tmont

I was severely disappointed by the lack of Zelda (that would've been my vote), until I read the first post. I vote for Mega Man. Super Mario Bros. 3 is probably one of the best games for any system, but the other two are nothing special, not to mention that SMB2 is just a sprite hack of Doki Doki Panic. Plus, that game is kind of creepy. The Mega Man games were all the same, but they were all the same awesome. And no game had better sprites than Mega Man, or music, or boss names (Wood Man, Hard Man, Elec Man, Bomb Man, Fire Man, Snake Man, the list goes on). And of course, Mega Man's real name is Rockman, and his sister's name is Roll, so that makes them Rock and Roll. You can't make this stuff up.

Contra music is rad. That guy is also rad.

So, at my office, we like to argue about programming concepts. Usually I bring them up as they relate to math, since I know more stupid little things about math than my co-workers, whereas they have a great deal more experience than me in just about everything else since they're all 30ish and have one foot in the grave. Anyway, here's a question (paraphrased) I posed to an interviewee: Sadly, the interviewee was... misfortunate, and couldn't solve this, even though I practically wrote the answer on the white board. An answer (in PHP): function truemod($num, $mod) { $return = $num % $mod; if ($return < 0) { $return += $mod; } return $return; } The follow-up to this (what I thought was a decidedly easy) question was going to be, "now do it without a conditional." An answer (in PHP): function truemod($num, $mod) { return ($mod + ($num % $mod)) % $mod; } We didn't quite get that far, however, since the interviewee gave up instead of translating "-5 + 7" (what I wrote on the board as I was trying to prod him into an answer) into a function. Anyway, I had run into this problem before, mainly when dealing with calendars, and had to hack my way to a solution. I brought it up to my coworkers, and what followed was a heated argument about whether "Tommy is wrong because -5 % 7 in Java is -5" (paraphrased). Since my coworker was slightly belligerent, and I found it kind of insulting, I gave him the mathematical answer, which is correct-ish, since I took group theory two and a half years ago and haven't used it since: However inaccurate that explanation was, they didn't really buy it, but I only wrote it up to be facetious, and wasn't really meant to be taken seriously. We ended up finding "bug" reports for both Java and PHP where people were complaining that the modulus operator wasn't accurate: it was returning negative numbers when that's not possible (for the very reasons that I so eloquently stated above). We eventually discovered the reason: Some languages truncate integer division toward zero, which means that, for example, 15/7 = 2 and -15/7 = -2. Java, PHP, JavaScript, C#, SQL and probably (I don't have a C compiler) C/C++ work this way. These are the languages in which -5 % 7 = -5. Other languages truncate toward negative infinity (i.e. they always take the floor), which means that 15/7 = 2 and -15/7 = -3. Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Haskell and Lua all work this way. These are the languages in which -5 % 7 = 2. In conclusion, it was a stimulating exercise. Can anybody give examples of other languages and their modulus operators? Fun time!! Try it yourself! (No, I don't know Haskell; I learned enough of it in 10 minutes to install a compiler and run one command) PHP: <?php echo -5%7; ?> JavaScript : (why do I need a space there to be able to write "JavaScript" as one word?) alert(-5%7) Java: public class mod { public static void main(String [] args) { System.out.println(-5%7); } } C#: class mod { static void Main(string[] args) { System.Console.WriteLine(-5 % 7); } } SQL: SELECT -5%7 Ruby: puts -5%7 Perl/Python: print -5%7 Lua: io.write(-5%7); Lisp: (mod -5 7) Haskell: -5 `mod` 7

Super Metroid, for the first time. Fun game, but a little disappointingly easy. Finished in 9:20, with 80% collection.

If you're just removing/altering bytes, use a hex editor; my favorite is XVI (for Windows). Also, the music is totally rad. Brings back fond memories! *sniffle*

The sound doesn't work in any browser except IE, because all the other browsers can't handle dynamic sound in an efficient enough manner. Here's an alternate link to a server that's not ridiculously slow: http://tmont.ath.cx:99/projects/2600/ Sweet.

Sure! You can find it here: http://www.tommymontgomery.com/2600/. Although, I haven't looked at this stuff for a long time, and the sound doesn't seem to be working for some reason.

Actually, I was able to hack the Invision form. It doesn't like it if you put a number that's not in the drop down, though. These will work: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;max_results=10 http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;max_results=20 http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;max_results=30 and these will break (in a rather amusing way, in my opinion): http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...p;max_results=1 http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...p;max_results=5 Apparently it just checks for $_REQUEST instead of $_POST (I don't commend that practice, for just this reason, although this is fairly harmless). Of course, you'll have to bookmark these links, as clicking on the "Blogs" link will still just take you to the index with a default of 20.

I tried to think of an example to refute this, but I couldn't think of one. I never realized that before. Interesting.

When I read the topic title, all I thought was "That damn beep!" I'm glad you mentioned it.

This might help: MIDI Parser if you need help with the MIDI file format. It's something I wrote a while ago when I was under the influence of my hex editing obsession.

To test stuff, you can do that on your machine, if you have a server (i.e. Apache). It would be fairly ridiculous to ftp stuff to dreamhost just to test a web page. If you're just learning PHP for fun, I'd download something like WAMP or XAMPP (depending on your operating system) to get you going really easily. If you're feeling ambitious, you can compile them all separately and try to get them to talk to each other via the configuration files. It's quite the learning process.

Very awesome.

I had almost the same experience, except I don't have any sisters. It was probably either Monkey Island or The Legend of Zelda for NES. I didn't really start beating games until I was in college and had a lot more time on my hands to actually finish games. The first game that I actually remember beating was Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure for Genesis, when I broke my collarbone in 6th grade.

I took a music history class in college, and we had these listening tests where our professor would play 10-20 seconds of some song (usually opera, it was all 17th-18th century music), and we had to write down the composer, the genre, the title (usually Latin or Italian), the year it was composed, and some other stuff I can't remember. Anyway, one of the pieces was Gregorio Allegri's Miserere Mei, Deus, and I fell in love with it. It's purely choral, with a little chant. Anyway, since I now suddenly have a lot of time on my hands, I decided to spend a day or two to arrange this classic piece of Christian choral music for rock stars. Kind of. Mainly I just added counterpoint and drums. Take a listen: My version Original (from my class) It's even on YouTube (with score) My version was created via MIDI, so the voices might sound slightly corny.

The same thing happened to me at work a few weeks ago. They randomly changed the IP address of one of our servers, which effectively rendered us useless for half the day, since the new IP address was not accessible from the memcache servers. It was awesome. Similarly, it would've been nice to know, like, at least 10 minutes before it happened.

That is an interesting wiki. I still think it's weak.

I consider the act of saving pieces until you're ready for them weak, regardless of context. Takes away from the randomness of the game, and that's what Tetris is all about (well, besides skill and reflex and puzzle solving and foresight and hand-eye coordination and...). Certainly an impressive video, though.

That's kind of a weak version Tetris; he's "saving" the long pieces until he's ready. Pretty cool, though. You can actually do-it-yourself and watch other's do-it-themselves on this version of flash tetris here. If you can last more than a minute on the death, mirrored, flipped mode, I'm impressed. here's a high score

Very cool stuff. If you're feeling truly ambitious, you could expand your equations program into the realm of 3D graphing. Then you could get some truly interesting pictures (double helix, springs, translucent prisms, etc.). But I don't know anything about 3D programming beyond what I've done in Maple and Mathematica, so it's all just idle chatter. But it would be cool.

Shinobi III's already been done. Otherwise I would've been all over it; that game rules. The other two Ninja Gaidens look way cooler than the first. The second one has those cool shadow ninjas, and the third one just has way cooler levels. The first one was just made to piss you off.

Hmmm... doing a quick skim of most of the games there, I appear to be the only one to run games I hate. To be fair, though, I didn't start hating Kid Icarus until after I started the run; Ninja Gaiden was receiving bad vibes well before I decided to tear it apart. And that was before I knew about the birds. My comments were a bit petulant, though; I probably should've waited a week or so to give me some time to cool off. Also, I got to write the "cheesy intro" for Ninja Gaiden, which I'm quite proud of. I think summed up the game quite nicely: I never could make sense of the cut scenes. For all it's hype, it's the most convoluted story involving a woman with a mullet I've ever seen.

Nothing's sexier than three ninjas in purple jumpsuits running real fast. If you don't believe me, then you should watch these: Ninja Gaiden in 13:49 Ninja Gaiden II in 12:45 Ninja Gaiden III in 16:08

I was too, until I realized that you can only use five lives total, meaning you can only die five times. Still, if you're good at the game, you really shouldn't have any trouble beating every level with just five lives.

Heh. I see what you're saying, but forcing the user to memorize button press sequences is not my idea of a well-made game. I've played a lot of Ninja Gaiden recently (did a speed run), and it's the same kind of thing: there's no way anyone could ever pass some of the levels without memorizing exactly when to jump and swing your sword. And the time you're spending memorizing where and when to do things is time you're not spending enjoying the game. Reminds me of #19 in A Gamer's Manifesto.