vikingerik

It's the other way around - 2600 Pac-Man didn't do any hacks and that's what made it terrible.

The signature hack on the system is to reuse sprites mid-frame. That's the "racing the beam": after an object has been drawn, reposition the sprite to draw something else further down on the screen, before the scanline beam gets there.

Pac-Man didn't do that. Instead, it draws only one ghost sprite per frame, and flickers between the four of them every four frames. The flickering and racing-the-beam are opposites, not one causing the other.

Atari's programmers knew how to race the beam for reusing sprites. Air-Sea Battle did it years before Pac-Man. What's different about Pac-Man is that the objects aren't constrained in their movement. They can overlap on the same scanline which makes drawing multiples with a single sprite impossible. The right solution to this and what Ms. Pac did is smart sprite reuse - if they're on the same scanline, flicker temporarily, but then when they move to be separated vertically, race the beam to display both together. This didn't happen for Pac-Man because Atari rushed it to release in too short a timeframe to implement that, and also the code wouldn't have fit into a standard 4k cartridge and would have needed more expensive hardware with bankswitching logic chips. 2600 Pac-Man's terribleness was a business decision, not a technical limitation.

The Sound Blaster 2.0 wasn't 16-bit. It could do a higher sample rate than 1.0 but it was still doing 8-bit audio in an 8-bit ISA slot. The Sound Blaster 16 was a separate product another year or two later.

We don't even keep very close to that as it is. Between daylight summer time changes and some time zones already being very far off from geography, some places like western Spain or China are already as much as 3 hours off from actual solar time.

I beat Chess39 on my second try on the hardest setting, using a wall of all pawns (27 pawns and 4 bishops.) Keep advancing your rear pawns whenever there's space so that no pawn is ever unprotected. Eventually the pawns will advance far enough that the opponent has no room and you'll start getting traps and forks.

The key is to make sure you never leave a defensive opening - you have to watch out for two enemy pieces attacking a pawn that's defended only once. The computer/opponent will sacrifice the first piece to get the second to break through behind the pawn ranks, and it can often demolish all the pawns from there or checkmate your cramped king.

Like the AI that was developed to play Tetris as long as possible. It succeeded by... pausing the game.

All it would need is a wi-fi antenna internally, and then it could connect to an open wi-fi network anywhere. And it's going to be pretty much impossible to avoid ever driving your car within range of some open network.

And just for comparison on that number, the entire Apollo spacecraft (command+service+lunar modules) was about 50 tons to lunar orbit. And that took a gigantic Saturn V to launch.

Right. Although in-universe, it was the NX-01 that was the genesis of the name for starships. NCC-1701 was a century later.

There's a fun time loop here: The Star Trek Enterprise and the real-life space shuttle Enterprise were each named after the other. In real life, the shuttle was named after the Star Trek ship. In-universe, the first starship Enterprise (NX-01) was named after the space shuttle. [Edit: I remember reading that years ago, but can't find any official source saying so now, although the intro to the Star Trek Enterprise tv series does emphasize the shuttle.]

(Of course, both really come from a long lineage of naval vessels with the name.)

The definition isn't fuzzy, we define a brown dwarf as an object that has undergone deuterium fusion.

The fuzziness is in the physical properties needed to achieve that. 13 Jupiter masses is generally the threshold where deuterium fusion starts, but that can vary: a brown dwarf composed of only primordial H and He would need a bit more, while one with some heavier elements from previous generations of stars will be denser and need slightly less. Rotation speed also matters: a faster rotator will experience centrifugal force and thus have less interior pressure.

And there is fuzziness in what we can observe, so sometimes we're not sure if an object is a brown dwarf. We may not know its exact mass and composition, and we might not be able to tell if it's radiating energy from deuterium fusion, or just from gravitational compression, or (in a binary system) if it's just reflecting light from its companion star.

The other reply gave good info, but didn't quite answer this. Once an object's core acquires enough temperature/pressure/density to start protium fusion, it will continue, not burn out. The fusion itself increases the temperature, and the produced helium is denser than hydrogen, so the core compresses more under gravity thus increasing the pressure too. So protium fusion creates its own conditions to continue, so there's no such thing as borderline stardom; once protium fusion starts at all, it will continue and it's now a red dwarf. Fusion doesn't begin or occur everywhere, it's still only at the core, but convection will eventually (10^12 year timescale) cause all the hydrogen to have moved through the fusing region.

Summary:

It's low resolution at only 256 x 80, stretched vertically to the screen size.

It's only 16 colors so only 4 bits/pixel.

That comes to 10kb per frame.

A variant of Huffman coding gets it to 3.52kb per frame.

It's at 15 fps and is 12.5 seconds in length.

15 x 12.5 x 3.52kb = 660kb, which fits in a 4mb cartridge.

There is dithering to give the appearance of more colors, and it's done in vertical stripes rather than checkerboards because that compresses better. Then at runtime, every other scanline is offset by 1 pixel, and in opposite directions every other frame, so the dithering blurs back together to give the appearance of many more colors.

Second Reality was art indeed, but the GUS didn't make all that much difference for it. The soundtrack didn't have higher rate samples for the GUS's memory to hold or more channels for it to mix. Later demos and games did use these capabilities, but for Second Reality, the GUS sounded just about the same as a 16-bit Sound Blaster.