4 ms·

I thought I knew Tetris. I guess I don't. I'm just humbled by how little I understood of the comment above.

shadefinale 3y ago
What's cool is a lot of the above terms are specific to NES tetris too. Tetris has a lot of depth and there's a ton of variants out there depending on what you want to get out of playing. Personally I love the TGM series but it's totally different from what you'd think of if you started with NES tetris.
crdrost 3y ago
Quick glossary: DAS - "Delayed autoshift," the delay is between when you press the button and when the long keypress starts to register as multiple clicks, auto-shifting the piece to the sides. So this is kind of a software-based "convention" that everyone knows, you open your word processor, you press the down arrow, it goes "down" one line and then waits for a quarter-second and then starts going in a more fluid motion steadily downwards as the software converts the continuous keypress to effectively be a stream of down-button-presses. Tetris has this too, if you hold down left/right you'll move once then after a delay it'll start shifting constantly to the edges. tapping, hypertapping - tapping a NES controller very quickly by using pressure in your grip to create a "springy" system where you can rapidly flip up/down across the actuation point, so that you don't wait for the delay and the computer-auto-button-presses but communicate each button-press yourself CTWC - Classic Tetris World Championship, hosted by the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Rolling - strategies where you flip tapping/hypertapping "upside down", so that the hand holding the button in tension is actually pressing on the D-pad while the hand actuating the button rapidly is pressing on the traditional bottom of the controller. I don't know what styles are popular but the controller itself might be held upside down to facilitate this. This is something like pressing on your mouse button with two or more fingers in an alternating rhythm in clicky-style games, normally the directional pad is too small to hit with multiple fingers but this technique allows multiple fingers to each register a separate keypress. Maxout - I believe this refers to when the score overflows the digits available for display and the game just tells you that you have 999,999 points and you have to use independent means to confirm how much you actually scored CRT monitor - hopefully I don't have to explain this to folks here but a big bulky sort of display that was used before LCDs became ubiquitous, short for "cathode ray tube," which is a big electron gun that we would eagerly point at our own faces hoping that the electrons all got 100% absorbed by little phosphors on the actual screen, which could be reliably triggered to emit red, green, or blue light.
- rkagerer 3y ago
  Adding one more thing about CRT monitors for younger folks here... they had better refresh characteristics than early LCD monitors (which had lag due to their more complicated electronics/processing).
  - Retr0id 3y ago
    They still have better refresh characteristics than LCDs, on paper, although the practical difference becomes negligible.
    - mrob 3y ago
      CRTs have better refresh characteristics at the same refresh rate, which is relevant to NES Tetris because it runs at a fixed 60.1Hz (slightly faster than NTSC). But LCDs are available with higher refresh rate than CRTs, so if the software supports it you can get lower average latency on an LCD.
      - charcircuit 3y ago
        Do the display controllers for LCDs not wait for an entire frame to be written, so it can display it at once?
        shawnz 3y ago
        There are LCDs with a refresh rate more than double 60Hz, so even with entire frames worth of latency they could still be faster than a 60Hz CRT
        Retr0id 3y ago
        The CRT's electron beam gets to "write" the video data onto the phosphor in real-time, as the analog signal comes off the wire.
        3y ago
fdeage 3y ago
"Human subcultures are nested fractally. There's no bottom." (https://xkcd.com/1095 https://xkcd.com/1095)

What's cool is a lot of the above terms are specific to NES tetris too. Tetris has a lot of depth and there's a ton of variants out there depending on what you want to get out of playing. Personally I love the TGM series but it's totally different from what you'd think of if you started with NES tetris.

crdrost 3y ago

Quick glossary: DAS - "Delayed autoshift," the delay is between when you press the button and when the long keypress starts to register as multiple clicks, auto-shifting the piece to the sides. So this is kind of a software-based "convention" that everyone knows, you open your word processor, you press the down arrow, it goes "down" one line and then waits for a quarter-second and then starts going in a more fluid motion steadily downwards as the software converts the continuous keypress to effectively be a stream of down-button-presses. Tetris has this too, if you hold down left/right you'll move once then after a delay it'll start shifting constantly to the edges. tapping, hypertapping - tapping a NES controller very quickly by using pressure in your grip to create a "springy" system where you can rapidly flip up/down across the actuation point, so that you don't wait for the delay and the computer-auto-button-presses but communicate each button-press yourself CTWC - Classic Tetris World Championship, hosted by the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Rolling - strategies where you flip tapping/hypertapping "upside down", so that the hand holding the button in tension is actually pressing on the D-pad while the hand actuating the button rapidly is pressing on the traditional bottom of the controller. I don't know what styles are popular but the controller itself might be held upside down to facilitate this. This is something like pressing on your mouse button with two or more fingers in an alternating rhythm in clicky-style games, normally the directional pad is too small to hit with multiple fingers but this technique allows multiple fingers to each register a separate keypress. Maxout - I believe this refers to when the score overflows the digits available for display and the game just tells you that you have 999,999 points and you have to use independent means to confirm how much you actually scored CRT monitor - hopefully I don't have to explain this to folks here but a big bulky sort of display that was used before LCDs became ubiquitous, short for "cathode ray tube," which is a big electron gun that we would eagerly point at our own faces hoping that the electrons all got 100% absorbed by little phosphors on the actual screen, which could be reliably triggered to emit red, green, or blue light.

rkagerer 3y ago
Adding one more thing about CRT monitors for younger folks here... they had better refresh characteristics than early LCD monitors (which had lag due to their more complicated electronics/processing).
- Retr0id 3y ago
  They still have better refresh characteristics than LCDs, on paper, although the practical difference becomes negligible.
  - mrob 3y ago
    CRTs have better refresh characteristics at the same refresh rate, which is relevant to NES Tetris because it runs at a fixed 60.1Hz (slightly faster than NTSC). But LCDs are available with higher refresh rate than CRTs, so if the software supports it you can get lower average latency on an LCD.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      Do the display controllers for LCDs not wait for an entire frame to be written, so it can display it at once?
      - shawnz 3y ago
        There are LCDs with a refresh rate more than double 60Hz, so even with entire frames worth of latency they could still be faster than a 60Hz CRT
        Retr0id 3y ago
        The CRT's electron beam gets to "write" the video data onto the phosphor in real-time, as the analog signal comes off the wire.
        3y ago

fdeage 3y ago

"Human subcultures are nested fractally. There's no bottom." (https://xkcd.com/1095 https://xkcd.com/1095)