I guess I'm showing my age but having read stuff like Michel Abrash's books years ago this article was a bit underwhelming.
Like no one who wrote any code back in the 80s or 90s even for a homebrew game was skipping this stuff, it was in almost every book and tutorial. Stuff like bit shifting was extremely common and a lot of games would have had design choices that were informed by coding challenges. Lots and lots of code had data structures aligned on byte/word boundaries or had data massaged to fit into the limits of hardware in order to make reads happen in a certain # of cycles, etc.. certainly almost all console games had lots and lots of fascinating design choices like this.
This game may have been exceptionally well optimized but it feels like if the original code is not in the public domain these weren't the best examples.
When he started writing about their being a clean sheet re-implementation I thought there was going to be a benchmark comparison of the modern rewrite vs the original on old hardware or something, that would have been interesting.
Thankfully or not I'm just barely young enough that I never had to write anything professional in assembly, though if I had gone into games maybe I would have.
> You might be able to argue he was a bigger star than any of them.
I think that's a hard argument to make.
Candace Bergen's career was just as long. Her first movie role was 1966, she was nominated for an Oscar in 1979, and she was on a popular sitcom from 1988 to 1998 that won her five Emmies and attracted national commentary after criticism from the Vice President.
I was a kid in the 80s and 90s and to me even then Chuck Norris was a B-movie self-parody joke character. He was not an A-list "action star" in the sense that Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or even Van Damme were.
The only problem with Chromebooks and the whole Google educational toolchain is it ruins school!
My kid is on it, every kid hates it and every teacher hates it. You just can't argue with the pricing. I'm amazed at how bad everything seems to old fashioned paper text books.
Every time I help my son I'm amazed how bad it all is. Horrible tiny screen that looks like is from 2000 and then the software is all designed for some Googler who has 2x 30" 5k displays. The usability is atrocious.
Chromebooks are the SaaS of hardware where the user is not the buyer. No one says “I would love to have a Chromebook at home” any more than they desire to run Salesforce at home.
A Chromebook at the same price point will get you similar if not better specs, 14" 16:10 FHD IPS display, convertible with touchscreen and pen input, backlit keyboard and 10h+ battery runtime.
A Fuzz Face works the way it does because it actually gets affected by the guitar's impedance changing as you work the knobs on the guitar and pick differently. The Fuzz Face has minimal input filtering, the guitar's knobs actually change the bias of the first transistor IIRC and cause massive changes in sound.
If you stick a buffer in front of it that interaction is gone and there is nothing you can stick after the buffer to bring it back. You pretty much have to plug the guitar directly into a Fuzz Face for it to work as intended. There are even constant arguments about putting the Wah in front of the FF or after it. I'm not sure if the article even has it right or whether Hendrix did it differently at different times. Other articles show a different order of the effects.
There are other fuzz circuits that behave differently and work better with buffers and would be more uniform when used with other types of instruments or with electric guitars with active pickups (which are buffered).
E.x. I have a Tone Bender and have had several Fuzzes in the "Big Muff" category along with one that was based on the Fox Tone Machine. The Tone Bender and Big Muff can't clean up at all like the Fuzz Face via the guitar controls, and IIRC the Fox Tone Machine is somewhere in the middle. The Fuzz Face when setup correctly is really quite amazing as you can go crystal clear to crushing fuzz with your volume knob on the guitar. When you've tried it you realize Jimi Hendrix was doing it constantly in an amazing way.
There are certainly guitarists who can play simultaneous melodies.
If you're limiting to a 6 string guitar the distance between the two melodies would be limited compared to a piano but guitars don't have to be limited to 6 strings.
Classical guitar is full of this kind of thing.
Having taken piano lessons but being more into guitar I think the thing is almost all people who play piano are introduced to this and it is a core concept in far more piano music than guitar music. But it is not impossible on guitar, and many works for piano that get adapted to guitar require the player to do so.
E.x. there are plenty of players who have studied and played the Well Tempered Clavier on guitar.
The whole thing about people being defensive is interesting. I love techno, but anyone who has learned other styles of music recognizes the repetitiveness and quirks of a lot of techno and some other electronic genres.
They do a great job with changing their timbre and tones but often ignore a bunch of other factors that make music interesting. Whether that is the rarity of time signatures other than 4/4, the way certain rhythms are locked into certain genres, the choices of keys used, the limited or missing chords, etc.. at some point you start hearing two electronic songs that sound totally different at a superficial level and you realize they're incredibly derivative of each other.
LOL. Las Vegas water prices are ridiculously low for the paltry amount of water they have. It's hard to get people to not waste the water when the price is artificially kept low.
Las Vegas water is less expensive than mine, and we have in excess of 10x the precipitation and everything is naturally green.
I still have an expensive Canon dedicated slide/film scanner from 20 years ago.
IIRC at some point their value started going up as they became rare.
Mine did something like 50MP scans of 35mm film/slides. The quality was more than enough.
But it was painfully slow.
This thing is not 100x faster, so I think it's still painfully slow. If it takes 5 minutes to do a roll of 24 that still means someone with hundreds of rolls needs to have a lot of time on their hands.
Not sure I can actually figure out software to get my old one to work FWIW, but I don't think I care to deal with it, I have a big enough mess dealing with the ~200k digital photos that are already on disk.
Another reason that this matters (which is artificial) is that at least in the US so many car owners are on "permanent car payments".
They never pay off their cars and trade them in on another one and just keep making payments without really ever owning a car outright. And increasingly as prices have gone up they are trading cars in that they are underwater on, rolling old debt into the next loan!
If you're in this category of insane financial ignorance trying to appear rich but actually being "car poor" of course this resale is a huge problem. But for anyone who buys a car outright or pays off their loan and then drives the car for many years it's not a problem at all whether you bought new or took advantage of the massive depreciation and bought a lightly used one for a great price.
Like no one who wrote any code back in the 80s or 90s even for a homebrew game was skipping this stuff, it was in almost every book and tutorial. Stuff like bit shifting was extremely common and a lot of games would have had design choices that were informed by coding challenges. Lots and lots of code had data structures aligned on byte/word boundaries or had data massaged to fit into the limits of hardware in order to make reads happen in a certain # of cycles, etc.. certainly almost all console games had lots and lots of fascinating design choices like this.
This game may have been exceptionally well optimized but it feels like if the original code is not in the public domain these weren't the best examples.
When he started writing about their being a clean sheet re-implementation I thought there was going to be a benchmark comparison of the modern rewrite vs the original on old hardware or something, that would have been interesting.
Thankfully or not I'm just barely young enough that I never had to write anything professional in assembly, though if I had gone into games maybe I would have.
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