koz1000
Joined 17 years ago
Karma
516
Submissions
105
Member since
Nov 18
Recent submissions
Comment · 9 months ago
As they say, it was a different time.
I'm friends with someone that worked at Atari around that era and he'll be the first to tell you it was a very loose atmosphere there.
Comment · 1 year ago
The amount of homebrew games has been growing year after year, and the results are getting pretty impressive.
Here's a review of what showed up at Pinball Expo 2024: https://pinballexpo.com/homebrew/
Comment · 2 years ago
My last name contains the character sequence "rz".
Back in the BBS days this would trigger a Zmodem transfer on certain clients. It made a lot of people upset.
Comment · 2 years ago
If you ever played a Williams Bally/Midway pinball machine from the 1990s dot-matrix era (Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, etc), all of the artwork and animation for those displays was done entirely by hand in Deluxe Paint Animation for MSDOS.
The features like stenciling and animbrush were incredibly powerful. And with a little bit of extra software the exported files could be converted directly into a format for the game software to use.
Comment · 2 years ago
We switched to C++. Nobody had a problem with the switch, although multitheading became a sticky point with some of the developers so we had to write an API to simulate nonpreemptive tasking like the old assembly system.
Comment · 2 years ago
It also ran Williams' line of pinball machines all the way until 1999.
Comment · 2 years ago
I was working on an 8-bit system back in this same time period. We couldn't afford flash devices and the kit required to reprogram them. But we did a similar trick with an extra write pin located near the ROM socket, then used a special daughterboard filled with SRAM that replaced the ROM and also touched the write line. Now we could just use our cheap debugger and blow an image into the address space the ROM used.
Only downside was that you lost the image on power down, so I can see why EEPROM was more important to Apple in developing their systems.
Comment · 3 years ago
Guess we shouldn't spoil how William Gibson's Neuromancer ends, then.
Comment · 3 years ago
I worked with erasable EPROMs back in the day. It was a pain in the ass.
Comment · 3 years ago
And a lot of smaller microcontrollers still use a UART port and serial protocol to reflash the device. It's the lowest common denominator for hardware interface and the simplest thing that works.
Comment · 3 years ago
And, not you specifically, but you're the guy that ruins RTO for everyone else.
I'm hybrid and every Wednesday there's a wave of people that slide in, put in their earbuds, and shout into Teams calls for eight hours. It's impossible to concentrate.
I've managed to get some of them to get self aware and use conference rooms or those silly phone booths, but it's a nonstop problem now.
Comment · 3 years ago
Glad you're enjoying it. We had a lot of fun making this one.
I have lots of early photos and stories going up on Mastodon. Go check it out.
Comment · 3 years ago
It's been 26 years. I figure that's long enough. =)
Comment · 3 years ago
If your NGG is on free play, here's the code to warp to the hole in one challenge (the final mode):
Both flippers, then 3L, 1R, 9L, 1R, 1L, 1R.
Then hold the left flipper button in before starting the game. Have fun!
(Source: I wrote the backdoor)
Comment · 3 years ago
My kid routinely asked for access to Photos, which seemed pretty benign. Turned out she was screen recording entire Netflix movies and saving them in her Photos cache, not only bypassing every single restriction but also tanking my iCloud storage quota.
@[email protected]