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Pretty sure water was just a teleporter? You may be thinking about the mirror effect? I think that was a kind of a portal effect. You had to make a large empty section behind each mirror that was used by the engine to render a mirrored copy of things in front of the mirror.

You could make some weird impossible geometries by just superimposing sections. Two sections could occupy the exact same coordinates, but movement and rendering were done across edges shared by sections and did not care about if there was some other section in the same space. As long as there was never a way to see those sections at the same time.

I had to see an eye doctor at the hospital when I was ~7 and I got to do some exercises, but I never learned to cross my eyes, and then it was like it probably wasn't very important since I did not have to go to the doctor again and no one mentioned it so I just went on with my life and it seems overall like not being able to cross my eyes is not a huge problem. But I guess it may be connected to my complete inability to see 3D effects or figure out how to see anything in the images in the article.

Sweden had a series of disasters like that in recent years. A few months ago one region tried to switch from their old healthcare system to something delivered by Oracle, but quickly had to roll back to the old system.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/27/oracle_cerner_project...

In 2021 an expensive system for schools in Stockholm was so bad that some parents got together and wrote an open source app to not have to use the bad official UI.

https://www.wired.com/story/sweden-stockholm-school-app-open...

I never bought that excuse for walled-garden consoles, since home computer games continued to do just fine after 1983 without locking down platforms.

The java 4k contest was fun (make a java applet game that is at most a 4096 bytes JAR, including all assets the game needs). Unfortunately I only discovered it shortly before it shut down (when no browsers supported java applets anymore). I did enter one year and it was not by coincidence that was the only time in 40 years of hobby-gamedev that I shared a game I made with people online.

It was a lot of fun to try to squeeze a game into 4 kB but I can definitely also admit that part of it was being able to use the extreme limit as an excuse for making things simpler and not have to worry about the game being ugly or not having sounds or not having a title screen and all the other 90% of stuff that would have been expected to turn it into a complete game.

I play around a bit with TIC-80. Some say it is just an open source PICO-8 and I guess it is to some extent. I paid for both but I have not spent as much time with PICO-8. I like that TIC-80 supports quite many different programming languages, but maybe PICO-8 does as well these days? There is no super obvious reason to use one or the other, so I go with the one with free source code.

Real retro gamedev is tempting, but it is difficult to find a real console that were heavily restricted while also being convenient to develop for. The fantasy consoles cheat a bit in being restricted like some early 1980's hardware while running code like some 2010's game engine. It's like the best of both worlds, but also a bit boring compared to writing something actually limited to what some old console could do.

I never was a big fan of Lua and that was something that kept me from looking closer at Löve, but a few months ago I discovered fennel (Lisp-like that transpiles to Lua) and that you can use that to write Löve games.

This looks like an up-to-date introduction:

https://itch.io/jam/love2d-jam-2024/topic/3484009/getting-st...

The "absolutely minimal Löve 2D fennel" repo was useful to me as I found the other templates a bit bloated (but possibly those are more useful for real-world projects beyond small experiments?):

https://sr.ht/~benthor/absolutely-minimal-love2d-fennel/

I did find that startup-time was bad for Fennel om some very low-end devices, or when running even a small game using LoveDOS in DOSBox, so I set up my test-projects to pre-compile the fennel-code to Lua as part of building the .love-files and that solved that problem.

Yes, https://www.love2d.org/ has links to both iOS and Android SDKs.

For Android you can also install the stand-alone LÖVE Loader app that can open .love files to play. Some games on itch.io comes with a .love-download (in addition to platform-specific executables), but I guess they can sometimes be extracted from other games too.

The .love-files, if provided or if they can be extracted from a game, are also useful on desktop, for playing the games in an operating system (like FreeBSD) that the game's developer did not provide binaries for.

The stand-alone app is also a fun way to do some gamedev on an Android phone. The .love file is just a ZIP, so it can be easily created from termux.

I am not sure in what way the state described is immutable at all? It just seems like mutable state hidden behind some access methods?

If I understand the distinction correctly, I run llamafile as a backend. I start it with the filename of a model on the command-line (might need a -M flag or something) and it will start up a chat-prompt for interaction in the terminal but also opens a port that speaks some protocol that I can connect to using a frontend (in my case usually gptel in emacs).

I have a somewhat common firstname.lastname@gmail.com and others with the same name use it pretty often. Surprisingly often it seems as if sites allow accounts to exist without email confirmation. I estimate at least 50% of the accounts out there that use my gmail is actually not me, and I like the idea of anyone trying to make sense of that data, if they can even guess that I am the Firstname Lastname that the address belongs to.

My personal observation, even if this is similar to what others already said: I found that in some (two? three?) big Java-based projects I worked on, where almost everyone used a IDE, the codebase became almost impossible to navigate or modify without using one, so I did. It was so easy to just add a method or class wherever, and it did not matter because you could just ctrl-click a name to find its implementation. It did not matter if you put 100+ methods in the same class or if you named things willy-nilly or overloaded method names.

If I was back working on a project like that, I would use whatever IDE everyone else was using. It makes no sense to fight it. But I prefer projects to not be designed for/by IDE, since that tends to make everything more readable and easy to navigate. I prefer to be able to navigate around the source-code on the command-line or use whatever generic tools to browse, and not be forced to ctrl-click my way around, and if (almost) everyone else working on the code wants that as well it is less likely that someone ruins it.

That said, I have at times also set up Emacs to use LSP or other built-in code-navigation tools, or templates (yasnippets) for generating boilerplate, for some projects. I rarely end up using it much. Usually I just jump around using built-in tools like M-x vc-git-grep or M-x rgrep. The code has to be pretty heavily designed-for-IDE to make those simple tools slow to use.

There is a mention of the Glitch assets, but I did not see any link? Looks like this is a good place to look: https://archive.org/details/glitch-public-domain-game-art

I remember downloading everything when it was released, adding it to my hoard, never using it for anything. The old Glitch site that hosted the content now just redirects to slack.com. It looked like this in 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20131209034741/http://www.glitch...

That is why I mentioned DOSBox. That is just one possibility, but probably currently the best one. DOS(Box) remains a fixed, known, target. Windows, even if it has impressive backwards compatibility, breaks older games often enough that it becomes annoying.

If a DOS game is distributed, as GOG does for old DOS games, with a bundled installer and DOSBox configuration, normal users would not even have to know they are playing a non-native game. We can treat it as just a generic virtual machine for games. The fact that it happens to also be backwards compatible with DOS games made 40 years ago is just a fun bonus, even if that is currently its primary purpose.

Alley Cat was one of very few old PC games that ran at a fixed speed, making it playable on higher end later PCs without having to use tools like MOSLO.

Too bad the new version was not completed for MS-DOS. If it was it would have been possible to play it on not just on Windows, but pretty much every modern and near-future (and far-future?) system.

DOSBox is a very good virtual machine for 2D games actually. It can support games far beyond what any real DOS hardware could. I wish there was support for exporting to DOS-executables included in some modern game engines, since that would provide at least a single fixed, future-safe, target platform. The closest I know of is an old DOS port of Löve 2D, but it only supports 320x200 VGA graphics. There is nothing limiting DOSBox itself to not support virtual VESA SVGA modes up to modern graphics modes (as long as x and y sizes each fit in unsigned 16-bit integers).

I searched boardgamegeek for games published in 1929. The only thing that grabbed my attention was Shambattle, the first published American miniatures wargame. It is an early, possibly the first, modern miniature wargame that used dice to resolve combat (no spring-loaded toy cannons like in Well's Little Wars for instance).

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31562/shambattle-a-game-...

Two 16-bit numbers could be combined to form a 32-bit pointer. Used as segment<<4+offset they just form a 20-bit pointer. Feels like wasting 12 bits to me.

To keep things simple maybe just handle that using emulator save-states instead?

A bit confused by the goto and skip instructions. Why multiply by 4 in one, but not the other? Sounds reasonable that both keep the target address a valid instruction pointer (aligned to 4 words)?

Adding two words to create an address is a fun variation of segment pointers, but even more wasteful than x86 16-bit segment+offset pointers (not a complaint, just an observation).

I read an article about humanoid robots yesterday and it scared me that it seemed like the expectation is still that the robot will be 24/7 online and "thinking" using some cloud brain. The current models described more in detail all used Open AI as a brain.

Having a personal robot would be great, but they have to invent a fully offline real positronic brain before I will consider allowing one in my house.

Fully open source might be too much to hope for, but that would obviously be the ideal. If it is closed source it definitely should be offline. I can have another, carefully sandboxed, AI in my computer that can help out with tasks that require online access. No need for the two types to be built into the same device.

Ctrl-w and ctrl-u in a default emacs do not even do the same things as in readline.

C-w is (usually) kill-region (similar to what most editors call "cut").

C-u is universal-argument, that is used as a prefix for other commands to add arguments.

There is a workaround I saw used by wcd, a tool for changing directories. To install it you have to add a wrapper function in your shell that executes the actual wcd binary, and after possibly interacting with the user to figure out what directory to change to the executable will print out the destination, and then the wrapper function will make the call to cd, affecting the shell it runs in.

https://wcd.sourceforge.io/

Some applications print usage information (e.g. with --help flag) to stderr. That is a bit annoying when there is a lot of output and I just want to grep for some flag, since the first attempt will fail and then I have to try again after adding 2>&1.

Some nice things have been introduced to Sweden, definitely, but unfortunately also garlic+onion has gone completely out of control. For instance going to France or Greece or India, countries known for their garlic, and I assume most countries in the world, they still know to not ONLY serve food where the difference in taste is the ratio of garlic to onions. They do still have dishes that use other spices. I asked in a few restaurants in Sweden and they literally did not serve a single garlic-free dish. Swedes went from zero to "old Nordic food is tasteless, so we should put as much garlic+onions as possible in everything to fix that" in ~60 years, and much of that happened in my lifetime in this century.

I can not find any recent updates, but this one (from 29/11, in Swedish) mentions ongoing discussions with China making progress on reaching an agreement to allow the Swedish navy to board the ship:

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/kina-redo-att-samarbeta-o...

You could use Godot (has a nice set of GUI widgets in addition to the game-specific stuff) or Lazarus (Free Pascal IDE) for instance. I did not use Lazarus much, but Free Pascal as a compiler and the language is nice and stable and supports a long list of platforms, generating native code (including cross-compiling between many different pairs of platforms).

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

You could probably have done something similar using Android with Termux, yes. I use rsync in Termux to move files to or from my phone all the time. Android is a complete mess when it comes to app permissions and the file system, so I would not dare to guess if it would be possible to access a USB drive from within Termux or not.

I preferred SailfishOS on my Jolla Phone (and my Jolla Tablet) as the experience is much better with how you can access files on the file system etc. But for various reasons (including a cracked phone screen) I went back to Android several years ago.

PlayOnLinux worked great for me in Linux. It installs Windows games into their own separate wine-directories, with their own C: contents and their own configuration, and with an option to pick a specific WINE-version for each game, when necessary. With a plugin you can export an installed game to its own single-file archive containing all of that game's full hard disk and config so that you can install it again later or copy to your other computers.

After switching to FreeBSD I tried to run PlayOnBSD, but it did not seem maintained and I could not get it to work. However it turns out the configuration for the games installed using PlayOnLinux were in simple text-files that I could easily use to launch all the games (after copying over to my new FreeBSD home directory).

Unfortunately after upgrading to FreeBSD 13.4 I have suddenly not had any luck at all running WINE or Proton. Need to try to figure that out some day. Or just hope that an upgrade to WINE 10.x will solve it.

The Fate books (at least several of them) are also free to download, with some Creative Commons license or similar, so you can read the rules without having to buy anything if you do not want to.

Old boardgame (wargame) rulebooks used to have numbered sections and subsections. I often miss that in modern rulebooks, even if some wargame rulebooks still have them luckily. It is so much easier to discuss the rules of a game when you have unambiguous identifiers for every paragraph rather than having to come up with ad-hoc vague references to some page and location below a heading.

The linked article has numbered sections, which is nice, allowing for specific references like "in Section 2.3" or "Figure 14.4", but the example rulebooks discussed from what I can tell do not.

I have not encountered a wargame that shipped with two rulebooks in the box, but often the latest rulebook PDF is available as a free download, so when playing a large wargame we often have printed one copy for each player, or at least almost that many. It is always good to have a rulebook within reach.