There is nothing unusual about the outside of these disks, but there is something unique about the data that is stored on them, something that Sierra On-Line would have been totally unaware of and cer...

Rainy days always remind me of summers at my grandmother’s farm in the Catskills, spending lazy days floating on the lake, laptop in hand, pipelining SPU asm loops until there were no more empty slots in the schedule to fill. Those days were pretty great. But do you know what’s not so great? Journalists blindly repeating the SPUs were difficult to program without any real understanding of the nuanced details. Not cool.In this post I am going to attempt to give a Fair And Balanced1, unbiased2, and nuanced (笑) description of what people usually mean when they complain about various aspects of the SPUs. The goal is to keep it nontechnical enough for humans to understand, while providing enough details to capture nuance beyond the usual generalisations. I will fail at both goals As always, this post is constantly changing as I get ideas/feedback from the Smart Kidz. Please feel free to share this with a games journalist you love!

In my previous post Life stories: From Art to Tech, part 2 you have followed me through part of my journey from small shop, small side-gig, to deploy big transformational projects at large studios.…