old-school

Octal number literals: when? why? ever?

I have never used octal numbers in my code nor come across any code that used it (hexadecimal and bit twiddling notwithstanding). I started programming in C/C++ about 1994 so maybe I'm too young for this? Does older code use octal? C includes support for these by prepending a 0, but where is the code that uses these base 8 number litera...

What old-school programming/system building techniques would you like to see used more?

As an industry we tend to have a short attention span and be easily distracted by "new" things—which often turn out to be old things, effortfully re-invented. Tony Hoare said that if we could learn the right lessons from the successes of the past we wouldn't have to learn from the failures. What were those successes, in terms of techni...

Creating a Simple Old School Console Emulator

Hello, I'm now with the dream to start a project of a emulator of old school consoles(Atari, Colecovision...), but before I start I need to know some things: Which is the most easy console to create an emulator of it? Where I can find some good resources to build it? Which is the best language to build a emulator? Thanks. ...

How to retreve the Interface ID of a COM class so that It can be passed to CoCreateInstance?

I want to programaticly retreive the Interface ID for any or any class so that I can pass it to CoCreateInstance. Any help is very much so appreciated!! See "How Do I Get This" below: HRESULT hResult; CLSID ClassID; void *pInterface; if(!(hResult = SUCCEEDED(CoInitialize(NULL)))) { return 1; } if(S_OK == CLSIDFromProgID(OLESTR("S...