Comment on Implementing a spellchecker on 64 kB of RAM back in the 1970s led to a compression algorithm that's technically unbeaten and part of it is still in use today

ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• xavier666@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I am still in awe of the fast inverse square root method used in QuakeIII. Good times.

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  • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    IIRC, someone got with the author of that bit of code to ask how they came up with it, but they had simply learned it from someone else. So they tracked them down and found that they had also learned it from someone else. They eventually landed on Greg Walsh as the original author, but for a bit the code had no known origin.

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  • Blooper@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I read this article and I know it’s written in English, but I’ve accepted defeat in trying to understand it.

    I write code for a living and I’m doing my best to ignore the feelings of inadequacy I’m currently experiencing.

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    • xavier666@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      but I’ve accepted defeat in trying to understand it

      I may have shared the link but even I don’t know how it how it works.

      It’s like admiring the Eiffel Tower; you can understand that it’s a marvel of engineering without understanding the underlying engineering concepts. Such experiences are rare but they truly humble you.

      Regarding the square root, understand the following concepts

      1. Bit shifting simply shift the bits to a certain side (Left or right) => 0010 << 1 → 0100
      2. Mathematically, it multiplies or divides the input number with a factor of 2, depending upon the type of shift
      3. If you shift the number n with a nice shift amount x (I have greatly greatly over-simplified this), then you can calculate the inverse sq. root since inverse square root is 2^(-1/2)
      4. Calculating the inverse square root manually will take lots of clock cycles, which was not feasible for a FPS game with the limited h/w
      5. Bit shifting is a lot faster since we are not computing, but instead shifting

      The resultant shifting gives us an answer which is close enough to the answer, and that is good enough for FPS games for calculation of reflections.

      PS: Someone who is more experienced in this domain can correct me if I’m wrong.

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• REDACTED@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Check out demoscene. The mind-blowing things they create with only with kilobytes…

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  • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Yeah. The average NES game was only 200kb.

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  • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I had a zx81, 1k ram, still could play pong.

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  • xavier666@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Thanks for this. Got a burst of nostalgia

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  • noxypaws@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Here’s one of my recent-ish faves on GB, music is so damn catchy

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=GleZBHhOsmE

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• General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  nes game programmers

  Were these guys even Real Programmers?

  Here’s a great talk about a guy who worked on a 1982 game for the Atari 2600, a game console first released in 1977. It’s a fascinating insight into the early evolution of computing. They didn’t work around limitations. They used a machine to do whatever it could. If anyone has ever wondered by what standard C is a high-level language, this is for you. Or if you want to know how we ever could have developed something to connect the abstract logic of some algorithm with some glowing pixels on a screen.

  Pitfall Classic Postmortem With David Crane Panel at GDC 2011 (Atari 2600)

  There’s an ancient myth that a god created the first pair of tongs. Tongs need to be forged in a smithy. Obviously, you need tongs for that.

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• jasoman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  In oblivion on Xbox they even reboot the console on a loading screen to clear up ram.

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  • Romkslrqusz@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    *Morrowind

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    • jasoman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Thank that is indeed correct.

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• sirboozebum@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Restrictions and boundaries spur innovation.

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  • jdeath@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    any constraints, really. pretty cool!

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• Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  The old scrollers in non-consoles (consoles had hardware scrollers) used funky tech too to reduce overdraw. Fun times.

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