Saturday, May 25, 2024
Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Sunday, May 12, 2024
The FREE ‘Never Obsolete’ PC from 2000! eMachines eTower 566ir
My mother had an E Machines computer. I wasn't impressed by it, but at the time it was adequate for accessing the Internet. However, if a person still has one of these old machines, there are many old video games that can be played on it.
The state of computers around the year 2000 was interesting. People were buying their first computers to access the Internet. Before this, I had abandoned my Frankenstein computer I had built up a piece at a time and purchased a 400 Mhz computer, which quickly became obsolete. In the early 2000's I purchased a roughly 2 GHz single-core computer which seemed amazingly powerful at the time. In 2005, I upgraded to a dual-core computer 2.4 GHz computer which also seemed like a big step up.
I purchased an i7 iMac in 2010 for around $2,000. This was one of the more powerful computers on the market but it would seem sluggish by today's standards. It had only slightly better performance than my old outdated laptop. A couple of years ago I gave the almost dead computer to a repair shop for parts.
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
M4 iPad Pro Impressions: Well This is Awkward
The M4 iPad display has a 1000 NIT brightness that can go up to 1600 NITS.
Considering that my computer monitor is plenty bright at 350 NITS, this seems like overkill. It would be useful if you wanted to read the iPad in direct sunlight, but how many people need that feature? My iPhone 10R is rated at around 600 NITS and it is reportedly readable in direct sunlight.
Plus it has a processor more powerful than all but a few desktop computers. Overkill, which is why Apple wants to charge a thousand dollars for this thing.
The iPad is not a very useful device. It is more limited than a computer, and less convenient than a smartphone.
If I want a tablet I can get a lower-end iPad for around $300, and less on Black Friday. I bought a Fire Tablet on Black Friday for around $80, and even though it is not a very powerful tablet, it can do basic internet tasks, stream video, and play games.
Re: Rare Golden Ship Galaga Glitch
Jeff,
1. There is a bug in the original arcade Galaga where a player can get the "bees" to stop firing missiles. Although this is part of the game, apparently it is considered a "cheat" and disallowed in high score records. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtYQB3JOFoc
If the player kills all the bees except for two on the left side and then doesn't kill them for 7 to 20 minutes, usually around 20 minutes, then all the bees will stop firing for the remainder of the game. I have been able to reproduce this on my Arcade1up and my PC.
This works because there is a table in memory for all the missiles. There might only be 8 entries in this table. The table size limits how many missiles can be on the screen simultaneously.
A horizontal value of zero in the table means the missile is inactive. The way the coordinates work in the game is that a horizontal value of zero is slightly off the left edge of the screen.
If you don't shoot the bees for 20 minutes, they will fire a bunch of missiles, and occasionally a few missiles will be created with a random horizontal coordinate of zero. Even though these missiles are "active", the code ignores them. Eventually, the table fills up with missiles that the code ignores.
I think that I heard that later versions of Galaga fixed this bug, although I am not sure. I wish that they had kept it in. It is a nice easter egg.
2. Galaga has a method of doubling your firepower by letting your ship be captured and then rescuing it. I usually avoid this because it at least doubles the vulnerability of losing a ship. However, I just watched some YouTube videos where people going for a high score get double ships. The way they survive and not lose one of their ships is to shoot most of the bees as they enter the screen. The small number of bees that survive are easier to deal with.
3. The video hardware has a large number of sprites that can be displayed on the screen simultaneously. This was impressive for its time. However, the number of sprites still has a limit.
The game allows the player with double ships to fire up to four missiles at a time, but reportedly this was too many sprites. So the game uses a single sprite to display two missiles, and four missiles are displayed with just two sprites.
As a former video game programmer, I find this interesting because I am not sure what happens if just one of the two missiles in a single sprite hits an enemy. Do both missiles disappear, or do both missiles keep going up the screen, or does the game switch to a sprite with just one missile? It is hard to tell by watching the game because the usual case is that both missiles hit an enemy. I am going to test this.
4. I am also wondering how the NES port was able to display so many sprites. The NES has a limit of 8 sprites on the same horizontal line, so if it exceeds this there might be some sprite flicker. I am going to test this as well.
On Mon, May 6, 2024 at 11:03 PM Jeff Wires wrote:
I love Galaga and never knew this! This is just giving me more to talk about on the show!Appreciate it!-JeffOn Sat, May 4, 2024 at 4:13 PM John Coffey wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_58poXHxOg&t=877sThe golden ship reemerges when the game switches back to the second player.The enemy ship switched to the wrong characters for that sprite but kept the same color palette. If we assume that ship type is a single byte value, then that byte was somehow overwritten with a bad value, hypothetically a zero or a one which could be the value for the player ship. Errors like this could be caused by a memory overflow where a value was written outside the bounds of a table or the limited stack memory was exceeded.I learned that if Player 1 exceeds 999,999 points, it will not display the millions in the score. It is not clear if the player's score still counts as being over a million, or if it goes back to zero. However, the second player does not have this problem and his score can reach 8 digits.
Saturday, May 4, 2024
Rare Golden Ship Galaga Glitch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_58poXHxOg&t=877s
The golden ship reemerges when the game switches back to the second player.
The enemy ship switched to the wrong characters for that sprite but kept the same color palette. If we assume that ship type is a single byte value, then that byte was somehow overwritten with a bad value, hypothetically a zero or a one which could be the value for the player ship. Errors like this could be caused by a memory overflow where a value was written outside the bounds of a table or the limited stack memory was exceeded.
I learned that if Player 1 exceeds 999,999 points, it will not display the millions in the score. It is not clear if the player's score still counts as being over a million, or if it goes back to zero. However, the second player does not have this problem and his score can reach 8 digits.
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
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