Live data from Hacker News

Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

twitter.com

21–30 of 143 posts

Re: Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

#21

There is a good debugging advice related to this story: "if your code is the same but suddenly starts behaving differently, check for hidden state."

It's more like code than state, isn't it? The thing that changed is the implementation of a circuit for computing the result of some calculation, i.e. a function.

Re: Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

#22
post #4

I often enjoy foone’s discoveries, and this was a particularly interesting one. I just wish it wasn’t all on Twitter. Why not put the text, plus pictures and whatever else (links?), into a blog posting, or just some HTML page with basic formatting? And then link to it with just the first Twitter post. Provide an RSS feed if you feel extra charitable (which is the way I enjoy most of the content related to this that I…

Heh, from foone themself: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html

Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?" CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT.

The short story is they are quite open about having ADHD, and that's what causes the long twitter rambles, but also what makes it very difficult to assemble it into a blog post. Every once in a while foone's wife will edit a popular thread into a blog post, examples: https://foone.wordpress.com/

If this seems like a particularly good story to you, maybe you'd like to edit it into a draft for a blog post and gift that to foone?

Re: Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

#23
post #6

TLDR: Some NES game cartridges contained coprocessors. The Pilotwings math coprocessor had 3 revisions and one of them produces slightly different outputs, even though the game ROM is identical. Star Fox had a 2D/3D chip called Super FX that sounds a lot like a GPU. It’s pretty cool that console games of that era could augment your existing hardware to support their requirements.

The most hilarious enhancement chip is the SA-1, used in the Super Mario RPG and other games.

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

It's essentially the same exact chip as the SNES's main CPU. Except three times faster.

Imagine buying a game for your 3ghz PC that ships on a flash drive. And that flash drive also contains a 9hz (edit: whoops, 9ghz, haha) Intel Core i9 CPU.

Re: Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

#24
post #4

I often enjoy foone’s discoveries, and this was a particularly interesting one. I just wish it wasn’t all on Twitter. Why not put the text, plus pictures and whatever else (links?), into a blog posting, or just some HTML page with basic formatting? And then link to it with just the first Twitter post. Provide an RSS feed if you feel extra charitable (which is the way I enjoy most of the content related to this that I…

I wonder how many stories will be lost because of stuff like this.

In particular, text messages.

I can't tell you how many stories have been told between myself and family and friends that are just one lost device away from oblivion.

Apple should have an official app to let people save their text with photos and videos, because they are really family heirlooms.

I suspect they are one of the primary reasons for icloud, and the new apple seems pretty "practical" in this respect.

Re: Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

#25
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not terrible. Twitter just isn't your preferred venue so you find it unnatural. It's natural for me to read and for others to read and for the author to have written on Twitter. Why not put it elsewhere? Twitter is our place. And we like when content is natively published there. I have no interest in Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Tumblr but I don't insist all the content in those places shouldn't be there…

> It's not terrible Low text density, atrocious typography, breaking of standard grammar, arbitrarily-spaced interruptions, no inline images (for mobile), limited external links and quotations, no headings, no custom formatting, random interruptions from other users. I really can't fathom an argument that Twitter is in any way optimal for reading content of any length. Value added is exclusively in convenience and so…

All of these are priority and value judgements.

The author sees all that very differently from how you do.

Additionally, there are numerous others, myself included, who see it differently.

Frankly, I am quite happy to take it however an author feels they can share it. Often, that brings context of value to me as well.

Not all of us care about optimal when reading. It is just reading. No big.

Re: Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

#26
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not terrible. Twitter just isn't your preferred venue so you find it unnatural. It's natural for me to read and for others to read and for the author to have written on Twitter. Why not put it elsewhere? Twitter is our place. And we like when content is natively published there. I have no interest in Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Tumblr but I don't insist all the content in those places shouldn't be there…

Imagine a feature length movie delivered as 300 webms.

One could make another movie about all that transpired during the consumption of the original made this way.

Re: Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

#27
post #4

I often enjoy foone’s discoveries, and this was a particularly interesting one. I just wish it wasn’t all on Twitter. Why not put the text, plus pictures and whatever else (links?), into a blog posting, or just some HTML page with basic formatting? And then link to it with just the first Twitter post. Provide an RSS feed if you feel extra charitable (which is the way I enjoy most of the content related to this that I…

Heh, from foone themself: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?" CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT. The short story is they are qui…

Just copy tweets to post?

Re: Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

#28
post #4

I often enjoy foone’s discoveries, and this was a particularly interesting one. I just wish it wasn’t all on Twitter. Why not put the text, plus pictures and whatever else (links?), into a blog posting, or just some HTML page with basic formatting? And then link to it with just the first Twitter post. Provide an RSS feed if you feel extra charitable (which is the way I enjoy most of the content related to this that I…

Heh, from foone themself: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?" CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT. The short story is they are qui…

[deleted]

Re: Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

#29
post #13
post #6

TLDR: Some NES game cartridges contained coprocessors. The Pilotwings math coprocessor had 3 revisions and one of them produces slightly different outputs, even though the game ROM is identical. Star Fox had a 2D/3D chip called Super FX that sounds a lot like a GPU. It’s pretty cool that console games of that era could augment your existing hardware to support their requirements.

Small correction, these are SNES games. The extra chips on NES games were primarily memory mappers and not as interesting as what SNES games did.

Even though the NES chips were still called "mappers" some of the later chips did a lot more, particularly on the Famicom, where cartridges could add extra sound channels. Even on the NES though you saw some minor graphics enhancements.

Re: Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

#30
post #4

I often enjoy foone’s discoveries, and this was a particularly interesting one. I just wish it wasn’t all on Twitter. Why not put the text, plus pictures and whatever else (links?), into a blog posting, or just some HTML page with basic formatting? And then link to it with just the first Twitter post. Provide an RSS feed if you feel extra charitable (which is the way I enjoy most of the content related to this that I…

Heh, from foone themself: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?" CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT. The short story is they are qui…

I've subscribed to threadreader so I can save posts as PDFs, but I really wish they'd allow me to dump the underlying data as well so it could be put into archive.org.
Post reply on HN