John AycockOct 3, 2024

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.

Show threaddemofox
@herrprofdr when I was working on starcraft 2, the engine lead told me how in snes days they used a scripting language (the language was bytes). I was amazed to hear it, but he said it was to be able to fit more game on the cartridge because of course, one scripting language command would translate to several machine code operations.
Pretty interesting stuff.
Oct 4, 2024 at 1:28pmWeb
Show threadPete / SyllopsiumOct 4, 2024

@demofox @herrprofdr very little is truly new, computers are just much faster now as you'll be aware, and high end technologies trickle down to commodity systems.

Witness the use of a virtual machine back in 1979, into the 80s, and then the modern day with different tools to run Infocom interactive fiction games on many different resource constrained systems. They probably got *that* idea from mainframes.