ComPet & Taming & Co. - History

haha that feels like the space courier missions in panel 1 and the nothing in panel 3 followed by the we working on space in panel 4 and the most recent AMA in panel 6.

Seriously McCormick you absolutely nailed MA in one graphic there. Well done! It's even an infinite loop.

 

Sometimes I think the one thing MA need is to employ someone who can answer the question: "Is this actually fun?"

Of course I say need... I don't think fun is something they particularly care about. This is why discussion of other games was banned on their forum. It's a little bit like North Korea in that aspect... control the press, don't allow dissent, try to keep everyone in the dark that there are better/cheaper games to spend your time on.

Actually on the "fun thing",... I started playing Shenzhen IO last night (it seems to be a game about writing assembly code and playing solitaire...). The company you work for kinda make cheapo electronics. Kinda imagining now making MA a little box that always says "No" when they ask if what they are doing is fun.

 

there is a -66% offer on steam for another 12 hours, if you google shenzhen io...
sadly it stopped working for me after the 3rd buy, even when logged out from steam. this made my fuckin day!!!!

BUILD CIRCUITS. WRITE CODE. RTFM.

best game in my life! and best 5€ invested EVER.

(melovethislongtimefiveeuro)

 

Yeh I picked it up in the same sale. I've not played much but have liked it so far. Actually just been doing some RTFM! :D

If you like it, there are other games by Zachtronics that might be up your street (Tis 100 maybe?). There was one (exapunks) where there is a gameboy in the game you can program and actually you can get a free download of just the gameboy part of the game, where you can try out all the programs other people have written for it. I lost an evening to that the other week. Love how people have implemented the Zelda and Mario theme tunes on it! It's kinda cool how the games are somehow encoded in PNG image files. So you download an image of what looks like a cartridge but when you drag and drop it into the game (emulator?) it brings up runable code.

Speaking of which, @McCormick you work in a school right? Zachtronics | Zachademics

 

@theProphet Fell into a bit of a Shenzhen hole last night haha. Was trying to make the esports sign with only 3 of the cheapest microcontrollers. Was quite pleased I managed to get the 2 inverted square waves down to 4 lines of code. I've almost got the other stuff nailed but keep running out of program space. 9 lines really isn't when you are trying to do a pattern.

I discovered that if you need to set two outputs to zero at the same time you can save a line of code by copying one to the other. Initially I thought this was a bug then remembered that the output/input configuration of those pins is defined by if you read or write to them so a copy immediately switches the source to an input, and if there is nothing attached you get a zero.

I've not yet encountered anywhere I can use this though... maybe later.

 

shenzhen is pretty cool now in my stupid opinion haha!
THERE i wanna goto the flea and popup markets, omgosh

second, oh my fucking gosh. IMPOSSIBLE HUMAN SHIZN!!!! why do i feel so brainraped nowadays, hmm?
seriously, the faster our computers become, the more all our brainz are belong to them.
we are on the way to destruction make your time har har har.

https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/

 

That is so impressive I don't think I even want to read the explanation. There's a certain point where I'm still happy to call something magic and have done with it... and I think that is it. :D

This might interest you though.

It's a project where they've made it so you can knock up a BBC BASIC program in 288 characters (fit in a tweet) and tweet it at the twitter bot, it runs it in an emulator and retweets a gif of the program running. You can even specify it run the program (on a BBC micro) for 3 hours first before doing the screenshot/gif but (because emulators) it can simulate that in just a few seconds. Apparently they've had something like 10k submissions in the year since it launched.

I like this one...
https://bbcmic.ro/#{"v":1,"program"...ć¨Ɗ)ćª½ČÄđpƑp`ĀąÝāĀą ČĀāČ\nMODE4:CALLPAGE+5"}

It appears to be gibberish. Mode4 is a graphics mode and I guess callpage+5 executes code at the page address plus 5. Page is an address where progams can start being stored. So I guess the ascii representing machine code? Dunno will have to look that one up.

Regardless it's next level stuff. I mentioned this thing to a friend and he said "heck I doubt I could code Hello World in such a small space".

 

Ni added shitty fishing in 2023 using the quest system but it's there