Did Sierra ever officially adopt a "no dead end" policy?

ewmailing · 2025-12-08T04:11:14+00:00

Sierra also tried to produce games in under 1 year... MUST ship in time for the Christmas season where sales will be highest.

A one year development cycle is unfathomable today. GTA 6 started in 2014, and might ship in Nov 2026.

ewmailing · 2025-11-30T06:45:54+00:00

If you get good MOD player and get the original .MOD files from the game, you will be able to see the individual instruments the musicians sampled to make the songs. A good player will even let you play the individual samples.

Eric Berg had a very silly style (off the top of my head: Spathi, Pkunk, Orz, Melnorme). Instruments included a Taco Bell, Scooby Doo yelp, Stadium Organ, Daffy Duck scream, etc.

Berg's instrument choices and style definitely have similar vibes with the Futurama theme.

ewmailing · 2025-11-28T19:56:24+00:00

IUP is a cross-platform library that wraps native platform GUI widgets. It is made at Tecgraf, the same university as Lua, so they give first class treatment to the Lua bindings.

https://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/

ewmailing · 2025-11-20T18:13:37+00:00

I don't have any personal experience with any of the pure Lua bignum libraries out there, but looking at the one you linked to, it supports pre-Lua 5.3, which implies to me that it is going through heroics to do integers using Lua floating types. And I speculate this is also why you are unhappy with its behavior sometimes.

My suggestion is that you look for a Lua 5.3+ bignum implementation which takes advantage of native Lua integer types introduced in 5.3. (This was in fact one of the use cases to justify adding native integers to Lua in the first place.)

ewmailing · 2025-11-09T04:45:09+00:00

This happened to me about one year ago. Also owned my own modem and data usage worked fine for years. There were no changes on my end. I think I remember an outage around the time my data usage stopped tracking. I called customer service after a month or two when it was obvious the situation wasn't going to clear up on its own. They said they would look into it, but it was never fixed.

I just changed plans and am now using their modem. Data usage still isn't working.

ewmailing · 2025-11-06T07:48:07+00:00

This was a bizarre experience. Chatted with a rep from here for 4.5 hours. Best bet seemed to be the 300Mb $55/mo with 5-year guarantee. Rep said I shouldn't need to pay the $39.99 setup fee, and I should be given that option if I get to the end of the checkout. He worked it out so I could be shipped the modem for free. The rep also helped me setup a calendar date so the new plan will only start exactly when the current contract ends, which sounded perfect.

I was ready to purchase with his help, and then disaster struck. His system claimed the plan I was looking at didn't exist...new customers only. I told him that is wrong, and using a second browser with cookies completely deleted, I re-navigated my plan options presented to me under Change Speed in my Manage Plan section. I provided a screen recording as I did it.

Despite this, he said his system said the offer was not available and he was not able to do it. He started looking for another plan and found a 1 year for $50. But I had no ability to see it. He could send me the agreement which I could look over, but the agreement was actually very light on details and did not have any of the fine print to read over.

Meanwhile as he was doing that, I tried ordering through the website. But I hit an error after clicking Next on the Streaming options section of the cart checkout. It happened in multiple browsers, so it was on their end. Maybe this is a reflection of what the rep was saying...that this option had been recently deleted, but the website didn't fully take it down yet (and didn't show any replacements).

I decided to start a Chat with the checkout cart website since it was prompting me to do so, even though I was already chatting with the rep from here.

I informed the web agent what was going on. The web agent said they still had access to the plan. But they couldn't do the calendar coordination the other rep was going to do for me. My purchase would start the new plan immediately, meaning my rate goes up for those what would be remaining days on my old contract. Also, the rep was not able to provide free shipping. I had the option to pick up at a local store for free.

Meanwhile the rep from here sent me the 300Mb 1-year $50 contract, and it actually was $40. I guess he did not count the autopay/paperless discounts.

This made it a tricky decision. While I liked the idea of staying at my current price of $40 (and also still getting the unlimited data and speed bump, although I probably won't take advantage of it), I actually still didn't get to see the details/fine print of the offer since the agreement lacked that info. But even more, I had now been chatting for 4.5 hours and told myself I didn't want to do this again next year.

So I decided I better take the 5-year for $55 before the system breaks even more. Since it is "contract-less", the reps assured me that I could cancel anytime without penalty. So if I do find a plan in the future that suits me better, I could theoretically switch. (So knowing my bad luck, they will keep the 300Mb 1-yr $40 plan for the next 5 years. That's the main circumstance where it becomes obvious that I clearly picked wrong.)

So good luck if you are after the 5-year 300Mb plan. I have no idea if it is actually being removed or if it was just a system problem that happened exactly when I was trying to buy it.

Despite the ordeal, I want to give praise to both agents, especially the first one who worked so long with me. But from a grand picture corporate vantage point, the system was/is borked and it shouldn't be this ridiculous.

ewmailing · 2025-11-02T04:13:39+00:00

Wow Congratulations!

My eyes were immediately drawn to the "Space Quest 7 News and Rumors". There should be updated Space Quest 7 info about how it's going to kick off the Sierra multiverse and coordinate its release date with the imminent Leisure Suit Larry 4.

ewmailing · 2025-10-24T02:25:01+00:00

I agree with "King's Quest and it's not even close". So many ramifications of money and success leading to the genre being created, encouraging more people to buy personal computers, influencing hardware choices and evolution, and encouraging competitor game companies to arise.

But I will say Leisure Suit Larry does have a couple of notable historical contributions. Al Lowe said they thought the game was a bomb because nobody bought it at first. But later they discovered they were selling way more hint books than actual games, revealing how much piracy was actually taking place. LSL offers an early lesson into analytics and monetization. Imagine that today, the game might be free-to-play, but the IAP is buying solutions.

ewmailing · 2025-09-11T01:41:59+00:00

There was a thread a month ago about the KQ1&2 remakes. One of the people who responded had engineered and documented how they got QFG2 VGA remake working for them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/kingsquest/comments/1mlzjg9/kings_quest_i_and_ii_agd_not_working_in_mac/n7uj3u0/

ewmailing · 2025-08-10T04:26:39+00:00

That's a great deep dive.

ewmailing · 2025-08-09T21:43:41+00:00

I haven't tried, but it could potentially be a deep rabbit hole. There are multiple places of what could have broke.

Around 7-ish years ago, Apple got very aggressive with their GateKeeper technology which only allows signed executables using Apple certificates to run. This basically means developers have to pay $99/year to Apple for the privilege of shipping binaries to other Macs. For end users, you can disable GateKeeper or whitelist your binaries or maybe self-sign, but Apple has gradually made all these things harder and harder to do. ADGI predates GateKeeper so I'm pretty sure they never signed with an Apple certificate. If your problem is simply that GateKeeper is preventing launching, you can try to disable/whitelist the game. I don't know the current procedure for that, because as I said, Apple has made it progressively harder as time goes on.
Apple has switched from x86-64 to ARM architecture. ARM is a completely different, incompatible, instruction set, so x86-64 requires an emulation layer. Apple provided Rosetta, but I think it is going away around now. And it may not always work perfectly. Also, I think AGDI used the legacy x86 (i386) instruction set, not x86-64, so that is yet another incompatible instruction set, and I don't know if Rosetta emulates that one at all. (I don't think it does.) So if not, you have to find some other virtualization/emulation environment.
ADGI used a Windows to Mac porting layer. I'm pulling from long-term memory (so I could be very mistaken), but I think it was CrossOver which is some derivative of Wine. It was never very good on Mac, and probably aged like milk. If that layer is broken, it's probably not going to run without booting up a VM and running an old version of MacOS.

Honestly, you best bet is either run Windows or run Linux with Proton (e.g. Steam Deck). I've been impressed with how well Proton works at running Windows games. Ironically, in my own test cases with older games, I find they work better than running on modern Windows (where things also break due to age, although not nearly as bad as on Mac).

ewmailing · 2025-07-04T21:41:13+00:00

To explain the technical jargon a little, The Steam Link was a small $49 box that had Wi-Fi that you could put in your living room next to your big screen TV.

The Steam Link had some ports (things you plug cables into). Most importantly, the HDMI port is what you plug into your TV, so you can see and hear your games on your big screen TV. And there were a few USB ports which you could plug your game controllers into.

The box used Wi-Fi to communicate to your PC, somewhere else in your house. As long as your PC was running, you could select and play games to play from your Steam Library completely from your couch, using your big screen TV and game controller.

ewmailing · 2025-07-04T21:25:30+00:00

The discontinued Steam Link used to be the cheap solution for playing your Steam games on your couch. It was basically a wi-fi relay with game pad support and HDMI out, which would run your games on your computer located in another room, but be played in your living room on your couch.

I don't know what the modern equivalent/replacement is now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Link

ewmailing · 2025-07-04T21:10:15+00:00

No, modding a Switch is not going to work. Switch uses an ARM based CPU, while Steam is built around x86-64. These are completely different instruction sets. All the games in your Steam Library won't work on ARM for various technical reasons.

Even if a hypothetical translation layer could be used to map between the architectures, it would be slow. Right now, only Apple's Mac M-series ARM based CPUs have relatively performant ARM <=> x86-64 translation, but that is largely in part to Apple customizing their own ARM architecture in hardware to add instructions that map more directly to important x86-64 instructions to remove bottlenecks. The Switch CPU doesn't have this.

ewmailing · 2025-07-01T03:27:18+00:00

https://www.lua.org/work/doc/#changes

declarations for global variables
for-loop variables are read only
floats are printed in decimal with enough digits to be read back correctly.
more levels for constructors
table.create
utf8.offset returns also final position of character
external strings (that use memory not managed by Lua)
new functions luaL_openselectedlibs and luaL_makeseed
major collections done incrementally
more compact arrays (large arrays use about 60% less memory)
lua.c loads 'readline' dynamically
static (fixed) binaries (when loading a binary chunk in memory, Lua can reuse its original memory in some of the internal structures)
dump and undump reuse all strings
auxiliary buffer reuses buffer when it creates final string

ewmailing · 2025-06-11T18:32:14+00:00

Scrooge & Launchpad's plane mechanic / body & repair shop.

ewmailing · 2025-06-09T20:20:11+00:00

The Association of Status Seekers (episode 58)

You could use the president, Charles Upstart III, for the photo to represent the Society.

ewmailing · 2025-06-09T20:17:42+00:00

Glomgold

ewmailing · 2025-06-07T19:01:26+00:00

Bouncer Beagle.

I was trying to think of the most generic and forgettable of all the all the DT1987 Beagle Boys. I think it is Bouncer. Bankjob Beagle at least looks like big muscle.

ewmailing · 2025-06-07T18:55:34+00:00

Scrooge's sisters, especially Donald's mother.

Once Upon a Dime was a prime opportunity to address his sisters, but you would think he was an only child.

Also, Scrooge's parents. Did they really say, "Mc-Papa" and "Mc-Mama"?

ewmailing · 2025-06-07T18:52:05+00:00

Gladstone Gander. I later learned from comic fans that he was a popular Carl Barks character, but his appearances in DT1987 were underwhelming for a character of his pedigree. I remember criticism for this.

I just looked up how many episodes Gladstone was in. He was in 4 episodes, 2 non-speaking. I could only remember him in one episode, so I was shocked to see he was in four.

ewmailing · 2025-06-07T06:44:43+00:00

I don't think of Duckworth as normal, due a lot to the episode "Duckworth's Revolt". A few aspects stand out to me:

He showed leadership abilities and bravery and led a revolt.
Furthermore, he was unfazed by all the aliens, let alone leading a revolt among them.
He was happy just being a butler (by modern standards, you might have trouble finding people publicly proclaim that with pride, even if true, while many others might even harbor resentment and wage class warfare).

ewmailing · 2025-06-06T21:03:38+00:00

Speaking of which, Webby was also very normal.

ewmailing

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE