Tuesday, September 24, 2024

This makes NO SENSE!🎁

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KVZxM7dpk70

It is hard to see, but he turns the second box 90 degrees before removing the lid.  If the boxes are not perfect cubes, he might be able to fit the first box in the second box.  I don't think the lid would close all the way, but it doesn't have to.  It creates the illusion that the smaller box contains the larger one.

Saturday, May 4, 2024

Rare Golden Ship Galaga Glitch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_58poXHxOg&t=877s

The golden ship reemerges when the game switches back to the second player.


The enemy ship switched to the wrong characters for that sprite but kept the same color palette.  If we assume that ship type is a single byte value, then that byte was somehow overwritten with a bad value, hypothetically a zero or a one which could be the value for the player ship.  Errors like this could be caused by a memory overflow where a value was written outside the bounds of a table or the limited stack memory was exceeded.

I learned that if Player 1 exceeds 999,999 points, it will not display the millions in the score.  It is not clear if the player's score still counts as being over a million, or if it goes back to zero.  However, the second player does not have this problem and his score can reach 8 digits.

Saturday, January 27, 2024

Pure Imagination Piano Solo

I can't imagine having the skill to play so many notes so accurately.   I would have to do it by wrote because my brain doesn't understand music very well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMqwsPM1gcc

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Saturday, November 25, 2023

The mysterious case of the "lost positive"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7TfjCIbtng

English is a mess and probably always will be.  It combines West Germanic languages, Latin, Old Norse, and French.  This gives us more words that mean the same thing.

At one time English had grammatical gender just like many languages do today, but dropped it.  I'm grateful for this simplification.