Post AwYWOPaD2JasxVDUem by foone@digipres.club
 (DIR) More posts by foone@digipres.club
 (DIR) Post #AwYTzIAhFsy8pBB4rY by foone@digipres.club
       2025-07-27T10:00:19Z
       
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       it's 3am on a sunday morning so obviously I'm hacking Wheel of Fortune Junior Edition.It uses a simple text format: it's 7-bit ascii ,but if he high bit is set, the character is followed by a space
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYUHLsKDvl3WXCDiq by foone@digipres.club
       2025-07-27T10:03:39Z
       
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       so the phrase:I CANNOTTELL A LIEis encoded as:"I CANNO\xD4TELL A LI\xC5"
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYUcCDxIkkBflFjoO by womble@infosec.exchange
       2025-07-27T10:07:25Z
       
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       @foone they must have been very short on memory, or there was a gas leak in the dev team office.
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYUnu5CZl7Osqjzxg by foone@digipres.club
       2025-07-27T10:09:34Z
       
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       @womble based on the ROM size, they were less than a kilobyte away from running out of space on the 128 kilobyte ROM hcip
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYUt3HHohKSqhqeaO by foone@digipres.club
       2025-07-27T10:10:29Z
       
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       looking at the rom's filled vs unfilled bits, they're less than a kilobyte away from overflowing the 128 kilobyte ROM chip this game shipped on.
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYUwY1rwMvz5jIuBM by foone@digipres.club
       2025-07-27T10:11:04Z
       
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       I bet they added in this compression late when they needed an extra kilobyte or two, and this was easy enough to implement and saved just enough space to fit
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYVLzmrsEYSQAQCsi by foone@digipres.club
       2025-07-27T10:15:35Z
       
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       actually no I found 12 kilobytes that are unused. they didn't need this.
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYWOPaD2JasxVDUem by foone@digipres.club
       2025-07-27T10:27:19Z
       
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       yeah I checked. they saved 2 kilobytes with this scheme
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYWoLdKLNX8Ep2glM by foone@digipres.club
       2025-07-27T10:32:03Z
       
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       perhaps they wrote this for the family edition or the original unsubtitled release, and it was needed there, but this is the junior edition with different puzzles
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYZ2lTpF7CuMYbHQu by eichin@mastodon.mit.edu
       2025-07-27T10:56:56Z
       
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       @fooneMmm, I've seen that encoding in a bunch of unrelated 80s stuff, usually because you get a free "signed" check when you're doing comparisons for other things
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYZ5tRk52oPwH7M7U by foone@digipres.club
       2025-07-27T10:57:36Z
       
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       @eichin maxes sense on an 8bit system, yeah!
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYfVIpPRqo3cigfGC by rotopenguin@mastodon.social
       2025-07-27T12:09:20Z
       
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       @foone a bit odd that they would pack away newlines, when spaces seem like a bigger savings.
       
 (DIR) Post #AwYjnOW1RQ7aI8V8XQ by th@social.v.st
       2025-07-27T12:57:13Z
       
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       @foone the trs80 model 100 used the high bit to terminate strings and save a byte.