Warren Robinett wrote an interesting one on Atari VCS Adventure http://www.warrenrobinett.com/inventing_adventure/

It doesn't go super deep, he had a more technical book in the works but I haven't heard any updates about it for a while: http://www.warrenrobinett.com/ecv/annotated_adventure_toc/in...

Thanks! This looks really interesting from retro-programming perspective.

Not sure if it will help but about:processes might give some more info about what is causing the activity.

Mostly, but there's Heart O' The City Hotel

Exe filters are cool, I think I first saw the split stream thing in the kkrunchy writeup https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/x86-code-compressio..., looks like it was first in PPMexe.

Zach's next game Kaizen comes out tomorrow! https://coincidence.games/kaizen/

Sounds like it’s come out just in time.

I thought Zachtronics had given up making games for some reason. Or did I dream that, if I did that would be really weird.

They did stop. I'm also confused that there's a new game.

Very exciting - Thank you for sharing! I knew that there was a new game on the way, but I had no idea it was so immediate!

Oooh… a factory automation Zachtronics game??

Take my money.

I thought Zachtronics shut down/wasn't making any more games? Are they back? If so, why?

What a coincidence, I love games like kaizen.

> The Beginners Guide even worse. Empty test levels strung together with tedious narration.

> The developer's depressed? That's the least interesting thing to learn about anyone. Depressed people promoting their depression sounds disingenuous.

I wonder if you played The Beginner's Guide to the end? Not that it necessarily would have changed your mind, maybe the conclusion didn't strike you as it did me (even seeing it coming).

Not him, but I did play it to the end, and it didn't "strike me". By the end, I was finding it more of a chore than a story I could enjoy, although I was a bit annoyed from thinking it would be more interactive (I remember some article I saw about it talking about how it explored the story through a series of games, but the final product doesn't really have any actual games).

I recall reading that the design kicked off because of some stock of surplus CRTs but that didn't ultimately end up used.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/a-history-of-gaming-pla...

> The system got its start in late 1980, when one of the hardware designers at Western Technologies (Smith Engineering), John Ross, had a light bulb go off -- or, to be more precise, a surplus one-inch Cathode Ray Tube (CRT).

> Western Technologies redesigned the system as a tabletop, and later that year General Consumer Electronics (GCE) licensed it for production -- though now with a nine-inch screen.

More of that history here https://www.vectrex.be/vectrex_jay_smith.html

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Yes but progressive jackpots accumulate if not won in previous drawings.

In this particular lotto, 4% of all possible numbers were bought in a typical period. So it's not truly riskless, but there was definitely a positive expected value.

Do you think a machine proof of "BB(n) grows faster than any computable function" would require that?

no, see the problem is that the machine needs a well defined problem, and the "BB(n) grows faster than any defined problem" is well defined but you would not come up with an insight like that by executing the BB(n) function. that insight requires a leap out of the problem into a new area and then sure after it is defined as a new problem you enter again in the computability realm in a different dimension. But if the machine tries to come up with insight like that by executing the BB(n) function it will get stuck in infinite loops.