O huh. I just learned that SHADOWFIRE on the C64 is able to simulate 50 different characters, by only updating one of them per frame.
So the limit is 50 to fit the refresh rate of a PAL TV.
The first complete interactive breakdown of the whole game – see the Maps tab to explore every tile in every map. Fun bugs: did you know you can kill anything in the game with the throwing knife, if your LUCK is low enough?
100 paces NW of the starting position is an invisible patch of grass where the author forgot to include a height check. Press E and you teleport to the Colony Craft, far above you. This bug has gone unnoticed for 41 years!
If you are a small personal site, you can request a free upgrade to the Plus version (which can remove ads) by emailing [email protected] and asking.
I did this in late 2023 and got a response in two days.
This does remain an absolutely horrific business practice.
This. The 'black circle' in the tutorial is no good, maybe a dotted circle instead to make it clear you're supposed to be tapping empty space and not a black bubble.
Paul Graham's essay today: "We should have a conscious bias against defining new forms of heresy. Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong. Only our initial assumption of course. If they can prove we should stop saying it, then we should. But the burden of proof is on them."
As someone who has personally explained the phenomenon of cargo cult to individuals over the years, I made the decision to abandon it years ago.
I didn’t succumb to the pressure of heresy. I simply grew up and realized that it wasn’t actually that useful of a tool for explaining first principles or encouraging people to learn things from a first principles perspective.
My experience was: If a person felt like they already identified as someone who understands idea from first principles, the cargo cult story didn’t incentive them to question their understanding.
I also found if the person didn’t identify as someone who understood things from first principles, then the implication that they were implicitly being compared to clever primitive people. It wasn’t exactly reassuring and motivating.
At some point, people need to grow up and realize these conversations aren’t always about trying to censor people or to construct new heresies to use as instruments of cancellation.
Sometimes we need to have these conversations so we can reflect on what we say, how our words make people feel, and if they’re actually effective at accomplishing what we hoped those ideas would accomplish.
Damn, "I got married" and one mouse scroll later, "Officially divorced". And it wasn't even to the same woman, he got married and divorced twice within 1 desktop browser viewport's worth of weeks.
My side project was to remake the Commodore 64 game, ENCOUNTER from scratch in three.js, adapted for both mobile and desktop. I got pretty far.
Then in 2017 I interviewed for an Engineering Manager role at Facebook (now Meta). The role was with a web performance team.
I'd barely had time to prepare - at most a week - and my coding interview was not amazing.
In the final interview segment we were discussing web performance and I mentioned the ENCOUNTER project as running at 60fps. We pulled up the game on the interviewer's random Android phone and it worked well! It turned out the interviewer was a fellow C64 nerd and we bonded over shared memories.
I learned later that the project code was used as a tiebreaker to get signal on my coding ability.
I'm working at Meta to this day!
https://gamesexplained.com/c64/shadowfire/#people