Redkey

In my (admittedly limited) experience, SDL/SDL2 is more of a general-purpose library for dealing with different operating systems, not for abstracting graphics APIs. While it does include a graphics abstraction layer for doing simple 2D graphics, many people use it to have the OS set up a window, process, and whatever other housekeeping is needed, and instantiate and attach a graphics surface to that window. Then they communicate with that graphics surface directly, using the appropriate graphics API rather than SDL. I've done it with OpenGL, but my impression is that using Vulkan is very similar.

SDL_gui appears to sit on top of SDL/SDL2's 2D graphics abstraction to draw custom interactive UI elements. I presume it also grabs input through SDL and runs the whole show, just outputting a queue of events for your program to process.

I'm a bit confused about this story synopsis, to be honest. How much does the home video game crash of 1983 have to do with video game arcades?

I'll admit that I was still very young at the time, and wasn't living in the USA. I had no idea about the crash until decades later when I read about it as a historical event. Looking back I can recall that console games in my country were a bit thin on the ground for two or three years, but home computers (the 8-bit and 16-bit kinds, not PC/Mac) and arcades kept going strong.

Video game arcades and random video games tucked into corners of takeaway shops and shopping malls were still a common thing for me well into the 1990s. They only really started dying out rapidly in the 2000s due to increasing competition from home systems and computers (this time it was PC/Mac) in terms of power and networking, along with the rise of Internet-connected feature phones and then smartphones, which gave many people an ever-present source of time-killing entertainment in their pocket.

Dedicated arcades with big cabinet games involving custom controllers or displays, or other special features hung on for a while, but those machines rarely appeared anywhere else, and in the end even most of them couldn't keep drawing enough customers to remain profitable.

At the very least, please state which section you made small changes to, even if you are sure it's not worth mentioning what or why.

Maybe we could treat the appearances of recognizable, non-living entities in games (cars, buildings, airplanes, etc.) the same way we treat musical scores; the producer would be legally obligated to pay some reasonable, small, fixed fee per use to the original creator, and that creator wouldn't be allowed to object. And this wouldn't entitle the producer to use any trademarked brand or model name, just the form.

Because the Gameboy logo check and the actual display of the logo happen separately, there were ways to pass the check while still displaying a different logo on the screen. Given that I bought cartridges from major retailers that did this, I'm guessing that Nintendo either didn't know about them, or didn't like their odds in court.

Sega was doing something conceptually similar around the same time, and that did get tested at trial (Sega vs. Acclaim), where the court ruled that Sega could go suck a lemon. So there's some doubt as to whether any of this is enforceable anyway, although Sega kept including a similar system in their hardware up to and including the Dreamcast.

Of course, a company as large as Nintendo could just bankrupt a lot of smaller companies with legal fees via delaying tactics.

It's weird to me how GIMP and Krita clearly share a large amount of code under the hood, and even some UI design, but at the same time it feels so much less painful to draw illustrations in Krita than in GIMP. I'm glad I gave it a try.

I think that like a great many game mechanics, the fact that it's been done badly many times doesn't mean that it can't be done well.

I totally agree with the article's author. He mirrors my own feelings perfectly with the line "I can only say, with the best will in the world, that I'll believe it when I see it at this point."

I still look forward to playing Routine, and I believe that it will be released before I die (unforseen accidents notwithstanding), but beyond that I'm not holding my breath.

Child's play compared to what you'd need to do on a modern chip.

I don't think it's the chips, but the operating environments. Modern CPUs offer dozens of multipurpose registers and many more instructions and addressing modes compared to those old, low-cost CPUs, which should make things easier, not harder. But no-one's building old-style dedicated systems around modern CPUs; our code now has to play nice with firmware, OS, libraries, and other processes, including resource management and preempting.

Compare a single-gear go-kart to an automatic sedan. Getting top performance out of the go-kart on a closed track is difficult and requires nuance. If we could drive the automatic sedan around the same closed track, we could easily demolish the go-kart, and not just with raw engine power. The improved acceleration, braking assist, and power steering are enough. But when we drive the sedan we're usually doing it on public roads with traffic signals, intersections, speed limits, and other road users. That's what's more difficult.

Apparently the original game and Brood War expansion are free to install through the Battle.Net launcher these days.

If you have the original discs, the later official patches added the ability to copy the "mpq" files from the CD into the game's directory, so you no longer need the disc in the drive. Of course, you're still going to need a drive for the initial installation. That should work for single player (it's been a few years since I last did it) but I don't know about online multiplayer.

I haven't kept up with anime much for many years now, but I can easily imagine that this is the case. There had been mecha anime with angsty pilots and behind-the-scenes politics before, but Evangelion pushed it all to a whole new level by adding mysticism, massively flawed characters, and existential dread into the mix. I know that almost immediately following the initial release of Evangelion we got Gasaraki and RahXephon, both of which bear obvious influences from Evangelion.

I didn't know that generative AI could do things like this now.