Professor in Computer Science at the University of Calgary. He/him.
Calgary, Canada
Joined January 2015
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Thanks for adding it! For anyone interested, the ebook is decently priced; for the print version, there's a 50% discount code (AYCO8676) for individual orders through the publisher that expires at the end of April.
Big thanks to the anonymous tip for @herrprofdr's "Amnesia Remembered"! 🙏
Would have easily looked this one over, but turns out, it's explained through the lens of @EA's 1986 text adventure #Amnesia.
Added to the site!! 📚
👉thevideogamelibrary.org/book…
#Archaeogaming
Okay, this site has gotten too gross. I'll keep this account as a placeholder but anything new will be on my Mastodon account. Its address is pinned from one of my older tweets (this seems to be working... for now), or you can find it atop my web page at cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock/
A new, open access #archaeogaming paper from the just-published FDG 2022 proceedings: doi.org/10.1145/3555858.3555…
Joint work with the always-brilliant @kbiittner and many others, finally establishing the link between Atari 2600 programming and stone tools that you always suspected.
There's nothing like having multiple forms of obsolescence together in one package, so you can imagine how excited I was to discover these beautiful aperture cards: punched cards with embedded microfilm!
IT LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES no thanks to these two components, but a big thanks to our tech who's like a thousand times better at (de)soldering than I am and replaced the blown cap on the drive's analog board. I have reached peak Apple II disk drive happiness for the week.
Considering how long I've been using retro gear, the fact that this is the first time I've blown a capacitor is pretty impressive.
I curse Past Me every few months, on average, for failing to keep the copy of Sather's Understanding the Apple II that I owned back in high school. What an amazing technical reference.
archive.org/details/understa…
A long shot, I realize, but does anyone happen to know the original source for this pic of Silas Warner that turned up on Reddit a while ago? The Reddit poster unfortunately doesn't remember, but it's a great photo of him.
John Aycock retweeted
Honoured to accept a Best Paper award with @herrprofdr on behalf of our coauthors #fdg2022 We present our findings tomorrow at 10:00 am (visit fdg2022.org/schedule for info)
How are game programming and stone tools related? The thrilling answer revealed as @kbiittner and I present "The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Large-Scale Analysis of Code Re-Use in Atari 2600 Games" at @FDGconf next week! Details: fdg2022.org/
I'm always surprised by how long the 6502's carry bit can persist.
Me: my decompression code will only work if the carry bit isn't trashed by the remaining 13 instructions in this loop
Me: ...
Me: well I'll be damned
Just wrote yet another apologia as to why video games are important and yes, they are a thing that should be studied. I figure we're 1–2 academic generations away from where defending game research is no longer necessary...?
Holy grail: acquired. Two years ago, I started looking for a 1986 article in an industry mag. It *looks* like it's available in online library databases; it is not. Needed rare microfilm of the magazine, was literally told "try again after the pandemic" by inter-library loans.
Fast forward nearly two years to a few months ago when getting microfilm access is possible again. Guess what? The article's not there either. ILL gave up. By sheer luck, the article author turned out to be a) alive; b) reachable; c) someone who keeps clippings of her articles.
A new #archaeogaming paper! Great collaborators! A previously unreleased Atari 2600 game!
New in IA59: Still Entombed After All These Years: The continuing twists and turns of a maze game by P.A.Newell, @herrprofdr & @kbiittner doi.org/10.11141/ia.59.3
