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Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

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Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#131

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

crtasm wrote: post #118
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will admit to paying for Bleem! in the long long ago. I still have the CD. Frankly, it was pretty damned amazing.

Did burned game CDs work with Bleem? I assumed it made some check for an official disc.

I'm afraid I don't recall. I feel like it probably did if it was possible, as a defense against being called a piracy tool, but I'm not sure if there was any way for a consumer CDROM to check for the wobble groove. I owned a PlayStation and official games so I only recall using those.

P.S.: Some googling suggests that it played "backups" just fine.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#132

Post by typon »

corpMaverick wrote: post #18
nanna wrote: post #3

Must be fun being related to John Carmack.

Just a fun question. If you had a choice; would you rather be John Carmack or Tony Hawk?

Jim Keller. He looks like Tony Hawk but is technical like Carmack.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#133

Post by Lorin »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #96
wlesieutre wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bug rather than deliberately blocked. The on-page retry button will continuously fail, but if you go up to the address bar and keep hitting enter it will eventually work. Still embarrassing for a tech company of twitter's size. Displaying a tweet to a logged out user should be the single simplest job their service has, but it's usually broken.

>embarrassing for a tech company of twitter's size I'm a heavy user of Twitter. They have the most ridiculous bugs all the time Let me list a few I can remind in recent two years: 1. A serious bug that makes the private lists' name, member count, and description visible to everyone for half a way 2. ANOTHER private list exposure bug after a year 3. Lots of their features are semi- or totally broken, the most obvious…

Don't forget videos appearing as a blocky mess for the majority of playback time no matter how good your internet connection is.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#135

Post by aeyes »

bonoboTP wrote: post #37
delecti wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how the UI looks to other people, because "all in once place" isn't really a complaint I can understand about the Twitter UI I'm seeing. There's buttons and stuff between tweets, but with 280 characters per tweet (140 was definitely less readable) they're not significantly more difficult to read on Twitter than they are in the paragraphs you posted.

And you have to click on "Show this thread" at the end to see more, otherwise you only see some of the tweets. And yes, it's absolutely horrible that there are all those buttons and a repeated profile pic intruded at random points in the text, like in the middle of a damn word . I get that you need to tweet to get views and nobody reads blogs any more but this "Twitter thread" concept is a UX horror.

And "Show this thread" takes me to the comments first, I have to scroll up to see other messages by the author and the order seems incorrect.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#136

Post by moosebear847 »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #19
fmax30 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would absolutely blow my mind, I would even merge it without multiple approves. :D And add a new contributors section in the readme with John Carmack at the top.

John Carmack is awesome, but I find this level of deification (of any individual) kinda creepy - it just feels unhealthy. Would you like to be treated that way, in Carmack's position? I realize that your comment was likely made in jest, but it still bugs me.

Interesting, yeah it's probably hard for a famous person to connect with you on a real level if you're busy groveling and kissing the ground they walk on.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#137

Post by tombert »

crtasm wrote: post #118
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will admit to paying for Bleem! in the long long ago. I still have the CD. Frankly, it was pretty damned amazing.

Did burned game CDs work with Bleem? I assumed it made some check for an official disc.

I never had the PC version of Bleem, but I can confirm that a burned copy of Metal Gear Solid worked for the Bleemcast port of it.

My parents wouldn't let me buy M-rated games, so the easiest way for me to play MGS was on my Dreamcast with a copy of Bleemcast that I found used at Gamestop for four dollars with a pirated copy of the game.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#138

Post by madeofpalk »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #96
wlesieutre wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bug rather than deliberately blocked. The on-page retry button will continuously fail, but if you go up to the address bar and keep hitting enter it will eventually work. Still embarrassing for a tech company of twitter's size. Displaying a tweet to a logged out user should be the single simplest job their service has, but it's usually broken.

>embarrassing for a tech company of twitter's size I'm a heavy user of Twitter. They have the most ridiculous bugs all the time Let me list a few I can remind in recent two years: 1. A serious bug that makes the private lists' name, member count, and description visible to everyone for half a way 2. ANOTHER private list exposure bug after a year 3. Lots of their features are semi- or totally broken, the most obvious…

I was surprised by being able to see a tweet from a user who had blocked me after someone mentioned it in my replies.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#139

Post by munificent »

jandrese wrote: post #81
underyx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you want a simple explanation for this story: he tried to run an old pre-iPhone mobile game on a computer. The game runs very slow on computers, which is surprising considering the performance difference between these old phones and a modern computer. The reason turned out to be that the game runs a memory cleaning command to avoid bugs arising from lack of space. Since modern computers have 10000x more memor…

It seems kind of crazy to me that people were using a GC language on a device with 128kB of memory. John even mentions how he was forced to run the GC on every frame to avoid problems. I would think when you are that constrained you would be closely tracking your memory usage. It's probably a miracle that those games weren't constantly hitching and crashing due to slamming up against the memory limits.

Garbage collection was invented for Lisp, which initially ran on a machine with 18,432 bytes of RAM.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#140

Post by MaxBarraclough »

tinus_hn wrote: post #61

Strange, if the software expects this little memory wouldn’t it be better to just limit the JVM to less memory?

mukesh610 had the same thought. [0] I think papercrane's response is correct: it makes more sense to disable explicit GC. Running a full GC cycle every frame is going to severely undermine a modern generational garbage collector. Disabling explicit GC, and using a modern low-pause GC, seems like the way to go.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222631

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