I think it’s very important for creative people and developers to try and make something on their own, and then see if it’s fun or not. The game development process in Taito eventually changed, and we, the game creators, were increasingly expected to listen to the sales team, which came up with new title concepts they thought it would sell.
Personally, I don’t think that is the correct approach. Creators should try to make a game on their own first, and then it should expand into a larger project. This is what I’ve felt throughout my whole career.
The point is that it needs to be creatively led first, before the management gets involved. If you don’t try to make something first, you will never know if it’s fun or not. Younger people who want to make games should play really old games. They may not have good graphics, but there is something shining within them in a playable sense. There’s definitely something to be learned from those games and also to inspire people to make something new. Forget about the graphics, focus on the core design. What makes it fun.
Tomohiro Nishikado – creator of Space Invaders (and countless other games)
Interestingly, he found using just a random arrangement of monitors apparently doesn’t won’t work. The array is carefully calibrated to display a two-dimensional code on each monitor, then photographed in order to understand “the positional relationship between monitors.”
To self-test a Roland MT-32, turn the unit on while holding down the 3 button, Volume and turn on the unit to enter test mode. You can check all the keys and play some test tones. To test the midi, you need to have the midi cables plugged in. To play a demo song, just hold just Master Volume. The “MIDI Message” light should flicker if it receives data.
Inkbox decides to program without an OS. Back in the day, we used to do this by programming directly to the system or to BIOS with interrupts for things like disk, device, and display access.
Fast forward, and if you want to do this today, one doesn’t talk to BIOS – they need to program via UEFI services. Inkbox walks us through doing multi-core bare metal programming of the old game Zaxxon. It’s excellent work and fun walkthrough.
Replacing your Subaru mid 2010’s Crosstrek Headlights
Once your car gets about 10 years old, one of the most annoying things is that headlights dim and yellow. This is due to a number of reasons – but primarily due to the degradation of the UV coating. You can buff it off, but it often quickly returns and you’re stuck with an annoying chore almost every year.
Another option is to buy replacement headlights. In the old days, you simply unscrewed the old bulbs and put in the new ones. Now you need to remove the assemblies – which often involves removing the bumper and surrounding shrouds – as is the case with mid 2010 Subarus.
The Crosstrek/Impreza’s in the 2015 era were actually not that bad to replace. TRQ does a great job showing you how to do the job yourself – including how to re-aim the headlights. It’s a great video.
Engineers at Intel released an open-source tool that tries to quantify the issues from increasing amounts of upscalers, frame generators, and AI rendering techniques. Ironically, the tool itself is an AI trained on large datasets. Their paper about the methodology is located here.
CGVQM is a video quality metric that predicts perceptual differences between pairs of videos. Like PSNR and SSIM, it compares a ground-truth reference to a distorted version (e.g. blurry, noisy, aliased).
What sets CGVQM apart is that it is the first metric calibrated for distortions from advanced rendering techniques, accounting for both spatial and temporal artifacts.
I got my start in programming with type-in BASIC programs. Back in the 80’s, almost every computer had BASIC built-in, but almost no kid could afford games. Or even get them – the nearest store that sold software from me was over 30 miles away. Mail order took 2-3 weeks. On top of that – kids are notoriously broke. What I did have was a library, and plenty of time.
Enter Compute! magazine. After ravenously devouring all the programming books our small Carnegie library had, I branched into magazines. BYTE was too news oriented and didn’t have type-in programs; though reading about the technology was fun. When I found Compute! – I was hooked. I eventually checked out just about every single magazine they had a dozen times over. I remember digging in the downstairs old issue stacks in search of any I might not have seen. I spent whole weekend afternoons typing the programs in – and then even more hours debugging each line to figure out where I’d gone wrong.
Nate Anderson recently wrote an article about those early days of type-in programs. Even more fun is the comments section full of people sharing their similar experiences.
With the internet and instantly available content and content development tools – it makes me wonder how the next generation’s engineers will develop. How will the instantly available world of free software and tools shape them compared to our generation of type-in programmers?
Thankfully, all these wonderful magazine scans have been saved in the Compute! Magazine Archive on the Internet Archive. I even sat down and typed one in (well – heavily utilized OCR as well!). What a blast.
Q-Day is the day when classical computational cryptography we use today is slated to be obsolete, because quantum computers will finally be powerful enough to crack them. It is likely to have a similar effect as the Y2K crisis in that many digital security systems are not using quantum cryptography safe algorithms. The good news is that people can, and are, starting to fix things now. The bad news is that when it happens, the effects will be very immediate and catastrophic. Even that, however, is only half the story. We knew exactly when Y2k would happen (January 1, 2000 at 12:01am), but we don’t know when Q-day will hits us – until it’s already happening.
Konstanitinos Karagiannis provides one of the best, fullest discussion of the upcoming crisis. He gives a much clearer idea of when quantum computers will be able to break just about all existing cryptography – including all the encryption underlying Bitcoin and other online digital currencies. And it’s much sooner than people were thinking even 2 or 3 years ago. Like fusion power, it was always thought Q-day was 10-20 years away. It’s certainly what bitcoin promoters will tell you.
The summary?
The NIST says that all systems should have switched to quantum computing safe security algorithms by 2035 – but Konstanitinos says it’s MUCH more likely that we’ll see real quantum cracking happen sometime at early as 2027 based on the recent rapid developments in quantum computing and algorithm improvements. He points out its likely to start from government backed security agencies or very powerful, well funded organized crime groups.
What does this mean? It means any companies not updated to quantum secure cryptography will have computing systems almost completely vulnerable to having financial accounts emptied, customer data stolen, system take-overs or destruction, and ransom attacks. Secure emails and chat communications will be perfectly readable and usable for blackmail or extortion. Secure government and military communications will become vulnerable to infiltration. Infrastructure systems from airline traffic control, public transit, water systems, government computing services, to power systems become vulnerable to ransom attacks, havoc, and destruction.
It also means bitcoin and all digital currencies based on elliptical encryption/similar algorithms are very likely to drop from their current values to zero within hours after the first confirmed cracks happen. Clever attackers will likely crack a large number of digital wallets quietly over weeks and months by simply capturing the encrypted transaction data, and then flash-liquidate as many wallets as they can before the scheme is discovered and values go to zero. It’ll likely happen in less than a day. North Korea, even without quantum computing, already is doing this to the tune of billions per year.
You’re not even safe now. It’s also highly likely governments are using record-now-crack-later strategy of recording secret communications and bank transactions now so they can uncrack them later when quantum computing is cheap and easy. It’s very likely we’ll see it used for extortion in just a few years when everyone’s communications, web traffic, and bank transactions become public knowledge. If you thought Wikileaks revealed a lot of stuff, wait until governments and organized crime groups unencrypt years worth of recorded traffic.
He also covers the good points. There are cryptographic algorithms that are secure from quantum attack – which you should be using today. He also outlines how we will detect if people are using quantum computers to crack things by describing the current cracking algorithms and their telltale signatures.
Still – quantum cryptographic cracking is likely to be like lightening from the blue. Everything will be fine until it’s discovered to be happening. It’s very possible that literally trillions of dollars could be stolen in the matter of hours or days.
Fluxfox is a floppy disk image library – written in Rust. It’s intended to serve the needs of the emulator world and supports IBM, Amiga, Macintosh, and Atari ST formats. It can even perform operations on disk images consistent with typical operations of a PC floppy disk controller, while also giving low-level access to the track bitstream for other controllers.
