Oh wow. I thought this was just a fun little tribute to wolf3d. After two days and six hours of playing I now understand how wrong I was. After a few levels it turns out to be so much more, and just keeps getting better.

I just gave this a go not expecting much. Man is it fun! And works great on the deck too! Playing with a controller makes it extra hard, but then again the originals were hard too and had even worse controls, so it fits well.

You can probably just use any handlebar mount that uses a flexible band instead of a rigid fixture. I’ve personally used this, but anything similar would do.

It sounds it’s just that: a cleaner two stroke. It fixes the issue of requiring oil mixed in the charge with some reasonable extra complexity compared to a regular (turbo-)supercharged two stroke. But on the other hand it’s hard to believe it could match a four stroke when it comes to emissions and durability.

The design as presented here has a longer compression stroke compared to exhaust stroke which means there will be extra pumping losses compared to a regular four stroke, and is the exact opposite of what high efficiency 4 stroke cycles tend to do (eg. miller cycle). As mentioned in the YouTube comments, ensuring sufficient lubrication for the upper piston rings will probably present a design challenge. Especially given that piston rings and honing patterns are difficult enough to get right even in current engines.

So I guess it may be a better design when compared to a high revving supercharged two stroke (like for example some snowmobiles have) assuming that emission regulations keep getting even stricter. But it’s not that much simpler than a four stroke, and most likely has much higher development costs given the relative novelty of the design. So I’m not really sure If there’s a business case for this, given that four strokes are slowly replacing the current two strokes in pretty much every application, and smaller recreational vehicles will probably go all electric anyway. But as far as novel ICE designs go, this one at least seems like it’s simple enough to be cost effective if ever produced.

I have to agree. I guess the only reasonable application for graphical languages is domain specific languages, and even then they need to provide a significant benefit over any text based alternative to outweight the tooling incompatibilities you mentioned.

Except there’s Simulink, which has been around since the 80’s, and is anything but a failure. For a few specific usecases, like modeling complex physical systems and developing control algorithms for them, it’s far better than any traditional text based language. Especially when it comes to maintainability of that code.

Though I have to admit that if you try to use it as a general programming language, you’ll learn that while that’s possible, it’s also very painfull. And even while implementing said control algorithms you’ll occasionally run on to some bits of logic that prove to be annoyingly difficult to implement with it compared to any text based language.