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Comment by nikconwell | Hacker News Reader

Great write up, thanks. I was intrigued by the "tilt" keymapping on the last line of your posting. https://computerarcheology.com/Arcade/SpaceInvaders/ notes:

> In the early eighties you would have found the Space Invaders cabinet in an arcade right next to the pinball machines. So a "tilt" switch, like you would find in a pinball machine, would not have seemed as strange as it does today. If you shake, slap, or otherwise physically abuse an SI cabinet you will get a TILT message and your game will end.

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Interesting! With pinball machines, that was to prevent cheating, since you could change the course of the ball by smacking the cabinet. (Some players consider doing this without triggering the tilt sensor a legitimate part of the game.) Hilariously, Video Pinball on the Atari 2600 supported it specifically: holding the button while you move the joystick nudges the ball around, but if you do it too much you get a TILT message and can't score any more points until you lose the ball.

It seems like a weird sort of reflex action to put a tilt sensor in a video game, though. Maybe they were just worried about frustrated players damaging the equipment?

I can’t believe I played so much video pinball without knowing that trick!

Supporting "tilt" was fairly common on home computer pinball games.

I'm firmly in the no-tilt camp, and it's very frustrating that all the pinball games out on Switch right now have no option to disable the tilt controls.

Brush up against the analog stick? Sorry, TILT.

It is a legitimate part of the game!

Bumping the table is a legitimate part of a pinball game (if you do not hit so hard to damage it).

Those tilt sensitivity is common in computer games, although in some computer pinball games there is no penalty for bumping the table too much.

(Of course, Space Invaders is not a pinball game and so physically attacking it is not legitimate.)

Space Cadet on the old versions of Windows supported bumping, too. You could avoid tilt by alternating which side you bumped. Two in a row from the same side would tilt, but alternating sides never did (for me).

Please don't use code blocks for quotes it breaks line wrapping on mobile.

It seems to break line wrappings, period. The breaking doesn't appear to be mobile specific, the quote appears as a single line on my laptop.

Incidentally I’ve never seen this implementation come out in a friendly way. Might be good just to turn it off tbh.

Noted.

When somebody who isn't pg learns ARC, maybe they will fix the URL parser, and add standard quote syntax.

HN stopped releasing source ages ago. There's a community-maintained fork, but the site we're currently using is opaque.

Sure, but if somebody made > terminate URIs properly in one of the forks, it might osmose into HN. One can dream. You can tell that they're still using the same broken code that is in the old ARC distribution.

HN actually has many improvements from the last Arc distribution, speaking as a person who runs my own fork of Anarki and used to run my own fork of the Arc distribution.

Unfortunately, they can't distribute their improvements, due to not having the time or YCombinator not wanting to give up some of their "special sauce" for dealing with spammers and vote rigging, etc.

And for what it's worth (which is likely very little) as a contributor to Anarki, support for > is on my list of things to add to sometime in the (mumble) future. Not that it will do HN much good.

Ok, I edited the GP not to do that.

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