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.

Did you know there's a long version? (Of the song, not the flowchart, though another reply has that too)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Svz-W5w2bPM

There's a 7-minute version, with two more verses that aren't in the version you always hear on the radio. The one starting at 3:45 in that video is particularly powerful and chilling.

Best is subjective there, of course. Tetris is proven solvable with that bag method. https://tetris.wiki/Playing_forever

20 cycles through the bag can be packed into exactly 56 lines and that pattern can be repeated forever. Such a solved game might not meet everyone's definition of best. Although for casual play it's great to have every piece coming regularly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_rotation doesn't say anything about bimodal. There's a formula with a relation between size and rotation speed, including the fact that smaller stars live longer and have more time to spin down, but it's nearly monotonic. Stars spin down because of their magnetic field exerting torque on their stellar wind, an effect that's much larger than any transfer of angular momentum to planets.

Consumers don't want to understand it because they don't want to consume less.

The article says "10x luminosity", and here's what seems to be the explanation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Luminosity_Large_Hadron_C...

That's the wiki article for the new one. Says "Increasing LHC luminosity involves reduction of the beam size at the collision point, and either the reduction of bunch length and spacing, or significant increase in bunch length and population."

The linked article says the new one will have "between 140 and 200 proton–proton collisions in every bunch crossing, compared to around 60 during the last LHC run." So the "10x luminosity" seems to be composed of ~3x more protons at a time along with presumably a ~3x tighter focused beam.

Publix is also on that first list, of happy and overstaffed and privately owned. I do most of my shopping there and it's much more pleasurable than Kroger or Walmart.

The rarity is that very few copies ever existed of a standalone boxed SMB.

Not every console came with SMB. One very early package didn't have it, and one later package included SMB3 instead. So SMB was sold as a standalone for these cases, but very few units were needed or extant.

Well, if there are 100,000 competitors and you want to win, then the 99.99th percentile isn't enough, and yes you would try to reach 99.999.

Right, iterating through pixels is better. The tricky part about iterating the angle is that you need to choose the step size correctly or else you could skip pixels. Like if you iterate in 1-degree increments, you'll plot 360 pixels total, but the size of the circle on your canvas might be more than 360 pixels wide. I'm sure there's a way to choose the angle iteration step size to guarantee not skipping pixels, but you'd often duplicate work and re-plot the same pixel twice.

So yes, start at (R, 0), increment the y-coordinate each time and possibly decrement the x-coordinate, until x=y which will be at 45°. If the circle's center is an integer on the pixel grid, you can reflect/translate each pixel in that first octant to all eight as you go. If the center is fractionally positioned, you'd have to calculate it all the way around, iterating primarily on y or x depending on the location.

Yes, this is broadly correct. The free market will (roughly) arbitrage out any differences between owning and renting. The hidden factor is that whatever money you have in house equity represents opportunity cost that it isn't in investments. If you have 400k in a house and the stock market returns 6% over inflation, then the opportunity cost is 2k per month in interest, which is comparable to what you'd pay in rent.

There are tax advantages that favor owning (in the US), for a primary resident and not an arbitrageur - mortgage interest and capital gains when you sell are not taxed, while capital gains in a non-retirement account are.

You can gain by appreciation and leverage, of course - but you can just as easily not, you don't know if your city is going to be the next high-flying Austin or Boulder, or run-down Detroit. My own house has been flat in estimated value for four years in an area that I thought would continue to rise.

Any angle within 23º of east-west will have henging at some time of year. You'd have to have the entire street grid be aligned diagonal rather than cardinal.

Love that "land for turn", although I think it might shift the balance a little too much, in that you can make a deck with too much land and high cost spells and know you can cast them reliably. There needs to be a risk factor in building up to high mana to make low mana spells matter.

Possible tweaks, maybe it has a cost (all lands have cycling 1 or 2 mana or life.) Or delay that draw until end of turn, which feels like about the right power level, but does have memory and execution issues.

I think this reason is dependency. Anything I'm doing where the action of one hand depends on the other has to go left-to-right. I can only finger frets with the left and then pick with the right. Can't go the other way, can't have the right hand act before the left, even if the left has the more complex task.

It's like Super Mario Bros. With a 4-way d-pad and 2 action buttons, why is the more complex 4-way on the left? Because most of the time you're holding a direction first with less requirement for precise timing, and then pressing the button at the correct instant depending on the movement. (We're talking general platformer play, not hyper precise d-pad moves for something like Super Metroid speedrunning.)

Even typing on a keyboard, I never hold a right-side shift or other modifier key, it's always left-shift then the target key.

On MacOS (at least my older version on a 2015 MBP), Cmd-~ switches between app windows. Totally undiscoverable but knowing that restores a lot of usability.

I've always thought he just kind of slurred over the "a", like you'd do in casual speech, it came out like "f'r'a man". In the recording there's a tiny slight bit of a vowel after the "r" sound. I don't think he blew the line, just didn't speak it clearly.

Several real pinball tables do this, keep a hidden ball staged to make it seem to instantly reappear. The Rick & Morty machine in particular does this - you can shoot into a portal, and the ball (actually a different hidden one) reappears instantly some distance away.

And the version from Full Tilt is a significantly enhanced version of the game. It has multiball, where the Windows bundled version doesn't.