November 2024 – Something Odd!

Eon is an astonishing Amiga demo released a few years ago. It runs on a bog-standard Amiga 500, a machine that first saw the light of day in 1985. Here’s how it was made.

Andreas shared a comparison that will make it clear to any developer on a modern machine just how much slower the Amiga 500 is compared to a modern machine.

Let’s MD5 ~800Kb data, using reference RSA MD5 code.

On an old, but modern, Surface Laptop 2 that took 2ms.

The Amiga 500 took 29 seconds.

This CPU is more than 10,000x slower than the CPU in your PC or Mac.

One of my WordPress plugins will do an MD5 calculation of the URL on every request, and it’s like nothing. It’s not a big job for a web server to do. An Amiga could not do that.

However, it can, in the right hands, seemingly perform miracles and create cool looking demos that even today impress! There’s something to be said for programming in a constrained environment.

I’ll spare you the long story of why I had to edit a JavaScript file, but today I learned that since Firefox 128 you can add a script override in the browser Debugger Panel. This downloads the JavaScript file in question, where you can edit it with your favourite editor.

Open DevTools by hitting F12 and select the Debugger.
Right-click on the JavaScript file in the source list and select “Add script override”.
Save your file somewhere and edit.
Reload the page to apply changes.
Remove the override by right-clicking on the file again and selecting “Remove script override”.

A context menu is open with the option "Add script override" selected.
The file highlighted is jetpack-boost.js located in a folder structure under app/assets/dist.
Other options in the menu include "Copy source URI," "Ignore source," and "Download file."

A context menu is open with the option "Remove script override" selected.
The file highlighted is jetpack-boost.js located in a folder structure under app/assets/dist.
Other options in the menu include "Copy source URI," "Ignore source," and "Download file."

The file I was editing was minified, so Firefox doesn’t save the nicely unminifed file you were looking at, but it’s not too hard to unminify it. It was a small change I was making, so it wasn’t too difficult to find the right place to edit.