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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Same here. In fact, I bought my Legion (which btw I feel like it was a good choice on OPs part because I believe Lenovo’s laptops tend to have better cooling engineering in general, for whatever laptop category, compared to other brands) to serve first as a work laptop, and then some gaming on the side, which I’m not too picky about because I don’t really play on PC that often anyway. My reasoning for that is that the business laptops I had been looking before going with the Legion were frankly overpriced crap with limited expandability, shoddy components and build, and full of built-in bloatware pre-installed. I find that gaming laptops tend to have higher quality components and slightly better expandability, so it was a win all around.



  • The closest thing to an explanation I could find online just said “legal issues”, but didn’t go into details.

    I don’t think that makes sense, or at least it doesn’t properly qualify the problem. BIOS is a set of baked-in software routines that mediate certain operations between software and hardware. In theory it could be reverse-enginereed and thus emulated just like the rest of the hardware is. In fact, many of the more simple systems (like 8 or 16-bit consoles) have their BIOS emulated. But for more advanced or poorer documented systems, there are, in my view, two problems with that:

    • If your reversed engineered version of the BIOS has bugs (and during early stages of development, it would have a lot), the ways in which these bugs could present themselves makes the situation ambiguous, because it may be hard to know, from the symptoms, whether the bug is on the BIOS or on the hardware emulation. So developers just use the official BIOS because then if you see bugs, you know for sure the problem is on the hardware emulation. And also, reverse engineering the BIOS would require a lot of effort that developers would probably rate as low priority given they could use a perfectly functional BIOS and avoid a whole lot of other technical problems as per above. I mean, for many systems, hardware emulation is a problem already complex enough;
    • Depending on the system, the BIOS code could be so simple that a reverse engineered version of it could conceivably be so close to the actual official code that it could, yes, trigger a copyright suit from the creator.



  • Wikipedia and other places says 1984 - I think 1983 is when development started. I wasn’t quite sure how much RAM the BBC Micro had, so I played safe and went with the ZX Spectrum’s configuration, which I had, although thinking about it now, the way the Speccy mapped memory meant that it actually had about 32Kb useable RAM as well. I don’t know how the BBCM mapped memory, so I’m not sure if a similar situation applied (less actual available memory).


  • To properly qualify how groundbreaking Elite was for the time, for those who don’t know it: it was a space sim that simulated 8 galaxies with 256 star systems each, each system with a star, a planet, and a space station each. All of that was wireframe-3D rendered, had a lot of complexities like different ship and enemy types, different playloops like trading, mining and combat, and it was one of the few games of that time that pioneered open-world gameplay.

    This was initially released on the mid-80’s for 8bit computers of the time, which had anything between 48Kb to 128Kb of RAM, and thus, the game binaries was also that small - they accomplished that by also being one of the few games of the time that pioneered procedurally generated content.