TetrisRant (1999) | Hacker News Reader

TetrisRant (1999)

tcrf.net

102 pointsfarazzz25 comments

Love the "crashing game is a secret not a bug" solution at the end too!

Yeah i remember reading something similar about a DOS game where the game was crashing when you exited and the developers hexedited the DOS extender to replace the crash message from 'Protection fault at blah' (or something like that) to 'Thank you for playing the game' (or something like that) :-P.

"Thank you for playing Wing Commander"

Yep, that was Wing Commander IIRC.

It seems it was a common solution to the external crash testing performed by publishers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9bkKw32dGw

Entertaining read! Kind of like a time capsule revealing what was going through their heads at the time. From reading it, it's pretty clear that shrooms and weed were heavily involved in the culture there at H2O.

Damn, they come across as angry teenagers with supercar posters on their bedroom walls.

Some are good, but that Lupin guy... geez. I'd like to think I'm a lot less elitist than I was when I was so (I assume) young, but he comes across a bit "racisist" himself.

This is an interesting snapshot of how racism seemed to be viewed at the time. Reading this I get the impression that bemoaning black women's hair seemed to be A-OK as long as you called her "african american". Can you imagine the recall that would happen today if this leaked out?

Rom dumping and illegal distribution was already going back than. If I understand this correctly this was not obfuscated in any way and located near the end of the rom. Fan translations of Japanese NES games should also have been around by 99, so people already fiddled with those dumps. So I'm a bit baffled by the intro text claiming the dev didn't expect anyone to find this for a long time.

I loved The New Tetris - specifically the power block mechanic (if you create a 4x4 square out of assorted tetrominos you make a silver power block, if you create a 4x4 square out of the same tetrimino you make a gold power block). I keep hoping we will see power blocks come back in newer Tetris games...

I'm making a trello card with a "reach goal" of saving things in 8.4 bits right now.

>25] Web pages that pop open other pages and windows and then disable your 'back' button.

I guess the web hasn't changed that much after all in 20 years.

Right, but even worse since we didn't have multi tab browsers yet.

So much usage of early JS on the web was simply malicious, and JS had a bad reputation for years. Many would even disable JS completely.

Amazing how AJAX was able to save JS on the web.

How did AJAX save JS? I would be interested in reading about that!

Mainly because updating a page without a refresh was novel. Then developers began exploring how they could manipulate the page in response, using the DOM.

The need for DOM manipulation led to a lot of early JS frameworks-- scriptaculous, then eventually YUI and jQuery afterwards. The explosion of clientside code in the browser also led to the V8 engine; before that, JS was far too slow for web apps to seriously compete with desktop apps.

But before all of that, JS was hated by both end users and developers. It did not have much use outside of dropdown navigation, image maps, and plenty of malicious (or at least annoying) client-side hacks (alert box spamming, popups, disabled back buttons, etc). It was not uncommon for users to have JS completely disabled. You needed to design sites knowing some significant percentage of users could not run your JS.

The improvements in JS performance over time is crazy.

I was an Opera user (started with 5.x IIRC) and its JS engine was pretty slow. I mean so slow that even in the early 2000s some pages with just a few animations were annoying to use and better viewed in IE.

Then at some point they rewrote the engine from scratch and also implemented JIT compilation to machine code. Opera might even have been the first browser to do so. After that it was lightning fast, ahead of IE, Firefox and Chrome before Blink/V8. If you use the last Presto Build of Opera today, those pages that still manage to render at all and use heavy JS are painfully sluggish, close to unusable.

Opera's JS engine rewrite felt like performance was suddenly IE times 10. Now it feels like Chrome/Firefox are Opera Presto times 100.

> You needed to design sites knowing some significant percentage of users could not run your JS.

Off-topic: if "everyone knows" this is no longer the case, then this statement about the new case is disappointing. It implies that the percentage of users who bother about privacy and security on the web is now insignificant, so nobody actually needs to consider them anymore, and nobody will, and things will just keep on breaking and staying broken.

There was also a whole scene of demo-like JS for years before XHR and serious use of JS... dig through http://www.ozones.com/ for some cool 90s era JS hackery.

It enabled genuine "web apps"; I think the first one I used that was really different from a static web page was Google Maps. Apparently that was 2005, I'd be interested to see other people's comments on the first really useful AJAX app.

The first I saw of functionality like this was editing the titles of images on Flickr.

I still remember the amazement I felt when I could click on the text, give it a new name, save, and all without having to load a single form.

The first common usage I remember was type-ahead autofill search suggestion type things (on google.com iirc). Such a small commonplace thing now, but it was pretty impressive at the time.

I thought it was Gmail?

Wow. Just wow. What it must have been like to be a coder in the 90s. Your job was your hobby.

Now the industry is full of crap kids who only studied CS for the money. But the truly gifted engineers are the passionate ones who live and breathe the craft.

Much respect for this time capsule.

I found out that the author died only two years later in 2001, and was only 29. Very sad.

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