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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised to see that (at least on the 360) there was no way for a title to terminate itself; the game process ran until it was killed by something else (e.g., the user launching another title, or shutting the console down).

Another surprise was the utter lack of a date-and-time clock chip. Without a network (and I'm guessing, without actually connecting to XBox Live), the 360 had no idea what time it was. That saved a bunch of money on hardware, and removed headaches involving coin cells (such as shipping policies).

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It's still the case on a Series X. There are separate pools for applications and games, as well, and the Series X is able to keep state for multiple running games at once, which is nice.

The only downside is that it seems to cause a certain amount of pain with applications sometimes not working when there's a contest over sending Dolby to a receiver.

On the time thing: turns out that PlayStation 3 and 4 will stop letting you run games if you replace the battery and it can't re-sync time with the PSN.

To be more precise, the "if your battery dies you can't play games" thing only applies to downloaded PS3 games. It does apply to all PS4 games (both physical and digital) though.

You can only exit PS3/4/5 games by pressing the PlayStation button; I don't know if this is a technical or UX/cert limitation.

Cert. Pretty standard rule, no quit or exit buttons on menus. It is the first thing I implement when making a new main menu.

...so why are we still confronted with “Press [Start] to play” messages in splash-screens? It feels like an anachronism... outside of retail environments games don’t need an “attract mode” - the only thing it’s attracting is my sense of ire...

On older consoles (X360, at least), that screen served two purposes:

- prompt the user to pick a location for their saved game (the console supported saves on the internal HDD, over USB, and later featured cloud saves)

- prompt the user to pick their local profile

For online-connected games, it also provides a "safe" spot to land if there are connection issues, which are very common nowadays (many games have online components and will drop the connection if put into sleep mode).

Just a design choice, I added one to Railgrade since I like the look. It gives the opening less clutter and a chance for players to get oriented.

On switch many games use the "Press L + R" pattern to detect which controller is the preferred controller.

> It gives the opening less clutter and a chance for players to get oriented

An attract-screen for a privately owned game isn’t “player orientation”: it’s a monkey-ladder scenario[1]. Just give me the main-menu right-away; just like how all PC games do.

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[1] I’m aware the actual story is likely apocryphal: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/games-primates-play/...

I only recently got back into PC gaming and all the titles I've played so far have an annoying "press space" or "press enter" before the main menu, before loading or both. This is with Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk 2077 and the original Halo:CE (don't ask :D).

What happened if you deliberately did something stupid like dereferencing a null pointer? What if you returned from the loop on the main thread?

I don't remember for sure. I think that if the title exited (by returning, or hitting an unhandled exception), the console tore everything down and relaunched the title . . . but it also might have just let threads die until there weren't any left to run, and then just sat there (running just system and UI threads).

It wasn't something I expected, and there were good reasons for the behavior other than "let's hassle developers with more annoying cert requirements".

>I was surprised to see that (at least on the 360) there was no way for a title to terminate itself; the game process ran until it was killed by something else (e.g., the user launching another title, or shutting the console down).

This is true of iOS apps too. Apple highly discourages apps closing themselves (maybe even outright forbids it, it's been a while)

I remember some launch demos were able to exit, usually with a forced splash screen ad for the full game. I thought it was a neat trick to use the xbox button to quit out of those and skip the ad.

So maybe exiting was allowed early on and discontinued later.

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