Viewing profile — dmbaggett

In the same era (age 7-12) I went to school on an airbase in Germany and at some point “they” (no idea who) decided I should not do normal math, but should instead spend time with …

I had “Microsoft Adventure” on the H89, which I played for a million hours and was why I dug up the original (probably not really; it’s complicated) Don Ekman Colossal Cave FORTRAN…

WUT, I had no idea. That’s cool!

I remember reading Byte Magazine when I was 7 and not understanding why I couldn’t plug one of those cool S-100 bus graphics cards into my Heathkit H89. So I made space invaders ou…

I don’t know how much time Andy spent building the “poor man’s VM” system, but I know it was a significant effort that underpinned the rest of the game. The packer was something I …

Thank you. Too many startups ago. :)

Sort of. While it was helpful to have the delta-compressed polygon list for each part of the level in its own 64KB chunk, the minor miracle of fitting >10MB levels into 2MB of RAM …

Exactly right! I had been working on a prototype for a Doom-style game in the summer of 1994 for the 3DO and built out the beginnings of the “sort polygons AOT” concept. While the …

Insomniac was down the hall from us when we wrote Crash 1 and yes, the Hastings brothers definitely wrote some very tight assembly code!

I don’t know about other developers at the time, but we had quite a lot of hand-written assembly code in the Crash games. The background and foreground renderers were all written i…

Many years ago (circa 1993) I ported the original Colossal Cave adventure by Crowther and Woods to TADS, a language created by Mike Roberts specifically for authoring text adventur…

It depends on when you do the query. Years ago (mid 2000s) at ITA, Carl wrote code to find the longest possible shortest route between any two airports with scheduled flights. At t…

We used these to make Crash Bandicoot and we even had a mode where you could run on the game on the SGI. It was ... sort of ... playable.

They were once required to do so (and may still be; I’m not sure at this point), at least if they want to offer flights to or from the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATPCO Howev…

For inference you could use a maxed-out Mac Ultra; the RAM is shared between the CPU and GPU.

Full disclosure: I worked with Andy on Crash and am an angel investor. If you’re interested in AI and gaming I recommend you reach out. This is an extraordinary team and opportunit…

Hopefully you’ve read the Polygon article and seen the videos with Andy Gavin talking about the underlying tech. I was going to do part two of the video series but COVID killed it.…

Yes, for Crash Bandicoot we had to entirely skip the C SDK for everything performance-critical; pushing arguments onto the stack and the SDK popping them off for each function call…

One of the best teams on the planet!

An authoritative source on this Inventing the Alphabet by Johnanna Drucker. She covers not only the modern evidence but also attempts to classify alphabets throughout history, with…

Unfortunately it's not perfectly supported. If you set up a private registry on gitlab and try to push packages with epoch versions, gitlab will normalize the ! to _ so everything …

I distinctly remember buying a 1GB hard drive in 1992 for $1300 via an ad in Computer Shopper. And that was a really good price!

At age 15 I wrote a pacman clone for the Atari ST and was both impressed by and jealous of Minter's Llamatron for the same platform. My game was 30Hz only rarely, usually degrading…

We didn’t use BSP trees for Crash 1-3; instead we pre-rendered frames of the game on our SGI workstations and recovered the sort order from the (software) Z buffer. Then we stored …

I honestly don’t know, but I’m guessing an expert 2022 3D game developer is around here somewhere. :)