ReBoot/Headscratchers

• What's with the whole "nullifying" aspect of the games? I don't recall a single computer program that vaporizes a large chunk of your mainframe whenever you play "Minesweeper".
  • A Wizard Did It.
  • http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/ There we go.
    • DUDE! Be careful with just linking to something like that. At least put a disclaimer on the link, like "THIS GAME WILL DELETE FILES FROM YOUR HARDDRIVE AS YOU PLAY IT" or something like that.
    • Sounds like a fun way to wipe a hard drive clean.
  • Prophesying the rise of DRM in commercial game releases in later years?
  • They needed a threat other than the viruses to work against? Another possibility is they did it to appease Moral Guardians -- they could point at it and say "Look, we're teaching kids that if you play computer games, you'll be hurting the poor computer sprites! Video Games are Bad, so go outside to play, kiddies!" Of course, it'd all be tongue in cheek, but the moral guardians wouldn't need to know that...
  • I've noticed that some games take running memory, so much that my computer can't run tasks. I'd imagine that's what the games do. The eat up memory, leaving fragmented chunks. Since time runs super fast in the computer a couple of games would eat up large amounts of memory, for the sprites their world is being destroyed, but for the user, they've played a game. Eventually their memory would become to fragmented and force a reboot, (or they'd just reboot anyways), exactly what happened before. Though I know little of computers and this probably isn't true for modern computers at least.
  • It sounds like mainframe is an old computer system without proper memory protection and a faulty memory allocator. When a new program comes in the operating system mistakenly sets the game to run in memory that is still being used by another program. It is common practice to free up any memory used by the program when it finishes, this may be what nullifies the sector. As for why the user losing the game prevents this happening, if they win they shut the program down normally, freeing the memory, if they lose then they close it abnormally, Alt-F4 as opposed to the quit button on the menu. This would bypass the freeing.
    • A problem with this is that freeing the memory isn't the same as nullifying it. When you free memory you just tell the memory allocator that the memory is available for use again, it's usually the case that you initialize the memory before you use it as you don't know what value it is. Though you could take the view that the programs assume memory is initially nullified and for this assumption to be correct memory is nullified at startup and when a program finishes it has to return the memory to the state it was in to start with, which you could infer to be null, however the faulty allocator prevents this.
  • The only reason for the nullification thing is drama. If there were no consequences for losing the games would just be inconvenient holodecks. The writers needed a penalty for losing and mass destruction fit the bill.
• If Bob and company reboot as NPC's in games who's objective it is to stop the User fro winning why do they have to face the same threats the User does? In several of the games they have to fight against other game characters who's objective it is to presumably stop the user from winning.
  • Maybe the game sprites hate Cheating Bastards?
  • Rewatch the episode AndrAIa, Bob explains the behavioural patterns of game sprites and mentions that some just attack anything that moves. Think of it as game AI slowly increasing. First everything was against the player character, then the games becamecapable of having different factions that could be turned against each other, and finally we get game sprites like AndrAIa, who observe their situations and act acordingly to what they've learned.
  • Truth in Television to a certain extent. In games as old as Doom, if you could get one game sprite to attack another, they'd fight to the death. Since the Mainframers are acting more like player characters, they get targeted because the game sprites can't distinguish friend from foe other than by behavior.
• Why is the time difference in games exactly the wrong way around? Nanoseconds are analogous to seconds, and seconds to days. The games must run at human timescales as they are an interactive program so for a sprite to compete with the user the sprites have to slow down, so time actually runs faster outside the game cube.
  • The games have to run in real time so they are given a higher processing priority by the process scheduler, so the game program gets more time slices than the city program, so for the same amount of real time the game time has more of its time processed so more game time happens per real time than the corresponding city time.
    • You seem to misunderstand. Say I'm playing Mass Effect. I gun down one group of enemies, then spend one second to readjust my aim. To the billion times faster people, 31 years would pass between gun bursts. To put it in the other side: say a Game lasts 2 hours to the perception of the Sprites. If they live at one billion times our speed, then 0.0000072 seconds would pass for the User. How does the User interact?
      • Actually the factor would probably not be as high as a billion times. It would probably be restricted to the framerate of the game (e.g. something around 25 times / second) I think most games only "think" during their refresh cycle. Still a large factor though.
• Why don't any of the games return to either the beginning of the scenario in question or a save point once the user loses? Also, why don't we ever see any campaign-type games, with multiple scenarios or missions (think the Command & Conquer Series, any Transformers or Star Wars PC game, or 2009's Ghostbusters: The Video Game), recurring throughout the series?
  • Maybe the User just gives up after one try...it would explain why s/he always loses.
  • There is at least one instance of Bob recognizing a game from before. Whether that game was played on Mainframe or not is the question.
  • And the game from the first episode was seen again at the beginning of the episode that brought in AndrAIa. The objective was different, but it wasn't infected by Megabyte that time either.
  • I've always assumed that there was more than one user sharing the computer in which Mainframe resides. Given the state of Mainframe it's probably either a school or library public computer that people are just dicking around with or a slightly outdated family computer that only one person knows how to use properly. Everyone else is just using it for games, surfing the web unprotected and generally screwing things up.
• What are multiplayer (online or "hot seat") games like for the sprites?
  • Just wait for the new movie(s?) to come out...
• Did anyone ever explain how SCSI and Cyris got though the firewall?
• "FREE! For only NINETY NINE NINETY NINE NINETY NINE!!!!!!!! Ninety nine WHAT? What is their form of currency, since no one seems to pay for energy shakes and the like?
  • Their currency is called units.
  • Why NINETY NINE ... It should have been FF FF FF!!, or maybe Effety-F Effety-F Effety-F!!!! computers don't general think in decimal arithmetic.
    • That would ruin the joke. It's supposed to make fun of the And 99 Cents trope, and for Effety-F to work you'd have to assume Viewers Are Geniuses.
• Why is Hexadecimal's sprite form shaped like the Statue of Liberty?
  • Really? The only resemblance I can see is that they both wear crowns. Hexadecimal has a crown because she's the Queen of Chaos.
    • It's the spacing in sprite form, and if Liberty weren't wearing a toga.
• If undefined energy is the in universe equivalent of water (energy shakes are a drink, energy slide is a water slide), why do the characters die when they fall in the energy seas?
  • The same way that a person dies when they are in an actual sea- by drowning.
    • I wouldn't call vaporizing on contact "drowning".
  • The energy sea represents the computer's power supply, energy drinks and the energy park are filtered from the sea. Imagine the energy sea is the ocean (not hard considering its size), can you drink water straight from the ocean?
    • Then it's exactly the same as for humans: too much electricity will kill us, same for the inhabitants of the computers. It's energy overload.
• Wait, I thought a lack of an Icon caused bad things when you went into games. How did Codemaster Lens not get swept away, or Megabyte for that matter? Is it simply because the two are so powerful that they can effectively ground themselves to the system through sheer force of will?
  • Their formats are different than sprites or binomes, maybe that affects it?
  • The only person that had a problem with Games was AndrAIa, which makes sense since she's not supposed to leave games. Mouse was said to have the same problem, but we never saw her enter games even after AndrAIa tested the corrections to her icon. The matter of getting stuck in games wasn't even brought up until well after Lens was in a game, and Megabyte was shown to have no problems with games in the first episode. The Spectrals couldn't reboot, but I assumed that was due to lacking a "solid" form to reboot with.
• So what would modern games be like to the binomes and the like, considering the fact that the only games seen played are of the no save, play in one go variety by User(s) who sucks balls at said games?
  • Sounds like a good idea for a new series. A...ReBoot reboot? (Sorry.)
• If Hex had the entire power of the core, why wasn't mainframe destroyed or depowered when hex fragmented herself?
  • Was it stated that she had the power of the entire core? In "Bad Bob", Megabyte was carrying nearly all of the Core's energy in a giant transformer, which was causing the game and system to horribly distort. If Hex was carrying the Core's full power, the system would probably have shut down already. Also, the Core itself isn't the actual source of energy, it merely stores Mainframe's energy supply which it converts from the Energy Sea.
    • Yes, she says "I have the entire power of the core coursing through me, nothing can hurt me or you now bob"
• How do Matrix and AndrAIa get to other systems in season 3? Matrix is in despair because some systems don't have ports to the Net. Yet he can still get to other computer systems by playing games.
  • The Games themselves were moving between systems at random. Matrix and AndrAIa were just hitching a ride on them, and had no control over which system they entered next. The despair was due to the Games apparently denying them access to a system that had ports to the Net.
• In the Season 4 movies, how exactly did Herr Doktor and Igor return? Hexidecimal turned them into biscuits at the end of Season 3, and had they been restored along with the city, they should have been turned back into normal binomes by the virus scan. So why is it that they are not only there, but still viral even before Megabyte's return?
  • "Costume upgrades" or paint?
  • They never converted. They are genuinely loyal to Megabyte.
• So Matrix is about to plant a trident in Megabyte's face, but then at the last moment decides "You're not worth it." Not worth what exactly? Cause by this point Matrix has already murdered a bunch of viruses in cold blood. For example, the Mantis virus from Icons who had a gun pressed against his head and was begging or his life. Matrix still killed him anywway. Matrix sounded like he didn't want to cross some kind of line, but he'd already passed it a long time ago.
  • The soul-searching dream in Number 7 probably had a lot to do with that. It was the slap in the face that made him realize just how far past that line he'd gone. Finally killing Megabyte like that wasn't worth becoming him, because he'd lose everything else.
    • How is killing a being whose purpose is to infect, conquer and destroy crossing a Moral Event Horizon? Dispite some moral ambiguity, guardians, who kill many virus throughout their lives, are not evil.
      • Guardians kill viruses out of a sense of duty and to protect others. Matrix probably realized that he'd be killing Megabyte out of hate and vengeance, and while the objective actions and result are the same, for Matrix personally it would have a very different effect. He spared Megabyte to save his own soul, not because saving Megabyte was objectively the right thing to do.