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Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

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

#61

Post by xg15 »

krisoft wrote: post #57

You know, I think the crashing demo is more compeling game design wise. I watch it and have an itch to pull up a bit the nose and give a bit more throttle. That itch is the demo pulling me in, causing me to want to play. The perfect landing is meh, clearly the computer can do it, why would I bother picking up the controls? Interesting that the developers disagreed enough to roll a new chip, at what I guess was a cons…

(Spoiler)

My understanding was that the "perfect" landing was first, using the old version of the chip. Then the new chip changed the physics calculations and the demo replay became a crash landing.

So the "crash landing" cartridges are the newer revisions and I'd guess the motivation to change the ship was a simple "update this dependency to the newest version".

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

#62

Post by kabacha »

spilk wrote: post #2

Twitter is the worst platform for long-form content like this.

> Twitter is the worst platform

Ftfy

Seriously twitter is one of few things I hate with a passion. Everything about it stinks. I don't even use twitter but I randomly get rate limited: "you can't see this content because your rate is too high" - first time I click on twitter link in two weeks.

It's just mind boggling how it became so big while being so absurdly terrible.

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

#63

Post by celdon25 »

capsulecorp wrote: post #43

I enjoyed this but I hate twitter as the delivery method for things of this length. Its a terrible way to digest the content.

Came here to say the same. Someone needs to tell these people that Twitter is not a blogging service...

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

#64

Post by city41 »

caprese wrote: post #8
anyfoo wrote: 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…

Less clickthroughs = more engagement = better viral loop Thats the why, since you asked

I can’t speak for foone as I’d never heard of him before today. But I have asked people why they post long threads on twitter (because they drive me crazy too) and this is the exact reason they give. A link to a blog post is far less likely to get clicked than a twitter thread is to get read. It’s right there in front of you and you’ve already read the first tweet after all.

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

#65

Post by knolan »

wendyshu wrote: post #27
patrickyeon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Seems like something that could be scripted to publish to a blog.

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

#66

Post by tty2300 »

kabacha wrote: post #62
spilk wrote: post #2

Twitter is the worst platform for long-form content like this.

> Twitter is the worst platform Ftfy Seriously twitter is one of few things I hate with a passion. Everything about it stinks. I don't even use twitter but I randomly get rate limited: "you can't see this content because your rate is too high" - first time I click on twitter link in two weeks. It's just mind boggling how it became so big while being so absurdly terrible.

This happens every time for me and a bunch of others have reported it. I think it's meant to be a dark pattern to get you to use the app. To get around it you have to reload the page from the browser reload button.

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

#67

Post by kyledrake »

thomasfortes wrote: post #47

Great content, and then I followed @foone and one of the recommended people was another account that I just followed because the pinned tweet was this: https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/732005292808900608 I saw it before and probably on HN itself, but was left hidden in some place in my memory, it is an amazing project!

Had the pleasure of meeting @foone in Seattle a month ago. Definitely follow that twitter, this is -normal- levels of awesomeness.

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

#68

Post by krz »

userbinator wrote: post #3

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."

I usually say “check environment”, which is usually the reason — cron jobs run in non-interactive mode, new version of system library, wrong PATH variable, new math co-processor and so on.

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

#69

Post by kabacha »

tty2300 wrote: post #66
kabacha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter is the worst platform Ftfy Seriously twitter is one of few things I hate with a passion. Everything about it stinks. I don't even use twitter but I randomly get rate limited: "you can't see this content because your rate is too high" - first time I click on twitter link in two weeks. It's just mind boggling how it became so big while being so absurdly terrible.

This happens every time for me and a bunch of others have reported it. I think it's meant to be a dark pattern to get you to use the app. To get around it you have to reload the page from the browser reload button.

Funny how this dark pattern pushed me to never use twitter again though I'd be willing to bet it works more often than it doesn't.

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

#70

Post by mrob »

Causality1 wrote: post #55
Shakahs wrote: 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.

Not just back then. Nintendo has put a lot of wacky stuff in cartridges. Learn with Pokemon Typing Adventure had a bluetooth adapter in its cartridge to communicate with its bundled bluetooth keyboard. Some early NES games were actually Famicom boards with a 60 to 72 pin adapter embedded in the cartridge. Morita Shogi 64 had a modem and a phone jack built into its cartridge. Animal Crossing for N64 had a real-time cl…

More examples: WarioWare: Twisted! for Game Boy Advance with a gyroscope sensor, and Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand (also for GBA) with a light sensor for detecting sunlight.
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