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The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
111–120 of 199 posts
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#112[flagged]
The LLM-use witch hunt accusations are rampant on every single article. That snippet doesn’t sound like an LLM to me.
Have your coffee and consider that this person was just complimenting coders from back in the day.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#113It's kind of amazing how much of those old games was actual logic instead of data. Feels like they were closer to programs, while modern games are closer to datasets.
Chris Crawford called this "process intensity", he noted it at least back to 1983 with Dragon's Lair, discussed in this 1987 article https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/j...
Funny because I rewrote a bad port of dragons lair for a custom console with a tiny engine and huge dataset relatively, each frame having one "if press X goto frame Y" instruction.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#114I grew up with and absolutely adore The Last Ninja series. I'm not going to comment on the size thing because it's so trite. Instead - here's [0] Ben Daglish (on flute) performing "Wastelands" together with the Norwegian C64/Amiga tribute band FastLoaders. He unfortunately passed away in 2018, just 52 years old. If that tickled your fancy, here's [1] a full concert with them where they perform all songs from The Last…
Reyn Ouwahand who composed The Last Ninja 3 with Fastloaders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bobBcV4HcY
He also has a few nostalgia triggering covers of some Galway tracks.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#115Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#11640kb and it felt like a full world... I'm burning through tokens to get AI to decide whether to go to the tavern or the market. Something went wrong somewhere
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#117Pretty much every 8-bit computer game of 1987 or earlier (before the 128kB machines became popular) were < 40Kb? The Spectrum and Commodore combined probably had a library in excess of 50,000 games.
I love how you can put all the games ever made for a given 8 bit platform on a single flash drive.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#118I was looking at a production service we run that was using a few GBs of memory. When I add up all the actual data needed in a naive compact representation I end up with a few MBs. So much waste. That's before thinking of clever ways to compress, or de-duplicate or rearrange that data. Back in the day getting the 16KB expansion pack for my 1KB RAM ZX81 was a big deal. And I also wrote code for PIC microcontrollers th…
The BASIC 10Liner competition wants you to know that there is a growing movement of hackers who recognize the bloat and see, with crystal clarity, where things kind of went wrong ... https://basic10liner.com/ ".. and time and again it leads to amazingly elegant, clever, and sometimes delightfully crazy solutions. Over the past 14 editions, more than 1,000 BASIC 10Liners have been created — each one a small experiment…
That website seems to be gone now, unless it’s supposed to redirect to a sketchy German wix ad…
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#119A few years ago, I decompiled a good part of the PC version of Might & Magic 1 for fun. According to Wikipedia, it had been released in 1986, although I don't know whether that refers to the PC version or to the original Apple II version. It is a quite big game: the main executable is 117KB, plus around 50 overlay files of 1.5 KB each for the different dungeons and cities, plus the graphics files. I guess it was even…
>When you want to cast a spell you have to enter the number of the spell from the manual, maybe because there was not enough memory to fit the names of the 94 spells into RAM Probably not ;) "Enter things from a manual" was a tried old copy protection technique. If you used the warez version you presumably did not have a manual so you got stuck. This didn't run on the 8008 or whatever, I'm sure the game could have kn…
Ah, that makes more sense than my theory. It's a weak copy protection method, though, as you can just try and see what happens, and I think they dropped it in M&M3.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#120I never figured out how they did the turtle graphics in this game. The C64 didn't have whole screen bitmaps, you could either use sprites or user defined character sets, neither of which made this straightforward.
And the loading screens were also amazing, particularly for tape loading.