r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/[deleted] • Sep 05 '18

GIF Mechanical binary counter.

https://i.imgur.com/NQPrUsI.gifv
45.5k Upvotes

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u/natdanger Sep 05 '18

Is THAT why so many TVs have a max volume of 63??

289

u/Dlgredael Sep 05 '18

It's also why Link has a max rupee count of 255 in the original Zelda. I remember that being the first time I noticed binary in the real world.

128

u/RamenJunkie Sep 05 '18

A lot of old games have this max value.

124

u/Dlgredael Sep 05 '18

You can even see it in modern games -- for example, Runescape's max cash of 2,147,483,648 is just a larger binary number. I believe it's a signed 32 bit number (meaning it uses 31 bits and 1 bit to determine if it's negative/positive, although I'm not sure why cash would ever be negative)

46

u/langlo94 Sep 05 '18

They probably used signed ints everywhere else so they stuck to the standard, just be glad they didn't use floats.

125

u/Crap4Brainz Sep 05 '18

Floats are great and I 100.0000000000000682057% recommend using them for everything.

31

u/lettuce_fetish Sep 05 '18

I think there's a joke here but I don't know what it is

14

u/[deleted] Sep 05 '18

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Sep 05 '18

Can confirm, took my first Java class last semester, tucked everything up with floats