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Back in those days, and more so with the Speccy, memory was king.
Programmers had to squeeze every last pip out of the lemon.
I know that one of the games produced sound by interrupting the video signal every 5th part of the 50 hertz signal which generated a noise and owing to the human eye's persistence of vision did not affect the picture.
It meant that the game could utilise the area reserved for sound generation in the game data.
That is how clever they were, and how sharp the skills were at reducing algorithms down to the barest minimum for speed and memory efficiency.
Nowadays with fast machines and limitless memory people just pump out any old crapola.
Long gone are the days of the memory wizards.
Alas and alack, O Tempora O Mores.
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur .
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Dalek Dave wrote: memory was king.
I remember when I wrote PooperPig for the BBC, after it finished loading from disk or cassette, I used the reserved buffers for data storage and decompressed the level maps into them.
It actually used the screen memory during compression so had to change the visible colours so it didn't look too crap.
I despair sometimes when I see that an ICON for a game uses more memory than the entire PooperPig code!
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Wow! I remember a neighbour had one, wrote an accounts package...
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I really wanted one when it first came out but couldn't afford.
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Veni, vidi, vici.
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I don't see why they[^] have a jobs page. Couldn't you just save your interest in an unsent email?
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Nah - that's the fast track route to a job in the NSA...
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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Don't believe him, he is just lessening the competition for the positions! 
Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true
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I like the flow chart, didn't know it was that easy. 
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They've been pushing more openness for a while now. Presumably because it is pretty difficult for an upper middle class Oxbridge graduate white guy to infiltrate jihadi organisations in Afghanistan.
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Getting harder for UMCOG's everywhere!
In this country being unemployed means we have the opportunity to follow our dreams. Oh boy I want to be an international playboy with a house on the Riviera.
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Thank you for your time.
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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"Code Chaos: Another nightmare for doctors, courtesy of the federal government" [^].
"Ever considered suicide by jellyfish? Have you ended up in the hospital after being injured during the forced landing of your spacecraft? Or been hurt when you were sucked into the engine of an airplane or when your horse-drawn carriage collided with a trolley?
... snip ...
So these exotic injuries, codeless for so many years, will henceforth be known, respectively, as T63622A (Toxic effect of contact with other jellyfish, intentional self-harm, initial encounter), V9542XA (Forced landing of spacecraft injuring occupant, initial encounter), V9733XA (Sucked into jet engine, initial encounter), and V80731A (Occupant of animal-drawn vehicle injured in collision with streetcar, initial encounter)." Taxonomy freaks are going to party-down, come October 14, this year when the new version ICD codes (155,000 of them) are adopted throughout the Corporate-Occupied-MallBurgerLand (U.S.A.) death-care system.
Want to see the current codes (ICD-10): [^].
“The best hope is that one of these days the Ground will get disgusted enough just to walk away ~ leaving people with nothing more to stand ON than what they have so bloody well stood FOR up to now.” Kenneth Patchen, Poet
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So what happens if you are injured while pushing a jelly fish where the sun doesn't shine on a horse drawn carriage and fell into the jet engine when the trolleybus collision occurred? Which box do you tick then? 
"It took so long to fill out the form that the patient died, doctor..." 
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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Z73.2 Lack of relaxation and leisure
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Go F99!
Though there are a fair few F73.1's out there, they're more commonly known as politicians
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Jacksonville, Fla that's where I'm from. (Just an observation)
In Fla they will need all kinds of new codes;
Homeless man gets harpooned while dancing in the streets panhandling.
Teenager passes out while huffing Freon from A/C unit in someones yard. (Actually happened)
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I worked on Dr. systems a few years back, so am familiar with ICD-10.
It must be really useful for the Gov't to be able to determine the need for JellyFish suicide awareness posters due to the large number of cases!
Given that a search engine over some keywords and descriptions would give just as good a result, you'd think that a computer system costing as much as a moon landing would be able to handle something like that, wouldn't you?
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Between the US and Canada: Port of Entry Point Roberts[^]
Pretty normal you think, but zoom out the map a bit...
Its a one mile square piece of the US all on its own and joined to Canada! What an utterly silly little piece of land and who the heck drew the border there?
It hasn't got an airfield, it can only be accessed through Canada. As a US citizen there, whose police force do you use? Whose ambulance and hospital? Who supplies you with electricity, who empties your trash? 
The silliest piece of land on earth!
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I don't know, this[^] (also US-Canada) which runs through the middle of a town and even houses takes some beating. Baarle[^] surely takes the biscuit though.
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CPG Grey made a funny video on the US-Canadian border on YouTube[^]
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Nice find, that was a great video.
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I've been to here: Another silly US/Canada border[^] Had a nice dinner at Angle Inlet. They do have an airstrip there but it's mostly used by fishermen.
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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That one's always amused me more since at first glance it's inexplicable; even though the Northwest Angle[^], like Point Roberts is the messy result of border treaties being written ahead of detailed surveys.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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There are some more corkers here[^]:
=========================================================
I'm an optoholic - my glass is always half full of vodka.
=========================================================
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