Eh, there were plenty of games that were coded for a particular clock speed, and then once the SE came out, had an update that included a software version of a turbo button, let you select which of two speeds to run at. They run FAST on an SE/30 or Mac II and unusably fast on anything newer.
I didn’t encounter too many of those back in the day, I think because there was the VBL task mechanism for synchronizing with screen refresh that made it easy to avoid using instruction loops for timing.
Much more common in my experience was the assumption that the framebuffer was 1-bit, but such games would still run on my IIci if I switched to black & white—they’d just use the upper left 3/4 of the screen since they still paid proper attention to the bytes-per-row in its GrafPort.
Could be that by the time I was using a Mac II though that all the games that didn’t meet that minimum bar had already been weeded out.
Yep, that’s definitely the question. The article says that there are caches of recently used graphs for use in large loops. Presumably those are pretty fast to swap, but I have to imagine programming a whole new graph in isn’t fast. But maybe the E2 or E3 will have the ability to reprogram partial graphs with good AOT dataflow analysis.
For sure. Pretty similar problem space, very different implementation and target market. Apportable wasn’t a transpiler (and boy were we proud of that); it was a reimplementation of the iOS frameworks on top of a replacement NDK (Android’s libc was bad-mediocre at the time. Real nasty behaviors in its (dl)malloc for instance). Similar to WINE. It was always targeting games, so there was never a lot of effort to port any of the UIKit controls, but OpenGL CoreGraphics were supported. It also had a compiler extension that let you access the whole Android SDK in ObjC, and a tool for generating ObjC APIs from JARs. The goal was to make ObjC the one true mobile dev language. I applaud the effort to do something similar for Swift, even if it does involve transpilation.
While the large sample size and many controlled variables are good, and make the results statistically significant, the effect sizes are awfully small. Only two of the emulsifiers, tripotassium phosphate and guar gum, increased the hazard of an individual developing diabetes by more than 10% (11% and 15% respectively, with very large error bars in the latter case). These are much smaller effects than previously known Type 2 diabetes risk factors.
For instance, the HR for family history of diabetes is 4.46 (vs 1.03-1.15 here, where 1.0 is no change in hazard).
> Even Super Mario World[10] got the treatment (I can't remember slowdowns but I was only twelve can then).
Yoshi’s Island 4 has a slowdown in some circumstances (have Yoshi, get Starman and hit P-Switch), as does another level I can’t recall, exactly… it has a bunch of Monty Moles that explode all at once. I think it’s on Chocolate Island. I think there might be a third with two Sumo Bros. and an Amazing Flying Hammer Bro. onscreen.
This again? Last time this came up, it was calculated that in order to get to the levels (mg/kg body weight) found to affect fertility in study rats and pigs, you’d have to eat something like between 2/3 and 2x your body weight/day, every day (because it’s easily excreted), of chlormequat-contaminated oats. The studies on rats and pigs used much higher concentrations than are found in oats.
The notch is what it is: a compromise between webcam quality, branding, and thin bezels. But it’s hard to argue but that Apple’s software integration with it is mediocre at best. None of the extra space is usable except by anything but the awkwardly tall menu bar and the status items or menu extras it holds, and the system not being aware of the notch —sometimes— like letting status items pile up underneath, or being able to put the mouse pointer underneath it but not when a mouse button is held down (this behavior was removed in a late version of Ventura), or putting the picture-in-picture window partially underneath the menu bar (like it expects only a regular-sized menu bar to be there)… is symptomatic of a larger quality and integration problem at Apple, I think.
EV: Nova was the first shareware game I ever paid for. Also how I learned to use ResEdit. The Ship Variants mod was the best! There was nothing quite so overpowered as a Type IV Modified Valkyrie, a ship that was basically impossible to capture in stock without a massively larger ship or small fleet. It had most of the cargo capacity of a stock (Type I) Mod. Valkyrie, but about 3-4x the weapons mass, filled with missile launches and an ion beam (unheard of on a 2-day jump ship), and with room to spare for a medium laser.
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