Old school coding and game programing was magic. The clever tricks that nes game programmers came up with to work around hardware limitations was phenomenal. It went way beyond the bushes and clouds in mario being the same thing but in a different color.
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
Submitted 2 months ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
xavier666@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I am still in awe of the fast inverse square root method used in QuakeIII. Good times.
VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 2 months 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.
Blooper@lemmynsfw.com 2 months 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.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 2 months ago
Check out demoscene. The mind-blowing things they create with only with kilobytes…
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Yeah. The average NES game was only 200kb.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I had a zx81, 1k ram, still could play pong.
xavier666@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Thanks for this. Got a burst of nostalgia
noxypaws@pawb.social 2 months ago
Here’s one of my recent-ish faves on GB, music is so damn catchy
General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 months 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.
jasoman@lemmy.world 2 months ago
In oblivion on Xbox they even reboot the console on a loading screen to clear up ram.
sirboozebum@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Restrictions and boundaries spur innovation.
jdeath@lemm.ee 2 months ago
any constraints, really. pretty cool!
Valmond@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The old scrollers in non-consoles (consoles had hardware scrollers) used funky tech too to reduce overdraw. Fun times.
troyunrau@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Long article for one sentence of trivia and no info on the algo itself. The death of the internet is upon us.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Doesn’t even name the algorithm, and somehow spells LZMA wrong, despite just having written it out longhand.
Well, it’s PC Gamer.
troyunrau@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Probably mostly AI written.
GrabtharsHammer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’d like to imagine they took the short trivia fact and applied the inverse of the compression algorithm to bloat it into something that satisfied the editor.
rice@lemmy.org 2 months ago
The blog post it links to has all the info, but it is more of a series of changes to the dictionary instead of 1 set thing
L3s@lemmy.world 2 months ago
!lemmysilver
LemmySilverBot@lemmy.world [bot] 2 months ago
Thank you for voting. You can vote again in 24 hours. leaderboard
lud@lemm.ee 2 months ago
What’s the Weissman score?
fatal_internal_error@lemmy.world 2 months ago
So it’s gonna be a dick measuring contest?
agelord@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’ll measure the most.
SirFasy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
If it aint broke, don’t fix it.
0x0@programming.dev 2 months ago
Only 1 GiB of RAM? Moooom!
Shut up Johnny, Voyager’s still out there with way less.rmuk@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Yeah, but I’ve not got two hundred Firefox tabs open on Voyager.
NoSpotOfGround@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The real meat of the story is in the referenced blog post: blog.codingconfessions.com/…/how-unix-spell-ran-i…:
ch00f@lemmy.world 2 months ago
For anyone struggling, lemmy web interface added the colon into the URL for the blog post link. Here’s a clickable version without the colon:
blog.codingconfessions.com/…/how-unix-spell-ran-i…
0x0@programming.dev 2 months ago
here’s another
NoSpotOfGround@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Thanks, and sorry about that! I removed the colon from near my URL now, just in case.
db2@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Thank you
potate@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
The blog post is an incredible read.