"How did game developers pack entire games into so little memory twenty five years ago?" Quora, awesome answer
OH MY GOD THAT'S FANTASTIC
seriously everything about that thread is coated in awesomesauce
> So the actual map was reading random bytes from the 32K ROM and reinterpreting it as terrain data :) Hey, instant extra 32K for map! We could have all the rest for code! And it was fun to try to figure out where we were "inside the ROM" based on the terrain (because, well, it's not really random).
that is honest-to-fuck beautiful to me ^_^ ^_^ ^_^
Also, regarding the Quora question: a book called Programming Pearls by Jon Bently was a companion of mine for many years in downtime reading, and the tricks in it were sometimes well beyond my understanding, but it was always a fascinating story of how humans used to outwit the limitations of hardware and software that existed back in the day.
I can't wait to find out in ten years what surreal tricks the technical community considers commonplace right now. ^_^
@LottieVixen
I know what I'm HOPING the answer will be
but I gotta go look at it ^_^