4 ms·
> Incidentally, if you were in a whimsical student mood, you could also chain all of the keyboards on a row of machines end to end resulting in five or six mach
by Waterluvian 3y ago
> Incidentally, if you were in a whimsical student mood, you could also chain all of the keyboards on a row of machines end to end resulting in five or six machines completely unconnected from their keyboard and the one at the end taking any and all input from the neighbours.
At about age 10, my brother and I chained two keyboards together and played video games like that. Once we did four with some friends but Escape Velocity would slow down to a complete crawl. Not sure why it did that.
- piltdownman 3y agoThere was some set of Apple Input support extensions around MacOS 7/8 that I remember using with it but can't google for the life of me atm. Provided gamepad support and other input niceties. I'm guessing constant polling across 4 devices impacted the tick rate of the graphics engine in Escape Velocity's case.
- slater 3y agoSprockets! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Sprockets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Sprockets
- piltdownman 3y agoExactly what I was thinking of! Between that, CodeWarrior, and Ingemar Ragnemalm's Sprite Animation Toolkit (SAT), you had the basic tool-chain for development of a huge amount of early PPC Shareware gaming. Halcyon days.