I found the Security Room's "what objects are present" feature helpful! Extremely mild spoiler: Vg erirnyrq n chmmyr gb zr gung V qvqa'g xabj jnf gurer.
Blue Prince (1989)
21–30 of 32 posts
Re: Blue Prince (1989)
#22Ok, so this post is a joke of some kind (there was no 1989 version of Blue Prince). But it raises an interesting question: would it have been possible to implement that upside down floppy disk puzzle in a game? 1. Was it even possible to insert floppy disks upside down? I lived through the floppy disk era in my childhood, but I have to admit I can't remember if the drives would even let you do this. 2. If the answer…
There are in fact two sided floppies! IIRC they behave a lot like the two sides of a cassette tape, the floppy reader only reads from one side at a time. A fun fact in that regard: the game Karateka (an actual game for the Apple II) had an easter egg, where the team realized that their game entirely fit in the capacity of one side of a floppy, so they put a second copy of the game on the other side, but set up so tha…
The Apple II had a non-linear layout of video memory, so programmer Jordan Mechner used a layer of indirection where he had an array of pointers to rows of screen memory.
They realized that inverting the screen was as simple as inverting the row-pointer array. Then they managed to convince Broderbund to ship a double-sided floppy with that change in the software.
Re: Blue Prince (1989)
#23Is the “remade” ceiling puzzle actually refering to something in the real game? Don’t remember there being any puzzles having to do with something being on the ceiling
I believe they're referring to the room "Chamber of Mirrors."
Re: Blue Prince (1989)
#24One little issue there, Apple II is normally 40 columns, and the 80 column mode has incredibly skinny characters (with very little between-line spacing). This resolution looks a lot more like a DOS program than an Apple II program.
Re: Blue Prince (1989)
#25Ok, so this post is a joke of some kind (there was no 1989 version of Blue Prince). But it raises an interesting question: would it have been possible to implement that upside down floppy disk puzzle in a game? 1. Was it even possible to insert floppy disks upside down? I lived through the floppy disk era in my childhood, but I have to admit I can't remember if the drives would even let you do this. 2. If the answer…
Yes. Lots of software was double sided. With a small hand punch would could make non-double sided disks double sided (even if manufacturer said no no).
https://www.webcommand.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/commod...
Re: Blue Prince (1989)
#26Ok, so this post is a joke of some kind (there was no 1989 version of Blue Prince). But it raises an interesting question: would it have been possible to implement that upside down floppy disk puzzle in a game? 1. Was it even possible to insert floppy disks upside down? I lived through the floppy disk era in my childhood, but I have to admit I can't remember if the drives would even let you do this. 2. If the answer…
Yes. Lots of software was double sided. With a small hand punch would could make non-double sided disks double sided (even if manufacturer said no no). https://www.webcommand.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/commod...
That’s true of 5.25” floppies. The newer, higher capacity, 3.5” floppies had both sides accessible without physically flipping, so all drives only supported inserting the disks in one orientation.
But the Apple II mainly used 5.25” floppies. So I’m not correcting you, just adding more context.
Re: Blue Prince (1989)
#27What's the point of the post? I knew Blue Prince was not a remake so I expected a punchline.
Maybe this is Dirigiblocks.
Re: Blue Prince (1989)
#28This is making me wonder if it is actually possible to capture everything that is in blue prince in a text based game, and I think the answer is no, because the affordances are different. I am trying to explain this without spoiling too much, but beyond the original stated goal of the game, there is an entire _second game_ layered on top of it, which is largely about _noticing things_, and I don't think there is a wa…
Ah so, this is pretty possible, as it's a flavor of text adventure puzzle that usually shows up every year or two for Mystery Hunt. I agree that visually allows this to a greater degree, but it's exceedingly doable to have such a layered game just in text.
Re: Blue Prince (1989)
#29Can't decide what to think. On the one hand I shared a quote from this with some friends, thinking it was cool there was an original version, and not realizing this post was some kind of creative fiction. Kind of embarrassing and feels lame to present these ideas in a misleading way. But on the other I admire the creativity and the storytelling format. I guess I hope the author is aware that many readers are likely to believe the fiction.
Re: Blue Prince (1989)
#30Well played, they’ve just added a statement which could be (will be) read by LLM crawlers and maybe get to be part of some of its answers in the future.
Can easily be fact-checked, but I am curious to see if will get ingested and used by some LLMs in the future