[HN Gopher] Street Fighter II, the World Warrier
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       Street Fighter II, the World Warrier
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 146 points
       Date   : 2021-12-23 12:29 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (fabiensanglard.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (fabiensanglard.net)
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Recent and related:
       | 
       |  _Street Fighter II paper trails - allocating sprite space by
       | hand_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657343 - Dec 2021
       | (67 comments)
        
       | endisneigh wrote:
       | I love the art style of sprites.
       | 
       | Is there any software to turn a picture into a sprite like image
       | as shown in the article at varying resolutions?
       | 
       | It would be cool to turn my room into a street fighter 2 like set
       | of sprites.
        
         | kingcharles wrote:
        
         | lbriner wrote:
         | I think they are called tile editors.
        
       | crehn wrote:
       | > Since the logo had already been created, I couldn't just go in
       | and change the letter at this point.
       | 
       | Why not?
        
         | allenu wrote:
         | > The GFX ROM and the 68000 instructions ROM as burned
         | separately. The problem Akiman describe is that the GFX ROM had
         | been burned but he could still make changes to the
         | instructions.
         | 
         | The sprite data was already burned to ROMs, but they could
         | still change the code.
        
       | u801e wrote:
       | I didn't even notice the typo in the title until I started
       | reading the article. I wonder how many would have noticed had it
       | not been fixed?
        
         | unwind wrote:
         | Hand up, luckily I scanned the comments before posting a
         | request to have it fixed. Great story!
        
         | syspec wrote:
         | Probably, not many... until word spread. Once you see it,
         | that's all you see
        
         | twodave wrote:
         | I noticed it right away. I am naturally a very accurate
         | speller, though. I think it has to do with the ability to more
         | or less visualize words. My wife can't visualize them. She
         | struggles with spelling and wouldn't have noticed the mistake
         | in the article at all.
        
           | pm215 wrote:
           | I'm not sure visualization is necessary -- I can't visualize
           | much at all, and definitely don't visualize words, but
           | misspelt words are immediately obvious to me. They don't look
           | right -- so maybe you need to have a memory of the way words
           | look, but you don't need to be able to actively recall it (ie
           | visualize them) ?
           | 
           | I've always assumed that spelling ability was linked to
           | reading a lot when young, but that's just my personal
           | experience so there's probably research somewhere saying that
           | theory's wrong :-)
           | 
           | As an aside, it's a minor miracle that reading is possible at
           | all (ie that we can do it fluidly and without conscious
           | effort rather than as a laborious decoding and sounding out
           | process). There's no inherent reason why the visual and
           | language parts of the brain should be so capable of working
           | together -- they never evolved to do it.)
        
         | lbriner wrote:
         | I would have probably assumed it was an American spelling (as a
         | Brit). Certainly wouldn't have bothered me too much.
        
       | JDazzle wrote:
       | Literally a duplicate post that was created about 11 hours before
       | this one.
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657343
        
         | mmmmmbop wrote:
         | This is a different article.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | royjacobs wrote:
         | This is another post in a series about SF2, it's not a
         | duplicate.
        
       | jonny_eh wrote:
       | Has anyone made an ips patch to fix the gfx rom and have the code
       | use it?
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | pupppet wrote:
       | Not to sound like an old man, but kids today will never know the
       | joy of walking up to the cabinet and going head-to-head (side-to-
       | side?) vs another live player. There's something about the live
       | experience that online play can't match. And yeah there's a few
       | arcades still out there, but it's pretty niche.
        
         | trasz wrote:
         | Many console (home console, eg ps4) games have a split-screen
         | mode.
        
           | kingcharles wrote:
           | I can't virtually punch my friend in the face when he kills
           | me with a hundred-hand slap for the thirtieth time in one
           | day.
        
           | pupppet wrote:
           | Not the same as walking up to a complete stranger and having
           | it out.
        
       | ArtWomb wrote:
       | Effectively "marching squares" implemented in a single bitmap
       | tile ;)
       | 
       | https://graphics.stanford.edu/~mdfisher/MarchingCubes.html
        
       | 300bps wrote:
       | I coach a FIRST Robotics team and I love to tell the kids stories
       | like this so they can get a feel for what engineering is like in
       | the real world.
       | 
       | Sometimes you just need to throw some duct tape on it.
        
         | dicroce wrote:
         | I've been a software engineer for 25 years and I think people
         | overly romanticize this attitude and we should properly fix
         | things more.
        
           | karaterobot wrote:
           | This is a situation where it was not possible to properly fix
           | the problem due to constraints beyond the designer's control.
           | Coming up with the best solution given a set of requirements
           | and constraints is the definition of design, and is where
           | design overlaps with engineering. Fixing the workflow problem
           | that resulted in a potentially embarrassing mistake to go
           | unspotted until 3 days before shipping would be an example of
           | good management...
        
           | toast0 wrote:
           | Fixing things is always a question of improvement vs cost. If
           | the graphics rom is already manufactured, there's a lot of
           | cost to make new ones. Better to make changes to the program
           | rom which hasn't been sent out yet and may likely be smaller
           | and less expensive than the graphics rom anyway. Typically
           | arcade machines may get one or two program updates but
           | usually no graphics or audio updates.
        
           | allenu wrote:
           | That's funny. I've been in it for 20 years and I feel like we
           | should be okay with hacks like this more. Isolated fixes like
           | this usually don't cause any knock-on effects, get the job
           | done, and usually don't change much. Of course, hacks in code
           | that needs to be touched frequently or affects lots of other
           | code is a different story.
        
       | 0x445442 wrote:
       | For anyone wanting to blog, take note of this one's style, layout
       | and presentation. It's what the web was meant to be.
        
         | nkrisc wrote:
         | > It's what the web was meant to be.
         | 
         | Difficult to read? You needn't sacrifice the desirable
         | principles of the web for legibility.
        
         | mrob wrote:
         | I disagree. Full justification is less legible than left
         | justification because it removes the positional cue of varied
         | line lengths, and monospaced font for body text decreases
         | information density for no good reason, which also hurts
         | legibility by forcing unnecessary eye movement. I don't usually
         | complain about typography because Firefox's Reader View can
         | usually fix it, but here Reader View makes the diagrams
         | unreadable. Instead, the font can be changed easily enough with
         | the Web Developer Tools, but the text justification is more
         | annoying because it's specified multiple times for different
         | blocks of text.
        
           | kingcharles wrote:
           | I agree with you; there have been studies that showed both
           | that left justified text and proportional typefaces are
           | generally more legible.
           | 
           | I wonder though - for long-time coders like a lot of the
           | audience here - have we become inured to reading monospaced
           | fonts, such that we read them easier and are therefore an
           | anomaly in such studies?
           | 
           | I know I cannot code at all with variable-width fonts, but is
           | that because I'm old school and grew up coding in the Time
           | Before when there were only monospaced fonts?
        
           | danielnixon wrote:
           | It's only a AAA (i.e. least critical) requirement, but
           | justified text is an accessibility issue according to WCAG.
           | https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/failures/F88.html
        
           | arthur6667 wrote:
           | Funny, I find this one of the more ledgible blogs i've seen
           | recently :) Isn't it personal preference? Same with, dare I
           | say it, line length. I have colleagues that insist 80
           | characters is ideal, I think it is terrible and should be
           | illegal.
           | 
           | But more to the point, I am pretty sure it is in reference to
           | not being bloated with crappy JS spyware, no moving photos
           | when scrolling, no ads, no subcribe popups, no 'you only have
           | free 2 articles left', no overriding the f'ing text selection
           | so i cannot copy paste code... So not medium.com basically.
        
             | 0x445442 wrote:
             | Sure the font and justification could have been different,
             | to each his own. But yeah, I was referring to the
             | simplicity, the table layout, prudent use of color and the
             | absence of JS.
             | 
             | I find the web to be unusable without configuring a Pi-Hole
             | to be my DNS server.
        
           | ghostbrainalpha wrote:
           | I think he is saying that the web was meant to be difficult
           | to read.
           | 
           | He is expressing nostalgia for a time when information
           | gathering had exciting new possibilities because of the
           | internet was new, but before we over optimized the soul out
           | of everything.
           | 
           | It's a slippery slope, because certainly the page could be
           | more readable, and most people would want that, but then
           | what's the next improvement? Sidebar links to similar blogs
           | you might like?
        
       | leglock wrote:
       | Polygon did a series of articles about Street Fighter many years
       | ago that has some more cool anecdotes from the programmers.
       | 
       | https://www.polygon.com/a/street-fighter-2-oral-history
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-23 23:01 UTC)