bananaboy

That looks really nice!

Exactly. There is a lot of ignorance in this thread. As if the only two roles are engine programmer and gameplay programmer where gameplay is just scripting. Nope. We have engineering teams dedicated to: UI, physics, rendering, streaming, automation, gameplay (people who write gameplay features that the game designers will access via script), build infra, pipeline (and pipeline is split up into people doing lighting/geometry tools vs tools that package up data for efficient runtime use), level editing tools, asset editing tools. I’m sure I’ve forgotten plenty. Then there are the QA teams, automation (not engineers but write test scripts etc), production, level designers, vfx artists, tech artists (almost programmers), character artists, 2d artists, prop artists, gameplay scripters. This is Activision but I know EA are similar and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that most AAA companies are also similar.

There’s a wide range of pay levels there.

It barely resembles id tech 3 at this point (I am an engine and pipeline programmer at Sledgehammer Games). There are very very few remnants of it in the codebase. I occasionally do some spelunking to see what’s left and these days it’s just the occasional comment and function names (although the content of the functions will have changed significantly).

It’s more nuanced than that. Programmers generally will be paid decently. Gameplay programmers aren’t really the bottom of the pecking order. That dubious honour usually falls to UI engineers. Other folks involved in development who often don’t get paid well and are usually involved in unions are QA, junior programmers, and junior artists. There are a lot more roles than just engine and gameplay programmer.

If you’re working for one of the big studios making blockbusters the bonuses can still be pretty good.

Absolutely! Maybe also Jonathan Kreisberg for guitar.. oh and on piano how could I forget Benny Green! I kind of feel he's not as big as he should be. Another pianist who I really love and took a few lessons with in NYC is Bruce Barth, also sorely underappreciated.

Depending on your definition, in jazz, I would say there are a few who might become/already are legends: Branford and Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Pat Metheny, John Scofield. Maybe also John Patitucci, Dave Weckl, Bill Charlap, Larry Goldings, Peter Bernstein, Bill Stewart, Brian Blade, Kenny Garrett, Kenny Barron, Bill Frisell. I tried to pick the bigger names who do a lot more touring internationally and who I think already have some wider visibility, rather than some of the (perhaps) lesser known players like Mike LeDonne, Chris Potter, Eric Alexander, Sam Yahel, Andy Gravish, David Hazeltine (who are all still phenomenal of course). I think Wynton and Branford, Mehldau, and McBride all have pretty visible profiles.

Yeah I know what you mean! I’m so thankful we can still go see Ron Carter and Herbie Hancock.

Oh crap I completely missed that! Boo!

Sonny Rollins was probably the last great player from the bebop age though who was there at its birth, and probably the last master who played with Charlie Parker too!

Ron Carter and Herbie Hancock are still going strong of course, and still brilliant. George Coleman, Jack DeJohnette, and Dave Holland are all still playing to pick some other names at random.

I don't think he's right about this AI slop comment (and I am anti AI slop!). The tom's hardware article might have used AI but it doesn't say that microcode updates fixed it, just that the microcode updates mitigated it. Yes it mentions the errata, but a human could have come to that conclusion based on the bug report. And firefox.com release notes for 151.0.1 specifically claims it has a fix for this bug! https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/151.0.1/releasenotes/

Some of these games are absolutely not DOS games though and no amount of semantics can change that. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City requires Windows 98 and DX9 or newer, for example, and it is available here.

edit: I see Vice City has been removed following a DMCA request!

Ahah I was just thinking about that tiny web server the other day and even submitted it here, but it didn't get any traction. Back then (and even now) I thought it was very impressive!

Yeah I agree too. I never understood the love for the win7 aesthetic!

Personally I never think of them being 64kb apart since you can’t access it linearly (without vesa at least and all the stuff I do for VGA is pre-vesa). I think of it as stacked planes.

Another option is MartyPC https://github.com/dbalsom/martypc

I was just thinking about the IPic a few days ago. I remember reading about this when it came out during my undergrad and I thought it was just about the coolest thing.

Awesome, do it! I love this kind of thing and do it regularly, mostly as part of the demoscene. I've written a bunch of demos for MS-DOS/VGA/Pentium 100 era hardware. All my own tools, almost all my own code (just using some standard library functions and someone else's mod player although that's on my list of things to write myself). All in mostly C with smatterings of assembly for speed (triangle rasteriser inner loops etc).

I also wrote a demo for 386/CGA hardware last year and I plan on porting that one to an 8086 as I think it is simple enough that it should be able to run on one. I've done a demo for the Sega Master System and I'm about to start a project for the Game Gear.

I also made a bare metal demo for the Leapster Explorer (an ARM-based kids toy).

I don't use AI for any of this because for me the interesting part is the journey as well as the final result. I want to learn how things work, and I enjoy writing the code.

How well does that run on real hardware (or PCem/86box)?

This is amazing, great work! I love it!

100% agree!

This is very cool!

I completely agree with you but I think sometimes folks carry some piece of data around as a string or int instead of something more concrete like a class or a strongly typed enum etc purely out of laziness!

I think that marlburrow account is probably an LLM or someone using an LLM to write their comments. Looking at their github account, the issues in their Kinbot repo all look like a bunch of LLMs talking to each other!

Has the article been edited since these comments? I see "It was a Y Combinator company" in the text.

I can’t read news stories about something terrible that happened to a child since having kids.

Neat! I’ve detected it with a simple (less reliable) way in the past for a demo (I forget why I needed to do that). It didn’t occur to me to inspect something like a built in command!

I used to use iTerm2. I had no idea it was doing all of this behind my back. That’s not what I want my terminal to do!

Amazing work and write up!

CNCD and Orange are two of my most favorite groups! Inside, Secret Life of Mr Black, Megablast are some of my favorites of all time.