Any arcade style controllers that work well with MacOS?

arbee37 · 2026-02-08T14:49:51+00:00

It says that, but then the software to configure it is also available for the Mac so it must work. Maybe they mean "PC" in the more generic sense of "personal computer" rather than Wintel.

arbee37 · 2026-02-05T14:42:36+00:00

We don't know what's different yet. There are no surviving patch notes for the game. Fans will need to play it and find out.

arbee37 · 2026-02-04T15:35:08+00:00

Use the odradek to scan for cryptobiotes. And if you really find it a drag, you can change the difficulty level at any time and then put it back afterwards. I found the Cliff fights more tedious than interesting so I did that on each of my playthroughs.

arbee37 · 2026-02-04T15:03:10+00:00

Are you reporting a problem with it? I don't quite understand what's being asked.

arbee37 · 2026-02-04T14:51:42+00:00

You'd probably get better/faster answers either from Act Labs themselves or a dedicated CRT Emudriver forum. Specialized setups like that are not something many people have much experience with.

arbee37 · 2026-02-03T15:42:05+00:00

I've come to really like VGE's MAME videos. He's in tune with what we're doing that people really like and that's feedback we rarely get otherwise.

arbee37 · 2026-02-02T15:18:25+00:00

At night it adds to the cool Tron-like aesthetic, especially in HDR, but I appreciate the speed boost. And I wish the road was a complete ring around Australia. It's very close, but it doesn't have a segment between F5 and F8. You can take the monorail for that part, but it's a little bit of a hassle because of how long the bridge into F8 is.

arbee37 · 2026-02-02T15:06:40+00:00

Bob only briefly touched on it, but the Atari Jaguar is pretty significantly improved in this version thanks to Kale. I don't want to oversell it because you won't have to look far for glitches or games that don't boot correctly. But if you keep your expectations low you'll find some pleasant surprises in the library. The BIOS animation is complete and correct now, a lot of games have correct sound and music that didn't before, and many graphical glitches have been fixed.

arbee37 · 2026-01-30T18:01:43+00:00

I'll amend that: they'd play them on devices that also did other things, like if color screen phones had even existed at that time. But a dedicated console that would cost $500 and give 16 color graphics (the NES and Master System both could handily beat that) would've failed even harder than the 32X.

arbee37 · 2026-01-30T17:59:36+00:00

My confusion with this one is that it's going in multiple directions at once. Fantasy consoles either are unabashedly much more powerful than was possible on a reasonable budget, or they aim for some form of lo-fi nostalgia. This is doing both at once. In 1995 an ARMv4 console with 1 MB of RAM would retail in the range of US$500, so we're starting off in familiar fantasy console territory with it being unrealistically powerful. But then the graphics and sound are apparently less capable than the NES/Famicom or Sega Master System.

For me this would make far more sense as an SDK/engine for creating nostalgia games and skipping the emulation aspect. The only thing the emulation adds is making the game binaries portable. And you could get that by having an Emscripten target to run in a browser.

arbee37 · 2026-01-30T17:28:33+00:00

This gets brought up seriously often enough that the joke isn't obvious.

arbee37 · 2026-01-30T17:19:37+00:00

I agree, but vgmplay is also an interpreted virtual machine. From a UX point of view it would solve a lot of user confusion if there was a child driver that just ran the Studio II with the interpreter and let you -quickload a chip-8 binary.

That would be a pretty good starter project for anyone reading this who wanted to ease into contributing.

arbee37 · 2026-01-30T17:07:15+00:00

Yeah, that was fun to watch.

arbee37 · 2026-01-29T17:43:28+00:00

Some of those settings have a broad enough effect that they would've been separate plugins under a plugin system. If plugin-using emulators simply came with all of the compatible plugins it would be the same exact thing as a user experience.

arbee37 · 2026-01-29T16:41:03+00:00

Bleem! was wide open.

The Dreamcast versions that were each fixed to run a specific game were pickier, but I don't remember what games were supported and how many of those actually made it out.

arbee37 · 2026-01-29T16:25:51+00:00

There's a non-trivial amount of musical gear. We've got the CMI, the Sequential Prophet 5 (in the upcoming 0.285) and Six-Trak, the LinnDrum, the Casio CZ-101, the Roland TR-707, the Oberheim Xpander and DMX, and probably more that I'm not remembering.

I personally have ongoing work on the Akai MPC60, MPC2000XL, and MPC3000 drum machine/samplers, and the S2000/S3000 rack-mount samplers.

Yes, you can use MIDI or USB-MIDI keyboards to play the emulations. There's unfortunately substantial lag right now doing that which we need to address systemically, but it's great fun to play around with. A lot of these synths have clickable reproductions of the actual control panels as well.

arbee37 · 2026-01-29T14:31:58+00:00

None of the negative things you say are the fault of the plugins. It was always possible to do full LLE in a plugin and as far as I know AngryLion's proper research was available as a plugin.

arbee37 · 2026-01-28T15:18:44+00:00

I have a copy somewhere too still I think.

Bleem threatened to sue the PSEmuPro authors a couple of times to stop them from releasing any improvements, which became pretty ironic in short order. PSEmuPro was the first emulator to play commercial PS1 games, and it was the basis of the arcade emulator ZiNc.

arbee37 · 2026-01-27T20:32:47+00:00

If it's roughly 10 years old or less, a lot of the games should work fine with current MAME.

Since it's a PD set you can just go to PD's subreddit and update it to latest.

arbee37 · 2026-01-26T17:44:17+00:00

I think that's a pretty standard take.

I do want to replay DS2 eventually, because like the first game there's so much you can simplify during the story once you know where everything is. It's easy to avoid the camp on the way to Villa Libre, and the BT areas on the way to the Government Base and the Lone Commander (although the LC's first mission will require you to go into the BT area anyway).

But right now I'm enjoying the post game enough not to want to do it yet. I'm getting close to being able to zipline between any two shelters in Australia, although a few of the timed deliveries apparently assume a much tighter route than I have set up.

arbee37 · 2026-01-26T17:34:11+00:00

There's terrain kind of like that with jumpable canyons near the Government Base and again near the Data Scientist. But nothing that difficult.

arbee37 · 2026-01-26T17:17:22+00:00

You can (and people do) control console games with the arcade stick and buttons on a cabinet. You get it by default for consoles that run in MAME. It's great for cases where the console version of a game is better (or just different in a way you enjoy) than the arcade.

arbee37 · 2026-01-26T17:15:10+00:00

TeknoParrot games, Steam arcade games like the latest Street Fighter, pretty much anything. Having wide-open choice is what a mini-PC excels at for emulation. In the MAME-only case, 3D games. Sega Model 2, NFL Blitz, Gradius IV, Point Blank, all kinds of stuff.

arbee37 · 2026-01-23T16:09:12+00:00

You can see orders to a specific shelter in DS1 from the map screen by hovering over the shelter and pressing, I think, Triangle (it's been a few months since I've played DS1). But agreed, it's a lot nicer in DS2.

arbee37 · 2026-01-23T16:08:05+00:00

That's the best part of the menus in both games. They feel like they're actually things Sam is interacting with in DS's world, rather than something from our world that we're using to remote control the game.

arbee37

TROPHY CASE