6 ms·
What causes it to freeze where it does?
by grendelt 5y ago
What causes it to freeze where it does?
- Ecco 5y agoMaybe an integer overflow somewhere? Either that or the NES is just too bored at this point and cries uncle.
- beebeepka 5y ago"cries uncle"? I am not a big fan of idioms but this one is bad. What does it mean? Edit: keep piling on me, guys. That'll teach me to like obscure idioms
- kordlessagain 5y agoIt’s where your bigger cousin is giving you a noogie and you want his dad to help.
- moron4hire 5y agoI always understood the usage of "to cry uncle", but never understood the origin until you described it this way. I guess, being the oldest cousin in my family, and not being the kind of person to beat up my younger cousins, it never came up.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoI don't think that's the actual origin, Wikipedia says it likely comes from a 19th century joke about a parrot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say_Uncle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say_Uncle
- Y_Y 5y agofrom the Iowa Citizen of 9 October 1891: > A gentleman was boasting that his parrot would repeat anything he told him. For example, he told him several times, before some friends, to say “Uncle,” but the parrot would not repeat it. In anger he seized the bird, and half-twisting his neck, said: “Say ‘uncle,’ you beggar!” and threw him into the fowl pen, in which he had ten prize fowls. Shortly afterward, thinking he had killed the parrot, he went to the pen. To his surprise he found nine of the fowls dead on the floor with their necks wrung, and the parrot standing on the tenth twisting his neck and screaming: “Say ‘uncle,’ you beggar! say uncle.’”
- variaga 5y agohttps://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/cry+uncle https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/cry+uncle
- biddit 5y agoTo admit defeat
- jcims 5y agoIt's intentionally obscure, it's basically a safeword for young kids that enjoy torturing each other in one way or another. You're getting piled on for being weirdly critical about something you clearly don't understand.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoYou know its an idiom, and refuse to just Google it?
- throwaway675309 5y agoIt's not a particularly obscure idiom (lots of pop culture tv shows make reference to it), and calling it "bad" makes zero sense.
- kthejoker2 5y agoHe says earlier in the video it's building up memory pressure, so it's some sort of (obviously unconsidered) garbage collection issue.
- Agingcoder 5y agoGarbage collection on a NES? AFAIK Lots of (most) games were written in asm, not with very high level languages.
- tinus_hn 5y agoThe NES contains 2k of RAM. Although you can extend that in the cartridge I doubt games use garbage collection. Why would you anyway? It’s such a basic, predictable game. There’s a fixed size playing field that contains only one fixed size moving object.
- __s 5y agoBetter would've been to suggest a memory leak But the level being near 256 suggests an integer overflow
- mypalmike 5y agoGoing a bit off topic here, but there's no reason you couldn't use a garbage collector to manage heap memory for your assembly language program. On the NES, such a memory management approach would be particularly insane.
- Agingcoder 5y agoYes, that's what I meant.
- pronoiac 5y agoI've heard somewhere that the CPU didn't have multiplication built-in, so in calculating how much level bonus to add would require a loop of additions. This was also an era where timing between frames was delicate, and if the housekeeping part of scorekeeping takes too long, weird things happen, it drops the ball on something else, and it seizes up.
- kevincox 5y agoI guessed that it was a math loop causing the slowdown, but I wonder what actually killed it. Naively I would have thought that you just missed a frame like many other games on the NES (see SMB1). It is surprising that a missed frame actually kills the game.