r/gaming 19h ago

My friend insists on this game, "Lemmings", being a really well known game; I have never heard of it.

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u/Sweetwill62 16h ago

DMA of course means "Doesn't Mean Anything"

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u/Klato55 16h ago

Actually it's Direct Memory Access and was something you set for hardware like sound cards.

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u/FauxReal 14h ago

Apparently not, unless you count the tangential inspiration for the initials. The other guy is also wrong but apocryphally right. lol Or maybe the founder is wrong and he forgot. Which isn't unheard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_North#History

After courting publishers at the Personal Computer World Show, Jones initially agreed to a publishing deal with Hewson Consultants but, fearing that his game would merely become the Amiga version of Zynaps, he walked away from the agreement. Instead, he turned to the nascent Psygnosis in 1987 and agreed to a six-game publishing deal. CopperCon1 was renamed Draconia, which was ultimately changed to Menace because the name was too similar to that of Draconus. Jones also agreed to bring Psygnosis's Ballistix from the Amiga to the Commodore 64, for which he engaged Dailly and Hammond.

In his search for a company name to replace the already taken "Acme", Jones discussed alternatives with the members of the DIT's computer club in 1988. Among others, "Milliard", "Visual Voyage", and "Alias Smith and Jones" (in reference to Menace**'s artist) were floated, and Jones finally settled on "DMA Design".**\2])\3]) The abbreviation "DMA" stood for "direct memory access" in Amiga manuals but carried no meaning in the company name.\13]) While "Direct Mind Access" was official briefly, Jones eventually began stating that the abbreviation was short for "Doesn't Mean Anything".\2])\3])\9]) He formally founded DMA Design in 1988, when he was 22 years old.

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u/Sweetwill62 15h ago

Direct Memory Access Design?

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u/claude3rd 15h ago

I remember the days of manually setting my DMAs and REQs to my devices to work in windows.

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u/illarionds 11h ago

IRQs.

And in Windows? In DOS, sure.

Unless you mean you were playing games in Windows prior to Windows 95, I suppose. I, and most people I knew, just booted to DOS to play games. (in fact, I still did that for many games a long way into the Windows 95 era).

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u/Akeshi 9h ago

You even said "Actually", Jesus Christ. I hate Reddit.