Yeah, you may have noticed a pattern to my terrible ideas. With the caveat that I need to finish The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and then I'm going to take advantage of my new bookshelf space and finally read Rules of Play, so it'll be a while before I get to your demands.Īt one point in November I had the idea to watch every stupid Christmas special ever created and write reviews.
![slush invaders hacked silver games slush invaders hacked silver games](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/u4fM_hY1G1M/sddefault.jpg)
I did enjoy the brief experiment where you told me what books to read, and I'd actually like to re-open that experiment, so let me know which of these books I should read next. But I've tried this in the past and it wasn't very satisfying. Unrelatedly, this entry prompted me and Sumana to Bookmooch about 15 books we're not gonna read/don't really need to keep, and I've put ten more in the equivalent of the proposed box.Īnother way to stop the cycle of reading the books you suspect you won't enjoy enough to keep, is to choose your next book at random.
![slush invaders hacked silver games slush invaders hacked silver games](https://www.g7r.com/img/slush_invaders-loadp.png)
I hope to have more details about that soon.Īlas, the day job returns on Monday, and the frenzy of writing will slow, but 2009 is looking a lot better for my fiction career than it seemed just a few days ago. Not only do/did I have the anthology, story revision, new story, and Beautiful Soup work, but I've embarked on a new project comparible in scope to The Future: A Retrospective, except cooler and higher-profile. Galaxian actually had a hardware PRNG connected to a simple resistor-ladder DAC and some low-pass filtering to generate white noise for things like explosion noises.Wow, this is a busy vacation.
Slush invaders hacked silver games generator#
Pacman used a very simple discrete sound generator using a couple bipolar ROMs you'd have to code specifically for that, or cheat and use PCM samples. Since there was no 'standard' for any of this hardware you'd have to write an emulator for each and every different game. The exception to the rule was Williams games like Defender, Stargate, Joust, Robotron 2084, Bubbles, and other similar era titles, that used 3 banks of 4116's for a total of 48kB of bitmap graphics memory, with DMA used to move graphics data from EPROMs to the screen buffer. Completely different from the bitmap graphics that everything uses now. The background images were one layer, with hardware that usually supported scrolling, and the foreground (or 'motion graphics') images in another set of EPROMs, with specific hardware to place said objects at specific locations on the screen, and yet another layer of graphics just for text images like player scores. Older games, especially from the 80's, used graphics systems that used very little RAM, instead the graphics all being stored in EPROMs. Trivial nonsense would actually prevent you from playing the game at all in some cases.įor those of you who aren't aware, this is true. I.e the emulator works differently depending on the game. What really happens is that the people who write emulators figure out how the original game exploited the hardware configuration and then code the emulator to look at which game is currently being played and apply an appropriate hack to make it work.
![slush invaders hacked silver games slush invaders hacked silver games](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nlIQEyntbQc/hqdefault.jpg)
Correctly emulating an old console on the other hand is a processing nightmare which can bring multicore 3GHz machines to their knees. What typically happens is if you faithfully emulate what an old console is supposed to do then at best a game plays with minor bugs, at worst it becomes completely unplayable. I remember reading quite fondly how the makers of Monkey Island 2 hacked their way around the scene where you dive to the bottom of the ocean to make the blue fade to black scene work despite not having a colour palate setup to do so. Older games did a lot of very weird crap to get around limitations of the time.
![slush invaders hacked silver games slush invaders hacked silver games](http://www.qiqigames.com/thumb/32/Battleon-Invaders-Hacked.jpg)
They'd exploit bugs in the microcode or timing imperfections to make their games small and efficient. A lot of old programs relied on some very specific behaviour of chips to perform accurately.