These “home pong” consoles were very common at the time. They don’t really do much, so their main value is historical interest, and this isn’t a particularly famous model. A quick eBay search seems to indicate it might go for GBP 80 at most, but probably more like GBP 20-40. So OP got a good deal, but they didn’t find a lost Vermeer. :)

They probably did. It’s not exactly honest, but the system is technically outputting a colour signal, and it was released at a time when that wasn’t a given. They didn’t say “full colour” anywhere on the box, did they?

Let’s call it a mix of lower expectations for the time, and a bit of marketing deception.

Found in an Edinburgh charity shop, so while it’s not impossible, it’s unlikely.

EDIT: Also, an NTSC signal on a plain PAL TV would be black and white (not even false colours) even if you got an otherwise stable picture.

It’s easy to forget, but these old systems didn’t connect to the TV with composite RCA connectors, but via RF. So we’re not just dealing with straight PAL, but with PAL over a broadcast system. Scotland was using PAL-I for broadcast, while Poland seems to have used a combination of PAL-D and PAL-K. Differences in channel ranges and bandwidths, and sound channel offsets, could make it difficult to tune a TV set designed for one system to a signal from another, especially if it’s a more modern set designed for automatic operation, as OP’s set appears to be.

In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer’s memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.

Yes, they’ve changed the Pitfall image. Originally they were using the first image from CrayonRosary’s post.

Gamer sites on the early Internet were full of these “Easter eggs” that were really just non-obvious things with clear explanations in the manual.

One that I found particularly irrimusing (and seems to keep popping up forever) was that holding some combination of buttons on the Gameboy Advance when you turn it on “plays a secret, alternative start-up sound, then it just sits at the Gameboy logo until you press a button. That’s all it does.”

Except if you read the manual you’d know that holding that button combo overrides the normal start-up and forces the GBA into multi-play download mode, so you can play those games without having to take the cartridge out of the console. Pressing a button in that mode cancels it and resumes normal start-up, loading a game from cartridge if one is inserted.

I’ve seen some people insist that their manual didn’t say anything about this, but I have trouble believing them given that it was written in the manual for the GBA which I bought on launch day.

Because in the English version of MGS that’s not “hidden” in the manual (or on the back of the box). You get the Colonel calling on the radio every ten seconds during that fight, virtually screaming at you “Hey you dumb kid, switch to the second controller port already!”

MDN is great, especially for finding current best practice, but I’ve always found their material much more useful for reference once I’m already familiar with the general usage of whatever I’m trying to use. I often find it difficult to get to grips with something new just with MDN.

I usually go read W3Schools first. It’s mostly a bit out of date, but not so much that it’s useless, and I find the tutorials much easier to digest. Once I’m comfortable with the basics, I switch to MDN to get up to speed.

And OP, it sounds like you’re already wary of this, but don’t let yourself be tricked into using a hodge-podge of libraries for every little thing. A lot of JS programmers will tell you that you “need” some library or other to provide a function that you can often replicate with just two or three lines of raw JS, if you know what you’re doing.

I think the JS library addiction stems from the bad old days of browser incompatibility, when almost everything had to be wrapped in layers of complex compatibility shims.

I was thinking of a variable-length hash, but if we use a fixed length (which I acknowledge the term “salt” does imply), then I agree.

In some places, the ZX Spectrum vs Commodore 64 war was epic. Likewise for Amiga vs Atari ST. Magazines for one fanbase would regularly mock the other. And I don’t know what the TRS-80 was going up against, but I’ve seen it called the “Trash-80” more than a couple of times.

What can help proof someone against this excessive dedication to one platform isn’t which platform you start them on; it’s starting them on multiple platforms as soon as possible. Getting them interested in the individual games rather than the fan club nonsense.

As human beings we naturally oversimplify things. So when our entire experience has been A, and the people around us frame the world as a choice between A and B, we’re naturally going to defend A with our life. That’s because without really thinking about it, we’ve bought into the idea that A is either right or wrong, with no middle-ground, and we hate to be wrong.

That is just inviting people to start throwing out names of lesser-known systems. Can we narrow it down to Western (including South America), Eastern European, or South-east Asian before we start?

Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade… salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on?

I didn’t have time to reply earlier, but I was thinking the same thing, except with the extra step of replacing the username with a unique user identifier randomly generated at signup by the user’s instance and kept secret.

I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.

Yeah, you got it basically correct. I bought a few of these games back in the day, and while I think you could do most of it by texting codes to premium SMS numbers, I did it by setting up accounts on the distributors’ websites. I paid by credit card (my phone plan didn’t fully support premium SMS billing), and they sent a special MMS with the game package attached (not as a link; this was in virtually pre-phone-Internet days). I had to make sure that my phone had enough MMS space free to receive the message including the bundled game, or I wouldn’t get it.

One advantage of getting the games through a website account was that I could have the game resent to the same number as many times as I wanted. Since I didn’t know any easy way to back up the game locally from my phone at the time (or how to reinstall it even if I could), this let me free up precious space by deleting the MMSs and uninstalling games without losing my purchase.

I played some games on a lower-mid-range Motorola flip-phone, but mostly on an nGage. It was like chalk and cheese. The experience on the flip-phone was stuttery and the controls were almost always painful to use. But Nokia was the biggest phone manufacturer at the time, and they even published guidelines for how to make games for their various categories of phone. So a lot of developers supported those specific requirements because they were common and well-documented. The nGage could run S60-targeted games flawlessly, and often the controls were pretty usable (obviously). The only real negative was that since even S60 phones usually didn’t have multi-press keypads, a lot of developers didn’t write their games to support them. So if a game needed diagonal movement or the like, I still had to use the keypad.

I have an RP2+ so I don’t know if it’s exactly the same, but with most Android devices, if you’ve configured the SD as an extension of internal memory, then no, it won’t work (and might screw some things up on the old device if you remove it). But if you’re just using it as external storage, I don’t think there should be any problem.

I’ve had to interact with too many people who say this with a straight face.

Not bad overall, although I don’t know where they got that “Atari 2600 Pitfall” screenshot. Not only is that not taken from the actual game, the 2600 couldn’t display that image. It looks like someone who mostly remembered the game drew it from memory in MS Paint.

If you might be interested but don’t want to click a random link without knowing what it’s for, this is a video about the history of a Mario 64 speedrun category, 120 stars, which involves collecting every star in the game.

I think it depends a lot on a person’s individual knowledge. If you keep studying far enough away from your main area of expertise, there’ll still be some point where you stop and have to blindly accept that something “just works”, but it will no longer feel like that’s what your main field is based upon.

Imagine a chef. You can be an OK chef just by memorizing facts and getting a “feel” for how recipes work. Many chefs study chemistry to better understand how various cooking/baking processes work. A few might even get into the physics underlying the chemical reactions just to satisfy curiosity. But you don’t need to keep going into subatomic particles to have lost the feeling that cooking is based on mysterious unknowns.

For my personal interest, I’ve learned about compilers, machine code, microcode and CPU design, down to transistor-based logic. Most of this isn’t directly applicable to modern programming, and my knowledge still ends at a certain point, but programming itself no longer feels like it’s built on a mystery.

I don’t recommend that every programmer go to this extreme, but we don’t have to feel that our work is based on “magic smoke” if we really don’t want to.

ADDED: If anyone’s curious, I highly recommend Ben Eater’s YouTube videos about “Building an 8-bit breadboard computer!” It’s a playlist/course that covers pretty much everything starting from an overview of oscillators and logic gates, and ending with a simple but functional computer, including a CPU core built out of discrete components. He uses a lot of ICs, but he usually explains what circuits they contain, in isolation, before he adds them to the CPU. He does a great job of covering the important points, and tying them together well.

AI coding is an improvement on infinite monkey Shakespeare in the sense that it only types whole words from a dictionary. Although that dictionary has been built from a mix of classic literature and SNS posts.

So this is a list of responses given by AI when you correct it? My guess was “Things you will never hear from a client when you politely point out a logical inconsistency, an incorrect assumption, or a wild over/underestimation in their project plan.” 'Cause in my experience the response you will get, 99% of the time, is “That won’t happen.”