FM Chiptune Musician | DX Complex Staff | SEGA, MSX and Retro Tech Dork | He/Him

Formerly _NetNomad@kbin.run
Microblogging at _NetNomad@oldbytes.space
https://netnomad.dxcomplex.com/

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • 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








  • I’m reminded of that onion article, “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made An Excellent Point.” on one hand, as an independant musician who has many friends in different artistic fields, we all agree IP law is a net negative for us all. the threat of wrongly being accused of copyright infingement and being punished for it is very real, whereas the threat of having our work stolen is non-existant and wouldn’t matter anyway because we’re making fuck-all money in the first place. and the fact that we can’t legally iterate on existing music the way humans have for as long as we’ve had music until very recently is just criminal. it makes me absolutely sick

    on the other hand, if IP law exists to protect small creators but in actuality protects corporate interests, and suddenly corporate interests think IP is bad, then we should be very worried. i said earlier that the threat of our work being stolen is minimal because we’re not making money, but with all this generative AI bullcrap, they’re using our art as raw fuel to displace artists entirely and burn the planet to a crisp. it makes me even more sick




  • _NetNomad@fedia.iotoGames@lemmy.worldThoughts on Mario Kart World
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    3 months ago

    i’m pretty excited. i was disappointed by 8 and disapointed even more when we got it again on Switch instead of a new installment, with . one of the main things that bugged me was the kart customization that felt more like picking nerfs than buffs. having that eliminated alone makes the game 10x more appealing, and then this new rally mode seals the deal for me

    …aside from the price like everyone else is saying. i’ll gladly get it used, but if we all wait for it to go on sale used, there won’t be any used copies to buy used! the comments in the gameplay streams nintendo did today where flooded with demands to drop the prices so i think everyone is on the same page. it’ll be interesting to see in the coming months if nintendo budges




  • were electronic dictionaries a bigger deal in japan than elsewhere? as far as i know, in america they were never anything more than novelties even before everyone had a computer in their pocket. i did a little googling and it seems like they were/are more common in japan but couldn’t find any reference as to why. my only guess is that it has something to do with keeping track of kanji but in the 80s they probably weren’t even capable of displaying kanji so /shrug





  • i wrote out a whole big thing and then my phone ate it so here’s the sparknotes: game design, both hardware and software, is a dialogue, with ideas bouncing back and forth between companies. none of your examples exist in a vacuum or were “never before seen,” nintendo just tend to be the ones who strike gold when they try something. with SEGA out of the game and sony and microsoft focusing solely on horsepower, the hardware dialogue has mostly stopped. it took a while to be noticable because consoles start developement way before they’re released, so it’s only catching up with us now. with new (sort of) entrants into gaming hardware like steam and retro handheld manufacturers entering the fray, things will likely get interesting again- but just like how we’re only feeling the drought now, it’ll take a while for existing hardware to catch up with the dialogue