I'm looking for a student for an M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Calgary. *This is a fully funded position.*
The project: building tools to help understand how "retro" video games were made under amazingly constrained circumstances. While it's a CS position, this is interdisciplinary work done in collaboration with archaeologists and others.
Needs: strong coding skills, good writing abilities. Ideally: low-level, reverse engineering, or compiler experience.
@herrprofdr Since you use the word "retro", this is about how people made games that fit original form factors even though larger computers are around, and not how people made games back in the eighties?
Not that you need archeology for either, you can just use anthropology and history, since many people who made games since the seventies are still available.
But I'll give one hint: coat-hangers were really important to keep everything together.
@herrprofdr It kinda feels weird, though... I've coded and made amateur games in the eighties, and I remember a lot of stuff from back then, like how to use Z80 assembly, or how to do Lords of Midnight stuff. Or map out a bitfield.
But I''m also still coding these days, despite long covid, and I feel it's all like a continuum -- I mean, bitfields are still a thing.
(Back in the early eighties I was twelve, though.)
@herrprofdr Oh. the coat hangers remark was real btw. You'd cut up and bend wire coat hangers, take out some screws from Speccy and disk drive and bend the wires so the drive and speccy were securely connected.
Otherwise you would get typing-induced resets.
And saving your work to tape instead of discovery disk drive was way too slow....
John Aycock
Halla Rempt