• bokherif@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 days ago

    In NFS Underground 2, if you place an empty file named “FOOBAR” with no extension in the game directory, you can bypass disk verification and the game just launches.

  • czardestructo@lemmy.world
    12·
    3 days ago

    I know way too much about the propagation of plasma in fluorescent lighting. When you first hit a fluorescent tube with high voltage you need some cosmic radiation to rip off the first barium ion off the cathode which causes a tiny little lightning strike of plasma that skitters across the inner surface of the tube. Once it makes its way across the length of the tube to the anode you now have a conductive path. This path then grows tremendously until it envelopes the whole cross section starting from the anode and works it’s way back to the cathode until the whole tube is filled with wonderful plasma that makes light when it excites the phosphor coating.

  • N00b22@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    Open NFS MW 2005

    In the titlescreen (Do not press Enter yet) type

    • burgerking (unlocks hidden challenge)

    • castrol (shows hidden castrol themed Ford GT)

  • Rednax@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 days ago

    In an older version of Stellaris, a cheesy strategy is to abduct or force relocate the entire galaxy onto a single planet.

    Usually having an overcrowded planet, has a several drawbacks.

    Since you can never generate enough food, your population will always be in decline. But this decline is capped per planet, and is quite small. As long as you can keep abducting and force relocating pops from your conquests, you can grow.

    Similarly, you ignore consumer goods for the only cost of a reduction in produced goods from jobs. But you barely produce anything via jobs anyway.

    The low happyness and overcrowding causes stability issues on the planet. But again, the negative stability is capped, so you enable martial law on the planet, and build fortresses, which provide a stability boost per soldier job they create. And only stability matters for revolts.

    You need minerals, but you can get those from mining asteroids.

    Your energy credits come from being a mega church, in which each pop following your religion, generates some credits, along with trade generated per pop.

    Alloys come from turning the planet into an ecumenopolis. Although you get a -50% production modifier, it is the only thing you need to produce yourself.

    But the real trick is giving all the cramped up pops utopian living standards. In this version of Stellaris, any unemployed pop living in utopian living standards, generated science points and trade value. Usually those are barely worth the extra cost of letting the pop live so luxuriously. But even if you don’t provide food and consumer goods, they still provide sciencd and trade.

    As a result, you got a stable planet generating insane amounts of science, energy credits, and alloys. While remaining a small empire, which kept tech costs low.

  • stringere@sh.itjust.works
    10·
    3 days ago

    In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.

    Latin palindrome, roughly “we enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire”.

  • PrimarilyPrimate@lemmy.worldEnglish
    55·
    4 days ago

    To tell the age of any horse Inspect the lower jaw of course; The six front teeth the tale will tell, And every doubt and fear dispel.

    Two middle nippers you behold Before the colt is two weeks old; Before eight weeks two more will come Eight months: the corners cut the gum.

    At two the middle “Nippers” drop: At three the second pair can’t stop; When four years old the third pair goes, At five a full new set he shows.

    The deep black spots will pass from view At six years from the middle two; The second pair at seven years; At eight the spot each corner clears.

    From the middle “Nippers” upper jaw At nine the black spots will withdraw. The second pair at ten are bright; Eleven finds the corners light.

    As time goes on the horsemen know The oval teeth three-sided grow; Then longer get - project before - Till twenty, when they know no more."

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldEnglish
      53·
      4 days ago

      The phrase “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” comes from this. If someone gives you a horse, you shouldn’t look into its mouth to see how old it is because, hey, free horse.

  • NSRXN@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    61·
    3 days ago

    09f911029d74e35bd84156e5635688c0

    I think lol

    nope. last “e” is a “c”. real close tho

  • Bob@feddit.nl
    13·
    3 days ago

    My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas was the mnemonic when Pluto was still a planet. I suppose not totally obsolete but I find myself ending at “nine” instead of something you’d serve beginning with N.

  • Zombiepirate@lemmy.worldEnglish
    45·
    4 days ago

    Loading a program from disk on the Commodore 64

    LOAD"*",8,1

    I haven’t loaded a game on that system since I was probably 10 or so, but I’ll never forget the command.

    I memorized it as L-O-A-D shift-2 star shift-2 comma eight comma one.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      45·
      4 days ago

      Fun fact: There’s a common misconception that this would load the first program on a disk, but it actually loads the most recently loaded program from the disk. If the disk is detected as being freshly inserted (as determined by the 2-character identifier in the disk’s directory header), that defaulted to the first program in the disk’s directory.

      Admittedly, most of the time that makes it a distinction without a difference, but if you’d loaded something else from the same disk first, and you then wanted to load the first in the directory, you would need to use LOAD":*",8,1 instead.

      That extra colon is vaguely related to the colon in C:\ on Windows computers. A lone colon was taken as an abbreviation of 0:, because in Commodore DOS(es) the drive “letters” were numbers. Dual slot drives were possible and then the two slots were 0: and 1:.

      “So what’s the 8 for in the LOAD command?” you might ask; "Isn’t that the drive “letter” "? No, that’s the device number. Note that drives on the 8-bit Commodores were always external. The 8 was more like the drive’s “IP address” on the serial bus.

      “What about the ,1?” That meant to LOAD the program at the memory address specified by the program’s header on the disk. Without that, the computer would ignore the header and try to load into BASIC memory.

      The neat part about loading at any address meant that it could overwrite parts of zero-page where the computer kept pointers to important internal functions. Overwrite the right one of those and the computer could be convinced to jump to a routine in the program that had just loaded without the user needing to type RUN.

      So, if you wanted to be i) certain of loading the first program in the directory of ii) the disk in the second slot of iii) a dual-slot drive on the serial bus identifying as device/address 9, and then iv) have the program load at its preferred memory location, you’d need to use LOAD"1:*",9,1

      The number of people who found the need to type that command in earnest, even back in the heyday of Commodore, probably numbers in the low tens, but there it is.

      How’s that for an obscure info dump?

    • rodneylives@lemmy.world
      3·
      3 days ago

      Along these lines, I have several important memory locations memorized. POKE 53280 and 1 to change the border and background colors. 828 is the cassette buffer, and 49152 the free memory above BASIC ROM. SYS 64738 resets the machine.

      I also can recite the powers of 2 up to 65536.

  • superkret@feddit.org
    37·
    4 days ago

    The “Turbo” button on a 486 PC was actually a CPU clock speed limiter. It was necessary to play older games who had a hardcoded framerate that depended on clock cycles, because they would otherwise run too fast.
    But for marketing reasons, IBM labelled the toggle as “turbo” instead of a speed limiter.

    • Gurfaild@feddit.org
      10·
      4 days ago

      well, actually… It usually changed the clock speed on 286 PCs, but on 486s it often disabled the L1 cache or introduced additional waitstates instead

  • P00ptart@lemmy.world
    26·
    4 days ago

    Morse code. Did a science project back in middle school with wires, buzzers and tappers on a board. Then I taught it to my boy scout troop for a badge. Then lost some of it before joining the army in communications (as well as a ton of other outdated means of communication) and then in Iraq, me and another commo guy wired up our rooms for it so we could talk shit about our leadership even if they were in the room. Anyways, after working with it that many times over a stretched out time frame, I’ll never forget that. Or the phonetic alphabet.