
Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made - ilamont
https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1126996260026605568
======
berberous
I've recommended @foone's feed on here before, but I'll do it again now. I
don't even know who this guy is or how I started following him, but his feed
is full of interesting fun threads like this, often looking at older tech like
this. I think most people on here would really enjoy following him.

~~~
LeoPanthera
His Twitter is Patreon funded which he literally never advertises, so I will
do it for him. [https://www.patreon.com/foone](https://www.patreon.com/foone)

~~~
dqybh
It's "literally" in the bio.

~~~
RandomGuyDTB
I haven't seen him tweet about it once.

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thomasfortes
Great content, and then I followed @foone and one of the recommended people
was another account that I just followed because the pinned tweet was this:
[https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/732005292808900608](https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/732005292808900608)

I saw it before and probably on HN itself, but was left hidden in some place
in my memory, it is an amazing project!

~~~
kyledrake
Had the pleasure of meeting @foone in Seattle a month ago. Definitely follow
that twitter, this is -normal- levels of awesomeness.

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userbinator
There is a good debugging advice related to this story: "if your code is the
same but suddenly starts behaving differently, check for hidden state."

~~~
alanbernstein
It's more like code than state, isn't it? The thing that changed is the
implementation of a circuit for computing the result of some calculation, i.e.
a function.

~~~
sgillen
I very often think of the current definitions of functions as part of the
program state.

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univerio
> you carefully dump acid on them, and you visually extract the ROM data.

Super interested in how that works. Do they literally map out the chip at a
transistor/gate level?

~~~
xvf22
Yup check out [https://hackaday.com/2017/05/02/how-to-reverse-engineer-a-
ch...](https://hackaday.com/2017/05/02/how-to-reverse-engineer-a-chip/) and
Ken Shirriff's excellent blog [http://www.righto.com/search/label/reverse-
engineering](http://www.righto.com/search/label/reverse-engineering)

------
krisoft
You know, I think the crashing demo is more compeling game design wise. I
watch it and have an itch to pull up a bit the nose and give a bit more
throttle. That itch is the demo pulling me in, causing me to want to play. The
perfect landing is meh, clearly the computer can do it, why would I bother
picking up the controls? Interesting that the developers disagreed enough to
roll a new chip, at what I guess was a considerable expense.

~~~
xg15
(Spoiler)

My understanding was that the "perfect" landing was first, using the old
version of the chip. Then the new chip changed the physics calculations and
the demo replay became a crash landing.

So the "crash landing" cartridges are the newer revisions and I'd guess the
motivation to change the ship was a simple "update this dependency to the
newest version".

~~~
aflag
It's a bit different than that. The newer version here is physical. So they
would stop making the older version at some point. Not like software that the
old version is always available. They likely realised it was happening, but
just didn't think fixing it was worth it.

~~~
xg15
Good point. I wonder if the devs of the game even consciously decided the
change at all or if the DSP1 supplier at one point simply started shipping the
version with the fix.

Which, ironically, would be an early example of forced automatic updates
messing things up.

------
meddlepal
I'm just gonna say Pilotwings 64 is one of the few games out there that really
hasn't had a ~proper~ sequel.

Come on Nintendo.

~~~
the-tomster
Pilotwings Resort was a launch title on the 3DS. Neat little nod to Pilotwings
(SNES) and Pilotwings 64 launching with those consoles. It was really cool
seeing it on the 3D screen.

~~~
bartread
I have this and can highly recommend it. Can be picked up at a fairly
reasonable price. Also, if you don't really like the 3D, you can always turn
it down/off.

As a game, Pilotwings Resort is definitely a worthy successor to the N64
version.

------
sopooneo
This hits on something I've wondered about for a long time. Since carts did
_not_ just include data, but also mappers and coprocessors, how do you write
an emulator that can accurately play an arbitrary ROM dump?

Does your emulator have to have knowledge of every single game, and what
mappers and/or "helper" chips each had, and emulate just the ones appropriate
for a given game?

~~~
kibwen
They do, absurdly enough. See for example BSNES,
[https://byuu.org/](https://byuu.org/) , here's a quote from their most recent
release notes: _" If the coprocessor firmware is missing, bsnes will fallback
on HLE where it is supported, which is everything other than SD Gundam GX and
the two Hayazashi Nidan Morita Shougi games."_

See past HN submissions about the extreme lengths BSNES goes to in order to
get this data:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3675123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3675123)
, _" In order to extract these programs from most of the DSPs, we had to decap
the chips, scan them in with an electron microscope, and 'tweak' the
processors to allow us to dump their protected program ROMs."_

------
Causality1
A fascinating read though there were a couple of small mistakes.

>Pilotwings came out a month after the SNES, not a year.

>ROM as in a file copy of the contents of ROM chips is not technically short
for "ROM dump" because, though it is a ROM dump, the usage of ROM to describe
it does not originate with usage of the term ROM dump.

------
Shakahs
TLDR: Some NES game cartridges contained coprocessors. The Pilotwings math
coprocessor had 3 revisions and one of them produces slightly different
outputs, even though the game ROM is identical.

Star Fox had a 2D/3D chip called Super FX that sounds a lot like a GPU. It’s
pretty cool that console games of that era could augment your existing
hardware to support their requirements.

~~~
JohnBooty
The most hilarious enhancement chip is the SA-1, used in the Super Mario RPG
and other games.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips#SA1)

It's essentially the same exact chip as the SNES's main CPU. Except three
times faster.

Imagine buying a game for your 3ghz PC that ships on a flash drive. And that
flash drive also contains a 9hz (edit: whoops, 9ghz, haha) Intel Core i9 CPU.

~~~
ryandrake
A 9hz microprocessor would indeed be something. Start the game up, come back
10 days later and one frame would almost be rendered...

~~~
nitrogen
It might even be longer than that... I wonder how long it would take to render
one frame of a modern game by hand if everyone on the planet joined in (let's
make it easy and render at 160x120).

~~~
lokedhs
I don't even have a napkin to write on so this will be the most back of the
hand of calculations.

One floating point calculation for a human would probably take on the order of
2 minutes. That's 1/120 FLOP. Let's round it to 1/100\. It's not like we're
accurate here.

Let's say a GPU is 1 TFLOP. That means the GPU is 100 trillion times faster
than a human. With 10 billion humans on earth (again, let's just round these
numbers), that makes the GPU 10000 times faster than the combined power of all
humans.

I don't think computational requirements scale linearly with resolution, but
let's just assume it does. Your regular 1080p screen has roughly 100 times the
pixels compared to your 160×120 screen. 10000/100 = 100, which means that the
framerate of your manually computed game will be 1/100 of the performance of a
regular GPU playing in 1080p.

I welcome someone else to make the same calculation. It'll be interesting to
learn if I'm close to a reasonable answer.

------
capsulecorp
I enjoyed this but I hate twitter as the delivery method for things of this
length. Its a terrible way to digest the content.

~~~
Nuzzerino
Came here to say the same. Someone needs to tell these people that Twitter is
not a blogging service...

~~~
icelancer
Or you should be a little more sensitive and read about the OP and why he
doesn't use a blog (severe ADHD).

~~~
MasterScrat
Source?

~~~
kalleboo
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18525434](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18525434)

[https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128](https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128)

------
laythea
I'm not a fan of this essay type thing being on twitter, split into lots of
little tweets.

~~~
antome
Twitter seems to be in this weird space where they have enough usability
positives over other social media (pretty broadly accessible, doesn't pester
you to log in, you can post NSFW content without it getting taken down) that I
guess people just force themselves to use it, even if a blog post would be
better formatted.

~~~
acdha
I think it’s the combination of feeling easy to do (both UI & not feeling
pressure to write a formal essay) and getting immediate feedback. For most
people blogging is mostly solitary in comparison.

------
dospunk
A lot of people are complaining about twitter as the delivery method for this
kind of content. I actually really like it, having things broken up like this
makes it much easier for me to digest because of my ADHD

~~~
Nuzzerino
I have "ADHD" as well. Your brain is like a muscle, and when you actively
avoid using it a certain way then it becomes harder to do things that way. The
attention economy and the "ADHD" epidemic have a parasitic symbiotic
relationship with one another. I'm sure you remember reading books as a kid,
so you weren't born like this.

------
Al-Khwarizmi
No video of the crash landing, though?

~~~
vultour
It's the very first tweet?

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
Oh, of course. I have become spoiled from years of graphic improvements in
games, I was expecting a depiction of the plane being torn to pieces or an
explosion to show that it crashed...

------
anyfoo
I often enjoy foone’s discoveries, and this was a particularly interesting
one.

 _I just wish it wasn’t all on Twitter._

Why not put the text, plus pictures and whatever else (links?), into a blog
posting, or just some HTML page with basic formatting? And then link to it
with just the first Twitter post. Provide an RSS feed if you feel extra
charitable (which is the way I enjoy most of the content related to this that
I read).

On Twitter alone, it’s just terrible.

That being said, while the format is terrible, the actual content here is
brilliant, especially in that level of detail, and exactly what I’m looking
for on Hacker News.

~~~
patrickyeon
Heh, from foone themself:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html)

 _Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on
hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there 's one highly-ranked
reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets
when you can make one blog post?"_ _CAUSE I CAN 'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN
IT._

The short story is they are quite open about having ADHD, and that's what
causes the long twitter rambles, but also what makes it very difficult to
assemble it into a blog post. Every once in a while foone's wife will edit a
popular thread into a blog post, examples:
[https://foone.wordpress.com/](https://foone.wordpress.com/)

If this seems like a particularly good story to you, maybe you'd like to edit
it into a draft for a blog post and gift that to foone?

~~~
wendyshu
Just copy tweets to post?

~~~
ngold
I've tried on multiple occasions to go on twitter, but it like trying to read
a newspaper with strobe lights as a reading light. How this became a format
will haunt humanity for generations. There is no difference in updating a blog
versus being forced to open one of the worst applications known to humanity.

~~~
icelancer
This is how the majority of young people consume content, when they read at
all. I get that people don't like it who grew up on blogs, but it is what it
is at this point and it's a lot like yelling at clouds.

------
mwest
Unrolled version:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1126996260026605568.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1126996260026605568.html)

Great story!

~~~
memco
For all those who hate trying to read this as a tweet: please see parents’
link. There’s a whole site built to compile all these into a blog like thing
for you.

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spilk
Twitter is the worst platform for long-form content like this.

~~~
kabacha
> Twitter is the worst platform

Ftfy

Seriously twitter is one of few things I hate with a passion. Everything about
it stinks. I don't even use twitter but I randomly get rate limited: "you
can't see this content because your rate is too high" \- first time I click on
twitter link in two weeks.

It's just mind boggling how it became so big while being so absurdly terrible.

~~~
tty2300
This happens every time for me and a bunch of others have reported it. I think
it's meant to be a dark pattern to get you to use the app. To get around it
you have to reload the page from the browser reload button.

~~~
kabacha
Funny how this dark pattern pushed me to never use twitter again though I'd be
willing to bet it works more often than it doesn't.

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b_tterc_p
Ah interesting, the demo changes based on the state. In a way it's a growing
organism.

------
lifeisstillgood
>>> then you collect all three types of DSP chips, you carefully dump acid on
them, and you visually extract the ROM data

Tell me more !! How? Do a YouTube video on this ! Hell, Netflix will pay for a
ten episode series on hardware hacking easy!

