mikejmoffitt

I'm writing a metroid-like game for Sega Genesis in C and 68k assembly. Probably nobody is going to play it.

For testing, some of the available flash or RAM cartridges are good bets. For distributing in small hand-built volumes, an NES cartridge is really just some parallel storage for the 6502 CPU(be it an EPROM, or a FLASH 29-series ROM (easier)) and another chip for the CHR graphics on the PPU bus (a similar ROM). RAM may be used in place of CHR ROM, and bankswitching "mappers" are commonplace, as the 6502 can not address much as-is.

It's fascinating to see this thing for the first time, but now it is understandable why Nintendo was not interested.

It is a good demo to show that (relatively) smooth scrolling can be achieved on such a low-end machine not designed for gaming, but as far as gameplay goes the resemblance to the Mario series stops below the surface. The physics that make the Super Mario Brothers games simultaneously unique, fun and challenging are more specifically defined than "2D Newtonian jump physics and you can jump on guys".

In addition, some of the background graphics are very well done conversions (clearly done by just looking at the original without actual access to the data) while the character sprites are surprisingly messy. What's going on with Mario's face? You'd think the Mario sprites would be the most important aspect of the presentation!

I don't want to be overly critical of something like this and it's really great to finally get a look at it, but it clearly took a lot of time so it's just odd to see certain details overlooked in what was to be a proposal demo to a big company like Nintendo.

What? The cloud tile re-use is from the first game, and no part of any Mario game plays back the melody backwards to generate the victory music. The victory music is a distinct musical track.

This shadertoy generates a scene from the game Gimmick! using a complicated shader. It was done for SIGGraph '15 but was rejected because it has trouble running on the judge's computers. Many browsers get upset while trying to compile the large graphics shader, as well as the very "fat" sound shader I wrote. I made a video of what it's supposed to do for those who can't run it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3izbzMNq74

It seems to work best on FireFox in Windows. Strangely, my old ThinkPad X61 _eventually_ ran it under Chromium, while Chrome on my desktop with a GTX 970 fails to compile it. Go figure.

A friend of mine created the GLSL code to show all of the bitmapped graphics shown, including tile animations, without any inputs. I wrote a wacky little "music stream" generator called ShaderTracker to create the music as a function of time. This is my first venture into anything shader related, so the graphics code is really the more interesting part. My friend is a genius and you should check out his shader work: https://www.shadertoy.com/user/Hamneggs

I am glad to see somebody write this because it still astonishes me that I'm faster than the computer. I don't want to wait before I'm ready to input things, I know it can work faster!

There are two sides to it - poor choices leading to performance issues, forcing the computer to wait, and also animations that completely halt UX until they are complete. Not much is more annoying than the seldom-overridden 300ms javascript click delay on touch devices, or the iOS animations that waste a lot of time.

I would use a Linux or OS X client. I would appreciate a good CLI as well.

"These operators increase the burden to learn Swift as a first programming language"

Come on. There are legitimate reasons not to carry one language's expressions to another, but this isn't a good one. Most people first learn of ++/-- as "By the way, you can use ++ as a shortcut to add one" and leave it at that.

No worries, it's also awful in a browser.

Disagreed - the X220 top lid is flimsy and cracks easily, and the resolution is impressively terrible (WXGA! In 2015!). I do appreciate its moderate battery improvements, but I'd prefer an X201 in just about any other way.

EDIT: I almost forgot that the X220 front bezel warps outwards in even the slightest cast of sunlight on a nice day. It's pretty alarming when it's not expected.

If you don't need the newest and fastest, I recommend a ThinkPad X201 (upgrade the LCD to an AFFS one if you like a little DIY), or you can go really hard and get an X61.

Debian has worked great on both.