FM Chiptuner and Retro Computer Nerd
https://netnomad.dxcomplex.com

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: February 21st, 2024

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  • a lot of games these days have higher graphic “fidelity” but it’s at the point where they’re exaggerating them just to show off. light and reflection systems in particular have kind of an uncanny valley feel to them now at least to me, and it makes the games much less pleasant to look at


  • windows 8 is a strong candidate, because that was their huge push into trying to remodel the OS in the image of mobile OSes. you had to perform quite the exorcism to get it functional. i skipped Vista so I’m not the best source on this but my understanding is that the issue with Vista is less that it was loaded with dark patterns and trying to be a walled garden and more just an unfortunate time to be an OS with the technology and security landscapes changing.

    of course, while the base OS wasn’t necessarily always the problem, Microsoft has anti-competitive practices going back even further and you could argue Windows stopped being good when MS started bundling Internet Explorer with it, so it all depends where you draw the line. might be safest to say their last truly good OS was MSX-DOS just because they abandoned it before they could do anything scummy


  • i’ve been playing the Shiren the Wanderer DS remake, and even with a code to keep EXP between runs it is still kicking my ass. slowly but surely getting closer to the end though…

    i’ve also picked up SEGA Rally again thanks to the recent documentary. it’s tough to play it in manual with the 3D pad because the button layout is optimized for the wheel controller which splits both rows of buttons between each hand, but i finally found a way to make it work and it’s a whole new game now. drifting around corners with the gear shift never gets old




  • i would recon this is true more often than not for attempts at 1:1 ports. glitches are more often introduced than fixed in the porting process, so if it isn’t deliberately a remaster or offers extra content, you’re probably better off with the original in an emulator. if you’re interested in mods, it’s also worth thinking about where the reverse engineering efforts have been focused- a lot of native PC ports have been picked apart and put back together with bugfixes and new content after the fact

    sonic adventure is an example of all of the above. if you want the absolute worst version possible, just buy it off steam. if you want the best version possible, buy it off steam and mod the shit out of it. fan efforts to fix an abysmal port of a port ended up creating an experience that arguably surpasses the original before even getting into all the extra bells and whistles you can mod in

    fan ports are also increasingly becoming a thing, so i guess the moral of the story is this: as far as official offerings go, emulation is probably going to be better than a native port, but if a game has enough enthusiastic hackers, then they may have frankensteined something even better together






  • i’m honestly a little suprised this hasn’t happened sooner. there were plenty of computers with similar hardware at the time with CP/M or DOS variants, and the unix-like fuzix was originally developed for the z80 and i think has a 6502 port. that’s not meant as a knock on decrayzo though- either way this is cool as shit

    i’m curious what the culture around the famicom and FDS as computers was in japan. it was wildly popular but it never seems to come up in discussions of other 80s JP computers, so i wonder if the reason it never got a DOS straight from nintendo was because everyone including them saw it as more of a console than a computer despite the name. or maybe that’s just a westerner’s bias talking and japanese folks really do consider it as a contemporary of the PC-88 instead of the SMS




  • your mission, should you choose to accept it: 1983. CBS is going to tell you that you only get one disc for your double LP. a deflated Jeff Lynne is just gonna slap A1 on the first side and a few random tracks on the second and be done with it. you cannot let this happen under any circumstances. everything wrong with the world in the last half-century? it all starts with Secret Messages not ending with Hello My Old Friend. if you can fix that, you can save us all

    if you can also convince him to move Loser Gone Wild to the b-side it would greatly help the flow and pacing of the album but that did not have nearly the same level of impact on the space-time continuum so we’ll just file that as a “nice to have”



  • many retro systems have implementations of a language called BASIC, which is about as easy as it sounds. it has some quirks that aren’t transferable to newer languages and you won’t be able to make anything nearly as sophisticated as retail games for the same hardware but if you find modern engines intimidating, it can be a good place to start

    that said, +1 for godot if you want to learn a more modern tool. it’s way simpler than it may seem at first and there is a huge wealth of beginner-friendly tutorials available online