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There's a modern remix of Space Debris on the soundtrack of the 2011 game Rochard by Recoil Games. It was made by the original artist Markus "Captain" Kaarlonen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsapsOqc7UI

The Quora link mentioned in the article seems to have a bit more in depth information about why the engine is so difficult to work with: https://qr.ae/TWNufs

I've started doing some maintenance on my old computers. I just finished recapping my Amiga 1200 earlier this week and this morning I ordered a long T15 torx driver so I can open up my old classic Macs.

I'm also planning on looking into modifying an old digital clock radio I have with and ESP that uses NTP to keep time more accurately but I haven't gotten very far with that yet.

The lockdown is really only half the reason I'm doing these projects now. The other reason is that I moved to a bigger apartment earlier this year so now I actually have space to hack around with this kind of stuff.

There was another bug in the original Transport Tycoon (not Deluxe) that gave an even easier way to make massive amounts of money. If you built a tunnel through the whole continent the price integer rolled over and instead of paying a ton of money for the you actually received billions of dollars.

I think he meant to type "I have been following this as closely as I follow JS libraries".

Here's one in Helsinki, Finland: https://goo.gl/maps/NoWE44KLKukEeq4d9

I also disagree that it is simple while you're on it although I have to admit that I'm not a very confident driver at the best of times so maybe that's just me.

UFO: Enemy Unknown (aka: X-Com outside North America).

You got it backwards. The PC version was known as X-COM: UFO Defense in North America and UFO: Enemy Unknown outside North America.

Reminds me of https://0hh1.com/ & https://0hn0.com/

Calling this just a metro/subway map seems incorrect at least in Helsinki's case. Its map seems to also contain all tram, commuter train and even a couple of main bus lines.

LGR has a great video about General Magic, the company behind Magic Cap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64

Reminds me of this article about an old Amiga computer running the AC system for multiple schools: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...

Which is pretty much exactly how Android works as well.

I've noticed the same in Finland

Thanks, now I see it

I've been staring at the logo for a few minutes now and I cannot make head or tails of it. It just looks like a random squiggle to me.

"PC World magazine named Stretch one of the biggest project management failures in IT history." It would be interesting to know more about this. The Wikipedia article doesn't really go into any detail and neither does the source article.

For example, there's a comment about having to lower the clock speeds but it doesn't say why this decision had to be made.

This is part of the new PowerToys utilities. There's already a post on Hacker News front page about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20890828

I hope this will allow me to finally ditch Chrome on Mac. On Windows I changed to Firefox when Quantum was released but on my old Macbook Air it has been too slow to use as my main browser.

This is what I used to learn vim https://vim-adventures.com/

Edit: Huh, looks like it doesn't work anymore. :/

LGR has a couple of related videos on YouTube.

Regular old B&W TV connected via HDMI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMiMz1uGCXI

A tiny 1/2 inch CRT used as a display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY7olqQF8iM

Cool stuff. I wonder how long it will take until speech synthesis is at the point where it can be used to create dialogue for video games. Obviously it would (at least initially) replace just the less important stuff spoken by background characters or less important NPCs, but even that could be a big improvement.

Just imagine how much more immersive a game like Skyrim would be if the writers could just write the lines and then run it through a speech synthesizer to get finished dialogue. No need to hire multiple actors and get them to a studio to record their lines. It would be so much easier and faster to create a massive amount of unique dialogue and you wouldn't have to listen to the same "arrow to the knee" line spoken by the same couple of actors over and over again everywhere you go.

It would improve user created mods as well since just about anyone could then just create new characters with completely custom voices and dialogue.

In my mind, "network play" refers to playing multiplayer games over a network, which this isn't? This is about playing a Game Boy game on an emulator that is running on a server somewhere, which sounds very much like "Cloud gaming" to me.

I've noticed a formulaic approach in Japanese video game development, where most games within a genre seem to have very similar mechanics as opposed to western made games. The RPG genre seems to be the most obvious example. If you take a modern JRPG (like one of the new Pokemon games for example) and compare it to an old Final Fantasy game from the NES there are a lot of similarities in the mechanics, like random encounters & combat, the way NPC dialogue is implemented, inventory management etc.

Now I'm not saying that they are identical games or that there hasn't been no innovation but to me it seems that for different Japanese games within a genre, there's usually one or two features that are done differently to stand out from the mass and everything else is done "like it's always been done". It seems like the thought process is something like: "RPGs consist of these features so we must have these features in the game for it to be an RPG".

Also I'm not saying that western games can't be or aren't formulaic, but if you take an old Ultima game from the 80's and compare that to modern western RPGs like Skyrim or Witcher or Diablo it seems very different, mechanics wise. Or if you take the Mass Effect trilogy and look at just the inventory management in them it is very different in each game. It seems to me like western developers are more eager to (sometimes unsuccessfully) improve, replace and/or reinvent gaming mechanics and they also are not afraid to blur the lines between genres. Many games from different genres seem to have, for example, at least some RPG elements in them these days.

I'm not implying that one way is better than another, that's a matter of taste. It's just an interesting point that I personally have noticed. It's especially interesting when you think that when not "chained" to a specific genre, Japanese developers can come up with something completely unheard of like Katamari Damacy for example.

Has anyone else noticed this or am I just imagining things?

I have a kind of opposite problem on an old Lenovo laptop where Windows boots just fine every time but any Linux distro I try randomly fails to boot with an ACPI error.

It's not a RAM issue though. AFAIK there's some bug in the UEFI/BIOS even on the latest version which Windows handles just fine but Linux randomly doesn't. I can boot Linux every time if I disable ACPI at boot but then I lose power management and battery percentage. Latest kernels (can't remember the version exactly, 4.somethingoranother) should handle the issue according to some forum posts I found but it doesn't for me.

I remember the first time I saw that you could walk right up to a wall in a game and the texture didn't become a mess of giant pixels. Sure, it was a mess of blurry pixels instead but still it seemed like (voodoo) magic to young me.

Too late to edit now, but thanks. :)

Looks like you're right. Ice hockey is the national _winter_ sport of Canada while lacrosse is the _summer_ sport.

Btw. ice hockey is _not_ the national sport of Finland (it's not even the national sport of Canada!). The Finnish national sport is pesäpallo (Finnish baseball).

I'm not saying that you're wrong about them not selling that many of these but I don't agree that the only people who would be interested in them are "Type A" personalities.

This morning on my way to work the driver of the bus I was in stopped at traffic lights (that were green) to help a person with an electric wheelchair across the road. The reason he needed help was because he was stuck in a bank of snow that a snow plow had pushed at the side of the road.

Using a git client with a graphical user interface has definitely helped me "grok" git as well. I use Git Extensions myself.