
But Soundblaster came with Adlib, so surely complete support for SB should mean Adlib support as well.. ?
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anonzzzies 2 hours ago
All my friends had Soundblasters; I had a self soldered Covox. Fun times.
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ranger_danger 6 hours ago
Ironically, and unfortunately, this doesn't actually emulate the FM Towns Marty (or even the regular FM Towns PC) like I assumed it would.
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rrr_oh_man 6 hours ago
Doesn't seem to support non-QWERTY keboards :(
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teiferer 4 hours ago
But it's written in Rust! Who cares about non-qwerty!

/s

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Dwedit 7 hours ago
Mysteriously, backslash has been mapped to backspace for some reason.
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unixhero 7 hours ago
Old terminals had this shenanigans going on too. Backspace was not backspace and so on
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JMiao 6 hours ago
probably in the minority but i want the screeching and grumbling hard disk sounds
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hggh 4 hours ago
IBMulator has HDD sounds: https://www.ibmulator.org/
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chvid 6 hours ago
Almost usable on an iPhone.
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throwaway5727 2 hours ago
This comment is itself a meta comment but here we go I guess...How is it possible that half the comments in this thread are about the title itself? It’s not even a made-up title, it’s taken straight from the project’s README...I keep seeing people complaining almost aggressively that others are touting Rust as a useful tool (which, to me personally, it certainly is). Does someone have a financial stake in opposing Rust’s development, or what?
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saiditmate 37 minutes ago
(This post will be downvoted and flagged by Rust cultists and Rust people with financial stakes.)

More like, if a submission has "written in Rust" in it, the Rust cultists and non-human bots will automatically upvote it.

There are definitely financial stakes at play, but financially interested Rust advocates are by far the worst of the bunch regarding behavior, apart from the Rust cult, which by lightyears is the worst of any programming language, with their organized social media manipulation and harassment and murderous ways. The Rust Foundation and others in the Rust community inherited and evolved their fundraising approach from Mozilla, and the Rust Foundation actively gives money to people whose primary job is to "promote" Rust, instead of purely giving it to developers to develop on compilers, tools, infrastructure and related technical topics. Other really bad offenders include, perhaps surprisingly, the Ada vendors, user pjmlp might be leading the charge there. Ada vendors still long for the days where they had a monopoly mandated by the US government.

Mojo got a billion dollar investment, but they seem to be focused on not shilling their language, but actually making a genuinely excellent language, though I have not tried it myself. As an example, it seems to handle temporary lifetime extension way better than Rust, C++ and Zig, with its explicit destructors among other features.

For languages like Scala and C++, they are way too embroiled in internal infighting to do much of anything. Funnily enough, one side of C++ is dominated by Rust cultists. C++ has an ISO standard, and is very complex, meaning some of the main proponents there are educators and book writers, though they generally seem focused inwards. No one really likes C++, it is too old and has very significant issues, but it can have practical value in some cases. Its ISO standard also hinders any party from gaining complete control of it, though its design and development has already been sabotaged from the inside, and it counts against C++ that it has failed to prevent that much sabotage. Rust is also facing sabotage from the inside, but this seems to be more due to tragedy of the commons, where proposal makers consider it more important for their proposals to become part of the Rust language (and the proposal maker in question getting prestige) than for the Rust language to improve, something that many languages suffer from. The Rust community might also in several cases be too afraid of their own cultists to say no to proposals or to criticize proposals properly. "Democratization" in Rust has been interpreted by some as that there should be no or barely any requirements and expectations for language changes. The lies and dishonesty of the Rust community and cult only worsens this issue.

Zig has anti-LLM activists, but they do not seem numerous nor all that active.

C has barely anyone, just some WG14 committee members and other interested people, the language is too old, too widespread, too minimalistic and too foundational either way.

Java, C#, Kotlin, Typescript, Go, Python, and many others, all have their niches, and the ecosystems of the garbage-collected languages seem to function decently. The systems languages, on the other hand, all seem to have significant technical or practical issues in some regards or another, and being the foundation of lots of other technology, they can both be strategically important and possibly more difficult to directly make money from regarding developing and designing the given languages. I wonder how Mojo's Modular is planning to make money, perhaps strategic control? Systems languages have a lot of room for improvement still. Mojo is an interesting entry, but it is still very young and untested.

Apart from cults and financial stakes of companies, organizations and individuals, there are some people from small or failing/failed language communities that are embittered about their languages failing/having failed or not being larger. This is especially the case with Ada and overlaps with financial stakes there, but there are also many other, often very small languages. A similar boat is newcomer languages, that often transition into the embittered and failed language boat. This is tragic, because on one hand, these languages should be praised for experimentation, especially when they have genuine innovation and not just random rehashing, and on the other hand, their makers ought to be aware that there are no guarantee of success. And many designers and comminity members of small languages are indeed graceful about their language not becoming widespread, but that is not the case for all such people.

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13415 19 minutes ago
Rust's user community is toxic and unbearable. That's enough to explain the widespread resentment against it. Their fanboys are annoying. CommonLisp used to have a similar community problem.
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gaoheyang 2 hours ago
nice
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BobMcBob 6 hours ago
Yet another avenue to play EGATREK in a browser. For that, its work it.
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unixhero 6 hours ago
What's great about Egatrek?
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EvanAnderson 5 hours ago
Oh, holy crap. I haven't thought about EGATREK in at least 30 years. I'm going to go dig it up right now. Thanks for causing me to recall that memory!
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szundi 7 hours ago
Why never seeing a title “written by C” or Java or js
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pigeons 7 hours ago
"Hax – a minimalist, terminal-native coding agent written in C" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49273175

but I see your point.

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teiferer 4 hours ago
Because their following is not cult-based.

(To clarify: I like Rust. I use it every day. But this is going too far.)

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pjmlp 6 hours ago
Because they predate HN, and aren't hip languages any longer.

There was a time for CoffeeScript, PureScript, Elm, Ruby and whatever else you can think of.

Naturally Lisp has to have monthly entries.

/s

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imhoguy 6 hours ago
Because nowadays "written in Rust" means "written by AI", as Java or C are not so sexy for LLMs /s
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tenox7 7 hours ago
The main feature of apps written in Rust is that they are written in Rust.
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dosisking 7 hours ago
"It's not a feature, it's a bug"
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fortran77 6 hours ago
I flag all these “written in Rust” posts.
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globalnode 5 hours ago
its just ppl trying to be different from their boring parents. wish i had enough karma to flag them too but i keep getting downvoted into oblivion for making fun of written in rust posts
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azwaterdamagere 5 hours ago
lol
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globalnode 6 hours ago
the other week i wrote a program in python, and ive been thinking of upgrading my cpp knowledge from v11, wish me luck
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tonyhart7 4 hours ago
how to use this fossil computer era ????? I cant type shhiiii
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rvz 3 hours ago

   Written in Rust™
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hnlmorg 5 hours ago
Early PCs weren’t written in Rust.
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queenkjuul 4 hours ago
Early PCs were made of steel which can rust
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hnlmorg 4 hours ago
Nicely done!
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pjmlp 5 hours ago
In C neither, despite urban myths.
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hnlmorg 4 hours ago
Is that something people believe? I can’t say that’s a myth I’ve ever heard.
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pjmlp 4 hours ago
Yep, before UNIX and C there were no systems programming languages, and after getting the clay tablets from UNIX and C, all civilisation was built upon them. /s

At least when you spend long time around some programming circles.

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avadodin 3 hours ago
computer, remove the extraneous slash es from the statement.
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pjmlp 3 hours ago
"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
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teiferer 4 hours ago
What does the "written in Rust" contribute to the title, exactly?
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Kudos 5 hours ago
Not specific to this project, but nowadays when I see "written in rust" I hear "written by Claude".
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binaryturtle 4 hours ago
"cross-platform" and Rust, as advertised in the current title/link label, is incompatible for sure. Can't get that to run on my older OS X machine nor my Amiga. :)
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