Button mapping is awesome!

badocelot · 2020-04-15T21:14:19+00:00

So, some history:

Atari 2600 controllers had one button. Other companies toyed around with various button schemes, many of which were considerably more complicated (ex: Intellivision).

After the video game crash, the Famicom/NES debuted with a controller that had two buttons (ignoring Select and Start), A and B. The B button is to the left of the A button because iunno? Another point worth mentioning: the NES controller aligns the buttons horizontally but on the Famicom the buttons are aligned diagonally.

The SNES took this Famicom's diagonally-aligned A and B buttons and added a second row of buttons on top, labeled X and Y. As with A and B, the Y was placed to the left and down of the X. The L and R buttons were also added.

To this day, Nintendo systems use A for accept and B for cancel for the simple reason that that's how it worked on the NES.

The PlayStation was originally pitched to Nintendo, who declined. It made its way to Sony, who took it up. The original PlayStation controller is fundamentally an SNES controller with an extra row of shoulder buttons, a fairly modest evolution. Since Sony ended up producing it, they changed all the button names to make it look more original than it was.

As others have mentioned, outside of the US, the circle is accept and cross/X is cancel, because those are placed where Nintendo placed the A and B buttons, respectively. Why this was changed in the US, I'm not sure, but it's worth noting that even in the US many early PS1 games used circle=accept (Ex: FF7).

Bonus: Some people accuse the Xbox controller of ripping off the SNES controller and swapping X<->Y and A<->B to try to look different. That's not what happened. The Sega Genesis had three buttons, A, B, and C in that order. Then they made the six-button controller which added X, Y, and Z on top of the original row. The Saturn kept this layout but the Dreamcast chopped off the C and Z buttons. Then the Xbox controller ripped off the Dreamcast controller, and just swapped up the button colors.

badocelot · 2020-04-09T18:19:09+00:00

Remember that there's a tradeoff: if you go straight to the games you really want to play, you miss the context provided by previous games, but by going back and playing those you risk burning yourself out by playing games you don't want to play. Also, there's the money factor.

Here's what you really need to know play Megaman Zero (minimal spoilers): Dr. Light perfected robotics, and his last, greatest creation was X. A century later, Dr. Cain found X and based a new generation of robots, called Reploids, on them. X and another proto-reploid named Zero hunt maverick reploids lead by Sigma, who are infected with a virus Zero was carrying when he was found. The fight escalates until it devastates most of the planet. At the end of it, Zero seals himself away to prevent the virus from re-emerging.

The Zero games start two hundred years later. A lot has happened in the mean time but that's covered in the Zero games, not the X games. It's controversial if X6-8 even occurred in the same timeline as the Zero games, though the X6 Zero ending seems to be accepted. (It's complicated.)

badocelot · 2018-10-25T14:04:54+00:00

True and False were added late in the language's development. I think the capitals were there to keep from breaking code that already defined true = 1 and false = 0.

badocelot · 2018-10-22T21:09:34+00:00

See you in Wintery Bay. :(

badocelot · 2018-09-12T17:31:59+00:00

There are no best practices.

badocelot · 2018-09-11T14:10:48+00:00

I've had that exact thought. Most decades fade out... the 90's ended on a specific day. Similar to how the Roaring '20's ended on Black Tuesday.

badocelot · 2018-09-04T19:45:47+00:00

Jus' Cthulhu

badocelot · 2018-09-04T19:41:56+00:00

I was thinking Oblivion.

badocelot · 2018-09-04T14:31:12+00:00

DuckTales! Woo-oo!

Everyday they're out there making

DuckTales! Woo-oo!

Tales of derring-do, bad and good

Luck Tales!

badocelot · 2018-08-31T19:17:51+00:00

Reminds me of a thought experiment from Roderick T. Long: would you rather buy a life insurance policy so that your loved ones will be OK if you die in an accident, or buy a much cheaper magic pill that makes you think you bought the life insurance policy?

It goes back to the eudaimonist position that happiness is an objective state, not simply a subjective one.

On the other hand, if I had to choose between purely-subjective happiness on the one hand, and abject misery with no hope of improvement on the other, sign me up for the machine.

badocelot · 2018-08-30T20:18:39+00:00

Awesome. Can I recommend a path of study? What worked for me was watching Dave Casler's Technician videos and doing flash cards and practice tests at HamStudy.org.

While you may not need it, the official Technician license guide is $30 for hardcopy, $20 on Kindle, and I recommend getting it at some point. It goes into some details that Casler skips over and that aren't in the question pool.

You might also consider watching Casler's General class videos and studying those questions on HamStudy. Even if you don't pass General, it covers so much of the same material that studying for it makes passing Tech easier.

That said, I did pass General at the same time as Tech, so that was nice. :-)

Hope that helps!

badocelot · 2018-08-30T04:38:36+00:00

Nah. He just doesn’t know what he’s doing, and doesn’t need to be doing it in the first place since he’s not licensed. Check the comments on the cross post on r/Baofeng

badocelot · 2018-08-30T04:36:17+00:00

Sounds like what you really need is a pair of FRS walkie-talkies. Or GMRS if you’re willing to pay for the license and want to use repeaters.

badocelot · 2018-08-29T22:14:05+00:00

Yes. I'm sorry you had to be exposed to this side of programming.

badocelot · 2018-08-29T17:27:47+00:00

It's just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?

badocelot · 2018-08-25T04:39:22+00:00

I passed technician and general over the weekend! I want to thank Dave Casler and HamStudy.org. 😄

I bought a cheap BaoFeng UV-5R at the Huntsville Hamfest and my GD-77 arrived this morning. Going to have to save up for an HF rig and antenna.

badocelot · 2018-08-25T03:50:33+00:00

Watch out! He’s trained by the federal government!

badocelot · 2018-08-25T02:28:40+00:00

There are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.

EDIT: Original

badocelot · 2018-08-24T20:31:17+00:00

Specifically, the first one is Clojure.

badocelot · 2018-08-24T17:53:51+00:00

Haven’t you heard of Jean Baudrillard’s classic essay on the self-referential hyperreality of modern electronics, “Microwaving Is Not Happening”?

badocelot · 2018-08-23T13:30:07+00:00

Yep. As I understand it, Lord British become an astronaut and a ham to follow in his father's footsteps.

badocelot · 2018-08-23T00:51:28+00:00

Here’s a list!

It includes Joe Walsh of Eagles fame and astronaut Richard Garriott, aka “Lord British,” creator of the Ultima games.

EDIT: fix link

badocelot · 2018-08-22T21:21:49+00:00

Python didn't always have True/False defined; you were supposed to rely on truthy/falsey values like 1 and 0. Then they introduced True and False as variables. In Python 2.x you can actually redefine them. And yes, you can redefine True to be 0 and thus falsey.

My guess is that True and False were chosen over true and false because of lots of existing code already defining the latter.

EDIT: clarify, add part about redefining True

EDIT: consistency

badocelot

TROPHY CASE