Does this 8088 code in the Leisure Suit Larry 2 game do anything?
retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
So there is no unfairness here. Put your pitch forks down.
They're not wrong really. It is gibberish on it's own. We don't know where in memory that it starts or the places it is referencing in the jumps. If it were ASM source code those jumps would likely contain labels instead of just raw dogging memory locations.
The fact that it just so happens to be from COMMAND.COM from MS-DOS 3 is a wonderful bit of detective work, but it doesn't make the snippet any less gibberish.
For example, taken out of its original context, this sentence fragment from your comment is meaningless:
"that definition, any language"
The code is not gibberish, but the way it was put there, missing information, etc, makes it so
This is a huge problem with SO, the person making the question is not usually the most qualified to decide and they usually won't come back to check for further answers.
One of many reasons I stopped answering a long time ago.
IIRC they recently changed the default sorting of answers to not always put the accepted one first to try to help with that common misconception.
It was sufficiently eunuchs-like for the time.
Also, it is by coincidence as seen in the COMMAND.COM disassembly which would be the correct answer.
https://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/88/29.html
INT 21 - DOS 2+ - GET RETURN CODE (ERRORLEVEL)
more in the link above. That took me like 30+ years ago back ;)
Perhaps this is something along those lines?
At Caltech some students would see how bright an LED could get if you immersed it in a liquid nitrogen bath.
There was always something fun going on.
Besides, IBM PC-compatible systems already had a reliable way of making basic sounds - the PC speaker. There was no need for the techniques you're describing on that platform.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of old games doing this for fun too.
I've read it a few times (half-heartedly) and then just to be sure (quite a few glasses of wine consumed already) I did a search for the word "screen" - nope, but not exactly conclusive.
There are several theories espoused but one comment is: "In a brief email conversation with Al Lowe ... he probably used the COMMAND.COM file as the basis for this code ..."
Your assertion about "reliable way of making basic sounds" is sort of true, if you ignore the shonky hardware that used to and get shipped as a "speaker". It's better nowadays and largely an anachronism. Back in the day you'd wedge a Soundblaster into an ISA slot along with some reasonable speakers or really good headphones and job done.
Your parent may be thinking of the silly games that used to be played with big old Winchester discs on big IDM gear and the like.
As someone else mentioned, it shows up in the GIF animation, about 45 seconds in, as a sequence of text boxes.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/8Aznd.gif
> Your assertion about "reliable way of making basic sounds" is sort of true, if you ignore the shonky hardware that used to and get shipped as a "speaker".
On the IBM PC, one of the channels on the PIT (programmable interval timer) was hooked up to a speaker. It didn't sound great, but it could at least make simple tones on its own, and even music, without sucking up too much CPU time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ
The Apple II had it much worse. It had a built-in speaker as well, but no timers -- the speaker was connected directly to the memory address $C030, such that performing a read or write operation on that address would toggle the state of the speaker (on/off). Playing a tone required the CPU to hit that address in an appropriately sized loop; since the CPU wasn't particularly fast to begin with, it was nearly impossible to play audio while anything else was going on.
Nowhere. It is shown in the animation posted in the article, which you may have not noticed was animated if your eyes jumped over it quickly enough.
The post says "there's a part in the game where the main character (Larry) has to write a program in 8088 assembly language as part of his tribal initiation. [...] The code shown in the game is:"
Emphasis mine.
There were a couple more, Coherent (also Unix-like) and PC/IX come to mind too
And this is how useful sites die.
By posting questions or answers, especially ones which get upvoted.
Comments are, intentionally, treated as lower value by the site. They're intended for discussing and correcting issues which may exist with a question or answer, not for revealing new information.
The point is that SO is missing out here.
> The point is that SO is missing out here.
Unfortunately, if comments were open to all initially the site would quickly fill with “me too” comments and other things that would fill the page with low quality content that would be effort to moderate. This already happens to an extent with answers.
My point being that the potential gain from automatically open comments may be less than the potential hassle from less useful users. Balancing these matters is difficult, many places get it even more wrong than SO and related sites do, and there is probably no perfect answer that doesn't put off some useful contributions.
Why can’t we highlight specific content and create a discussion thread hinged off the highlighted part?
Creating a properly written, end-to-end answer for a complex question is an heroic task if all you wanted to point out was that there was a demonstrably better way to do Item 15(a)(5)(iii) and the author missed it.
It’s funny that we, collectively as programmers, use git all day long to solve this problem for modifying discrete blocks of programming language text with discussion and more, but can’t seem to ever apply the same tools and fascination to written English.
Even more interesting now that we use the best answers to train models. You’d think there would be more discipline involved in making the best answer even bestier. (Like, say, Wikipedia)
... though note also that once you get karma on one site you get some base karma on all sites.
You only need reputation to have your edits applied immediately, without review. You can suggest edits at any rep level (even while logged out).
You don't need karma to comment on your own questions/answers (i.e. in reply to someone else's comment on what you posted).
Basically anyone can flag comments obsolete and this can make them be deleted without review.
My last comment was "this code breaks for obscure input X" but I can no longer locate it.
The real main problem with StackOverflow is that all the easy questions have already been asked and answered, and all the hard questions get little attention, so it's hard to get karma honestly. Many people have luck operating in obscure language tags.
You are too late.
That said, sometimes moderators could lock questions which were different from where they redirected to and insist that’s correct. This was one of the worst issues, imo.