khedoros1

> My previous work with PWM relied on being able to set a hardware timer to control when the speaker turns on and off.

I've got an Arduino project where I did that. The output is on a single digital pin, audio encoded as PWM. It turns the output off at the beginning of an audio frame, and sets a timer to trigger an interrupt when it's time to turn the output on.

I've got a memory block of event structs, each event representing a write to NES sound hardware. I emulate enough of the features to support everything that the Legend of Zelda title theme uses. 16MHz is more than enough to decide on the sample for 2 square channels, 1 triangle, and 1 noise, outputting a 6-bit output sample at a 31250Hz sample rate. The output is only slightly scratchy; the polyphony is actually surprisingly smooth.

I don't see how the availability of AI has anything to do with whether you have a use for a personal computer.

Those are the ones that I learned, from the magic system in Ultima Underworld. I think that H and W are swapped, and that Tolkien's alphabet includes a few more letters. They're both similar to the Elder Futhark runes, if I'm remembering correctly.

Outer Wilds is exactly what came to mind for me, too. Made a jump...missed. Thrown into a decaying orbit around the black hole. Absolutely terrifying, and panicking didn't help in the least!

And getting close to the upper atmosphere of Giant's Deep for the first time, staring, thinking about the atmospheres of real-world gas giants, knowing that I need to take the plunge.

That game exposed some phobias that I'd only been vaguely aware of before.

> They all have DRM which make it essentially encrypted with no decryption service available.

Not all do. Games for a lot of systems can be read directly from the storage media.

> Likewise, the game isn’t usually 100% contained on disc.

Only for the couple most-recent generations. But even virtually all of my PS4 games (not to mention earlier generations) are actually on the disc, playable without a download.

> So the question in my mind becomes, do game companies have an obligation to support games in perpetuity? I think when phrased that way, the answer is an obvious no.

Agreed, but I also think that if they don't have that obligation, then society doesn't have the obligation to provide copyright protection when they drop support.

I had a few reasons, when I tried tackling RE of a DOS-era game a number of years ago. I wanted to document the file formats, look through the data and find unused media, identify and fix some of the more egregious bugs in the game, build modding tools for it, understand the techniques used to build something that was memorable from my childhood, reduce the friction of running it on a modern system, make available optional improvements like higher resolution, texture replacement, and so on.

It ended up being more than I had the patience to finish. It might be doable for me now.

A lot. Often a couple dozen for pages that are currently queued up to read, with pages further to the left being older and often forgotten (or they're pages that I would like to have read, but don't want to take the time to read, and I haven't accepted that distinction yet). Another window might have reference material for whatever I'm working on. If I've only got one page open there, it usually means that I'm not deep into the process.

The aspect that I especially like is covering the 3-state aspect of the logic. Studying CS, it was kind of vaguely mentioned, and we skipped over to doing logic diagrams with gates and the assumption of 2-state logic really quickly...and it seems like most games do that kind of skip too. Working at the transistor level grounds it better to the actual components.

I went from a 19" CRT capable of 1600x1200@75Hz to a 17" LCD capable of 1280x1024@60Hz, basically because that CRT would've taken up a huge chunk of desk real estate in my dorm.

My first impressions were that the screen was bright as hell, sharp (but I was torn on whether that was good or bad, given the blockiness that it introduced), thin and light (awesome!), and sucked to run at anything but the native resolution. After a few hours, I realized that my eyes weren't getting tired looking at it, and that it was nice not to have the subtle hum around anymore.

The CRT was a decent screen (for 1999), and the LCD was a decent screen (for 2003). Of course, I just got used to the differences, since the LCD was much more practical in my life. I still have it in storage right now.

Probably because they're advertising their product, and the comment also sounds like it was written/edited by AI itself.

I definitely only care about a handful. I've got categories like "beaten", "in-progress", "maybe someday", and "meh". You accumulate a lot of free stuff over the years, things you got because they were in a cheap bundle with what you wanted, the thing you bought to play with a friend and did exactly once, etc.

GOG's similar. I've got so many things that I bought for $0.80, got for free, or bought for the memories and haven't actually picked up.

That's just on PC. I have a lot of physical media for a lot of different game systems. I think I'd probably have enough games on hand for the rest of my life if Steam and GOG both disappeared tomorrow.

> ANYWAY, people have lost the ability to write in cursive, or even write in print neatly.

By 2nd grade, I had good, clean print handwriting. Third grade is when they started teaching (and requiring us to use) D'Nealian cursive. My cursive never has been attractive, but its influence crapped up my print too. I do my best to slow down just a bit if I think someone else will have to read it.

> a) Memorize Times Tables.

My kid was taught the tables last year. They went up to 12x12. They also did a bunch of multiplying numbers specifically by 2, but I'm not sure exactly how high. Maybe 2^15, or so?

Wow. Your old PC is more powerful than any computer I own. Faster version of my CPU, double the RAM, newer generation GPU. A fraction of the storage, though. I built it in 2020 to replace the desktop that I built in 2008.