Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)R

Redkey

@ Redkey @programming.dev

Posts
0
Comments
185
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Programmers then and now

    Jump

  • In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

    Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer's memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.

  • Atari 2600: The Atlantis of Game Consoles

    Jump

  • Yes, they've changed the Pitfall image. Originally they were using the first image from CrayonRosary's post.

  • Apparently it was in the manual, but I'm just learning it now.

    Jump

  • Gamer sites on the early Internet were full of these "Easter eggs" that were really just non-obvious things with clear explanations in the manual.

    One that I found particularly irrimusing (and seems to keep popping up forever) was that holding some combination of buttons on the Gameboy Advance when you turn it on "plays a secret, alternative start-up sound, then it just sits at the Gameboy logo until you press a button. That's all it does."

    Except if you read the manual you'd know that holding that button combo overrides the normal start-up and forces the GBA into multi-play download mode, so you can play those games without having to take the cartridge out of the console. Pressing a button in that mode cancels it and resumes normal start-up, loading a game from cartridge if one is inserted.

    I've seen some people insist that their manual didn't say anything about this, but I have trouble believing them given that it was written in the manual for the GBA which I bought on launch day.

  • Apparently it was in the manual, but I'm just learning it now.

    Jump

  • Because in the English version of MGS that's not "hidden" in the manual (or on the back of the box). You get the Colonel calling on the radio every ten seconds during that fight, virtually screaming at you "Hey you dumb kid, switch to the second controller port already!"

  • Introducing Lemvotes

    Jump

  • I was thinking of a variable-length hash, but if we use a fixed length (which I acknowledge the term "salt" does imply), then I agree.

  • You never forget your first

    Jump

  • In some places, the ZX Spectrum vs Commodore 64 war was epic. Likewise for Amiga vs Atari ST. Magazines for one fanbase would regularly mock the other. And I don't know what the TRS-80 was going up against, but I've seen it called the "Trash-80" more than a couple of times.

    What can help proof someone against this excessive dedication to one platform isn't which platform you start them on; it's starting them on multiple platforms as soon as possible. Getting them interested in the individual games rather than the fan club nonsense.

    As human beings we naturally oversimplify things. So when our entire experience has been A, and the people around us frame the world as a choice between A and B, we're naturally going to defend A with our life. That's because without really thinking about it, we've bought into the idea that A is either right or wrong, with no middle-ground, and we hate to be wrong.

  • You never forget your first

    Jump

  • That is just inviting people to start throwing out names of lesser-known systems. Can we narrow it down to Western (including South America), Eastern European, or South-east Asian before we start?

  • Introducing Lemvotes

    Jump

  • Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade... salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on?

    I didn't have time to reply earlier, but I was thinking the same thing, except with the extra step of replacing the username with a unique user identifier randomly generated at signup by the user's instance and kept secret.

    I wonder if there's a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.

  • Here's a very good reason to emulate J2ME (pre-smartphone Java games)

    Jump

  • Yeah, you got it basically correct. I bought a few of these games back in the day, and while I think you could do most of it by texting codes to premium SMS numbers, I did it by setting up accounts on the distributors' websites. I paid by credit card (my phone plan didn't fully support premium SMS billing), and they sent a special MMS with the game package attached (not as a link; this was in virtually pre-phone-Internet days). I had to make sure that my phone had enough MMS space free to receive the message including the bundled game, or I wouldn't get it.

    One advantage of getting the games through a website account was that I could have the game resent to the same number as many times as I wanted. Since I didn't know any easy way to back up the game locally from my phone at the time (or how to reinstall it even if I could), this let me free up precious space by deleting the MMSs and uninstalling games without losing my purchase.

    I played some games on a lower-mid-range Motorola flip-phone, but mostly on an nGage. It was like chalk and cheese. The experience on the flip-phone was stuttery and the controls were almost always painful to use. But Nokia was the biggest phone manufacturer at the time, and they even published guidelines for how to make games for their various categories of phone. So a lot of developers supported those specific requirements because they were common and well-documented. The nGage could run S60-targeted games flawlessly, and often the controls were pretty usable (obviously). The only real negative was that since even S60 phones usually didn't have multi-press keypads, a lot of developers didn't write their games to support them. So if a game needed diagonal movement or the like, I still had to use the keypad.

  • Use same SD Card between devices?

    Jump

  • I have an RP2+ so I don't know if it's exactly the same, but with most Android devices, if you've configured the SD as an extension of internal memory, then no, it won't work (and might screw some things up on the old device if you remove it). But if you're just using it as external storage, I don't think there should be any problem.

  • The general feeling of documentating things

    Jump

  • I've had to interact with too many people who say this with a straight face.

  • Atari 2600: The Atlantis of Game Consoles

    Jump

  • Not bad overall, although I don't know where they got that "Atari 2600 Pitfall" screenshot. Not only is that not taken from the actual game, the 2600 couldn't display that image. It looks like someone who mostly remembered the game drew it from memory in MS Paint.

  • The History of 120 Star's Early Era | Summoning Salt

    Jump

  • If you might be interested but don't want to click a random link without knowing what it's for, this is a video about the history of a Mario 64 speedrun category, 120 stars, which involves collecting every star in the game.

  • Relatable

    Jump

  • I think it depends a lot on a person's individual knowledge. If you keep studying far enough away from your main area of expertise, there'll still be some point where you stop and have to blindly accept that something "just works", but it will no longer feel like that's what your main field is based upon.

    Imagine a chef. You can be an OK chef just by memorizing facts and getting a "feel" for how recipes work. Many chefs study chemistry to better understand how various cooking/baking processes work. A few might even get into the physics underlying the chemical reactions just to satisfy curiosity. But you don't need to keep going into subatomic particles to have lost the feeling that cooking is based on mysterious unknowns.

    For my personal interest, I've learned about compilers, machine code, microcode and CPU design, down to transistor-based logic. Most of this isn't directly applicable to modern programming, and my knowledge still ends at a certain point, but programming itself no longer feels like it's built on a mystery.

    I don't recommend that every programmer go to this extreme, but we don't have to feel that our work is based on "magic smoke" if we really don't want to.

    ADDED: If anyone's curious, I highly recommend Ben Eater's YouTube videos about "Building an 8-bit breadboard computer!" It's a playlist/course that covers pretty much everything starting from an overview of oscillators and logic gates, and ending with a simple but functional computer, including a CPU core built out of discrete components. He uses a lot of ICs, but he usually explains what circuits they contain, in isolation, before he adds them to the CPU. He does a great job of covering the important points, and tying them together well.

  • Pain

    Jump

  • So this is a list of responses given by AI when you correct it? My guess was "Things you will never hear from a client when you politely point out a logical inconsistency, an incorrect assumption, or a wild over/underestimation in their project plan." 'Cause in my experience the response you will get, 99% of the time, is "That won't happen."

  • Most under-utilized consoles?

    Jump

  • Ha! I was a Mega Drive fan as a teen, and I got really angered by this... until I realized that you were speaking about the Mega CD and 32x specifically. Yep, there really weren't many good games for either of them.

  • Most under-utilized consoles?

    Jump

  • I think the DC had the technical strength to go up against the PS2, not just early on, but for quite a while. The PS2 is incredibly flexible in theory, but looking at its library it seems like most developers just used Sony's default rendering setups. If you ignore the quickie PS1-to-DC ports and only compare titles which got equal effort from developers, it can be hard to tell the difference, and in some cases I'd even say the DC version looks a little nicer.

    In this alternate universe where the DC didn't get killed off prematurely, what might've eventually turned the tide for the PS2 would be having between 1.5 and 2 times as much RAM (depending on how you account for different distribution), although that advantage may not have existed if it weren't for the large gap between their release dates.

    But Sony could afford to delay for two years; consumers waited for them. Sega couldn't sustain launch-pitch marketing for that long, especially with an actual console on store shelves that people could experience firsthand, as opposed to teaser videos of what the console "might" be capable of. Few publishers or consumers wanted to invest in a console before the clear winner of the previous generation had entered the market.

    All that being said, I don't know that the DC was really under-utilized, in technical terms. I feel like a good proportion of the games in its library are using almost all of the power it had under the hood. Perhaps Sega's management and engineers had learned their lesson from the Saturn, because the DC seems very straightforward from a programming perspective. It's almost ironic that it lost to the PS2, which took flexibility and parallelism to heart at least as much as the Saturn did, if not more.

  • Most under-utilized consoles?

    Jump

  • Also, the battery life was hideously short. It would suck down a set of 6 AAs in less than 3 hours. I suspect that the CCFL backlight on the LCD screen was the culprit. And the console was huge. I have the official belt pouch and as a teen it reached most of the way down to my knee. The redesign was a bit smaller, but not much.

    A lot of the games sucked, but there were some pretty good ones too. Just not enough games overall, I think.

  • My Advanced Retro Simulation Environment brings all the boys to the yard

    Jump

  • How do you think your A.R.S.E. compares to Microsoft's planned Binary Universal Technology Translation System, and Sony's upcoming Original Software Heuristic Inter-platform Real-time Interpreter?

    I like the big offering from MS, I cannot lie. Sony's outline looks well-rounded, too. I searched online, but I haven't seen any real details about your system. Even after I put down my phone and got on my desktop to type on a proper keyboard, I couldn't find A.R.S.E. with both hands.