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Optimizing the fun

I like making things as effective as possible. That's pretty much what I do at work. But I also like doing it just for fun.

Sometimes it might feel a bit too tedious to see all that trouble to achieve something in a game that could have been completed with less effort. I just can't help myself. If I see a room for improvement I take it as a personal challenge.

A good example from way back in the early days of my computer "career". There was this operating system called MS-DOS. The one with 640kb of memory ought to be enough for everyoneNow the system itself used up some of that memory, so usually you were left with a bit over 500kb free after booting up. At some point the games started to be so advanced they needed more. Some even close to 600kb. There were ways to optimize the memory usage of the system itself like not starting some unnecessary at boot time.

I remember spending a lot more time trying to optimize the free memory as high as possible instead of playing those games. Or maybe it's just my memory doing tricks and I actually ended up playing those games for many hours. I just don't remember much of anything about them, but I thing I could still write quite optimized CONFIG.SYS to free that precious memory.

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