DOS and the BIOS were exceptionally slow at text. Essentially one character at a time winding their way through DOS to the BIOS and back.
Direct access to the text mode segment (0xb800 if I remember correctly) was much faster. The fonts were blitted out by hardware for every scan line, so you just changed the few thousand bytes of video memory at hundreds of thousands of bytes per second.
I think the ISA bus was potentially capable of 9.5 megabytes per second on the original IBM PC 5150, but I don't think the processor could come close to that. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was over a megabyte per second, which would mean you could repaint a 4000-byte 80×25 screen in 4 milliseconds. Clone CGAs would give you snow if you did that, though, so you had to limit your updates to the HBIs and VBIs, slowing the update speed visibly. IBM's actual hardware used dual-ported VRAM to avoid this problem.
The 8-bit ISA bus was theoretically capable of 1.19MB/s. The bus architecture always took 4 cycles per transfer (enforced by the 8288 which had a 4-cycle state machine, iirc one cycle for address, one for data, and two wait states), transferred 8 bits per transfer, and ran at the 4.77MHz frequency.
The actual usable bandwidth was always much lower, somewhere between 80kB/s to a bit over 380kB/s, depending on how you were using the bus, because the cpu needed to fetch its instructions on the same bus. In a way, the bus was usually always running at 1.19MB/s though, because all the basic devices (ROM, RAM, common simple ISA cards) were able to always respond in the basic 4-cycle transfer, it's just that most cycles were spent fetching instructions instead of actual data.
Later machines made the bus faster by increasing width, increasing clocks, and dropping one mandatory wait state at AT for 5.55MB/s theoretical, and dropping the last wait state in the fast clones for 8.33MB/s theoretical.
Thank you; I didn't even realize that the RAM chips on the motherboard were physically connected to the actual ISA bus! It sounds like you know a lot more than I do about it.
This is interesting, thanks! Just wondering if the REP and REPcc prefixes with LODSW/STOSW/MOVSW would have allowed higher transfer rates due to there being no need to decode instructions after the first loop cycle?
IBM's BIOS blanked the screen during scrolling because its own CGA hardware had single ported RAM and produced snow. Later clones were usually better, not the other way around.
Being an engineer I am surprised, but for normal staff its very common to not have a personal laptop. The most common request from layoffs or firings in my company has been a request to keep their company laptop
I've worked at a few companies where they'd offer to sell, for a nominal amount, the work-laptops to ex-staff.
I know the last time I left my job I was given the opportunity to buy an M1 mac with 16Gb of RAM for €100, so of course I did.
(Though I also paid €500 to keep the phone they'd bought for me, which was perhaps not such a good deal, it was convienent and I do like the phone, but I'd have been happy to have a random cheap android phone, I have no specific requirements beyond "small enough to fit inside a sporran"!)
If you spend a lot of time in work working on laptop, you might just plain not need one at home. It is not necessary for entertainment, sport, cooking, whatever. You do not need it to learn new things. Plus, some people have desktops or console for gaming.
And if you are coding full time, it is better to not do coding in your free time if you want to maximize learning anyway.
I have never hidden the fact from any of my management in any of my companies that I interview with other companies on a semi-regular basis.
It reminds them that while I am a replaceable cog in their machine, I am also a cog that other machines would like to install given the right opportunity. And I am always aware of my current market value.
How does that prevent you from using your personal laptop for a job interview?
It would never occur to me to use an employer's hardware for such a purpose. It seems absurdly lazy, but I know that not everyone's life works like mine, so I would like to understand why this would be a real problem for people.
I had a really bad meeting one day that became the straw that broke the camel's back. When I went back to my desk, I saw an interesting job posting. I immediately fired up the company's copy of Word to draft up a resume, and used the company computer to send the email from my personal account. Less than a month later, I was working for the new company. It was done intentionally. I almost sent the resume via company email, but I really wanted to ensure I could access any response.
> It would never occur to me to use an employer's hardware for such a purpose
That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.
For 99% of people, the default would be "I'm going to join this Zoom meeting from the laptop I use all day long to join Zoom meetings, and I'm going to code using the laptop I use all day long to code".
Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer. Their personal laptop might be relatively underpowered and struggle to run all the required software efficiently during an interview. The issue becomes even more significant as more of the tools used require an account - you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service, so you just use the ones you're used to using every day.
Common or uncommon, its extremely unprofessional. You know when you are dealing with a kid or with professional who actually wants to get hired and has some manners.
Sharing other's company secrets by mistake, using other company's resources in ways that are definitely forbidden - is this a person you really want to hire since they will behave the same in your company? Is this a person you want to give trust with some internals?
In market with 100s or applicants thats enough to disqualify anybody who actually needs an interview or two to get hired.
Maybe this is just an agree to disagree moment, but literally no one I know would consider this unprofessional at all.
I've been in management for the past decade and interviewed a few hundred candidates in that time. Never once did I ask or care who owned the laptop they were using.
And similarly, if someone on my team used their work laptop for an interview, I wouldn't care at all.
What I'm seeing here is that Binance has the IT culture of a SV start-up when it should have the IT culture of a bank. Sounds to me like a thug with a $10 wrench could've been just as effective.
> Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer...you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service...
I struggle to come up of even the most absurd interview scenario where the tool makes the difference especially in our field where if a FOSS tool is not standard, then there's a sufficiently powerful free tier (eg., Sublime, IntelliJ). Heck most remote interviews, they take you out of your tools completely and ask you to code on some shared browser-based editor.
> That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.
I'm calling HN SV start-up bias. Outside of the startup software eng'g industry, a lot of people exercise very good separation between work tools and personal tools. I know a lawyer, _who's the head of his own law firm,_ bring his personal laptop to the office just so he could purchase tickets during office hours.
I think this is also down to a few factors:
- SWEs are typically issued high-end machines in contrast to other professions whose standard issue is still 4GB (or 8GB, if you're lucky) RAM. For those professions buying a better personal laptop is a low bar to clear.
- SWEs are more efficient when they have admin access to their own machines. Though it begs the question that maybe some inefficiency would've been an acceptable tradeoff to $6.3B.
- SWE is one of the professions on the poster for the "Get paid good while working from Bali" lifestyle, wherein BYOD is implied, especially if you are freelancing.
> I struggle to come up of even the most absurd interview scenario where the tool makes the difference
I had an interview recently where I'd initially planned to use my own machine, then gave up and just used my work computer.
I'm used to the whiteboarding/UML/flowchart software I use at work, so I either needed to pay for a personal subscription so I could use it in the interview or be forced to use some other software I'm not familiar with. I also didn't have a personal paid AI code tool, so again either pay for a personal one or just use the work Claude account. Also the webcam on my work laptop is substantially nicer than my personal laptop.
Also, critically, it doesn't matter. If IT or my manager had pinged me to ask "Did you do an interview at noon yesterday?" I would have said yes and then the only follow-up would have been them asking if it was a random thing or if I was actively looking.
I think IT (and I guess, lawyers) are probably the only people who care much about separating work and personal devices, just because they're prone to being aware of how much surveillance of the device can be happening. People in marketing/sales/whatever back office stuff will be logged into their personal Facebook, Netflix, iMessages, Email and bank and never consider that their keystrokes are being logged and screenshots are being taken.
IT is aware of surveillance. Lawyers have a legal responsibility to take all reasonable steps to safeguard confidential client information. A lawyer misusing a work device is probably roughly equivalent to a healthcare worker doing the same.
If you work from the office, and they have tight security, they might frown upon bringing personal devices to connect to the internal network.
Also, some people might not have dev environments set up on their personal devices. Heck, a lot of people only use the internet through their smartphone, when they're not at work.
My employer allows personal computing equipment at work, but has a separate, completely isolated network they connect to. You're never allowed to connect them to the company network.
It’s on Polygon, which writes cultural and political essays on games - they’re not really reviews focusing on game mechanics, player experience etc ( well they do talk about it but it’s usually drowned under other concerns ).
Whether you agree with them or not is not my point ( and yes in this particular case they visibly dislike the game designer’s politics and this eats up a large part of the article) - just that it’s expected .
The fact they look like reviews is very confusing though ( I looked around the website this one is under ‘impressions’ not ‘reviews’ though ) unless you consider politics should be an integral part of reviews but that’s a complicated discussion.
I wish they were a bit more self reflective about this. The author says, “I’m not raising these points to get a dig in on Blow for a perspective I personally disagree with,” but come on, let’s be real. You absolutely are raising these points to get in a dig at him, if only because you know your audience will complain if you don’t. Like, I find Blow to be a huge blowhard (nominative determinism at work) but having played the Witness, you can absolutely write a review of that game without mentioning his politics and I seriously doubt that Order of the Sinking Star is different. If you want to write about his politics, that’s great, there’s a lot of grist there to discuss. But stop pretending you’re doing something other than opinion journalism
It seems perfectly pertinent to show the wide gap between the game's message and the developer's message.
So weird that you want journalists to "shut up and play ball" while the developer doesn't have to. If anything, it is Blow and Trump who are finding and attacking political enemies everywhere, all the time. You are fine with culture wars, but only when they come from one side - the other side is dirty and terrible to have the galls to do the same.
No, Blow "plays ball" in the things he produces: his games aren't political as far as I know. But the journalist does not play ball: He includes political jabs when reviewing games without political jabs.
(For both parties it is legitimate to throw political punches in other contexts, like on social media.)
I don't know that we can entirely avoid discussing politics in the context of a game where even his publisher felt the need to publicly disavow his political views.
It's also a game that incorporates work from a wide variety of other creators, several of whom made well-publicised statements that they would not have agreed to be a part of this had Blow's current political views been common knowledge at the time.
> I don't know that we can entirely avoid discussing politics in the context of a game where even his publisher felt the need to publicly disavow his political views.
Of course we can! If some far-left activist makes a puzzle game without activism in it, we should do the same and judge the game on its own terms, without need for political discussion or publisher statements.
> It's also a game that incorporates work from a wide variety of other creators, several of whom made well-publicised statements that they would not have agreed to be a part of this had Blow's current political views been common knowledge at the time.
This is like the collaborators of our hypothetical far-left puzzle creator disavowing him for being woke. That's obviously just as bad. If the work (the game in this case) has no political content, the political convictions of the collaborators don't matter.
> If some far-left activist makes a puzzle game without activism in it
If a far-left activist made an overly non-political game incorporating the work of other leftists, they would catch flak from their own compatriots over betraying their principals for money.
Look, "separating the art from the artist" is all very well, but we can't do that without acknowledging the political views of the artist(s) (especially when the artists are publicly beefing over said views)
> If a far-left activist made an overly non-political game incorporating the work of other leftists, they would catch flak from their own compatriots over betraying their principals for money.
I don't think that's true. It doesn't make any sense. Leftists would obviously be perfectly okay with collaborating with other leftists on whatever.
The point was that people on both the left and right should be okay with collaborating with people of the opposite end of the political spectrum when it comes to apolitical projects.
Imagine you were only allowed (or willing) to contribute to the Linux kernel if your personal unrelated political views align with those of Linus Torvalds. That would obviously be crazy.
> Look, "separating the art from the artist" is all very well, but we can't do that without acknowledging the political views of the artist(s)
Absolutely we can! We don't go around referencing the political opinions of our car mechanic or hair dresser, because these don't matter for the quality of their jobs. Exactly the same holds for game designers who make unpolitical games.
> The point was that people on both the left and right should be okay with collaborating with people of the opposite end of the political spectrum when it comes to apolitical projects
> We don't go around referencing the political opinions of our car mechanic or hair dresser, because these don't matter for the quality of their jobs
The hair dresser example is the worst example you could have thought of, given the importance of hairdressing for the African-American population. Or just see how parents and very serious people freaked out when teenagers started keeping long hair during the 60s-70s.
Hairdressing is extremely political.
As for the car mechanic example, I wouldn't be black and have my car "repaired" by a racist who would overcharge me out of spite and could sabotage my brake lines. Or just talk with women about their experience with car mechanics and see how much their political opinions on women don't matter.
Again, you can afford not to engage with politics at the hair salon or the garage only because you belong to the dominant group.
Start talking to people who aren't like you and you will discover a lot of things you never see in your life. That's what it means to be "woke": it is to awaken to the experience of people who are looked down upon.
It's not. You don't have to evaluate their political opinion to evaluate the quality of the hairstyles. You can just look at their work. Whether the hairdresser is on the left or right, he/she can't and won't force a hairstyle on you which you don't want.
> As for the car mechanic example, I wouldn't be black and have my car "repaired" by a racist who would overcharge me out of spite and could sabotage my brake lines.
This is ridiculous. You could equally have chosen an example of you as an old white man, with a woke car mechanic who overcharges you and sabotages your brake lines out of spite. But you didn't. Because that would be just as absurd. But you only see your political enemy, right-wing people, as evil, not left-wing people, your political allies. That this is extreme political bias I need not point out.
>You could equally have chosen an example of you as an old white man, with a woke car mechanic who overcharges you and sabotages your brake lines out of spite. But you didn't.
Because it is ridiculous. It is a completely absurd premise born in a mind that tries to "both sides" things that are not the same. "Woke" is not reverse racism.
"He [Donald Trump, who lied for years Barack HUSSEIN Obama isn't American, never said he was wrong and is still insisting loudly on the HUSSEIN, lied about Haitians eating cats and dogs, and many, many, many other racist lies and wipping up hatred] is the best President we have had in my entire life, by far. It's a miracle. I just hope it doesn't abruptly go bad."
You invented the stuff in brackets. He didn't write any of it. He can like Trump for other reasons, e.g. for getting rid of DEI laws or for reducing illegal low-skilled immigration.
This certainly doesn’t mirror my experience of cloud gaming (gfn) which is indistinguishable from local gaming to me, incl 4k. By and large it’s a significantly better experience than local gaming: silent, cheap, non configuration/setup, works almost everywhere for me etc .
Your article is 6 years old(!) , cloud gaming has gone a long way. If anything , try it first.
Cloud gaming has a latency problem that cannot be fixed because the speed of light being a thing. I play many titles that require fast reflexes and any latency is unacceptable.
Also I muck around with mods, emulators etc. PC Gaming isn't just whatever is on the Steam Store.
I used Nvidia GeForce now for some months and must admit that I can't feel a difference most of the time.
I tried call of duty warzone and even this was great multiplayer experience. (Game is a mess with GeForce now, can't remember shader cache and must recreate it every GeForce now session)
You don't feel the difference until you play without the lag.
I've got something like 1400 hours in HellDivers 2, playing Level 10 I don't want to experience any lag. I recently changed the configuration of my machine and I've able improve framerates/frame pacing and it make a lot of difference when playing the game i.e. some melee counters I can much more easily perform.
I used GeForce now for the summer as I wanted to avoid a hot pc in my room.
Any game I played with GeForce now I also played local, yes there is a minimal difference, but sometimes I got better feeling with multiplayer as the cloud service had better connection to the game servers than my local provider.
And I will prefer most multiplayer games with my local machine, but it impressed me very much (more than stadia and Xbox cloud)
If my provider has a bad peering to the gameservers, but a good peering to the cloud gaming servers, you get a better gaming experience with cloud gaming.
No it isn't. You would have bad peering between you and the game server. It doesn't make much sense however you try to explain it away.
You are adding an extra latency between you, the game server and the other players. Playing mental gymnastics about how it could be better when it can't isn't going to convince me or anyone else.
Conversations like these feel like the sort of conversations people were having at the end of days of the Amiga where they were talking about the custom chips and all that jazz being better ignoring the fact that people were buying Voodoos and Soundblasters.
If i get 150-200 ping direct connected to the gameserver, vs 20ping on the cloud gaming vm + 60ms from connection to the cloud gaming, you get a better multiplayer experience.
Never said its the default or that i want convince someone, but it happens to me at least with two games at the evening.
I think gp was providing numbers just to give an example of why it might work, not actual numbers. Their point was mostly that internet routes are noisy and not guaranteed in performance ie you might not go through the best possible path.
While the numbers might differ , I know this is technically possible from my experience in corporate environments buying links to minimize latency. Basically your isp might optimize for a different function ( cost, etc ) than Nvidia ( who wants to make make players happy and subscribe ).
My isp used to throttle Netflix or YouTube ( I don’t remember ), and gfn users occasionally report better performance when using a vpn ( it’s usually throughput not latency though ).
Even if I pretended what you said might be true, the ISP would still be noisy between you and Nvidia. So you would still have the latency between you, Nvidia and the game server.
It still doesn't make sense, however you try to create imaginary scenarios where it might make sense. A lot of people in tech seem to do this, where they will try to invent fantasy scenarios to prove people wrong. It is extremely tiresome.
This ignores all the obvious other problems with game streaming, e.g., what happens when their servers have an outage? What happens when they decide they aren't going to support a title anymore?
It matters for anything multiplayer shooter and even single player games with quicktime events. Using WiFi, wireless controllers, TVs with frame pacing and bluetooth headsets adds latency already in your own house of around 10-50ms (although it is a combined latency, not network).
I know and I can't use cloud gaming myself in part because of the games I play and because I'm used to 240fps PC latency so no game can feel good, I can barely stand using steam link for couch gaming. But there are loads of people that wouldn't notice the difference if they're used to 30fps consoles and loads of games where the latency doesn't matter.
It matters in almost every game I play as well, but for some it doesn't really matter like Baldurs Gate 3, Blue Prince, etc. And I think if you're used to 30fps on console you might not notice a difference in most games, but if you're used to 240hz/fps on a PC any game will feel atrocious until you get used to it.
Yes. I stopped playing video games when 3d happened ( mid to end of the 90s) because most games were either uninteresting (3d for the sake of 3d), or plain ugly.
I started playing again during lockdown, and that was a bit of a shock - modern games are gorgeous, use 3d properly, and often enough have brilliant stories. I still play pixel art games - as you say, it’s timeless .
While I certainly played several shooters (DOOM, Quake, CS) a bit, but not with any passion.
But my favorite early 3D game was Total Annihilation. Which is not a 3D game. It's a 2D game with a 3D rendering engine. Classic RTS isometric POV, but all of the benefits of a 3D engine (arbitrary model rotations, movement dynamics, rockets flying through the air, shrapnel...oh, the shrapnel).
Similarly with Warcraft III, another RTS done with a 3D engine. Its gift was the interstitial cinematics done with the engine for story telling purposes.
In both these cases, 3D added immensely to an ostensibly 2D experience. I also imagine once they got things sorted out, it made things much easier for the level and scenario designers to be able to just put Objects into their flat-with-some-terrain 3D worlds.
I remember TA very distinctly - my brother was very good at it, I’ve always been hopeless at RTS games.
You’re right - 3d improved the game. However outside of examples such as this one , I feel that it generally took a while (15 years maybe ?) for game designers and coders to eventually find a middle ground , as in use the latest technical fad, but still make a game that is pleasant to play and better than without the technical fad.
But for whatever reason, here in HN you see a lot of people that don't play games but feel the need to give their opinion on the gaming industry, criticize modern gaming, and ramble on how old games where better. I find it really weird...
No, as the previous poster said, this is my lived experience, and I play games these days. I’m neither criticizing modern gaming nor rambling on how old games were better. If anything I have a very solid gaming culture, having spent a great amount of time trying out things.
What I’m saying is that there was a time ( which lasted for a while ) when 3d games experiences were worse than 2D games, and it took a while for 3d games to catch up.
Surprisingly enough ( to me at least) games evolved in the right direction (immersive games with stories and good gameplay and not just more empty technical demos ) when the industry might have gone wrong instead.
I’ve been busy catching up with what I’ve missed ( which is extremely enjoyable since time is a very good way to find out what’s good ), and it feels like things got better around 2010-2015 so 15 years after it stopped being interesting.
There are timeless early 3d games too. Metal Gear Solid or FFVII are popular examples, but there are also: Thief, Morrowind, Deus Ex, American McGee's Alice, and many more.
Then again, it is indeed a much different aesthetic than pixel art.
That's fair. I haven't played Metal Gear Solid for a long time but I did replay Deus Ex a few years ago and it still holds up. The low resolution is a bit of a problem but it's not a barrier.
Early 3D on the PC was better than on the N64, though. The low draw distance and blanketing everything with fog was pretty horrendous in a lot of games.
Ff7 is an interesting example : I’ve never understood the appeal of the original game which I’ve always found to be truly hideous, including when it came out. It looks like chunky pixel soup - I’d rather have 2D pixel art which looks clean.
Now, I played the remake recently - the game is actually excellent ! It’s just that at the time ( to me at least ) the original art was so ugly as to ruin the game / break immersion. This is an issue I’ve never had with 2D games, pixelated or not.
Yeah, I’d agree, I definitely wouldn’t classify FF7 as graphically timeless.
I think most people would agree that early 3D games (PSX and N64 era) - particularly ones attempting to achieve texture-mapped photorealism, like FF7, GoldenEye, Tomb Raider etc. did not age gracefully, at least where graphics are concerned.
Contrast that with something like Mario 64, which, while still chonky, looks way better because it’s so highly stylized.
I've noticed that stock mesh/texture Deus Ex has staying-power partly because everything is visually cohesive. Most objects have similar levels of detail and follow similar implicit rules for how they are (or aren't) complex.
This is, unfortunately, easy to ruin that with partial mods, breaking your immersion when two objects from different universes are in the same room.
It’s exceedingly frustrating, and you either get an awful lot of exposure ( say you stop reading in English , only read in Norwegian and read 10k pages a year ) or you grind and learn word lists.
The good news is that word lists are now much easier to learn thanks to SRS systems.
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