Weekly Geekly Rundown for July 7, 2023

Computers within Terraria, Domino NAND Gates, Independent RPGs, and Michael Mann

Comic from xkcd

A Computer within a computer in Terraria?

As a fan of retrogamer personalities like Perifractic (Christian Simpson), Jan Beta, 8-Bit Show and Tell (Robin Harbron), The 8-Bit Guy, and Adrian’s Digital Basement, I’m a big fan of emulation and computer related projects. My daughters and I will be building a SmartyKit this summer, essentially hand building an Apple-1, and we’ll be tinkering with our two Raspberry Pi machines and an old Commodore 64 in order to teach them both some Python and BASIC.

Yes, I’m still a big fan of BASIC. I love the way that you can interface directly with memory addresses (you can do this in the SmartyKit too) in a way that makes the intuition behind the functions a lot of higher level languages use more intelligible. I’m also one of those who thinks that many criticisms against GOTO statements are overstating the arguments made by Edsgar W. Dijkstra in his “A Letter Against the GOTO Statement.” An editor changed the title of that piece to “Letters to the editor: go to statement considered harmful,” a change that Dijkstra believed to be less than useful in retrospect.

My thoughts are much more in line with those of Donald Knuth in his article “Structured Programming with Go To Statements” who argues that structured programming, the real thing Dijkstra and anti-GOTO activists desire, is a good thing and that you can achieve it using GOTO statements, even as Knuth demonstrates how GOTO statements had been overused in ways that made code hard to decipher. Besides, all loops contain JMP commands which is all a GOTO is anyway. I’m not recommending writing FOR (or FOR NEXT in BASIC) loops using GOTO statements, though it can be done, I’m just saying GOTO statements can be useful.

And having written my own version of Spaghetti code as a preface to the point of this section, let’s get to back on track.

I love computer emulation. Emulators like VICE and Altirra let you write (or run) programs for long gone systems without the need to hunt them down on eBay where you can’t be sure you won’t need a solder and replacement parts when the old computer arrives. Emulation is a means of running a computer within a computer, in the case of VICE and Altirra you are running Commodore BASIC and Atari BASIC on your modern day PC. That may not be the most efficient use of processing power, but it is a FUN one.

This love of emulation is why I am so impressed with the more recent trend of building working computers (kind of like building emulators based on system architecture) within crafting video games. Earlier achievements of this kind were the use of Redstone to “build” an 8-bit computer within Minecraft that let you play 8-bit games. This was followed by someone “building” a PC within the Minecraft video game that was capable of running Minecraft. That’s right, you could play Minecraft within Minecraft, and do so using a means that was infinitely repeatable (processing power allowing). Given that the versions built were 1Hz, the current implementation is very primitive and SUPER slow, but the prospects are wild.

This brings us to the most recent attempt to build a computer within a computer within a crafting video game, the Terraria 32-bit computer by Xander Naumenko. Since Terraria is one of my twins’ favorite games, this achievement was big news in our household. The processor is much faster than the 1Hz of the Minecraft processor and runs at a blazing 5kHz. That’s still significantly slower than a Commodore 64’s clock speed of 1.023 MHz, but it’s significantly faster than the 1Hz of the Minecraft processor (if 1Hz is right because that is SLOW). Unlike the Minecraft computer, Xander’s computer is 32 bit, though the programs he’s running with it likely only need 8-bits, and the logic gate he designed is specific to the peculiarities of the logic of the wire system within Terraria. Xander explains briefly how his logic gates work in his video, but I wish he’d gone into even more explanation. Still it’s a very cool project, though Xander hasn’t gotten up to running Terraria within Terraria yet.

Speaking of better explanations of logic gates and how adders work within computers, let’s step from the virtual to the completely physical. In this video for Numberphile, Matt Parker demonstrates how to build the adders that underpin computer logic using dominoes. It’s another completely excessive project that has very little utility, it takes a lot of dominoes to add numbers together and resetting the system takes forever, other than to teach how gates work. Like Xander, Matt had to modify standard gate architecture to match the medium, in this case dominoes and how they fall. It’s a cool project too and both these projects combine to form the basis of a robust introduction into how computers work.

Weekly Luke Y Thompson and Courtney Howard Film Article Cavalcade

This week Luke and Courtney both provide their opinions of the upcoming Mission Impossible film.

Luke’s review of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, like his review of Top Gun: Maverick, extremely critical, but it is worth reading because Luke is an excellent writer. I may disagree with him on a number of occasions, and I likely will here, but I can never say that his criticisms aren’t well thought out. Luke, unlike many critics, has been a part of productions and that shows in his ability to focus on issues beyond narrative and acting.

Courtney’s review of the film for FreshFiction is closer to what I expect my opinion will be when my family and I go to see it. She thought it was an excellent entry into the series and like Luke’s review her comments go beyond narrative and acting and into other elements of the craft of making films. Her ability to write on those topics, though I don’t know if she has experience on productions, gets her higher regard from me than I have for many modern critics. Having worked on a couple of films in support capacities, never ask me to move a tire or you’ll get a 30 minute story about moving tires in the middle of Nevada as a Production Designer and Cinematographer battled over how tire placement affected lighting, I prefer to read critiques that acknowledge that more than actors exist.

Geekerati Roleplaying Game Recommendation

This section of the newsletter is easy. Just read Wednesday’s piece. It includes a number of classic role playing games, including one that was initially published as a series of pocket sized paperback books.

Geekerati Blog/Newsletter Recommendation

You really ought to check out

Jonah White

’s recent post about Candela Obscura and how it might bring even more people into the hobby. Jonah’s

Game, Play, Gather

newsletter is a regular read. I particularly like his “lingo check” asides. They help to break down the jargon of the hobby and are a fantastic tool for making gaming more accessible to a wider audience.

Lingo check: a d20 game is any game that uses a 20-sided die as its main means of conflict resolution. D&D is only the most popular example of this mechanic.

I will have my own post about Candela Obscura up soon, though mine will discuss both the history of storytelling games and the narrative assumptions underlying the mechanics of the game.

Geekerati Music Recommendation

Instead of recommending an album or song this week, I’m going to recommend a music related site that I visit on at least a weekly basis in order to deepen my appreciation of music. Rick Beato is a former, and probably still currently, Music Producer who shifted to producing a YouTube channel that does deep dives into songs and musicians in a way that enhances the listening experience. Beato’s tone is largely upbeat. Even when he doesn’t like a song, or genre, he’ll find things that he does like about them to discuss. He masterfully incorporates music theory into his discussions in a way that introduces those principles to a wider audience. Kind of like how Jonah White uses his Lingo checks to explain gaming concepts. Needless to say, here is his interview with Christopher Cross (yes the Yacht Rock guy), a musician he thinks created one of the most underrated guitar solos ever.

Classic Film Recommendation

The Criterion Channel says that “contemporary American auteur Michael Mann’s bold artistic sensibility was already fully formed when he burst out of the gate with THIEF,” and that’s true as far as it goes, but it’s a statement that leaves out how Michael Mann’s artistic sensibilities were honed in the forges of broadcast television. It’s the kind of broad sweeping statement critics make from time to time that make me ask “does this person even like the medium? Does this person watch a wide array of movies and TV, or just what they are ‘supposed’ to watch?”

Michael Mann is indeed a fantastic director and THIEF is this week’s recommendation because it is an excellent film and is a strong film for an initial theatrical release, but it was directed by someone with five years experience working in the grindstone that was 70s television. During that time, Mann worked as a writer on a number of shows but his Starsky & Hutch really stands out. Not because it was on one of the most successful cop dramas of the 70s, a series that many argue redefined the genre on tv by making it more raw. Rather because episodes written by Micheal Mann are standout episodes on that show. When people talk about how the show redefined the cop show, they are likely talking about a Mann episode.

In general, Starsky & Hutch (which my wife and I watched in entirety during COVID) can be described as a show that “jumped the shark” immediately. By episode 5, excluding the pilot, one of the main characters is turned into a heroin addict by evil drug dealers and has to be detoxed by his partner and once clean Hutch never even thinks about heroin again. By season 2 they are hunting a vampire, which puts it on the same level as The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries where they took on Dracula in season 2. Mann’s episodes were something different though. Episodes like Texas Longhorn, Lady Blue, The Psychic, and Jojo just felt different than a lot of the other episodes. They were grittier and more in line with the cinema of the 70s. You can watch them on Amazon Prime to get a sense of what I mean.

They were good enough, and an important enough a part of his cinematic education, that he pulled elements from them for his later work. Remember the trailer park scene in the movie version of Miami Vice? That moment is taken straight out of JoJo. Starsky pulls a pizza box out of a garbage can in a trailer park and uses it as a decoy in almost exactly the same manner as it occurs in Vice. It’s better done in the later movie, but over 20 years of filmmaking experience can have that effect, but the point is that the idea and craft were honed in television.

Critics, rightly, give a lot of praise to the gritty filmmaking style of theatrical releases in the 70s. They praise directors like Coppola, Scorsese, and Don Siegel, but they often forget to mention their work for Roger Corman’s AIP (in the case of Coppola and Scorsese) or television (in the case of Siegel and also Mann). Great filmmakers, like great game designers, hone their skills somewhere, often hidden from view or in a medium where directors/writers tend to be overlooked.

Mann’s skills were honed in television and you can see the influence of his work on Starsky and Hutch in THIEF. The setting and style are all there.