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Steven Tattersall

@tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place

mastodon 4.6.6

home: #atari 16-bit things (demoscene)
work: PlayStation Advanced Technology Group

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14 Posts

Joined November 04, 2022

Website:

http://tattlemuss.com

Github:

https://github.com/tattlemuss/

Location:

Cambridge UK

Demozoo:

https://demozoo.org/sceners/2328/

Posts

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Apr 06, 2026

Replying to @goto80@post.lurk.org

@goto80 I thought it was fantastic, thankyou for creating this

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Mar 24, 2026

Replying to @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place

Actual game post: here's one of the roles our group is hiring for, a DL engineer: https://careers.playstation.com/deep-learning-engineer-for-game-technology/job/5831515004 #jobs

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Mar 21, 2026

I thank John Mastodon again for his provision of the mute option.

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Mar 18, 2026

Actual game post: In amongst all the (industry) job losses, we at SIE ATG will actually be recruiting for a couple of programming roles in the near future. I'll post the job descs when I have them (one is ML network development, one is ML inference related)

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Mar 17, 2026

Replying to @evilpaul_atebit@icosahedron.website

@evilpaul_atebit@icosahedron.website I'm hoping there is a "catalog" in there somewhere

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Mar 17, 2026

Replying to @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

@syllopsium @congusbongus yes, this was the situation in 2001. I once worked on a game where the player did no meaningful interaction for the first 10-15 minutes (due to unskippable cutscenes)

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Mar 17, 2026

Back in 2001 or so, in the PS2 days, I used to have a sign pinned to my desk with the words "A GAME IS NOT A FILM" that I could point to. I see that little has changed.

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Mar 14, 2026

If they just renamed it to the Straight of Hormuz they wouldn't have had so much difficulty.

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Mar 07, 2026

Scene guru @ggn@mastodon.gamedev.place has started a tutorial on cracking ST games: https://beyondbrown.mooo.com/post/cracking_getting_started/ which has prompted me to add a "stop on bootsector" option to the hrdb debugger.

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Feb 21, 2026

Seems a bit unfair. That's not what bobsleighs are designed for.

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Feb 09, 2026

Replying to @questor@mastodon.gamedev.place

@questor it was very satisfying :) From the Motorola PRM I knew there must be patterns in there, I just couldn't "see" them. There is probably a way to encode this very efficiently as a tree of decisions, but I can't see that yet.

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Feb 07, 2026

Replying to @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place

And there is an added bonus: after switching over to this new scheme, I noticed that a lot of the "unpackable" blocks of 64 entries were actually the same. In fact, of the 244 original unpacked blocks there are only 72 really unique ones. By tweaking my table generator to remap these repetitions, my table data now occupies 7.6K rather than the original 64K. The runtime cost is some bit swizzles and an extra table lookup when looking in an "unpacked" block. Win! #atari

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Feb 06, 2026

Replying to @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place

the purpose of this exercise is to compress my decode table -- I don't want a 64K array of decoder function indices. The previous image showed that there is 2D structure in the bit pattern -- every 512 values there is repetition. In this image I swizzle the opcode values using bitshifts, and making each row 64 values wide. It turns out that 75% of the 1024 rows always have the same value in every column. This should allow me to shrink the table to about 17.4K with a simple lookup.

Steven Tattersall @tattlemuss@mastodon.gamedev.place · Feb 06, 2026

A visualisation of the 68000 instruction set. This 512x128 image encodes each of the 65536 possible opodes in the first word of the instruction. Each different colour maps to a different signature of operand/size decoding.
For example, you can see the Line-A and Line-F instructions as the horizontal blocks of green right the way across the image.
(Generated from one of the tools I'm using to create a disassembler)

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