A potential ley line blockage that's cleared by a ritual performed every winter solstice by a hobbyist spellcaster who lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere?
TL;DR: It all seems to have started with a (possibly deliberately) misnamed pair of socks for sale on Amazon. They began showing up as suggestions when people searched for programming-related items.
Yep, I put an Afterburner mod in mine back in the day and got the best of both worlds: a screen you can see without standing outside at midday, and a comfortable, wide layout that doesn't make your hands cramp up.
...Pascal, Fortran, Prolog, Lisp, Modern C code, PHP, Java, Python, C++, Lua, JavaScript, C#, Rust...
The list is infinite.
Show me a language in which it is impossible to write spaghetti code, and I'll show you someone who can't recognize spaghetti code when it's written in one of their favourite languages.
I haven't done it myself, but briefly flirted with the idea a while ago. This seems to be a solid guide, including tips specifically for the Surface Pro 8:
Even crazier, the C64 version was only distributed in North America, ignoring the majority of potential buyers. And it apparently runs OK on PAL machines without modification.
One of the big draws of the game was all the detail in the backgrounds, and the little touches of animation. The C64 version being disk-only allows it to retain a surprising amount of this. As a tape game, the already long inter-level load times would've blown out and ruined the game.
I don't think that an NES or Master System port could've covered the game even as well as the C64 version. But I agree that it is strange that there was no Mega Drive or SNES version. The SNES in particular could've replicated a lot of the arcade's scaling effects with a minimum of trickery.
These "home pong" consoles were very common at the time. They don't really do much, so their main value is historical interest, and this isn't a particularly famous model. A quick eBay search seems to indicate it might go for GBP 80 at most, but probably more like GBP 20-40. So OP got a good deal, but they didn't find a lost Vermeer. :)
They probably did. It's not exactly honest, but the system is technically outputting a colour signal, and it was released at a time when that wasn't a given. They didn't say "full colour" anywhere on the box, did they?
Let's call it a mix of lower expectations for the time, and a bit of marketing deception.
Found in an Edinburgh charity shop, so while it's not impossible, it's unlikely.
EDIT: Also, an NTSC signal on a plain PAL TV would be black and white (not even false colours) even if you got an otherwise stable picture.
It's easy to forget, but these old systems didn't connect to the TV with composite RCA connectors, but via RF. So we're not just dealing with straight PAL, but with PAL over a broadcast system. Scotland was using PAL-I for broadcast, while Poland seems to have used a combination of PAL-D and PAL-K. Differences in channel ranges and bandwidths, and sound channel offsets, could make it difficult to tune a TV set designed for one system to a signal from another, especially if it's a more modern set designed for automatic operation, as OP's set appears to be.
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer's memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.
Gamer sites on the early Internet were full of these "Easter eggs" that were really just non-obvious things with clear explanations in the manual.
One that I found particularly irrimusing (and seems to keep popping up forever) was that holding some combination of buttons on the Gameboy Advance when you turn it on "plays a secret, alternative start-up sound, then it just sits at the Gameboy logo until you press a button. That's all it does."
Except if you read the manual you'd know that holding that button combo overrides the normal start-up and forces the GBA into multi-play download mode, so you can play those games without having to take the cartridge out of the console. Pressing a button in that mode cancels it and resumes normal start-up, loading a game from cartridge if one is inserted.
I've seen some people insist that their manual didn't say anything about this, but I have trouble believing them given that it was written in the manual for the GBA which I bought on launch day.
Because in the English version of MGS that's not "hidden" in the manual (or on the back of the box). You get the Colonel calling on the radio every ten seconds during that fight, virtually screaming at you "Hey you dumb kid, switch to the second controller port already!"
MDN is great, especially for finding current best practice, but I've always found their material much more useful for reference once I'm already familiar with the general usage of whatever I'm trying to use. I often find it difficult to get to grips with something new just with MDN.
I usually go read W3Schools first. It's mostly a bit out of date, but not so much that it's useless, and I find the tutorials much easier to digest. Once I'm comfortable with the basics, I switch to MDN to get up to speed.
And OP, it sounds like you're already wary of this, but don't let yourself be tricked into using a hodge-podge of libraries for every little thing. A lot of JS programmers will tell you that you "need" some library or other to provide a function that you can often replicate with just two or three lines of raw JS, if you know what you're doing.
I think the JS library addiction stems from the bad old days of browser incompatibility, when almost everything had to be wrapped in layers of complex compatibility shims.
In some places, the ZX Spectrum vs Commodore 64 war was epic. Likewise for Amiga vs Atari ST. Magazines for one fanbase would regularly mock the other. And I don't know what the TRS-80 was going up against, but I've seen it called the "Trash-80" more than a couple of times.
What can help proof someone against this excessive dedication to one platform isn't which platform you start them on; it's starting them on multiple platforms as soon as possible. Getting them interested in the individual games rather than the fan club nonsense.
As human beings we naturally oversimplify things. So when our entire experience has been A, and the people around us frame the world as a choice between A and B, we're naturally going to defend A with our life. That's because without really thinking about it, we've bought into the idea that A is either right or wrong, with no middle-ground, and we hate to be wrong.
That is just inviting people to start throwing out names of lesser-known systems. Can we narrow it down to Western (including South America), Eastern European, or South-east Asian before we start?
Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade... salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on?
I didn't have time to reply earlier, but I was thinking the same thing, except with the extra step of replacing the username with a unique user identifier randomly generated at signup by the user's instance and kept secret.
I wonder if there's a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.
A potential ley line blockage that's cleared by a ritual performed every winter solstice by a hobbyist spellcaster who lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere?