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Posted on 19-02-18, 20:14 in Nintendo Switch emulation is now among us

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Nobody is playing games on these bleeding edge emulators and enjoying it. But if they are, and if they’re that desperate to accept such an inferior presentation, they wouldn’t have bought the game in the first place.

No, the reason these emulators are around is because people are curious and enjoy developing them.
Posted on 19-02-22, 19:55 in Nintendo Switch emulation is now among us

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Posted by Nicholas Steel
Posted by BearOso
Nobody is playing games on these bleeding edge emulators and enjoying it. But if they are, and if they’re that desperate to accept such an inferior presentation, they wouldn’t have bought the game in the first place.
So the fanatical fans of ZSNES and UltraHLE2064 were a myth? I mean to imply that there are plenty of people out there that are tolerable of poor experiences...

Do you remember that time? Access to games was much more limited. Games disappeared from store shelves shortly after they were released and the only way to get them was through mail-in companies like Funco. Games like FF5 and SD3 were just translated and only available through emulation or copiers. When UltraHLE came out, the novelty was the higher resolution and frame rate compared to the console. Controllers with analog sticks were less widespread, and that was a big limiting factor. Personally, when I had access to the real thing, even if I had to wait months for a used game to become available, I would choose that above all.

There were idiots that accepted the poor presentation, but for the most part I don’t think they were there for the game experience. For them it was a street cred thing that they tried to lord over others. These are the ones who refer to the programs as “my zsnes” or “my Firefox.” It made them think they were superior to those who weren’t in the know.
Posted on 19-02-26, 18:10 in Nintendo Switch emulation is now among us

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Posted by byuu
That isn't still the case? I even pre-ordered Riviera on PSP from Gamestop, and the store employee opened the only copy they received -- mine -- before I arrived to pick it up.

Gamestop stores have always been crap. Software Etc., Babbage's didn't have those dumb policies. Funco was fine until Gamestop bought and twisted them.

After that, I just started buying games online.

There was no online then. Nobody put credit cards into the internet because no one on the internet could take credit cards. I'm talking about the mail-order sheets that Funco put out. A year after FF3 was released, I borrowed it from a neighbor and I liked it and wanted a copy. Trouble was, no stores had it anymore. So I put in an order to Funco, and when they (maybe eventually) got a used copy in, they'd send it to you. That was the kind of unavailability that pushed people to emulation at the time.

ZSNES couldn't quite reach full speed (with transparency, no skipping, etc) on our P2-333, so the notions of it being fast enough to run perfectly on the original pentium are uninformed. Snes9x was only marginally slower, but also not any more accurate at the time. I, for one, wanted my games to be perfectly smooth and to sound correct. So I'd certainly favor the real thing, even if there were some obstructions to getting it. By the late 90s, the internet was finally making buying used games easy, so there was even less reason to emulate. SNES emulation didn't get good enough to replace the real thing until you came around in the mid 00s.
Posted on 19-02-27, 17:15 in Nintendo Switch emulation is now among us (revision 1)

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Posted by Nicholas Steel

No, ZSNES is perfectly capable on a Pentium 1 so long as it's the MS-DOS version (which also supported the transparency effects etc.) The Windows versions of ZSNES need something like a Pentium 3 though >.>

Sure as hell didn't run well on our Pentium 1, unless you count 30fps max as running well. I was talking about the DOS version (the Windows version didn't come around until later). A P2-333 was pretty much the baseline. It just barely maintained full speed in most games. And I was a tweaker and ran stuff like fastvid to enable MTRR. You *could* run ZSNES on a Pentium 1, it was just completely pathetic.

Posted by shadowinthelight

Pentium might not have even been necessary. I remember getting playable if not full speeds on my brother's 486SX.

You're definitely misremembering, or you two have a different definition of "full speed." Yeah, it could run the game near realtime, but with significant frame-skipping and poor sound, the same way no$sns runs full speed on a Pentium. A 486SX would definitely not maintain full speed by my definition, 60fps with no sound cutouts.

Posted by "neologix"

Got Chrono Trigger SNES at Toys 'R' Us for $80-90

I remember our TRU having it on a big display under glass on an endcap and touting it as something big, but I didn't know much about it at first. I guess they were charging extra for the game length. I don't know if that was the MSRP, but I remember about $80 as well.

Posted by "KingMike"

I thought FF3 SNES had been a pretty consistent US$50 loose game for decades.

It was about that price when I ordered it. Didn't get it until at least a year later because of the wait list. FF2 was more expensive, obviously because of age.

Post: #45 of 175
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The TSC is on-die, so it’s usually faster. It’s safe to enable HPET in BIOS or EFI, but don’t make any changes to your operating system. It’ll choose the timer appropriate for the job. As Jistuce says, most advice on the internet is snake oil.
Posted on 19-02-28, 21:20 in bsnes v107 released (revision 1)

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Posted by MT

Pure Nearest Neighbour leads to distortion due to pixels of different size at fractional scaling ratios.

Sounds like you need the sharp-bilinear filter. Get the shader pack at https://github.com/hizzlekizzle/quark-shaders and extract all the .shader files into your user's AppData\Local\bsnes\shaders directory, which you need to create. Load up bsnes and select sharp-bilinear from the Settings->Shader menu, and voilà! It's pixelated, but no aliasing artifacts.
Posted on 19-02-28, 23:15 in bsnes v107 released

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Posted by sureanem
If I understand the source code correctly, it still has some artifacts since some lines will be sharper than others. (e.g. scale to nearest integer multiple, then the last mile with bilinear)

In practice, because the scaling ratio is so high, especially on a 4k monitor, you don't notice that. There's a couple other options in that shader pack that do something similar with different methods that change this up, AANN and Pixellate. Smoothstep and Quilez filters aren't available in that pack, but they will give you the complete uniformity you want, as they're more alike to band-limited sampling. They won't be as sharp, though.
Posted on 19-03-03, 00:26 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 1)

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Posted by sureanem
A 40" 1080p TV is less than $200 (new), and that's all you need.

Unfortunately, that's not true. You could buy one of those, sure, but maybe it's a B-grade panel with dead pixels. It's too costly to hire skilled workers to use finer polarizers, so they use ones with shitty viewing angles so they don't have to be as straight. Then they use the cheapest, slowest display controller they can to save money, and buffer the hell out of the stream, causing 300ms latency. Tight voltage levels on the backplane to reduce motion blur? Nope, too expensive to manufacture. Should they calibrate it before shipping so the colors are right? Nope, adds an extra QA step to pay wages on.

You get what you pay for. Initially, the smart features were just candy they added because they needed a fast enough chip to run higher resolution menus anyway. Now they're expected by the populace to be there. That 40" 1080p TV has the same smart crap as the several thousand dollar models. They're not charging more for it.

*Edit Add*
I should note that I still use a 10-year old 1080p display for my consoles. Excellent uniformity, calibration and comparably low input lag, so I admit your position has value. My point is: develop OCD and you'll really be able to tell if a display is actually worth the cost.
Posted on 19-03-03, 18:00 in I have yet to have never seen it all.

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Posted by CaptainJistuce

Same argument I had when people were claiming HD wasn't needed, DVD was fantastic, and you couldn't actually see the difference between 480p and 720p and that the human eye can't actually perceive 1080p.
I can still see pixels, I can still see color banding, there's still room for improvement.

At a distance of 10-15 feet, 1080p->2160p on anything less than 55 inches is indistinguishable. Even then it wouldn't make much difference. Up close, however, 2160p is significantly better. I can't go back to 96dpi computer displays. I'm hoping for a 5120x2880 27" monitor (other than the one that's out). That would be perfection.


Also, I gravely dislike that frame rates have been capped at 60 for so long, as someone who greatly enjoyed running his VGA(-esque) CRT at higher refresh rates. To say nothing of the scourge of chroma subsampling.

But you can't see more than 24 frames per second anyway!
No, you typical internet dolt! 20fps is the bare minimum to perceive motion and 24fps is a standard used by filmmakers that's only slightly above that.
Posted on 19-03-03, 22:05 in I have yet to have never seen it all.

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Posted by sureanem

Not everyone lives in America. Sure, you ought to be able to get Netflix on there. But what about obscure, regional streaming services? Maybe if you live in the UK, you can get BBC iPlayer on there. But can every broadcaster in every country afford to port their "player" to each brand of televisions? Do they even care?

We've got a Samsung one and it has basically everything available. You'd have to be *very* obscure or be illegitimate to not be on there, and even then it still might. You've got roughly 3 or 4 operating systems to port to, all unix, all framebuffer APIs. Hell, you can write an HTML5 video app and you're done.


Add in that many people like to watch dodgy soccer streams, IPTV, torrents, and similar, and it stands to reason that the compatibility and ease of use will never come close to the good ol' VGA cable. Maybe if the TV manufacturers start integrating Popcorn Time into their TVs, we could start talking.

On Sony and LG TVs you can side-load popcorn time, but you well know offering something like that straight up is out of the question.

VGA cable and ease of use together? Surely you're joking. Screw-on connectors and not being sure your cable has the right wires and pins is easier than HDMI's plug and done? In what alternate universe was VGA common on TVs?


A TV signal is much worse than DVD quality. DVDs don't have grain, and have much higher resolutions.

In the US, ATSC is 720p or 1080i. DVDs cap out at 480p. Sure, you're more likely to have compression artifacts with OTA TV, but it absolutely has higher resolution than DVD. DVDs will have grain, too, if the camera filming had grain.

The same goes for consoles, except maybe for the rare few who don't output through composite. The TV won't be your bottleneck, the signal will.

Rare few? The last console to output composite was the Wii, and that was released 12 years ago.

Yes, 4K was little more than a buzzword initially and its use in conjunction with compressed video is unjustifiable, but PS4 Pro and Xbox whatever use it now, and the next generation in a little more than a year will make it more widespread. With games you sit close, and unlike video, rendering produces aliasing. 4K helps with this.
Posted on 19-03-04, 23:16 in I have yet to have never seen it all.

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Please tell me you're trolling and not really this thick-headed.
Posted on 19-03-06, 01:58 in I have yet to have never seen it all.

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Posted by Covarr

FWIW, ever since they realized they could track and sell our viewing histories, "smart" TVs have generally skewed cheaper than traditional "dumb" TVs. Hooray for corporations using our data to subsidize product sales!

Joke's on them. We don't have to connect the TV to the Internet and it most certainly doesn't have a cellular modem.
Posted on 19-03-06, 20:04 in I have yet to have never seen it all.

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It’s not that your posts are upsetting, it just seems like your perceptions of modern society are, well, wrong. Your beliefs about standard prevalence are disconnected from reality.

I somewhat agree about smart tv interfaces, but they’re really not that much of an annoyance.
Posted on 19-03-07, 04:21 in I have yet to have never seen it all.

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Posted by Nicholas Steel
Samsung has for a while (maybe still do) used Tyzen for their Smart TV's O/S, which is a custom version of Android. It's not compatible with most Android software... our 2016 Samsung TV is also extremely slow & crap performing when doing anything computery.

Tizen actually has nothing to do with Android. It started as a joint effort among a bunch of companies to make an embedded operating system built on Linux. History lesson: The UI uses the EFL, Enlightenment foundation libraries. Enlightenment was the hip X11 window manager before KDE and GNOME brought in the desktop paradigm, and gnome actually used it as its window manager for quite a while before bringing in sawmill.
Posted on 19-03-08, 01:22 in I have yet to have never seen it all.

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Posted by sureanem

No, of course not. A chink box is an cheap SoC running Android or Kodi, preloaded with IPTV/Popcorn Time/similar, with absolutely no regard for copyright law or other unimportant paperwork. Not all streaming devices that are manufactured in the People's Republic of China (e.g. all of them) are chink boxes. Just like how you'd refer to cheap, low quality routers as "chink routers".

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs and understand that the word generally isn't acceptable. If you're using it well knowing its derogatory intent, I hope Kawa or Screwtape bans you.
Posted on 19-03-12, 18:51 in Blackouts

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Yeah, it’s all over the national news here in the U.S. even crazy Trump has called out Maduro and is trying to get aid in and diplomats out.

Speculation says the regime may have deliberately caused the blackout to prevent info about Guaido and opposition from spreading. Even if not, it would be complete negligence and mismanagement, so the regime is still to blame.
Posted on 19-03-14, 22:47 in Blackouts

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Except in this case there's no organized militarized rebellion. There's no rebel fighters, the opposition is pacifist. The US is only denouncing Maduro and attempting to provide supplies for the general population. There's no incentive to invade except humanitarianism. Since you're hinting toward this angle: the oil supplies aren't needed and aren't sufficient. Mismanagement and stupidity, not especially tyranny, are ruining the country.
Posted on 19-03-15, 02:55 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE

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Posted by CaptainJistuce
Posted by Screwtape
Posted by Nicholas Steel
It's the runniest train in town.

I ded.
RIP in peace.

But before dying, give me your PIN number so I can withdraw all your money from an ATM machine.
Posted on 19-03-21, 19:34 in Mozilla, *sigh* (revision 1)

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Posted by sureanem

What did the FSF have to do with this? As far as I can see, all they've done is to take credit for the actions of others. Linux, X11, Firefox, apt, none of these are GNU projects.

As far as I can tell, the GNU project has made three substantial contributions to free software:
* A C library
* A compiler
* A set of coreutils


You don't need any of that extra stuff if all you do is browse foot-dermatophagia mailing lists with emacs all day.

A serious anecdote, though:
Recently I was trying to update Snes9x GTK's translation support that had broken for some reason. I ended up just upgrading the autotools stuff for 1.58, but I was disappointed by the mess of files it produced. All these mandatory "GNU" files are strewn over the place. "Fill in the blank," templates would say, "your project is called GNU ____". Try to run make without some of these literally pointless GNU files and you get errors.

So for the next version I set out to replace autotools. Warning: if you expouse this choice publically, you'll get a lot of backlash from seeming autotools-lovers. Ignore them, because they're rote-methoders that barely figured out "./configure; make; make install", and they're afraid it'll change. I started looking at CMake, which is quite popular, and Meson, which looked simple from when I was playing with Mesa git. I looked at Meson first, and a couple hours later I realized I was pretty much done. I wrote nearly all the build script in one go, and it ran and worked the first time. That's how much easier it was than autotools. No more ABOUT-NLS advertisement for GNU, no more config.* files or M4 macros or sed scripts littering the directory. I may eventually get into CMake because of its ubiquity, though.

I'm not entirely sure. It's true that a hostile environment drives off some people, but I'm not certain it's completely unrelated to skill level. Linus' famous rants didn't seem to hurt the project, for instance.

Linus's famous rants are not unjustified or rude, but angry. Some really bad code made it to him despite all the layers of maintainers, and the retort needs to travel all the way up the totem pole for it to have any effect. This sort of thing is common in any real workplace, but the Internet echo chamber amplifies and remembers it. If you're close enough to Linus that he'd accept your code and commit it directly to his tree, where it will affect millions of people, you need to take responsibility for your actions and be more careful.

*edit*
The only reason they still are relevant is due to inertia, like how the Linux kernel is too tightly bound to gcc now to ever compile under Clang, even though they would want to.

It mostly compiles with clang, just a couple hiccups like asm-goto. Google Pixel devices all have the kernel built with clang. LLVM/Clang are quite good: excellent performance, clangd, clang-format, debugging tools, etc. They benefit from extra hindsight, having been started way more recently than the GNU toolchain.

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Posted by sureanem

It should be noted that these aren't matters of personal taste but rather necessity, and that a version without any additional software is provided.

start menu to one that looks like the regular one.

Check out my new patch for Final Fantasy III. It removes all the bugs, but remains totally neutral about everything else. Oh, and Sabin's hair is now black and his default name is Coolzo.
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