Star Control 2 (which takes many Starflight influences and also hired Greg Johnson) also used a lot of procedural generation. It has around 500 stars and 4000 worlds with minerals and lifeforms. I recall the SC2 lead programmer Fred Ford saying they used a fixed seed, and they went through many seeds until they found one that looked good. I presume Starflight was of the same mindset.
> So instead of finding the NES next to your other PCs at the time, it was near the toy aisle?
> Anyone who maybe was able to witness the revival able to comment with their anecdotes?
That is NOT my recollection. I bought my Atari games from the same isle I bought my NES games from at Toys R Us (obviously in different years).
I think there is truth that game console marketing shifted into its own more toy like thing, distinct from computers, but I think that shift was already underway by the heyday of the 2600. I remember an entire display of just video games (2600, ColecoVision, and others), which was separate from other software, computers, and the consoles.
With the Toys R Us closure, I wrote an article about my memories of Toys R Us and The Great Video Game crash (and recovery) that tries to fill in for people what living through the crash actually felt like.
While the objc_msgSend, objc_msgSend_stret, et. al, is an annoying detail, that isn't really the hard part. (And in fact, all the good bridges use libffi to do more direct invocations and avoids a lot of this problem.)
The hard part of bridging is those places where Objective-C introspection is not powerful enough to discover the types of parameters or signatures of functions. Typically, this is all the C stuff.
So for example, Obj-C's runtime introspection cannot tell you the make up of a struct. So it cannot tell you the size of NSRect, NSPoint, NSSize, or the individual data types inside the struct (and the names of each item if you need to access them).
And the Obj-C runtime introspection cannot tell you about what C functions exist and what the parameter types and return types are. So for example, there is no Obj-C runtime way to look up that CGPointMake takes two CGFloat parameters and returns a CGPoint struct.
Also, inline functions (marcos) in C/Obj-C are also problematic for these bridges since they need to call the functions at runtime.
Apple shipped a framework called BridgeSupport in Mac OS X 10.5 which contains XML data for all the things that cannot be determined at runtime. It also contains .dylibs with symbols for inline functions. BridgeSupport is still in macOS today, but it isn't getting much love and Apple keeps (accidentally?) breaking things in BridgeSupport every release.
Lua creator Roberto Ierusalimschy just gave a talk about "Functions in Lua" and starts his talk explaining that our (conversational) language has still not evolved a precise way to articulate all these different ideas about functions.
On his first slides, he shows the words, "anonymous functions", "lambdas", "closures", "function values", and "first-class values", and shows how each has subtly different meanings/implications and tends to take us down different lines of thinking which affects the conversation you are trying to have with somebody else.
I don't remember if that clip shows all the dialog, but they talk about how they rule the forest and make rainbows and "fairies just want to have fun". They like to dance and don't know if humans can dance.
This video does show you making them mad by walking into the fairy ring (because the human smell is impossible to get rid of). So they make you dance to your death as punishment.
The last fairy message at the end of the credits is also borrowed straight from the game. When you leave the screen in the game, a fairy will fly to you in the next screen to say a randomized good bye message before flying off.
I remember reading a story about how he picked the name "Roland". He wanted a company name that would be pronounced and spelled the same way in any language and country, and escape translation issues. The irony was not lost on him that the Japanese (his home country) have trouble pronouncing the 'R'.
It's more the l than the r, the pronunciation is also otherwise completely different in Japanese, because they don't have consonant finals, only nasals. You end up with ro-rahn-doh.
That's what I was thinking. If he really wanted a name that would be the same in English and Japanese, he would have nixed the "d" at the end and called the company "Rolan".
In college, I talked to a Japanese friend about it (I was studying Japanese at the time, so differences between the languages were a natural topic). He could tell the difference between "right" and "light" when I enunciated them clearly, one after the other to provide an immediate contrast between them, but couldn't otherwise. In most cases, context was enough to disambiguate the meaning.
So, he can (of course) physiologically hear the difference, but he wasn't conditioned to listen for it. There are features like that for me in other languages (tones in Chinese, as one glaring example).
You met a very small sample. The stereotype in the West is that Japanese can't do the L sound when it's actually specific versions of the R sound that give people not exposed to it early enough alot of issues
There are no humans that "can't" hear the difference between L and R.
But there are languages that don't have both sounds.
Just like English-speaking people usually being unable – or unwilling – to say the soft T sound in た、て、と but it's not like you can't hear the difference: [0].
I grew up speaking italian, which has basic vowel sounds, but effectively no difference in length.
Learning to hear the difference between ship and sheep took me a long time, and it's the same for everyone I know.
Most of my friends who are not regularly exposed to english still fail to notice it or pronounce it.
The same for learning to hear the difference between "a" and "o" in hungarian.
Of course everybody can learn to hear, but it's definitely non-trivial. Your brain just isn't wired to look for the difference, even if clearly the sound is there.
Curious episode: there was this story about an American woman who came to a public office where I lived here in Italy asking about a place near the seaside, and really couldn't understand how the employee would continue using the word "bitch" so freely... it took them some time to clarify that he was referring to the beach :D
That happens. I had a colleague (here in Finland) who in the 1990's happily and regularly e-mailed English colleagues with a greeting "Hello gays" instead of "guys". The English, not surprisingly, never corrected him.
Here's a really funny one: English speakers don't even notice the difference between 'th' in theater and 'th' in the. The sound is completely different, but unless the difference is pointed out, we never even notice it.
> English speakers don't even notice the difference between 'th' in theater and 'th' in the.
So I can say "the" with a "th" that sounds like "thanks", or "theater" that sounds like "the" and nobody will be able to tell the difference? Imagine me saying "that" as "thatch". No one would think I have a lisp? No one would say I'm not a native speaker? You know that's BS, unless you said can't perceive instead of can't hear.
I'm saying English speakers never realize the two sounds are different until someone points it out. Of course we can hear it, the sounds are very different.
It's easy to think that the way we think about sounds is perfectly natural, except that it isn't. The reality is that it's all relative. I'm sure the tones in Chinese come naturally to you but to the rest of us it's a challenge.
As for R and L, Japanese speakers can certainly hear the difference, but it's hard for them to remember or pronounce the difference. Believe me I've tried to explain it many times, and when you try you realize the difference is more subtle than we always assumed.
Korean has more vowel sounds than English. We can hear the difference, but feel convinced that it "doesn't matter" and that "those sounds are practically the same". And it's devilishly hard for us to consistently get the sound right. And that's what R and L are like.
It distinguishes meaning in all contexts as far as I can tell.
In some words, either the voiced or unvoiced variant do not have an assigned meaning, but you must use the correct one.
In some cases, there is a near clash. For example, "thin" and "then" have a different vowel, which is clear when they are enunciated clearly. However, when it's an unstressed vowel in surrounding speech, particularly fast speech, the difference relies much more on the leading consonant, because unstressed vowels in English gravitate toward the central [Ə] sound.
There are also situations like "this'll" (contraction of this will) versus "thistle".
>There are no humans that "can't" hear the difference between L and R.
You'd be surprised.
There are no 100% objective sounds the ear directly hears -- interpretation and identification of sounds happens at the brain, and a person that was raised with a specific language/pronunciation can be "deaf" to the difference of certain sounds.
Evidence from Best & Strange (1992) and Yamada & Tohkura (1992) suggest that Japanese speakers perceive English /r/ as somewhat like the compressed-lip velar approximant /w͍/ and other studies[4] have shown speakers to hear it more as an ill-formed /ɺ/. Goto (1971) reports that native speakers of Japanese who have learned English as adults have difficulty perceiving the acoustic differences between English /r/ and /l/, even if the speakers are comfortable with conversational English, have lived in an English-speaking country for extended periods, and can articulate the two sounds when speaking English. Japanese speakers can, however, perceive the difference between English /r/ and /l/ when these sounds are not mentally processed as speech sounds. Miyawaki et al. (1975) found that Japanese speakers could distinguish /r/ and /l/ just as well as native English speakers if the sounds were acoustically manipulated in a way that made them sound less like speech (by removal of all acoustic information except the F3 component). Lively et al. (1994) found that speakers' ability to distinguish between the two sounds depended on where the sound occurred. Word-final /l/ and /r/ with a preceding vowel were distinguished the best, followed by word-initial /r/ and /l/. Those that occurred in initial consonant clusters or between vowels were the most difficult to distinguish accurately. Bradlow et al. (1997) provide evidence that there is a link between perception and production to the extent that perceptual learning generally transferred to improved production. However, there may be little correlation between degrees of learning in perception and production after training in perception, due to the wide range of individual variation in learning strategies.
The same can happen with colors (for them, depending on whether the language/culture has a name for them).
So what you write is not 100% true. At best, it's debatable:
What do you mean? 'i' is like in 'India' while 'e' is like in 'enter' but more contracted (otherwise it would be more like an ä).
Maybe you're talking about 'ie', but that is a diphthong and is spelled out as a long i.
I first learned about Roland because of their partnership with Sierra On-Line and the MT-32.
I remember Scott Murphy (Space Quest co-creator) told a story about the first time Roland came to hear how Sierra was using the MT-32. They were blown away by the full musical scores they sequenced (Space Quest 3). He thinks they were expecting Space Invaders like sound effects.
A little more context for those who don't know the history of music in PC gaming, Sierra was the first major company to push hard on PC sound cards. They partnered up with Roland and Adlib to promote and sell their cards so they could take advantage of them for their games.
Wikipedia citation: King's Quest IV was the first commercially released game for PC compatibles to support sound cards instead of only the standard built-in speaker.
Sierra took it seriously and hired professional musicians to kick off their effort.
Yeah, they really did put a lot of effort in supporting a variety of scattered audio and video options back in those days.
Kings quest IV, as well as Hero's Quest I, both specifically supported my Casio keyboard. Multi-channel MIDI output using different instruments which they mapped correctly, and even some of the built-in sound effect channels for effects like flowing water or bird chirps.
Same with video, I had a Tandy which had its own proprietary video mode of 320x200 resolution in 16 colours, which was specifically supported you most Sierra games, along with the generic CGA and EGA modes. Tandy also had a proprietary 3-channel sound mode which was supported, though the MIDI via my external keyboard sounded way better.
It wasn't that proprietary. It's the same 3-voice TI PSG used in the IBM PCjr, TI 99/4A, BBC Micro and various other computers, consoles and arcade machines of the time.
On that note, I'd just like to say Sierra was one of my favorite game companies as a kid, especially the King's Quest series.
On the one hand, I'm glad that Roberta and Ken Williams have lived a pretty awesome post-Sierra life traveling the world on a boat, but the kid part of me wishes they had continued creating games.
I had one of these connected to my Roland electric piano in the early nineties. I was amazed to discover I could connect it to my PC's soundblaster ISA card via its joystick port with a MIDI adapter cable and have an amazing soundtrack to Space Quest. It even displayed "Insert Buckazoid" on its one line, 20 char VF display.
