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IBM spent a humongous amount of man hours upon the running man in smit under AIX, many of those consumed with making sure it ran correctly on all systems of var
by Zenst 10y ago
IBM spent a humongous amount of man hours upon the running man in smit under AIX, many of those consumed with making sure it ran correctly on all systems of various speeds without the animations going crazy. Alas I don't have exact man hours, but that was what one of the engineers told me a nearly 2 decades ago now. Hopefully somebody else has more detail upon this as one of the earliest examples of progress animations that still runs today that I'm aware of.
I still hark back to the days of the C64 and the likes in which had tape storage and was common to have a game as a loading screen to play. Was a small program and used to give the user something to do whilst they waited 20 minutes for the program to load. Many also rewrote the cassette storage code for faster storage/loading and would often be a case of loading that program with the small game like space invaders that you could play whilst the main game loaded utilising the quicker tape handling code.
- krylon 10y agoBroken Sword let you play Breakout during the installation; it was such fun (I had not played Breakout in a long time at the point) I was almost sad when the installation was finished. ;-) I have often wondered since why this was not a more popular way to deal with long running installers.
- royjacobs 10y agoHaving minigames during loading or installation was actually patented by Namco for Ridge Racer, I believe. I'm not quite sure about the details since I seem to recall things like invade-a-load on my Commodore 64 at least a decade earlier, but there you go.
- Cpoll 10y agoExpired in 2015 :) When I was younger, it seemed so obvious to add a minigame to a long loading screen, I had assumed that there were technical reasons for not doing it.
- aerique 10y agoI think it's because Namco had a patent on games in loading screens from 1995 to 2015: http://kotaku.com/the-patent-on-loading-screen-mini-games-is-about-to-exp-1744705351 http://kotaku.com/the-patent-on-loading-screen-mini-games-is...
- reitanqild 10y agoGhostbusters game on c64 had it when I bought it used in 1991 or 92 I think.
- yoklov 10y agoIt's a common example for a patent that had a lot of prior art but was granted anyway. I don't know enough about patents to say if there was a reason the prior art didn't apply, but I know that Namco was fairly protective of it and it was somewhat limiting for people working in the game industry. Although, loading screens are less common now than they were back then, and I think that would still be case even if such a thing were never patented.
- dEnigma 10y agoNot quite the same thing, but DVDFlick lets you play Tetris while your DVD is being authored and burned, which was a nice suprise.
- eltoozero 10y agoSMIT running man example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMWSD69BWqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMWSD69BWqI If anyone knows where I can get those animation frames, I'd like them for a personal project as a "running" indicator.
- _sh 10y agoDr Racket has something similar. http://soegaard.github.io/blog/2013/06/21/running-man/ http://soegaard.github.io/blog/2013/06/21/running-man/
- michel-slm 10y agoOne Linux distribution used to let you play Breakout during installation, but I forgot which one. Caldera, maybe?
- eru 10y agoDon't most Linux installation just let you use your computer normally during installation? (And by normally I mean, as booted from a LiveCD.)