_NetNomad

this guy hates

look at the comic again. the orphan being launched has their arms raised and is going “aaaaaaahhhh” like on a rollercoaster. clearly having fun!/profits have nothing to do with it, this is the most ethical way to handle the situation

and yet i went to the store today and they had no gamecube games???

aw hell! K&T are great, that’s a real shame

appropriate given they’ve been screaming “DON’T YOU WANT ME” at disinterested parties all this time

something that i think gets lost in the sauce in thrse discussions is whether fun is derived from playing or winning. people are comparing Silksong- and to get ahead of it right now i haven’t played and am not criticizing either of the Hollow Knights- to old arcade and early console games and their legendary difficulty, but a lot of those games were meant to be complete and fun experiences even if you game over very early on. they also didn’t have levels full of bespoke Stuff in them, it was the same few tiles and entities in different configurations., so being stuck on level 1 didn’t mean you were missing out on a narrative and worldbuilding. with how the lines have blurred between games and narrative art forms in the last few decades, there are different incentives at play and someone stuck on world 1 of SMB isn’t missing out nearly as much as someone stuck on whatever the first stage of Silksong is. it’s all ultimately apples and oranges

thank you!

can anyone recommend a good read into the actual developments happening with ATproto as of late? i’ve seen a lot of insisting lately that things are changing/have changed but no one’s saying what exactly is or has changed

what confuses me the most about these videos is the call to action. go back? that’s not how time works!

anyone interested in this should also check out Star Garden, which combines elements from the original Air Ride and the a-life features in the Sonic Adventures, a very dangerous combination for gamecube kids

the history of the xbox layout is fascinating and frustrating. i got a little carried away, so wall of text incoming, sorry! TL;DR the XBox layout is the SEGA six button layout with two buttons chopped off

once upon a time, SEGA released the SG-1000, which had two buttons on it’s joystick. it didn’t have a D-Pad because it came out the very same day as the NES, but future revisions- the SG-1000 II and the Master System- would come with a joypad very similar to Nintendo’s. The numbers were not labelled on the SGs, but on the Master System and SK-3000 computer they were assigned 1 and 2, with 1 corresponding to B (and also labelled start) and 2 corresponding to A.

the Mega Drive/Genesis was backwards compatible with the MS in a few ways, one of which was controllers. the Mega Drive controller is mechanically a Master System controller with two extra buttons, one being Start and the other being… A. despite 1 and 2 mapping to B and A in Nintendoland, SEGA relabelled those buttons B and C on their new controller- plug your MD controller into a Master System and A does nothing! notably the MD also reverses the letter order from right to left to left to right, so it goes A B and C.

i’m not sure what was in the water that generation, because SEGA was not alone in their malarky. the SNES had A and B buttons right where you’d expect them but for NES ports and sequels often used X as B and B as A. despite the fact that perfectly good A and B buttons in the same orientation as the NES II and Gameboy were right there. sorry muscle memory! the Virtual Boy retained the regular A B layout, so one wonders if button position was a contested point for Miyamoto and Yokoi.

but i digress- the MD later tacked a second row of buttons, X Y and Z, to a second row above A B C and this carried over to the Saturn’s default and analog controller. the analog controller was based on the Micomsoft (not Microsoft) XE-1AP, a third party analog controller for the MD and JP microcomputers that retained the Nintendo A and B position and bizarrely has E1 and E2 buttons on the left hand side in a mirrored configuration. the Saturn analog controller however used the familiar MD/Saturn right hand six button array.

so here we are, and SEGA is collaborating with Microsoft (not Micomsoft) on their next generation console. everyone at SEGA had their own pet theory for why the Saturn didn’t take over the world and one that kept coming up is that the controller was too convoluted. the undisputed winner of last generation used the same four-button array used by the SNES, which overtook the MD at the tail end of the generation before. the obvious move would be to mimic that, so despite the C button being the first and main button on the SG-1000, the “real A button,” it and the Z button above them got the boot, creating the Dreamcast controller. when the Dreamcast failed, Microsoft decided they weren’t out of the fight just yet and early plans for their DirectX Box included backwards compatability with the Dreamcast, leading it to have the same button layout but with a size more akin to the Saturn analog and XE-1AP controllers. Nintendo would return to the SNES layout the next generation for the DS and Wii Classic Controller, and things have been steady for the in the two decades since

and that’s why we’re stuck arguing which layout is “right” until the end of time!

most people join the fedi to get away from shit like bluesky, so until they become actually decentralized i think most fedi instances should block/ban bridges if anything. the current status quo of bridges being around for those who want/need them but are easily ignorable for the rest of us is probably the best case scenario right now

i don’t particularly love “stomp clap hey” music but you have to remember the context- this was right after the miserable corporate pop music of the 2000s. there was nowhere to go but up and this was one of those first steps in that direction., no matter how small. stomp clap hey was the weeds growing in the empty lot left behind by the 2000s that eventually lead to the meadow of listenable music returning to the pop charts in the 2020s

what’s the difference between an Action RPG and an ARPG to you?

very promising sign that they’re casting for the roles instead of casting for recognizable names. i am cautiously optimistic

but at least your drunk uncle won’t boil the oceans in the process too

people are recommending the retroid pocket 5, but i had a flip (1) which is internally equivalent to a 3+ and it ran gamecube perfectly. the flip was discontinued (and for good reason, it’s battery had a nasty tendency to go spicy pillow) but you can buy the 4 new cheaper than the 5 and there are a few used 3+s floating around on ebay

interesting read. usually when people lay out the history of the series, they call 20 years ago the dark ages and 10 years ago as when things started to turn around. the thing for me is that 20 years ago we were still getting amazing side games that kept the lights on like the Advance series, and it was only when those stopped and Sonic Team had to stand on their own that things really fell apart. but now here we are with then collaborating with others and getting gold like Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog and Superstars, and meanwhile Sonic Frontiers is the first Sonic Team Sonic game i’d call genuinely good since… Adventure 2? Which speaking of which just got a brilliant movie adaptation. we’re so back

i think you’re mixing up a few different things here. beam-racing was really only a thing with the 2600 and stopped once consoles had VRAM, which is essentially a frame-buffer. but even then many games would build the frame in a buffer in regular RAM and then copy everything into VRAM at the vblank. in other cases you had two frames in VRAM and would just swap between them with a pointer every other frams. if it took longer than one frame to build the image, you could write your interrupt handler to just skip every other or every three vblank interrupts, which is how a game like super hang-on on the megadrive runs at 15 FPS even though the VDP is chucking out 60 frames a second. you could also disable interrupts when the buffer was still being filled, which is how you end up with slowdown on certain games when too many objects were on the screen. too many objects could also lead to going over the limits of how many sprites you can have on a scanline, which is why things would vanish- bit that is it’s own seperate issue. if you don’t touch VRAM between interrupts then the image shown last frame will show this frame as well

COBOL is still being updated because, believe it or not, people are still writing COBOL