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#71
Software / Releasing the Radeon 9250 PCI ...
Last post by onionmixer - Sep 29, 2026, 09:06 AMhttps://github.com/onionmixer/openstep-radeon9250
https://github.com/onionmixer/openstep-mesa342
https://github.com/onionmixer/sdl2quake-openstep
Just a heads-up, this work was done with the assistance of AI.
Following the previous Matrox project, a package (.pkg) is also provided.
I haven't been able to test many other applications yet... but at least sdlquake (glquake) runs correctly.
Compared to the Matrox G450 PCI, there was plenty of usable VRAM, so I could proceed with the work with a lot less worry.
Of course! For those who don't intend to use separate 3D features, the driver works just fine on its own without installing Mesa or Quake. However, the Quake test was only performed at 1024x768/RGB32 with a 640x480 Quake window.
And just like the Matrox driver provided, it supports 256-level grayscale. You can feel that classic NeXT hardware vibe.
It took a little less than 3 weeks or so. Originally, I planned to stop at just making the G450, but strangely enough, just 3 days after finishing the G450 driver, the card's VGA died. So I had to hunt for another 3D-supported PCI card and build a VGA driver all over again. I'm hoping this one holds up and works well for a while... but who knows.. T.T
#72
Software / Re: New apps - SSH client, IRC...
Last post by ptek - Sep 29, 2026, 09:01 AMQuote from: jade_nekotenshi on Sep 29, 2026, 07:43 AMTurns out OPENSTEP's compiler has a bug on m68k that was causing ed25519 host key verification to fail.
I found it and nailed it to the wall with a kluge that works around the miscompile. I also added selective optimization flags that increased throughput on x86 by about 30% and on 68k by about 15%. I've tested, to some extent, StepSSH on both platforms. RatChat would also have been affected by this bug when connecting to servers with TLS, so it's been fixed as well.
Very interested to know what the m68k bug was. Was it a fpu bug?
#73
Software / Re: I'm currently analyzing th...
Last post by onionmixer - Sep 29, 2026, 08:46 AMQuote from: ptek on Sep 29, 2026, 07:16 AMI don't know. I just used Darwin 0.3 as that was the only source I had access to and it was better than nothing. Also found that Darwin provide the source to otool which supported m68k, i386, hppa, sparc and ppc. I can't remember if fdisk, mkfs and disk were updated.
Oh!!! That is genuinely great information... It'll be super helpful as a reference for my upcoming work. Thank you so much for sharing!
#74
General Discussion / Re: Thoughts on AI usage for r...
Last post by ptek - Sep 29, 2026, 08:45 AMYes AI is very useful, scrolling through a 200 or 500 page specs pdf is not fun 
Waiting for RAM prices to drop so can start running locally. Been looking at tutorials to run very small models locally shakespeare and tinystories just to learn more.
Waiting for RAM prices to drop so can start running locally. Been looking at tutorials to run very small models locally shakespeare and tinystories just to learn more.
#75
Software / Re: New apps - SSH client, IRC...
Last post by jade_nekotenshi - Sep 29, 2026, 07:43 AMTurns out OPENSTEP's compiler has a bug on m68k that was causing ed25519 host key verification to fail.
I found it and nailed it to the wall with a kluge that works around the miscompile. I also added selective optimization flags that increased throughput on x86 by about 30% and on 68k by about 15%. I've tested, to some extent, StepSSH on both platforms. RatChat would also have been affected by this bug when connecting to servers with TLS, so it's been fixed as well.
Note, SPARC is still completely untested. If anyone actually has a SPARC, I'd greatly appreciate test results (even if it's just to compile and run "make test")
I found it and nailed it to the wall with a kluge that works around the miscompile. I also added selective optimization flags that increased throughput on x86 by about 30% and on 68k by about 15%. I've tested, to some extent, StepSSH on both platforms. RatChat would also have been affected by this bug when connecting to servers with TLS, so it's been fixed as well.
Note, SPARC is still completely untested. If anyone actually has a SPARC, I'd greatly appreciate test results (even if it's just to compile and run "make test")
#76
General Discussion / Re: Thoughts on AI usage for r...
Last post by Adam_Hall - Sep 29, 2026, 07:23 AMDespite the best efforts of tech companies, I suspect all this AI tech will be pretty much free and their efforts to gate keep it will eventually fail spectacularly, like AOL tried to gate keep the Internet 20+ years ago and failed. It is going to take a drop in hardware prices and an end to the deals they are making with NVIDIA to keep hardware expensive, but I hope to just run everything locally and see a future where that will be the most common solution for individuals and companies who want to use AI. I rent a pod right now and do little experiments with open source engines.
#77
Software / Re: I'm currently analyzing th...
Last post by ptek - Sep 29, 2026, 07:16 AMQuote from: onionmixer on Sep 29, 2026, 01:15 AMQuote from: ptek on Sep 28, 2026, 01:18 AMWhen I was trying to find the VESA VBE code in the OS4.2 patched kernel the Darwin 0.3 kernel sources helped me a lot.
I'm asking because I'm not entirely sure... are XNU and Darwin very different?
I don't know. I just used Darwin 0.3 as that was the only source I had access to and it was better than nothing. Also found that Darwin provide the source to otool which supported m68k, i386, hppa, sparc and ppc. I can't remember if fdisk, mkfs and disk were updated.
#78
General Discussion / Re: Thoughts on AI usage for r...
Last post by onionmixer - Sep 29, 2026, 05:03 AMQuote from: ZombiePhysicist on Sep 29, 2026, 04:22 AMWe certainly live in interesting times. By some counts, both at the precipice of the darkest of times, and also at a time where the most creative have the greatest lever in bridging their imagination into reality. A bizarre duality.
Nevertheless, my personal stance is that we just have to do our absolute best in our current situation. Honestly... aside from that, there's really nothing else someone like me can do, haha.
#79
General Discussion / Re: Thoughts on AI usage for r...
Last post by ZombiePhysicist - Sep 29, 2026, 04:22 AMWe certainly live in interesting times. By some counts, both at the precipice of the darkest of times, and also at a time where the most creative have the greatest lever in bridging their imagination into reality. A bizarre duality.
#80
General Discussion / Re: Thoughts on AI usage for r...
Last post by onionmixer - Sep 29, 2026, 02:58 AMThank you for bringing up such a great topic. As a newbie to this community, it's not an easy subject for me to just dive into casually.
Like many of you in this community, I'm someone who has "one foot" in programming. I've been programming for quite a long time, spent nearly 20 years as a PM, and because I worked with Linux for so long, my career as an SE actually ended up being longer. Naturally, I drifted quite far away from the hands-on work of building software. Though there was a time when I even built my own Linux distribution
When I first started using AI back in September 2025... I genuinely laughed.
"Why would anyone use this? It's barely at a level where it can do anything outside of basic web coding."
What changed that mindset—from my perspective—was around April 2026. Claude's progress was so immense that I could clearly divide my work into "before" and "after" that point. By around June 2026, Codex had also improved enough to be reasonably useful.
To be honest, my economic situation and the resulting family pressures became so severe that I went through psychiatric counseling in 2025. Things had been continuously tough ever since the pandemic... but 2025 was—truly, insanely difficult (and things are still tough now). But... working with AI genuinely... really improved my condition a lot. Moving past that period where I felt like a useless person in this world... now, I've reached a point where any project I want to build can be brought to life with AI. Of course, it requires paying some AI subscription costs and grinding away my personal time, but if anything, it seems to be working out for the better in my case.
Naturally, when I first used AI, the output I produced was far more pathetic compared to colleagues who had lived as programmers for a long time. It was just at a level for my own personal use. But now, about a year later... I'm turning out results good enough that those very colleagues ask me to teach them how to use AI. Managing servers, web programming which mainly generates revenue, and the "unprofitable, hobbyist projects" I do on the side... I'm producing such insane results that I run out of tokens every week and have to ration them. My recent classification was PM (Project Manager), and I'm simply doing the same thing with AI that I used to do by dividing tasks among people and checking up on them.
Now, let's talk a bit about the realistic side of using AI for the work "I" want to do.
Most of the projects I want to tackle are generally not things that make "money." When I built a mobile app connected to a web service 12 years ago (which completely tanked because of the pandemic—only the web backend survived, haha), I redesigned the encryption protocol between the mobile app and the server daemon based on a few SSL algorithms. And I built the server in Objective-C. Does building something like this make money? No, it doesn't. I knew full well that just using plain old HTTPS would have been much easier, but I persuaded my team members and built it this way anyway. Thanks to that, I got a mobile app with a fairly guaranteed level of technical completeness and stability, but! That was pure self-satisfaction. It was just a matter of "pulling off" what I wanted to do, not an outcome that generated "money." The only reward was hearing people around me say, "Whoa... you guys are out of your minds."
Recently, as I prepared to reuse some of the libraries from that project and open-source them, I converted the core of the server daemon from Objective-C to C++ (because I figured that having to set up the server environment every single time just to compile libObjc2 would be inconvenient for others. Most regular engineers rarely enjoy dealing with such tedious setup processes). This task? Naturally, the engineer didn't want to do it. So I handed the conversion over to AI... After about 3 weeks, a prototype came out. Once I laid down the major architectural lines, that engineer—who hadn't really believed I could pull it off—is now using AI like crazy and applying it enthusiastically to his own personal projects
Back when I made a living through programming, I used to be deeply obsessed with development methodologies. eXtreme Programming, and Test Driven Development—known as XP and TDD. What is one of XP's signature practices? Pair Programming. Working on all sorts of tasks with AI, I've come to think so often that this might just be the ultimate partner and setup for applying these exact methodologies. A human can watch the AI's output in real-time, pointing out when it's heading in the wrong direction and correcting it on the fly. And through having the AI write countless unit tests—which honestly I wouldn't have bothered doing before out of sheer laziness—I can significantly elevate the quality of the final output. Plus, as Martin Fowler talked about, I discuss refactoring with the AI and refine the technology, 15 hours a day... Could I ever do this with a human? I'd love to, but in most cases, people just can't operate like this. They might be more skilled than I am... but they simply don't enjoy the sound of a computer fan whirring as much as I do.
I know that this approach has helped keep my mind and mental state in a comparatively healthy place. The current version of me feels infinitely better than the miserable past version who relied on psychiatric meds for stress, lived in a daze all day, just getting by and breathing. Minor stresses don't phase me anymore. My general relationship with my family has improved vastly, too, because I can be relatively more patient with my kids.
Let's also talk about hobbyist coding. Coding that doesn't make money... previously required hiring an engineer or begging someone else to do it. What I thought was fun might not have been fun for others. And if they turned me down? Even if I had the money, it simply couldn't get done. Nobody was going to volunteer to build a VGA driver for OPENSTEP, and 12 years ago... even if I had tens of millions of won, I couldn't find anyone to hire. But AI doesn't "mock" the work I want to do; it sits down and brainstorms paths to make it happen together. It may not have the profound insights of a senior engineer, but when I propose a direction, it reviews it and judges whether it's feasible or not. Isn't this XP and TDD? I want to pour my absolute all into it... and as long as I put in the effort and keep pointing the AI in the right direction, it sticks by me and pushes through to the end. And when a job finishes successfully, it even praises me, saying, "Your persistence brought this result to life" (though I'm not foolish enough to miss the fact that it's just a routine pattern, haha).
And when working with humans, it's been quite a while since I last felt this kind of dynamic. Compared to regular, professional engineers who half-ass their work and lack genuine passion, collaborating with AI feels infinitely more serious and rewarding. At least to me.
Discussing how to implement OpenGL acceleration in OPENSTEP, investigating memory-blocking regions, uploading data to VRAM for acceleration—yet when the AI doesn't know how to render it, guiding it to map the computed VRAM data into Mesa and directly reading the related memory to draw it onto AppKit... This kind of high-level architectural guidance is still something a human directs (for now, at least). A typical human engineer... isn't going to work this hard for 220 dollars a month. They won't touch tasks that don't look good on their resume, and even if you offered them an annual salary exceeding 100 million won to build a driver within a month? No way... But AI—whether a task makes money or not—responds with genuine sincerity. When you point it in a new direction, it doesn't complain; it starts by doing the research. If this were a commercial project where an engineer was being paid a fair market rate, I wouldn't do it this way either, because I'm lazy too. But... I'm not well-off enough to burn that kind of budget on hobby projects. If it's something I want to do even if others laugh at it... in cases like this, AI is infinitely better than a human.
I collect all sorts of "hardware"—from the Apple II and MSX to modern-day PCs and various gaming consoles. Every single piece holds memories and sparks the curiosity I had as a kid staring at computer magazines. My dream is to breathe my desired "usability" into all of these vintage systems, giving them a "purpose" so they aren't just relics of the past, but remain meaningful even if used today. To achieve that, instead of hiring people and waiting around in vain... I need a companion who will simply charge forward in the direction I want. And whether that companion is a human or an AI... doesn't really matter to me. As long as I'm in a healthy enough state of mind to communicate with others, produce results, and—if those results turn out great, wonderful; if not, so be it—it stands as proof that I am alive. Whether I leave that proof behind through AI or through my own labor... doesn't matter "to me." As long as the outcome of something I built remains as a useful record to help someone else out... that is more than enough for me.
This is just my personal view, but... we've reached a reality where whether you used AI for "coding" or not has become irrelevant. However, "what to build" using AI still has to be decided by a "human." No matter what we build, if the end user of that creation is a "human," the judgment of "what kind of outcome will actually be useful to people" can only be made by a human. Of course, there are people who find pure joy in the coding process itself, and I fully respect their perspective. I think the feeling I used to get from programming back then was truly wonderful.
However, around 3 years ago... after an acquaintance I was very close with passed away (he was about 4 years older than me), it gave me a lot to think about. I realized that if I kept going the way I was, I wouldn't even be able to start the hardware collecting and the things I had only been "thinking" about doing before I died. Around that time, I started using AI, and as AI has grown increasingly capable recently, I've caught a glimpse of hope: "Maybe, while I'm still alive..." That's why... as long as my health and condition permit, I'm not going to stop. I can build small programs, but I don't have the chops to analyze the BSD, Xorg, or Linux kernels and write device drivers. In my own domain, I have enough skill to self-certify, but it's a modest level when it comes to realizing all my dreams—and I'm self-aware enough to realize that other people aren't going to step in and build these things for me.
This got a bit long, but... regardless of what others might say, I fully intend to keep using AI enthusiastically for the projects I want to pursue. If having too many things I want to do is a problem, then I suppose that's my problem... but other people's perspectives do not take priority over "my mortality." For similar reasons, I recently left the Reddit community "https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/", which is how I discovered this NeXT community. Some people there simply fail to distinguish between AI-generated garbage content and the actual value generated by AI. For the record, my final post there was blocked by a moderator, so I just went ahead and posted it separately in a new Reddit community I spun up myself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldLikeAnOnionmixer/comments/1wsi4gi/the_following_is_the_final_post_i_wrote_in_the/
I also agree that the series of tasks I'm doing in this community might give some people a negative impression. Therefore, if there are those who disagree with my views, I can fully understand and respect their perspective as well.
P.S. Since I'm not very fluent in English, I wrote the entire post in Korean first and translated it into English using an AI tool. If there happen to be any expressions that sound unpleasant or offensive—contrary to my actual intent—I kindly ask you to keep that in mind and take it in stride.
Like many of you in this community, I'm someone who has "one foot" in programming. I've been programming for quite a long time, spent nearly 20 years as a PM, and because I worked with Linux for so long, my career as an SE actually ended up being longer. Naturally, I drifted quite far away from the hands-on work of building software. Though there was a time when I even built my own Linux distribution
When I first started using AI back in September 2025... I genuinely laughed.
"Why would anyone use this? It's barely at a level where it can do anything outside of basic web coding."
What changed that mindset—from my perspective—was around April 2026. Claude's progress was so immense that I could clearly divide my work into "before" and "after" that point. By around June 2026, Codex had also improved enough to be reasonably useful.
To be honest, my economic situation and the resulting family pressures became so severe that I went through psychiatric counseling in 2025. Things had been continuously tough ever since the pandemic... but 2025 was—truly, insanely difficult (and things are still tough now). But... working with AI genuinely... really improved my condition a lot. Moving past that period where I felt like a useless person in this world... now, I've reached a point where any project I want to build can be brought to life with AI. Of course, it requires paying some AI subscription costs and grinding away my personal time, but if anything, it seems to be working out for the better in my case.
Naturally, when I first used AI, the output I produced was far more pathetic compared to colleagues who had lived as programmers for a long time. It was just at a level for my own personal use. But now, about a year later... I'm turning out results good enough that those very colleagues ask me to teach them how to use AI. Managing servers, web programming which mainly generates revenue, and the "unprofitable, hobbyist projects" I do on the side... I'm producing such insane results that I run out of tokens every week and have to ration them. My recent classification was PM (Project Manager), and I'm simply doing the same thing with AI that I used to do by dividing tasks among people and checking up on them.
Now, let's talk a bit about the realistic side of using AI for the work "I" want to do.
Most of the projects I want to tackle are generally not things that make "money." When I built a mobile app connected to a web service 12 years ago (which completely tanked because of the pandemic—only the web backend survived, haha), I redesigned the encryption protocol between the mobile app and the server daemon based on a few SSL algorithms. And I built the server in Objective-C. Does building something like this make money? No, it doesn't. I knew full well that just using plain old HTTPS would have been much easier, but I persuaded my team members and built it this way anyway. Thanks to that, I got a mobile app with a fairly guaranteed level of technical completeness and stability, but! That was pure self-satisfaction. It was just a matter of "pulling off" what I wanted to do, not an outcome that generated "money." The only reward was hearing people around me say, "Whoa... you guys are out of your minds."
Recently, as I prepared to reuse some of the libraries from that project and open-source them, I converted the core of the server daemon from Objective-C to C++ (because I figured that having to set up the server environment every single time just to compile libObjc2 would be inconvenient for others. Most regular engineers rarely enjoy dealing with such tedious setup processes). This task? Naturally, the engineer didn't want to do it. So I handed the conversion over to AI... After about 3 weeks, a prototype came out. Once I laid down the major architectural lines, that engineer—who hadn't really believed I could pull it off—is now using AI like crazy and applying it enthusiastically to his own personal projects
Back when I made a living through programming, I used to be deeply obsessed with development methodologies. eXtreme Programming, and Test Driven Development—known as XP and TDD. What is one of XP's signature practices? Pair Programming. Working on all sorts of tasks with AI, I've come to think so often that this might just be the ultimate partner and setup for applying these exact methodologies. A human can watch the AI's output in real-time, pointing out when it's heading in the wrong direction and correcting it on the fly. And through having the AI write countless unit tests—which honestly I wouldn't have bothered doing before out of sheer laziness—I can significantly elevate the quality of the final output. Plus, as Martin Fowler talked about, I discuss refactoring with the AI and refine the technology, 15 hours a day... Could I ever do this with a human? I'd love to, but in most cases, people just can't operate like this. They might be more skilled than I am... but they simply don't enjoy the sound of a computer fan whirring as much as I do.
I know that this approach has helped keep my mind and mental state in a comparatively healthy place. The current version of me feels infinitely better than the miserable past version who relied on psychiatric meds for stress, lived in a daze all day, just getting by and breathing. Minor stresses don't phase me anymore. My general relationship with my family has improved vastly, too, because I can be relatively more patient with my kids.
Let's also talk about hobbyist coding. Coding that doesn't make money... previously required hiring an engineer or begging someone else to do it. What I thought was fun might not have been fun for others. And if they turned me down? Even if I had the money, it simply couldn't get done. Nobody was going to volunteer to build a VGA driver for OPENSTEP, and 12 years ago... even if I had tens of millions of won, I couldn't find anyone to hire. But AI doesn't "mock" the work I want to do; it sits down and brainstorms paths to make it happen together. It may not have the profound insights of a senior engineer, but when I propose a direction, it reviews it and judges whether it's feasible or not. Isn't this XP and TDD? I want to pour my absolute all into it... and as long as I put in the effort and keep pointing the AI in the right direction, it sticks by me and pushes through to the end. And when a job finishes successfully, it even praises me, saying, "Your persistence brought this result to life" (though I'm not foolish enough to miss the fact that it's just a routine pattern, haha).
And when working with humans, it's been quite a while since I last felt this kind of dynamic. Compared to regular, professional engineers who half-ass their work and lack genuine passion, collaborating with AI feels infinitely more serious and rewarding. At least to me.
Discussing how to implement OpenGL acceleration in OPENSTEP, investigating memory-blocking regions, uploading data to VRAM for acceleration—yet when the AI doesn't know how to render it, guiding it to map the computed VRAM data into Mesa and directly reading the related memory to draw it onto AppKit... This kind of high-level architectural guidance is still something a human directs (for now, at least). A typical human engineer... isn't going to work this hard for 220 dollars a month. They won't touch tasks that don't look good on their resume, and even if you offered them an annual salary exceeding 100 million won to build a driver within a month? No way... But AI—whether a task makes money or not—responds with genuine sincerity. When you point it in a new direction, it doesn't complain; it starts by doing the research. If this were a commercial project where an engineer was being paid a fair market rate, I wouldn't do it this way either, because I'm lazy too. But... I'm not well-off enough to burn that kind of budget on hobby projects. If it's something I want to do even if others laugh at it... in cases like this, AI is infinitely better than a human.
I collect all sorts of "hardware"—from the Apple II and MSX to modern-day PCs and various gaming consoles. Every single piece holds memories and sparks the curiosity I had as a kid staring at computer magazines. My dream is to breathe my desired "usability" into all of these vintage systems, giving them a "purpose" so they aren't just relics of the past, but remain meaningful even if used today. To achieve that, instead of hiring people and waiting around in vain... I need a companion who will simply charge forward in the direction I want. And whether that companion is a human or an AI... doesn't really matter to me. As long as I'm in a healthy enough state of mind to communicate with others, produce results, and—if those results turn out great, wonderful; if not, so be it—it stands as proof that I am alive. Whether I leave that proof behind through AI or through my own labor... doesn't matter "to me." As long as the outcome of something I built remains as a useful record to help someone else out... that is more than enough for me.
This is just my personal view, but... we've reached a reality where whether you used AI for "coding" or not has become irrelevant. However, "what to build" using AI still has to be decided by a "human." No matter what we build, if the end user of that creation is a "human," the judgment of "what kind of outcome will actually be useful to people" can only be made by a human. Of course, there are people who find pure joy in the coding process itself, and I fully respect their perspective. I think the feeling I used to get from programming back then was truly wonderful.
However, around 3 years ago... after an acquaintance I was very close with passed away (he was about 4 years older than me), it gave me a lot to think about. I realized that if I kept going the way I was, I wouldn't even be able to start the hardware collecting and the things I had only been "thinking" about doing before I died. Around that time, I started using AI, and as AI has grown increasingly capable recently, I've caught a glimpse of hope: "Maybe, while I'm still alive..." That's why... as long as my health and condition permit, I'm not going to stop. I can build small programs, but I don't have the chops to analyze the BSD, Xorg, or Linux kernels and write device drivers. In my own domain, I have enough skill to self-certify, but it's a modest level when it comes to realizing all my dreams—and I'm self-aware enough to realize that other people aren't going to step in and build these things for me.
This got a bit long, but... regardless of what others might say, I fully intend to keep using AI enthusiastically for the projects I want to pursue. If having too many things I want to do is a problem, then I suppose that's my problem... but other people's perspectives do not take priority over "my mortality." For similar reasons, I recently left the Reddit community "https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/", which is how I discovered this NeXT community. Some people there simply fail to distinguish between AI-generated garbage content and the actual value generated by AI. For the record, my final post there was blocked by a moderator, so I just went ahead and posted it separately in a new Reddit community I spun up myself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldLikeAnOnionmixer/comments/1wsi4gi/the_following_is_the_final_post_i_wrote_in_the/
I also agree that the series of tasks I'm doing in this community might give some people a negative impression. Therefore, if there are those who disagree with my views, I can fully understand and respect their perspective as well.
P.S. Since I'm not very fluent in English, I wrote the entire post in Korean first and translated it into English using an AI tool. If there happen to be any expressions that sound unpleasant or offensive—contrary to my actual intent—I kindly ask you to keep that in mind and take it in stride.