[HN Gopher] Rebecca Heineman has died
___________________________________________________________________
Rebecca Heineman has died
Author : shdon
Score : 882 points
Date : 2025-11-18 01:25 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcgamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcgamer.com)
| evan_ wrote:
| The first time I became aware of her was in the "Another World
| 101" series, about her SNES port:
|
| https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/index...
| memonkey wrote:
| What an amazing career. RIP.
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| I was lucky to catch some of Becky's livestreams on YouTube over
| the years.
|
| More than a brilliant programmer she was truly a kind soul. She
| never approached topics with any kind of ego. Just a joy and love
| for the things she'd worked on and the people she'd worked with
| some_furry wrote:
| Yeah, that's the impression I got from everyone who's saddened
| by her loss.
|
| We lost a legend.
| deeg wrote:
| I didn't know her but reading the eulogies it was obvious she
| was a kind person who touched so many people. I hope some day
| my eulogies will be similar (if lower in scope).
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Many years ago I played one of her works, Bard's Tale 3: Thief of
| Fate and enjoyed it very much.
|
| It was a masterful blend of RPG, dungeon crawl, and puzzles and
| had a memorable soundtrack.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru5kg35dNso
|
| Having a bard in your party let you choose a soundtrack and their
| songs brought magical effects. For example, the Rhyme of Duotime
| let your party attack more frequently in combat:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oR4j7w4FIY
|
| BT3 is available on the Internet Archive:
| https://archive.org/details/msdos_The_Bards_Tale_3_-_Thief_O...
| sosborn wrote:
| The original Bard's Tale was my first RPG and I've been hooked
| ever since.
| mitb6 wrote:
| BT3 was wonderful, lots of nostalgia for me. Sad to hear of her
| passing.
| senectus1 wrote:
| ahh i have fond memories of this game... and the silly anti
| piracy attempts (decoder ring) they shipped it with.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| In middle school, a friend and I 'cracked' that decoder ring
| by copying all the info by hand on to paper so we could both
| play the game from one store bought copy because we were
| poor. I don't think we ever finished the game, but it's still
| one of my happiest early gaming memories.
|
| They remastered all three of the first Bard's Tale games a
| few years ago and released them on Steam with many quality of
| life improvements-- I bought the set without a second thought
| even though I know I will probably never take the time to
| play it all the way through. I've spent a few dozen hours on
| it so far, though.
| mrits wrote:
| It is hilarious to think if you could beat BT3 you could
| also crack the decoder ring
| einpoklum wrote:
| It seems Bard's Tale 3 can be played on the DosBox emulator:
|
| https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=188&letter=B
|
| ... which is available for many platforms, including Windows
| and Linux:
|
| https://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1
|
| although the latest version of DosBox seems to be from 2019, so
| maybe others can suggest a more actively-maintained emulator.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| DOSBox-X is a port that is actively developed and has many
| features missing in vanilla DOSBox.
|
| There are a few other ones as well. DOSBox Staging is one.
| Magic DOSBox seems to be the most popular on Android. There
| is some iOS port as well.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| "DOSBox Staging" is such a weird name for that fork /
| continuation.
| einpoklum wrote:
| That sounds promising. Do they also have a "compatibility
| by game title" database?
| mrits wrote:
| She was originally chosen to do a remaster of the series. This
| was eventually reassigned to another publisher.
|
| If you purchase Bards Tale 4 you get the remastered 1,2, and 3
| for free.
|
| I have played BT 1 every year or so since the late 80s.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| The first trilogy (including BT3) was also remastered about 7
| years ago and released on Steam, it's like $15 and has many
| quality of life improvements.
| trashface wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't know BT3 was by a different author, it
| definitely had its own vibe distinct from the first two, which
| this guy wrote
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cranford). I liked them
| all though.
|
| The steam remasters are incredibly faithful to the originals -
| right down to the timing and flow of the turn-based combat.
| Makes me wonder if they are emulating the original code
| somehow.
| moregrist wrote:
| I believe they're using the PC ports, running in something
| like DosBox or FreeDOS
| amatecha wrote:
| Very sad news. This one hit pretty hard for me as not only was
| she so awesome and contributed so much to so many great games,
| but the short timeline between "oh dang I have cancer and we're
| fighting it" to, well, today... was just way too short :(
| djmips wrote:
| You are not alone. I can only think that her post about being
| very vulnerable after chemo from immune system supression made
| me realize how lucky you have to be to beat cancer with chemo.
| empressplay wrote:
| My understanding is the cancer had already metastasized by
| the time it was discovered. Chemo was always a hail Mary
| sadly :(
| lez wrote:
| You are not alone being hit hard by the pace of the cancer's
| progression. Dr Makis talks about his shocks lately as an
| oncologist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gIYQCjB_NU
| zeta0134 wrote:
| Rebecca was well known in emulation circles for her high quality
| work on various games of the era, often pushing the hardware in
| unusual ways. This article is one of my favorites, detailing the
| wacky tricks she used to get Another World's 3D rendering system
| running acceptably on a Super Nintendo
|
| https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/
|
| Rest in piece, you absolute legend.
| edf13 wrote:
| Today I learned...
|
| "Super Fami-Com ("FAMIly COMputer")"
|
| Doh!
| djmips wrote:
| It was a sequel to the Famicom.
| rob74 wrote:
| She also somehow pulled off the port of Doom to the hopelessly
| underpowered hardware of the 3DO in just a few weeks, after
| others had tried and failed for much longer than that. The
| final release had a reduced viewport and a bad framerate, but
| the background music was great (recorded with a band and stored
| as audio tracks on the game CD).
|
| https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do
|
| Also, 62 years is much too young! And one month from diagnosis
| (because of being short of breath) to dying is really rough -
| although there's a lot of progress on cancer treatment, some
| forms have symptoms at such a late stage that they're
| unfortunately still a death sentence...
| siev wrote:
| Gonna link SSFF's enjoyable telling of the 3DO port story:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxF1_wg2d_Q
|
| I will never get over the company CEO sending here PNGs of
| new weapon models and saying, essentially, "Yeah so you can
| just copy & paste these into the game, right?"
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| Aww I'm very sad to hear this. She was close friends to a partner
| of mine and I met her about ten years ago through that
| connection. She seemed to be a lovely person.
| awaymazdacx5 wrote:
| Running x86 server architecture in software development. PC
| Gamer's obituary claims she was debugged.
| Dedime wrote:
| Admittedly I didn't dive much into this to get the full context,
| but it's saddening to me that a legendary game designer had a
| GoFundMe. I was hoping achieving that level of status in a
| traditionally well-paid industry would leave one well off,
| financially.
| reactordev wrote:
| Cancer and US Medical Care has a tendency to drain any savings
| you have. Also, it was sudden so it's not like she was ready to
| retire at all.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I'm wondering if she actually got the fundraiser money,
| considering how quickly this moved - the last update implied it
| would have to go to her funeral, and I hope it pays for the
| bills or helps her family.
| ido wrote:
| The games industry is not traditionally well paid,
| unfortunately.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| This. It's consistently lower-paying than the rest of the
| software industry.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's such an erractic industry in terms of compensation. You
| can found a studio, make some acclaimed darlings, and still
| end up shuttering and being no better off than your average
| joe. Then there's being a "software engineer in games" where
| you're a cog in a wheel fixing bugs in the yearly Sportball
| game that gets compensated 200k and you live very well
| despite never truly "impacting" the industry the same way.
| 200k isn't mindblowing for a software engineer, but it's well
| beyond "average joe" range at that point.
|
| I'm that cog. Or at least, was. Situations like this make me
| thing a lot about the state of the industry and where I lie
| in life.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Video games are an art form, the downside is they pay like
| one too.
| connicpu wrote:
| Yep, unfortunately that's a big part of the reason I left for
| a more traditional tech role. The same skills are extremely
| valuable at any company writing performance critical
| software.
| thelibrarian wrote:
| Considering the James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame is
| having to hold a fundraising auction of his memorabilia to fund
| his cancer treatment, cancer is expensive in the US.
| fastball wrote:
| Cancer is expensive everywhere, the difference is who pays
| for it.
| anonyfox wrote:
| actually a difference is also how many players along the
| supply chain siphon money out of the process. the more
| greed is allowed and acted on for the treatment, the more
| expensive it gets. introduce layers of insurances,
| hedgefonds, pension funds, lobbyism, ... it adds up to
| riddiculous amounts far beyond the original
| R&D/infrastructure/treatment costs.
| simondotau wrote:
| And those are just the downsides of a market-based
| system. There are also upsides of single-payer systems,
| like monopsony buying power.
| philipallstar wrote:
| And also downsides, e.g. many treatments just aren't
| available, and many others would never have had their
| discovery funded without the market-based system
| existing.
| ben_w wrote:
| Governments can (and do) directly fund medical research
| including drug discovery. This is in part because
| governments of even just middling competence have an
| incentive to keep their workforce (which also includes
| their military) healthy.
| simondotau wrote:
| Nobody is advocating for eliminating a market-based
| system. My country (Australia) has both single-payer and
| a market-based private healthcare system.
| philipallstar wrote:
| You can imagine how that system, like most, is actually
| getting its medical advancements from the US.
| rsynnott wrote:
| This... is a think that people believe, but it's not as
| simple as that. Most basic research is universities, all
| over the place. Many drugs are developed in Europe. A lot
| of medical machinery is developed and made in Europe
| (Siemens, Philips and Roche are huge in this space). Like
| most things, med tech is fairly globalised.
| simondotau wrote:
| And let's not forget that a substantial amount of medical
| research performed in the USA is not market-based but
| rather publicly funded through the NIH.
| jjcob wrote:
| And performed by researchers that received free education
| in their home country before moving to the US because
| they hope for a better career there...
| philipallstar wrote:
| Most of that is funded by the NIH and not by the local
| systems. Spending money is easy.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > This... is a think that people believe, but it's not as
| simple as that.
|
| This is a thing people believe because pharmaceutical
| companies keep repeating it. And to be fair, they're not
| entirely wrong in that getting a drug/treatment from the
| lab to the pharmacy is _incredibly_ expensive because
| most drugs don 't work and clinical trials are super
| expensive.
|
| It does seem to me that a better system would be to split
| out the research/development and manufacturing of
| pharmaceuticals into the lab development (scientists),
| the clinical trials (should be government funded) and the
| manufacturing (this could easily be done via contract).
| philipallstar wrote:
| > It does seem to me that a better system would be to
| split out the research/development and manufacturing of
| pharmaceuticals into the lab development (scientists),
| the clinical trials (should be government funded) and the
| manufacturing (this could easily be done via contract).
|
| The market is there to risk money in the world of
| imperfect information trying to predict what would be
| good to pursue. That is one of the hardest parts of the
| process, but it's not even made your list.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Which the US had a situation exactly like that until very
| recently: development labs, often at Universities, with
| scientists paid for by grants (some private, but the
| majority being public, government grants), with clinical
| trials overseen by government agencies like the National
| Institute for Health (NIH), and winning research
| eventually being tech transferred for cheap to
| Pharmaceutical companies to manufacture, distribute, and
| market.
|
| The companies have the biggest PR arms, so took the most
| credit for a system that had been balanced on a lot of
| government funding in the earlier, riskier stages.
| Eventually the marketing got so unbalanced people didn't
| realize how much the system was more complex than the
| marketing and voted for people that decided it was a
| "free market" idea to smash the government funding for
| the hard parts of science.
| razakel wrote:
| This is a comforting lie Americans tell themselves to
| justify being ripped off.
|
| You pay double the OECD average, and more per person for
| healthcare than the Swiss - and that's only counting the
| publicly funded parts!
| Clent wrote:
| This implies the US is subsidizing the world's healthcare
| system and sacrificing it's own citizens for the benefit
| of every non-American.
|
| You're ok with that?
| bentcorner wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense. If you make a thing, the
| price you set for selling that thing in a country has
| little to do with where you happen to be living when you
| made that thing.
| jrflowers wrote:
| This is either intentional bad faith trolling or you are
| not aware of the per capita spending on healthcare in the
| US.
|
| https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-
| collection/health-...
| fastball wrote:
| You don't think cancer is an expensive disease to treat?
| You don't think it involves a lot of inputs?
| kragen wrote:
| It's a lot more expensive in the US. Three years of
| ribociclib is US$100k here in Argentina, which dwarfs the
| usual costs of things like chemotherapy, radiation therapy,
| and surgical resection. (All of which is normally paid for
| either by a health plan or by the public hospital system.)
| In the US, if you have to go through all of that, I think
| the cost is going to be at least an order of magnitude
| higher.
| latentsea wrote:
| How'd the theme song to that show go again?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Not just legendary game designer, but co-founder of a game
| studio and publisher (Interplay).
| superultra wrote:
| The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet
| according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations
| combined.
|
| It's a tragedy that our own citizens are not the direct be
| beneficiaries of that wealth.
|
| I think a lot about the scene in Star Trek IV when McCoy is in
| a hospital and says "what is this the dark ages?"
|
| Gofundme is like a kafkaesque tragic absurdity that - hopefully
| - will be looked at as an indictment of the inequitable K
| shaped economy we've built, and hopefully fixed in the future.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| As a lucky European, I have US labeled as "richest third
| world country".
| Tade0 wrote:
| > The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet
| according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations
| combined.
|
| This framing by Forbes (any many others really) is insidious
| because it doesn't take into account the population number
| and how unevenly wealth is spread.
|
| For instance, Switzerland is not a huge economy - around the
| 20th in the world, but its citizens enjoy an extremely high
| quality of life because both income inequality and incomes
| overall are significantly better that in the US.
| apothegm wrote:
| Population size is usually included in those calculations.
| It's typically GDP _per capita_.
|
| But I couldn't agree more that the inequality and social
| safety net (or lack thereof) make the numbers deeply
| disconnected from QoL. Which I believe is the whole point.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > It's typically GDP per capita.
|
| If so, then the US is ~7th, or 5th among nations
| numbering in the millions. Still very high, just not at
| the top.
| stavros wrote:
| I was hoping one wouldn't need to be well off to get treatment
| for an illness, but that's the US for you.
| chaostheory wrote:
| The video game industry is not a well paying one, even for
| programmers
| empressplay wrote:
| @dang could we have a black banner please?
| zote wrote:
| For posterity, we have gotten a black banner. Farewell to a
| true hacker. She will be missed.
| jpgvm wrote:
| RIP Burger. Thanks for all the epic games and stories.
| yawaramin wrote:
| Also, would it be possible to make the black banner a hyperlink
| that points directly at the HN submission?
| squigz wrote:
| Here is a good response/thread from last year on that
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39064497
| altairprime wrote:
| (@dang has no effect in HN comments. Contact the mods using the
| footer contact link for attention to threads.)
| JohnBooty wrote:
| "Legend" barely begins to describe. She is up there with the
| Carmacks et al.
|
| She was probably the first programmer I knew by name as a kid,
| following the games industry as a kid.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| I'd heard the 3DO doom port story linked here before and it is
| absolutely wild stuff. Legend.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| RIP, Burger.
|
| I played BT1, BT2, and BT3 for hours and hours.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| This breaks my heart, I will miss Burger Becky, she was the
| sweetest kindest person and a legendary programmer.
|
| https://www.burgerbecky.com/becky.htm
|
| The first "Boom & Bust" episode of Netflix's series "High Score"
| series told the story of her winning the first Space Invaders
| U.S. national championship as a kid.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Score_(TV_series)
| sevenseacat wrote:
| I knew I'd seen her somewhere before, that was it!
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| rip burger o7
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Damn I knew she had cancer but never thought it is so quick.
|
| "We have gone on so many adventures together! But, into the great
| unknown! I go first!!!"
|
| Such a legend. RIP.
| INTPenis wrote:
| She was responsible for a large part of my early gaming years,
| without me even knowing it. Another legendary account retired.
| netule wrote:
| Rest in peace, Burger Becky! I really enjoyed her interview with
| CoRecursive a few years ago about porting DOOM to the 3DO[1] and
| highly recommend a listen.
|
| [1]: https://corecursive.com/doomed-to-fail-with-burger-becky/
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| Wow. What an impactful person. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say
| that I did know about her till her death though I've played many
| of the games mentioned in the WP article about her. RIP.
| cast4 wrote:
| As a retro-enthusiast, I was captivated by the stories she shared
| in her interviews, particularly about working on the cancelled
| Half Life port to Classic Mac OS (supposedly it even ran on 68k
| Macintoshes, How amazing is that !?). She said that she still had
| a CD of the gold master on her shelf. I really fear that work may
| never see the light of day now...
| jonbaer wrote:
| RIP, https://www.mobygames.com/person/343/rebecca-ann-heineman/
| splitbrain wrote:
| Offtopic: several of the embedded Bluesky posts at the end of the
| article show "The author of the quoted post has requested their
| posts not be displayed on external sites." Seems not to phase the
| PC Gamer "journalists".
| DerekL wrote:
| It's _faze_ , not _phase_. It 's a common mistake.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| [0] is a good article about this; not least that this has
| been happening since at least 1889 (to the point where I'd
| say we could now probably consider it a valid alternate
| spelling.)
|
| [0] https://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/0011
| 66.... (no, I've no idea why they're behind the wrong
| subdomain certificate)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Because they don't really live on that server any more. The
| correct URL for the languagelog archives is https://languag
| elog.ldc.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/..., but none
| of the links will keep you on that domain.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| Looks to me like it's the quoted post that's not to be
| displayed, not the post itself.
| rsynnott wrote:
| These are quote-posts; the quote-post isn't protected but the
| quoted-post is. Bad choice by whoever wrote the article (in
| fairness the default Bluesky interface doesn't make this
| particularly clear), but nothing is being displayed that
| shouldn't be displayed.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| >Heineman's cancer fundraiser is now collecting for her funeral.
|
| Am I crazy or does that sentence have, I don't know how to
| explain it, the 'rhythm' of a joke? Feels like accidental
| rhyming, a mark of bad writing?
| siev wrote:
| It unfortunately reads a bit like an unintentional punchline,
| yes.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Sounds like it's trying to be ironic
| altairprime wrote:
| My family would say that sentence "with a wry smile", a useful
| literary phrase for that particular variant of humor.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| What a true legend. The amount of people she has touched with her
| work is enormous.
|
| Feeling a bit of regret. I feel like I made a poor first
| impression on Rebecca when I first met her a few years back at
| VCF East. I saw her again recently but was suffering from severe
| undiagnosed sleep apnea so much so that I was practically asleep
| at the event. I didn't know about the cancer. Thought I would
| have another chance. This is happening more and more in my life.
| :/
|
| Let us cherish all the great moments that she helped bring to us.
| dmead wrote:
| Im reading this wearing a CPAP.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| > I saw her again recently but was suffering from severe
| undiagnosed sleep apnea so much so that I was practically
| asleep at the event.
|
| Go visit a pulmonologist and get a diagnosis. Getting one and
| starting on a CPAP was life-changing for me.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Just began using a CPAP last week. My first attempts were to
| try and use a nose clip, sleep wedge, and other tools to no
| avail. Following a take home test I discovered my apnea was
| severe. I have now started with a CPAP machine. Results are
| promising.
| nottorp wrote:
| Pop-up when pressing back on mobile that stopped returning to HN.
|
| Sheesh, the mobile web is really predatory. Good that I don't use
| it much.
| pm90 wrote:
| Im inclined to blame the US healthcare system. It looks like a
| gofundme was setup to pay for her cancer treatment. A sensible
| system a) wouldn't need patients to pay for treatment and b)
| might have caught it earlier through regular screening
| enkonta wrote:
| So nobody dies or cancer in places with universal healthcare?
| matteason wrote:
| Something doesn't have to be perfect to be better
| enkonta wrote:
| That's not the argument that was being made.
| matteason wrote:
| Well the argument certainly wasn't "nobody dies of cancer
| in places with universal healthcare"
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that would
| have been caught by a screening regime currently in place in
| other countries which is not in place in the US?
|
| Without such evidence your post reads more like propagandizing
| a death for political purposes than an honest argument.
| LexiMax wrote:
| > Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that
| would have been caught by a screening regime currently in
| place in other countries which is not in place in the US?
|
| Do you have any evidence that it wasn't?
|
| I honestly don't know if earlier detection was possible, or
| would have helped her out or not. What I can tell you is that
| given the state of health care in this country, you can bet
| that my default assumption would be "yes" until proven
| otherwise.
|
| Starting with the assumption of "no" gives our system more
| slack than it deserves.
| delichon wrote:
| > you can bet that my default assumption would be "yes" and
| "yes" until proven otherwise.
|
| That's a recipe for healthcare inflation. There are endless
| unproven tests and treatments.
| altairprime wrote:
| Looking at corporate profit levels versus wage levels
| over the past twenty years, the U.S. as a capitalist
| country _can_ afford a great deal more of healthcare
| inflation in order to raise the quality of life for its
| population.
|
| _Should_ its businesses afford that out of their
| profits?
|
| Since households can't afford eggs, much less health care
| costs, at the wages paid by businesses; so this decision
| is up to firms rather than households to decide.
| Founders, your input would _especially_ be appreciated
| here.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > Do you have any evidence that it wasn't?
|
| Most types of cancers are not routinely screened for. The
| post says that the cancer was in her liver and lungs, and
| neither liver cancer nor lung cancer are routinely screened
| for (lung cancer screenings are recommended for people with
| a history of heavy smoking).
|
| > What I can tell you is that given the state of health
| care in this country, you can bet that my default
| assumption would be "yes" until proven otherwise.
|
| This is clearly a politically-motivated point rather than
| one grounded in science or reality. Cancer screening in the
| US is generally _more_ aggressive, not less aggressive,
| than in other developed countries. For example, the US has
| historically recommended annual mammograms starting at age
| 40, while Europe doesn 't start until age 50 and only does
| them every two years. US guidelines are to start screening
| for colon cancer at age 45 (c.f. 50 in most of Europe), and
| the US uses a much more invasive (and costlier) approach to
| colon cancer screening on top of the age gap.
|
| If anything the US probably _over_ invests in cancer
| screening. The evidence in favor of starting mammograms at
| 40 is extremely dubious, as is the evidence for invasive
| and expensive colonoscopies (standard US practice) over
| fecal matter tests (standard European practice) for colon
| cancer screening.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Even if inappropriate, this reads like a normal expression of
| grief to me.
|
| It's normal to be upset about the circumstances under which
| someone died, and to be angry if you believe it was
| avoidable. Under the five stages model, this would be
| bargaining and anger.
| squigz wrote:
| Another one of these? Jeez.
|
| Whether you're right or not, it doesn't matter - this is not
| the time or place to bring this up.
| pm90 wrote:
| What is the right time
| squigz wrote:
| Most other times that aren't "when people are mourning
| someone who just died"
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Huge loss to the community. She was, by all accounts, an amazing
| programmer. I remember when she uploaded the source code of her
| Doom 3DO port she indicated that she had to write her _own_
| string lib because the base one sucked:
|
| > I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one
| 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can
| you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the
| functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.
|
| https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do
|
| I can't even imagine the level of skill required to just say,
| "Fine, I'll write MY OWN string lib!" while chasing a deadline.
|
| As an aside...I wonder what will happen to her personal
| artifacts. There was a media blitz awhile back when Tim Cain said
| he doesn't have the original source code to Fallout because he
| was "ordered to destroy it" by Interplay when he left. But Becky
| then chimed in to say that she _did_ have a surviving copy,
| because she was a founder. [0] I hope someone else on her behalf
| would be able to continue that effort, but I worry that with her
| death, Bethesda would assert that no one else has "legal
| standing" to do so.
|
| [0] https://thisweekinvideogames.com/news/fallout-1-2-source-
| cod...
| archon810 wrote:
| Not just "write my own string lib", but "write my own string
| lib in assembly"! Wow.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Not just strings but burgers too!
|
| https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/burgerlib
|
| Welcome to Burgerlib
|
| The only low level library you'll ever need
|
| Burgerlib is a low level operating system library that
| presents a common API that operates the same on numerous
| mobile, desktop, and video game platforms. By using the
| library, it will allow near instant porting of an application
| written on one platform to another.
|
| Burgerlib is not meant to be considered an engine, it's a
| framework on to which an engine can be created on top of and
| by using the common API, be compatible on dozens of
| platforms.
|
| Filenames and paths are standardized, all text is UTF-8
| regardless of platform. Display, input, audio, music, math,
| timers, atomics, and typedefs operate the same.
| devnull3 wrote:
| Meta: I think such black strip moments should be pinned at top of
| the hacker news while it lasts.
| alecco wrote:
| Please no. It would be impossible to decide the cutoff for who
| deserves it. Loud communities would bring drama when their
| favourite person doesn't get pinned. A black strip might be
| fine, though.
| devnull3 wrote:
| In this case, I had to search for the word died/dead/"no
| more" to even know who is no more.
| parpfish wrote:
| i think the comment is saying that "if there's a black strip,
| we should pin the article/news that justified it"
|
| because there's currently a black strip up but there's no
| articles about a death on the first page
| netrap wrote:
| Weird. I just googled it and it said her partner also died of the
| same thing?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Her partner died of complications of Guillain-Barre syndrome.
| (Her partner was also a beloved figure in the TTRPG design
| space.)
| teraflop wrote:
| No, Jennell Jaquays died from Guillain-Barre syndrome, not
| cancer.
| matthew28845 wrote:
| Was it the AI response hallucinating?
| erickhill wrote:
| I had the honor and pleasure of meeting her in 2018 at PRGE
| (Portland Retro Gaming Expo). She was sitting at a signing table
| after being on a panel. When it got to be my turn, I asked her if
| I could get a photo instead of a signature. She quickly said yes
| and I bent down to get into the frame. She was extremely kind and
| always cracking jokes. What I didn't know until I got my phone
| back and later looked closely was that she'd given me rabbit ears
| in the picture.
|
| RIP, Becky.
| archon810 wrote:
| Are you able to share said photo?
| erickhill wrote:
| Sure https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:q75jbezh5tm2jhj2yyzsgfe
| o/po...
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Never heard of her name before, but I certainly heard of the game
| she developed, like many here. RIP to a prolific game programmer.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| I saw her last few talks at VCFeast. Always extremely engaging to
| hear from someone with as much skill and knowledge as her.
| Amazing to hear how she built her own debugger for the (i
| believe, i have the memory of a goldfish) Atari 2600. I always
| tried to catch her talks if possible, if just to get a glimpse of
| what the past looked like. I'm going to miss having those to look
| forward to.
|
| RIP
| umvi wrote:
| Feature request: make it so the black bar is a hyperlink and it
| takes you to the thread it is referring to.
|
| This article is not on the front page so it took me a while to
| find what the black bar was referring to.
| alecbz wrote:
| So scary to go from diagnosis to passing in such a short time.
|
| Cherish every sunrise.
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