[rntksi]

That was unexpected, to see BKED being mentioned here! I was about 6 years old when I first used it (that, and a nice game called "bum"). This brings back so much memories. And to think that it had this much history behind its programming! Amazing. Definitely should poke the author into releasing the source code for next generations to have a look at it.

[jimmies]

I bet every relatively complex program that ever tried to display Vietnamese chacters had to do something wonky at some point. There might have been more amazing engineering stories. They just don't get told very often because of the sanction and lack of communication in the olden days. Part of what I want to do in life is to document as many of those amazing stories as possible before they got lost.

Remember the BKAV splash screen with the running green man in DOS? I have never wondered why a TUI program like BKAV would bother going around just to make a graphical screen just to display a useless running man. Now as I thought about it, it perhaps was because the author faced the same issue, so it's just another graphical program pretending to be a textmode one. The running man is perhaps just because he could do it while he was at it.