
Trying to build a nice wall... Bricks in shapes are falling in place, almost managed to get to the top, rows vanishing in a spectacular splash!
Damn, I'm never gonna get paid for building that wall.
We hate to be the ones to break it to all you El Reg readers, but we're informed the classic video game Tetris is turning 40. Tetris, perhaps the Soviet Union's biggest-ever export, is celebrating four decades of dropping blocks on everything from personal computers to consoles big and small and modern smartphones. This …
> "The reason Tetris rows disappear? Legend has it it's due to the limited memory in the Electronika 60, which necessitated clearing the screen."
Admittedly it's been a while, but only the completed rows disappear, right? Did the Electronika 60 have a monitor with infinite height? It seems like that would have been the more obvious limiting factor.
I guess it is plausible that the original idea was that your scoring was based on the number of symbols that fall before you hit the top and that the destruction of complete rows that disappear and shunt everything down was a later innovation. Personally, I've no idea. I'm sure one of the mentioned documentaries would clear that up. I should go watch one.
《> "The reason Tetris rows disappear? Legend has it it's due to the limited memory in the Electronika 60, which necessitated clearing the screen."
Admittedly it's been a while, but only the completed rows disappear, right? Did the Electronika 60 have a monitor with infinite height? It seems like that would have been the more obvious limiting factor.》
According the Electronika 60 wiki entry it had an address space (no separate D/I space) of 32K words (64Kb) but memory was (typically?) 4K words (8K bytes.) There was no on board video (so no memory mapped video) so presumably a serial (rs232) terminal was required. Given terminal capabilities varied massively (from minimal to ansii) you would need to store the current state of the display in ram which could run to 25×80 bytes (~2Kb) but better encodings would use fewer bytes but 8Kb less the OS/CCP/monitor still wouldn't leave a lot of memory to play with.
Actually Tetris or a simplified version is still a decent programming exercise today.
Wow, I wasted many hours, many years ago, in a dark room full of buzzing machines while waiting for things to happen... Happy memories.
Any suggestion for a good (paid) Android version of the classic Tetris game? I have done a search 1-2 years ago, but only found low-quality clones or mutant versions (different gameplay). As for the "official" Android Tetris game, it's an ad-riddled hell according to the comments.
Perhaps..? "Do one thing and do it well"
Kudos for bashing it out...
https://github.com/dkorolev/bash-tetris/blob/master/tetris.sh
That fork has a bug in that some of the pieces are black, the original doesn't have that problem https://github.com/kt97679/tetris/blob/master/tetris.sh
[This vulture in particular - who would've been around two-and-a-half years old when Russian computer programmer Alexey Pajitnov first coded his magnum opus - remembers spending hours playing Tetris on his first-generation Game Boy in stunning green-and-black high-contrast graphics. One can only play so much Super Mario Land or Metroid 2 before needing a break, after all. ]
I had those games and still got my brick Gameboy even if the screen is so scratched I have to play the games on a Gameboy Color instead.
I got a Gameboy instead of a Sega Game Gear not only due to orice but because the Sega Game Gear battery life was horrible. Playing those old Gameboy games today is not the same, but still fun.
"Although some sources on the internet claim the game was created in 1985, Alexey created the first version of Tetris on June 6, 1984, now recognized as World Tetris Day," a spokesperson told The Register.
Earlier interviews with Pajitnov in 1993 and 2004 say 1985 and an interview with Rogers in 1998 also says 1985. As does the Encyclopedia Britannica.
So I'm going to defiantly stick with 1985 in spite of what Big Tetromino would have you believe.
I have the 1988 version on my system, runs pretty well under DOSbox, but, for the life of me, I have been unable to coax the music, which I know is there, out of the program.
This copy of the floppy is the same code I played on my old DOS box, but where is the music? I have the Cessna on the splash screen, the clicking as the initial text crawls by, even the Boss key, but no Russian folk tunes. I know I didn't have a sound card, the 8-bit tunes came through the PC speaker, perhaps with the aid of a TSR, I'm not sure.
Does anyone have music? Does anyone know how to get music? It's just not the same without that music...
Maybe your DOSBox config needs to have the PC speaker enabled?