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Comment by hannofcart | Hacker News Reader

I thought I knew Tetris. I guess I don't. I'm just humbled by how little I understood of the comment above.

Quick glossary:

DAS - "Delayed autoshift," the delay is between when you press the button and when the long keypress starts to register as multiple clicks, auto-shifting the piece to the sides. So this is kind of a software-based "convention" that everyone knows, you open your word processor, you press the down arrow, it goes "down" one line and then waits for a quarter-second and then starts going in a more fluid motion steadily downwards as the software converts the continuous keypress to effectively be a stream of down-button-presses. Tetris has this too, if you hold down left/right you'll move once then after a delay it'll start shifting constantly to the edges.

tapping, hypertapping - tapping a NES controller very quickly by using pressure in your grip to create a "springy" system where you can rapidly flip up/down across the actuation point, so that you don't wait for the delay and the computer-auto-button-presses but communicate each button-press yourself

CTWC - Classic Tetris World Championship, hosted by the Portland Retro Gaming Expo.

Rolling - strategies where you flip tapping/hypertapping "upside down", so that the hand holding the button in tension is actually pressing on the D-pad while the hand actuating the button rapidly is pressing on the traditional bottom of the controller. I don't know what styles are popular but the controller itself might be held upside down to facilitate this. This is something like pressing on your mouse button with two or more fingers in an alternating rhythm in clicky-style games, normally the directional pad is too small to hit with multiple fingers but this technique allows multiple fingers to each register a separate keypress.

Maxout - I believe this refers to when the score overflows the digits available for display and the game just tells you that you have 999,999 points and you have to use independent means to confirm how much you actually scored

CRT monitor - hopefully I don't have to explain this to folks here but a big bulky sort of display that was used before LCDs became ubiquitous, short for "cathode ray tube," which is a big electron gun that we would eagerly point at our own faces hoping that the electrons all got 100% absorbed by little phosphors on the actual screen, which could be reliably triggered to emit red, green, or blue light.

Adding one more thing about CRT monitors for younger folks here... they had better refresh characteristics than early LCD monitors (which had lag due to their more complicated electronics/processing).

They still have better refresh characteristics than LCDs, on paper, although the practical difference becomes negligible.

CRTs have better refresh characteristics at the same refresh rate, which is relevant to NES Tetris because it runs at a fixed 60.1Hz (slightly faster than NTSC). But LCDs are available with higher refresh rate than CRTs, so if the software supports it you can get lower average latency on an LCD.

Do the display controllers for LCDs not wait for an entire frame to be written, so it can display it at once?

There are LCDs with a refresh rate more than double 60Hz, so even with entire frames worth of latency they could still be faster than a 60Hz CRT

The CRT's electron beam gets to "write" the video data onto the phosphor in real-time, as the analog signal comes off the wire.

But only once every 60 Hz (for a 60 Hz display). So, if you have an LCD display with higher latency but also higher refresh rate, you could on average be spending less time waiting for new information.

We're talking about the NES here, the physical output is analog, and locked to ~60.whatever fps

I’m not sure if the NES can, but by the 16-bit era the console can modify what’s being output between scan lines. Obviously that’s only beneficial if the action affects what is below the current scanline, but the way images were drawn allows for techniques that aren’t possible when the entire frame is buffered at a fixed refresh rate.

There is also a lot more to latency than just refresh rate. Retro RGB, My Life in Gaming, Digital Foundry and more have volumes on digital signal latency, and it is not as simple as getting a high refresh rate monitor or television. The TV itself can add latency. If going through a receiver, it can add latency. Need to scale a signal from 720p or 1080p to 4K? Maybe you’ll add latency, maybe you won’t. If the display doesn’t have a fast scaler, external devices can be used which will reduce the total latency, even though they may add some of their own (10-33ms).

But the framerate of a CRT is surely limited by the decay time required for the phosphor to stop glowing. I suppose this could be mitigated with a weaker beam for each higher framerate frame...but then you'd get a dimmer image.

Though after looking it up: seems hard to find, some quote as little as 1ms, but the general trend is towards 4-5ms, so 200fps in theory. Learn something new every day.

I suppose in that case, then it really just comes down to people having fond memories of lugging their CRTs to lans, but not wanting to re-enact it when we have great >=27" 144hz 4k monitors that are also like 10mm thick :p

I couldn't imagine how big and heavy a CRT with similar specs to modern displays would be!

Pretty big. I’m the OP and this is the CRT I have:

https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1738948621238694167

At least 40lbs

Funny story, one of my best friends, former head of BD for confluent and former power lifter got this CRT for me and literally carried this massive thing down the street in downtown DC to deliver it to me. Ha!

It's possible to buffer whole frames, but there's no technical requirement to do so. Gaming LCDs update line by line.

>there's no technical requirement to do so

It lets you avoid tearing even if the sender starts acting weird.

I must be missing something because it doesn’t seem like ‘DAS’ needs such a technical name. Isn’t it just ‘pushing the D pad the direction you want the piece to go, then letting go when it gets there’?

DAS is probably shorter than anything most people could come up with to describe the style. Do you think your own description: 'pushing the D pad direction you want the piece to go, then letting go when it gets there' is a better way to communicate?

Almost any sufficiently advanced community will develop jargon that those outside it find confusing or lackluster.

It's not even a 'style' though, is it? It's just using the controls as designed.

Hyperclicking I get - it's pushing the button faster than the inbuilt repeat rate. DAS seems to just be.. what people must have been doing before hyper clicking got invented? Were people calling it DAS before hyper clicking became a thing? Or was it a retronym introduced to describe the disadvantages of that technique compared to hyper clicking?

The latter, and that happens all the time. I didn't hear ICE vehicle until EV was really on the scene.

Analog clock

Snail Mail

Well, considering Windows and MacOS have system settings to tune this (key repeat rate and key repeat delay), and considering the modern Tetris innovations are about how you can physically press a button faster, it doesn't seem that strange.

The selling point isn't being "technical". It's the 20x reduction in syllables.

DAS was basically a name people came up for to describe how keyboards repeat keys. Initial keystroke, a short delay, then repeated presses afterwards.

What's cool is a lot of the above terms are specific to NES tetris too. Tetris has a lot of depth and there's a ton of variants out there depending on what you want to get out of playing. Personally I love the TGM series but it's totally different from what you'd think of if you started with NES tetris.

"Human subcultures are nested fractally. There's no bottom." (https://xkcd.com/1095)

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