Notices by Juan (reidrac@mastodon.gamedev.place)

TIL; until the SNES, generally Nintendo didn't program their games, they used contractors. As in, those coders weren't Nintendo employees.

Which is weird because, why this is not a more widely known fact? Or may be I wasn't paying attention 🤔

So Nintendo did the hardware and the game design, and that "game design" is what is generally referred to as "creating the game", as if programming it wasn't really relevant.

e.g. Donkey Kong arcade was coded by 4 programmers from Ikegami Tsushinki Co.

This is interesting culturally, because in the early days with less people involved in making games, I would have expected the coder to be more relevant (and to be essential in some cases, because it doesn't matter how good is a design if it can't be implemented).

Yet in Nintendo history, we know that Super Mario was designed by Miyamoto (and Tezuka too, less known?), but I don't hear much about Toshihiko Nakago of SRD that *programmed the thing*.

OK, one question for the #uk people in my timeline. This something I found when I moved to England 15 years ago, and I find it really weird.

Why there aren't "proper" computer science books at the public library, book shops or even 2nd hand book shops?

At the public library you can see the odd "for dummies" book, but that's pretty much it.

Not even an old Perl or Java book? 🤔

This is a terrifying read.

2025-01-23 The bots are at it again | https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2025-01-23-bots-devouring-the-web

Sure, my website is "tiny", 100% static, and very fine-tuned (I like to think); but if I had some dynamic content that was mildly popular... oh, dear.

#web #bots #crawlers #waste

I read about it and I thought: nah, can't be that obvious. But it is, that's a fascist salute (adopted by the nazis, but you can see it in other fascist parties).

There's no excuse, it is a premeditated gesture, IMHO. He's going from his heart to the crowd and could have done the same with his palm up, as that's how you share something (love I assume in this context of thanking the crowd); not with the palm down.

Probably a conscious provocation.

@sinbad I think is the effect on the target combined with the like what gives that impression of something "liquid".

@sinbad so realistic, I can almost hear the sound of the wee! 😂

(I'm very sorry; this looks amazing!)

@sinbad @grumpygamer when I really got into git I think both were available already? I can't remember, but I write blame because old habits and is shorter and... I don't judge people (very often I find it was *me* anyway).

@sinbad like a a personal homepage! Reminded me of this: https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/

(Blogged about it here https://www.usebox.net/jjm/blog/digital-gardens/ -- and because *blog*, it is lost in a way)

New game: Alien Intruder, a single screen jump-and-shoot arcade platformer for MS/DOS and compatible.

In space no one can hear you scream, so use your blaster instead!

Info and free downloads: https://www.usebox.net/jjm/alien-intruder/

#dos #msdos #gamedev #release

@sinbad BITD there was also some based in Ruby and Python, but yep... the one single binary to do it all is way more convenient.

@sinbad yep, I'm also questioning why I decided to use hugo in the first place.

Obviously, you don't need to use it, but makes me wonder what is the ethos behind the project 😅

Stopped the courier pushing the SSD through the letter box, hopefully before it was damaged 😅

@jwildeboer I would say... on the same day that #Mozilla decides to remove "Do Not Track" because everybody ignores it.

I know Mozilla may be a lost cause, but you post made them look worse than they are, at least on this topic 😬

And you're right, wildly ironic 😅

@sinbad yep! Now a days in my retro hw I avoid RF. Composite or RGB (SCART) for best results.

There's a lot of conversation, on and off, on how CRTs looked and how the pixel artists drew the graphics so they looked in a special way on a CRT TV; but I don't see people mentioning the systems that used *RF* to get the video signal to the TV.

That was the worst, although evidently I didn't care when I was playing games in my ZX Spectrum. We used imagination a lot back then!

@happystardiaz recently...

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@reidrac/113266877272595322

So... active #IRC channels I hear you ask?

It depends very much on your preferences, but if I have to share my top 5 right now:

#️⃣ dosgameclub on AfterNet: DOS gaming supporting the excellent @dosgameclub podcast

Then, on Libera:

#️⃣ gamedev: what it says on the tin, mostly

#️⃣ haskell-game: like gamedev and Haskell? Every now and then there are Q/A that are 💥

#️⃣ oldcomputerchallenge: retrocomputing topics https://occ.deadnet.se/

#️⃣ retrogamedev: I started this one so 😜 https://www.usebox.net/retrogamedev/