In my father's accent/dialect (South Wales), the number seven is monosyllabic: it sounds more like "sevn" (with the v pronounced quite softly). The number "eleven" is similarly monosyllabic, and sounds more like "levn". I often use this when counting to a rhythm. Shame the numbers from thirteen onwards do have more than one syllable.
One thing that I heard from folks who do development for retro Atari platforms is that the 68k support in GCC has been getting worse as time has gone on, and it's very difficult to get the maintainers to accept patches to improve it, since 68k is not exactly widely used at this point.
Specifically, I heard that the 68k backend keeps getting worse, whilst the front-end keeps getting better. So choosing a GCC version is a case of examining the tradeoffs between getting better AST-level optimisations from a newer version, or more optimised assembly language output from an earlier version.
I imagine GCC 6.5 probably has a backend that makes better use of the 68k chip than the GCC 11.4 that ngdevkit uses (such as knowing when to use dbra) but is probably worse in other ways due to an older and less capable frontend.
Yes, we migrated over to Linux for a number of reasons, among them 1/higher developer mindshare, and 2/Linux had better SMP performance for the first decade or so vs. FreeBSD as we started to buy beefier multi-core and multi-socket servers.
Having worked at both Yahoo and Amazon, I don't think that's necessarily true. Amazon has a strong culture that's reflected in our Leadership Principles and has survived multiple significant tech stack changes over its history. Yahoo was never quite so principled as much as it was quirky and fun.
My favourite example of this sort of redundancy is the fact that there are numerous rivers in England called the River Avon. Avon is believed to come from the Proto-Brythonic word "aβon" [0], meaning "river".
Upper management seeing a really straight line between performance and dollars.
Right now there are steps in between which means they care more about selling the design and its variations. If there is a PPA miss you could point the finger in a few directions
I played Ur-Quan Masters for the first time earlier this year. Despite its age, I found it to be one of the finest games that I'd ever played. The story, in particular, is just perfect, and has just the right mixture of seriousness and comedy, very much in the same style as another (even older) classic, Starflight. Being able to build the game from source and read through the code was a nice bonus.
I highly recommend checking it out; if you can get over the rather dated graphics and gameplay mechanics then you'll find this to be a real gem.
I've tried playing through it a couple times. I always get into a sort of permanent game over mode where the Ur-Quan have started to invade my airspace and I don't have ships capable of fighting them off because I've been gathering resources.
I do wish there was some way of turning off the in-game timer that triggers the invasion and let people progress at their own pace. I gather it was probably a "feature" at the time that the game story progresses whether you, the player, are progressing it or not...but it's hard to soldier on after the second or third restart and dozens of hours lost.
I had a retail box copy of Star Control 2, and it came with a big fold-out map of the star system, with points of interest highlighted. If you play without the advantage of that guide, it is understandable if you struggle. They intended for you to have some guidance.
I think I still have that map in a box somewhere. What a great game.
My brother brought home a stock of copied floppies back in the day. The had a number written in sharpie on them, that was it. I had a notebook with all sorts of notes and drawings. I think having that map might have ruined the experience a little for me.
If memory serves, the map just subtly highlighted stars where there was something more than mere resources to be found. It could be backstory, useful items, dangerous enemies, etc. The marking was so subtle that I didn't even notice it until my second playthrough, when I was deliberately trying to discover more stuff.
My suggestion is to read the walkthrough and enjoy it! there are some massive things going on through that whole section of the game, and you really get the idea that you're one really small speck in a whole universe.
if you haven't read (one of the many) walkthroughs yet, go ahead and find some interesting things just being a fly on the proverbial wall.
Star Control 2 is a game where the game is incidental, and the real hero is the story writing.
This also was what stopped me from ever completing the game, even back in the 90s when it was still Star Control 2. I am not really a fan of games that force an arbitrary timer on the player, it feels like a holdover from the bad old days of coin-op arcade machines.
A while back I discovered a fork of Ur-Quan Masters which includes a time dilation feature that seems like it might make the game more fun to play, although I haven't tried it yet simply because I don't want to start playing and realize once again that I'm being punished for exploring and forced to start all over again: https://uqm-mods.sourceforge.net/
At least in Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mass Effect 2 when this same thing happens it's based on a trigger, so as long as you know the trigger you can go do the mission immediately. Alas in Star Control 2 the timer is counting from the beginning so the game leaves you little choice.
> I am not really a fan of games that force an arbitrary timer on the player, it feels like a holdover from the bad old days of coin-op arcade machines.
I like it in RPGs, when it’s well-done. It improves immersion for me, when there’s not just talk about urgency, but actual urgency.
But one of the games where I loved it most, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, people complained a lot about it.
After my first few playthroughs, I was so much faster, and had far more time than I needed, and I always wished I could go back to knowing less and being back under time-pressure.
I do not like it for non-RPGs or games with "RPG elements" like X-Com.
If you're talking about the original X-Com, there's no hard time limit. The game gets more difficult over time, but you can never lose purely by playing too slow. Notably, the aliens never attempt to infiltrate Russia, so you can never lose by complete infiltration of the Council of Funding Nations.
I honestly consider it to be the best video game of all time. It holds up surprisingly well, which is pretty amazing since it's from more than 30 years ago.
Ironically, Welsh is a much simpler language than Irish, and easier to learn for an English speaker. Almost completely regular orthography, much simpler grammar (with no grammatical cases). But, simple or not, the grammar and orthography are very different to English.
Do you mind if I ask how you learned Irish? It's a language that I would like to learn a little of at some point, but so far I've been too daunted to attempt it.
What is it that makes USB perfectly fine for spinning rust but not quite ideal for SSDs?
I've been booting a couple of Pi 4s from USB SSDs for a while, in order to avoid relying on SD cards, but I'm not really familiar with what all of the implications of this are.
Oh - I'm just talking about speed. Of course there's no problem using SSDs aside from that. I'm running several older Pis off of SATA SSDs connected via USB 2, for better speed and reliability than SD cards.
For spinning rust, two fast (220 MB/sec) drives don't max out the single USB 3 channel on a Raspberry Pi 4. I have one colocated with two software mirrored 8 TB drives, with UASP, and I can get the full 220 MB/sec per drive at the same time with that setup.
