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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's true! I still play it from time to time, although I do not need the cheats nowadays anymore. There is something about the design that was never matched by any of the new doom games. For me, all the demons look the same in the modern games.
So in that regard it has not yet been superseded, at least for me.
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.
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.
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.
If that's your idea if fun, I can recommend the game My Summer Car. It's basically a simulator for Finnish country life in the 90's.
You spend most of your time drinking, going to the sauna, driving a crappy old Datsun hatchback (which you first have to rebuild in excruciating detail) down country roads, and adjusting your car's carburetor.
I looked up a gameplay series, and there is so much minutia remining me of Norwegian country life as well. The ticketing machine on the bus is exactly as I remember it from the 90's.
in GTA 2, naming your player "GOURANGA" activates the cheat code mode. "IAMDAVEJ" gives you all guns.
in half-life 2, typing ent_fire !picker in the console makes the thing you are looking at catch fire. it's also the base command for a lot of other things; if you're looking at a door and add "unlock" to the command, the door will open.
when stacking firewood, always put the pieces with the bark facing up. that way, rain can't get the wood wet, and the logs dry quicker.
paper maps fold long side first.
the modern graphical interface of the personal computer was developed by Xerox and plagiarized by Steve jobs after he got a factory tour in 1972, but he missed the most important part of the computer that he saw: it was fully networked using what we today call Ethernet.
when stacking firewood, always put the pieces with the bark facing up. that way, rain can't get the wood wet, and the logs dry quicker.
I read this as being another feature of half life. I was very impressed by the level of detail the devs put into such an early game. Although slightly confused why log stacking would be part of a game
Morrowind on the original Xbox came with cheat codes.
Put the cursor over the health, magicka, or fatigue bar, enter the codes with the black and white buttons then hold A until the bar fills. If you close the menu before you let go of A, it will continue to refill constantly until you open your menu again.
Health: B, W, B, B, B, A
Magicka: B, W, W, B, W, A
Fatigue: B, B, W, W, B, A
You could actually use the magicka code for all 3, but I liked that there were 3 different codes.
My ICQ number; various employee numbers and alarm codes long since changed from previous jobs; procedures and rules from those jobs; all kinds of cheat codes from games that I no longer play or own; various old computer protocols, port names/numbers, etc. that no longer matter; and I'm sure more stuff (and some other stuff that, living in Japan, isn't relevant to anyone here).
What did dqd stand for anyway? I know the spispopd and kfa/fa ones (though the doom wiki says it's full ammo, whereas I always thought it was firearms armor because it does both those things), but there's nothing on the wiki about the meaning behind dqd
3.14159265359 (ok the last 9 is actually an 8 but it's followed by a 9 so I round up).
Not exactly obsolete, but there's no reason for anyone to memorize that many digits of Pi except for trivia. Number of times it has come up in trivia: 0.
Back when wr used parallel IDE, most motherboards only had two IDE connections. Each connection could support two devices, a master and a slave. If you had a hard drive and a CD-ROM, it was best to put them on separate channels. This is because only one device could talk at a time, and the slower CD-ROM would block the faster hard drive from operating. If you had to put them on the same channel, then the hard drive should be the master so it gets priority.
Then there's scsi. My family wasn't rich enough to have scsi shit when I was growing up, but I do know a few things. On paper, it's very simple; give each device a unique ID on the bus, and then attach terminator blocks at each end. I'm also aware that, in practice, this description is a cruel joke.
I know it primarily as a cheat code in Star Wars pod racer on N64, but I've seen it in other games too, and even referenced in different non-gaming contexts.
I still don't really know what it means.
When I was a kid I remembered it as "RR-Tan-Genta-Bacus". It wasn't until decades later I realised it is real words "tangent", "abacus".
The model codes to 2nd and 3rd Gen Intel I series chips. Made figuring out what processors were in used laptops quite easy back in the day. Now I have to Google them (doesn't help that their naming scheme is more confusing).