Stumbling through Winter Games

[davidn]

Continuing my one-video-long tradition of playing Olympic-themed games when the real thing is going on in some part of the world outside my basement, here is Winter Games on the Commodore 64, which kjorteo wrote about some centuries ago. Oddly, despite being four years older, this one looks rather better than the PC sequel I had that came out in 1988. Does it play any better? I'll find out, but the answer may not surprise you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bfJWdXoxXI&hd=1

Comments

[premchaia_pre4]

Things I have been tempted to tell people, as an exaggeration with a truthy center:

“So, you know how programs on the C64 and similar generations of computer would sometimes dump garbage to the display while doing non-interactive operations, due to using the video RAM as extra memory to enhance whatever it was they were doing?

“So, you know how human neurosystems have cortexes with a bunch of specialized-ish processing to deal with reconstructing and modeling geometry and three-dimensional color and shape and occlusion and lighting, not to mention spatialization and impulse response of other sorts? You know what you can do if you're not using those to actually process light fields and environmental sounds? Extra memory!

“Kinesthetic senses and the like can tell what each of your joints and muscles are doing. That's state—and the motor neurons have a delay, which makes a lovely set of delay lines, which is even more state. Guess what? Extra memory. Those regions of the brain for utterances that you're about to speak, or utterances that you're hearing? More nice long delay lines in there too; extra memory. Even—if you're really careful with the mapping—the parts that recognize presence and emotional and social information, if you're not using them for interactions at the time? Extra memory.

“So the upshot of this is if you see me in the corner with my eyes rolled back, babbling frantically to myself under my breath about invisible people while twitching all of my limbs into weird oscillating shapes, it probably just means I'm thinking about something really, really complicated…”