The game is a little difficult without any kind of knockback when you hit enemies, and there are several instances where enemies will just stop and stand on your exact X/Y position for the duration of your invincibility, which makes it hard to shake them off after you get hit by them. I've only made...

I just got around to playing the demo; where exactly are you running into the issue where the player can just ignore everyone and run past everything? I'm having great difficulty in doing so, and I made it halfway past the second map before losing all my lives. Edit: I've played a bit more (enough t...

There won't be many, because if you want to have a specific kind of expansion audio, you must use the cart mapper which contains that audio, and that's going to decide a lot more than just what the extra audio is; it determines whether you have a scanline counter, a cycle counter, how your program m...

I can think of two things: - Enemies drop power-ups which make fighting easier, especially boss fights - Enemies drop currency which can be used in shops to power yourself up In both situations, the player can choose to completely ignore fighting, which will make things more difficult later, or can ...

The reason I'd be willing to believe "modern RF poses less health risks than older RF" is because we used to have X-ray radiation concerns with CRTs. To oversimplify, in the 60s, CRTs could produce X-rays, but a minuscule amount compared to what you'd need to regularly expose yourself to i...

you don't need to wait booting the PC for 5 to 10 minutes just to surf the internet While I agree with your other points, this one seems a bit outdated imo, unless you use underpowered hardware (e.g. 4GB RAM PCs) and no modern features like hibernation. That's because it's otherwise difficult to ar...

It still nests, it's just that "NEXT" would always refer to the most recently encountered "FOR", implying that they're implemented with a stack, which forces nesting to work correctly and prevents you from interleaving (i.e., FOR A, FOR B, NEXT A, NEXT B) like the ZX allows you t...

Science uses peer-reviewed studies and not youtube videos nor noname news aggregators.

Physical buttons can also have different functions. For example the buttons on one of my monitors are used for navigating the on-screen menu, but when no menu is visible they act as shortcuts to specific sections of the menu. In almost any game the functions of the buttons on the controller changes...

Soooo... this means we're not getting Skynet anytime soon? We already have Skynet, but it's the dumber one where it just determines whether or not you're allowed to post your thing and/or keep your account, and all anyone does is throw their hands up, "sorry, nothing we can do to fix this!&quo...

I work in AV right now, and create UIs that go onto touch panels, often for offices where there's always a handful of people who have a lot of anxiety around operating anything computerlike. The flexibility of a control panel just being glass screen that you poke might seem like a huge advantage, bu...

Music engines are similar! They interpret music data just like a BASIC interpreter interprets lines, and a common way to implement a LOOP command (i.e., the equivalent to FOR/NEXT in music) is like this: On song start, let LoopCount = 0. When the "LOOP <label> <count>" command is encounter...

To add more to the AI discussion, AIs don't actually understand the underlying theory behind what they generate. Their knowledge is more like "this keyword means this output, based on what I've seen before". By looking at billions of examples in its training set, it does not acquire any un...

I don't like the sensationalization surrounding ChatGPT, because it's basically Stack Overflow without the peer review, yet everyone talks about it like there's some kind of grand revolution happening. That and ironically, being a programmer and knowing how AIs work makes me trust them even less . :...

The algorithm you're describing is called Run-Length Encoding (or RLE), and yes, it's a good algorithm for what you're doing. If you're curious about what else is available, LZ77 is another common encoding scheme where you have two commands: (1) output X amount of raw bytes, (2) copy X amount of byt...