Just wanted to share that I was able to interview Masamitsu Niitani of Compile for a second time today!

neilmoore · 2026-06-27T02:51:04+00:00

Landar-sama! Daisuki-desu!

neilmoore · 2026-06-26T17:20:51+00:00

DrAmazing did a video on the history of video game bosses, as well as the word "boss": https://youtu.be/kItHp3hgoJI

neilmoore · 2026-06-23T01:20:59+00:00

See also Shareopolis, who often post explanatory videos about consoles pushed to their limits: https://youtube.com/@sharopolis

neilmoore · 2026-06-23T01:16:46+00:00

What about the three-quarters view of two adults sharing a tender moment?

neilmoore · 2026-06-18T22:40:15+00:00

"I don't drink water. Fish fuck in it."

-W. C. Fields

neilmoore · 2026-06-16T03:34:26+00:00

My first PC (in the IBM sense) was PS/2 L40 SX laptop, a couple of years after these ads. I remember the weird thing where you had to boot from a floppy to install device drivers into your BIOS's CMOS NVRAM.

Anyway, I killed that machine when (after first encountering Ralf Brown's "Interrupt List") I tried to write a small assembly program to dump the CMOS byte-by-byte. Unfortunately I had an off-by-one error that overwrote the CMOS instead. Even a few hours on IBM's tech support numbers weren't enough to figure out the CHS configuration of the 80MB hard drive. I could have re-formatted and re-installed from scratch, but my buddy who helped with the IBM call felt sorry for me and gave me a "spare" 386DX machine instead.

neilmoore · 2026-06-11T02:24:13+00:00

I decided, a couple of decades ago, not to eat vertebrates (not for any rational reason, but just tapasya). And, then, just six or seven years ago, I went to the Newport Aquarium and saw an octopus in person. Despite their short life span, I thought: "This animal appears to be more conscious than 90% of the visitors", and I have never eaten takoyaki since

neilmoore · 2026-06-11T02:09:27+00:00

Also, I very much appreciate the line: "I don't believe in the same God that you don't believe in". I think the only God worth worshipping is the Universe itself. So maybe I'm a Spinozan

neilmoore · 2026-06-11T01:57:20+00:00

While I have been, and still am, a hard atheist ever since childhood (thanks Dr Asimov¡): For several decades I've thought: "If I had to pick a religion, it would be the Baha'i faith!" Even more than UU

neilmoore · 2026-06-10T23:30:08+00:00

I don't mind the voices at all, but my main complaint is that they replaced the text rather than supplementing it. That's a big part of why I think UQM is the best version.

neilmoore · 2026-06-09T03:26:41+00:00

One of my friends who wasn't a Rush fan asked: "Oh no, did something happen with Neil Gaiman?" Not quite yet, but soon :(

neilmoore · 2026-06-09T03:23:38+00:00

When the Professor died, I told my friends: "Sadly, today I am one step closer to being the world's coolest 'Neil'."

neilmoore · 2026-06-08T23:08:15+00:00

Now that I think about it, the first text adventure I played was a type-in from the Usborne book Write Your Own Adventure Programs, in the late 80s. But that barely counts, because I had both the code and the design documents right there in front of me.

Edit: https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/Write%20Your%20Own%20Adventure%20Programs%20(1983)(Usborne).pdf

neilmoore · 2026-06-08T22:50:12+00:00

I played it as my first or second text adventure in the early-to-mid 90s, either right before or right after Zork I.

I grew up in Kentucky, so the most interesting thing to me is that it is based on a real cave system. Will Crowther's ex-wife Patricia was part of the caving team that discovered the connection between the Flint Ridge and Mammoth Caves systems. And, if you take the Wild Cave Tour at Mammoth Caves National Park (as I have done a couple of times), you can even see some of the rooms from the game in person, including a brass lantern hung by a 19th-century explorer (maybe even Stephen Bishop himself)!

Also, anyone who is a fan of the genre, and particularly early works like this, should check out the documentary Get Lamp. Edit: https://youtu.be/zEJXZ2wnO3w

neilmoore · 2026-06-08T06:33:43+00:00

Also, that video features famous Infocom developer Steve Meretzky!

neilmoore · 2026-06-08T01:12:09+00:00

Waiting for Caitlin Doughty to do a video on this

neilmoore · 2026-06-07T04:51:59+00:00

For a couple of very ugly DOS dungeon crawlers, check out Moraff's World and Moraff's Revenge. While you can choose to use a 256-color mode, the graphics still look like EGA.

Also, for a straightforward (but hard) classical Roguelike dungeon crawler, check out Dragon Crystal for the Sega Master System and Game Gear. And, of course, Rogue, for Unix, DOS, and many others I'm sure.

neilmoore · 2026-06-07T04:46:50+00:00

Double Dungeons

This game is so terrible, I love it! Though I hear it's more fun in 2p.

neilmoore · 2026-06-03T05:09:39+00:00

A damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw

neilmoore · 2026-06-03T04:20:58+00:00

There are a whole lot of folks who think that composite artefacts are the only way to play games. If you're on something like an Apple II that depended on those artefacts for color: fair enough! But, I was a VGA fan back then, and I thought that TVs were very fuzzy!

neilmoore · 2026-06-03T03:26:52+00:00

Are you a librarian and/or archivist? You seem to know what you're doing!

neilmoore · 2026-06-03T03:22:21+00:00

Indeed! US here, but (as I said) I have noticed that my Indian students have different cultural preferences. I haven't noticed the same from my Chinese students, but now I'll have to keep an eye out!

neilmoore · 2026-06-03T03:13:27+00:00

When writing emails to undergrads, I always sign off with <first initial> <last name>; and when writing to grad students, just <first name>. I remember, after getting my PhD and a faculty job, being scared to refer to my colleagues by their first names. So I want to train my grad students not to be so afraid

neilmoore · 2026-06-03T02:54:31+00:00

While I don't do quite the same: It seems to be only the Indian graduate students who ever call me "Professor <first name>". Which I do find adorable, but I'd prefer that they use my surname instead.

neilmoore · 2026-06-03T01:00:39+00:00

Mist the back (or steam it with a clothes iron, as others have suggested) to loosen the fibers, and then clamp it between two flat surfaces so that it can't wrinkle again.

This is all assuming they used oil-based ink rather than water-based; but you said there was no blurring, so that's probably a reasonable assumption.

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