Kentaro had been extremely busy. When Tetsu Kobayashi saw him again, three days had already passed.
The pressure at work was enormous. Competing against Nintendo's new console next door left no room for slacking off.
Still, Kentaro came home with his usual relaxed smile, never bringing the stress of the office back to the house.
"Tetsu, how's your game coming along?"
"Uh…"
Tetsu scratched his head awkwardly.
This old man really knew how to hit a nerve.
"I think it's going fine," Tetsu muttered, "but there are still a few problems. Right now, we're trying to fix them, and the key to fixing the problem is… well, fixing it. So as long as we fix the problem, the problem will be fixed. That's the problem."
Kentaro leaned back instantly.
"What kind of answer is that?"
"Let me take a look," Kentaro said.
"Dad, you're a hardware engineer!" Tetsu protested.
"Hardware engineers still have to understand basic programming!" Kentaro snapped back, louder.
He leaned over, but his gaze first fell on the messy garage floor. Empty ramen cups, bread wrappers, and snack bags littered the ground—clear evidence that Tetsu had been working hard and barely eating properly.
"Work-life balance matters too," Kentaro muttered before turning to the screen.
Seven kilobytes of data. Two hundred and twenty lines of Pascal code, packed tightly.
"Hmm… looks decent. Syntax is fine."
Then his eyes narrowed.
"Tetsu, what's this part supposed to be?"
A block of strange, repetitive strings filled the screen.
"Oh, that's an index," Tetsu explained, waving his hands.
He compared it to a supermarket layout: shelves, categories, and item codes that helped programs locate resources faster.
Kentaro shook his head.
"The idea's clever, but did you consider that the SG1000 cartridges only have 8KB of storage? After verification code, images, and sound files, you're left with barely 7KB. Instead of wasting space on indexing, why not just define each character individually with a case statement?"
Tetsu froze.
Kentaro's approach was old-fashioned, but in a system with such limited memory, it suddenly made sense.
He realized that optimization wasn't about complexity—it was about survival within tiny constraints.
His code wasn't running in a supermarket; it was running in a two-square-meter newsstand. There was no room for elaborate shelving when every byte mattered.
"Right!"
Tetsu slapped his thigh and dove back into coding.
Watching him hammer away at the keyboard, Kentaro sighed and smiled.
"This kid…"
Seeing Tetsu's messy hair and tired face, Kentaro couldn't help but feel proud. Back in America, Tetsu had been all about looks and girls, never one to care about long hours. But now, he was working like a man possessed—probably for his father's sake.
Moved by the thought, Kentaro decided he'd make sure his son was properly fed from now on.
But as he stepped out of the garage, a sudden idea struck him.
Wait.
Tetsu's indexing method might be wasteful for an 8KB game, but for hardware optimization—that was different.
"Of course!" Kentaro's eyes lit up.
If the software approach could be adapted into hardware calibration, it might unlock unused performance in their home console—without increasing costs.
The SG1000's Texas Instruments chipset was decent, but the tuning was weak. If they could refine how the system handled memory and data flow, they might squeeze out more power from the same components.
It wouldn't catch up to the Famicom, but even a small boost could make a big difference.
Excited, Kentaro's heart pounded.
This could work. Even if it failed, it wouldn't make things worse than they already were.
Unknowingly, Kentaro had stumbled upon the foundational idea of cache—temporary data storage that allows processors to access information faster. Though primitive in 1980s hardware, this principle would later define modern computing efficiency.
For now, Tetsu focused on rewriting the Tetris base code, while Kentaro began testing new calibration methods for the SG hardware.
Both father and son worked tirelessly, each unknowingly sparking the future of software and hardware optimization in their own way.
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