ovineimperator: biggaybunny: ... - A Scientist's Thesis

Saturday, June 10, 2017

biggaybunny:
prettyflyforajeskai:
trenchgun:
gayunclejunkrat:
i dont understand half of the words here but god if this isn’t the funniest thing i’ve ever read
im pretty sure red and blue weren’t programmed but just sort of… mutated into cartridges
Red and blue are why QA teams were invented
for fuck’s sake they weren’t badly programmed. They were bleeding edge. It’s so easy to forget that but Red and Blue were literally pushing the limits of what they could fit on the cartridge.

They used every trick in the book. In that way, the programming behind them is GENIUS. It’s frankly a lost art, in this era where hardware is insanely cheap and scalable, when you can just keep throwing more resources at the problem. But Red & Blue were when programmers had to get creative. Not currently using a piece of memory? Repurpose it, we can’t just leave it lying around. Only have a couple registers? Juggle them, keep careful track so we can restore them when we needed. Does this data need to be single purpose, or can we also use it for, say, a seed value?

And all this WORKED. I guarantee you 99% of children playing this never saw a bug in casual play. MODERN games are buggier by a landslide. Remember when X&Y came out and there was an ENTIRE CITY you couldn’t save in because it’d DELETE YOUR SAVE? Imagine that happening in the days of Red&Blue. It couldn’t have. I can turn on my red cartridge TODAY and have it work. And the bugs that did exist, those edge cases they missed? They produce this behavior because the game REFUSES TO CRASH. Sure, you can make it crash if you try hard enough, but goddamn it’s resilient. It just plugs away with garbage data in memory for as long as possible.

Y'all looking down from your 64-bit quad-core smartphones with 128GB SD cards like Red & Blue were programmed by amateurs. What, you also going to bitch that the Wright Brothers didn’t make a jet engine? These are artifacts from pioneers who wrote the goddamn book that others would use as gospel.

Sincerely,
a pissed off goddamn programmer.
@maggiedeshiboux