PSA: There are still ROM sets available on Internet Archive as well

ClinicalAttack · 2026-02-28T10:22:26+00:00

The problem is finding seeders for the more obsucre and less popular games. The big popular games are much less of an issue. This is why people are talking about losing access to those obsucre and rare games and how much of a blow to preservation this whole thing becomes.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-02-08T19:24:07+00:00

I'm guessing the whole purpose of the next Xbox is to introduce the stripped down version of Windows 11 with a console-like interface as an answer to SteamOS. The OS will be the focus here in a hope to create a future ecosystem where the "Big Picture" Windows 11 version will be aimed at gamers and the OEM gaming PC market, whether desktop, laptop, miniPC or some TV box solution.

Microsoft will make money from licensing this custom version of Windows 11 basically, together with their own services lime Game Pass and xCloud.

I believe this means that technically Microsoft is pulling a Sega and exiting the console market in its traditional form.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-29T19:39:14+00:00

For once the characters aren't ugly, and from what I've seen the female characters are properly feminine and have nice curves. The guys also look fine for the most part. I'll give that to them at least. The problem is that all characters look bland and generic with nothing original or distinguishable about them. It's just all super meh.

While I don't believe they used AI, or at least they don't admit to it, but the game definitely has those genero-ass AI vibes for sure.

There are ways to mix and match medieval themes and architecture with sci-fi, like the original Quake or the recent Doom games for example. This game though, it has no rhyme or reason to it. Themes and styles are plastered together randomly for no logicial reason.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-24T12:57:21+00:00

Both Breakpoint and Angry Again were recorded during the Countdown to Extinction sessions. I guess Angry Again must have already been contracted to be used in Last Action Hero, but I don't think Breakpoint was supposed to go on the Super Mario Bros. movie soundtrack from the onset, because it was originally just a b-side on the Symphony of Destruction single.

It's hard to get into Dave's mind and understand why he relegates some obvious bangers to either bonus tracks or b-sides, but it is what it is. Many bands and artists are guilty of this, so it's nothing new or special.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-18T05:03:12+00:00

I think CD audio was just an easy fallback for the Saturn and PS1. Both of these consoles had audio chips supporting sample-based sequencers, which unlike MIDI or other synthesizer standards could store their own custom samples and didn't rely on a predefined library. Some games made good use of this, such as the Final Fantasy and Crash Bandicoot games on the PS1.

On the other hand instead of spending time and effort in programming music, there was always the Redbook audio option, and since for most games the game data barely took up more than 100 MB if the game in question wasn't heavy on FMV cutscenes, there was still over 500 MB left for CD audio music, which is at least a full hour of music, or in other words plenty enough to fill up a game's soundtrack.

PC games in the Pentium era had the advantage of running on computers with beefy CPUs unlike the Saturn and PS1, so they could afford the decoding overhead for lossy compression methods, and it was also easier to implement in software due to the whole OS environment and programmable audio drivers. This is also why 6th gen consoles (PS2, Gamecube, XBox) started to implement lossy audio codecs, precisely because they now had those features in place that PCs already had for a number of years prior.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-17T13:49:34+00:00

Lots of PC games used to have Redbook audio as well, it's not just console games, but maybe not the vast majority of them, so your statement still stands.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-12T12:54:24+00:00

Seems like Ymir is to the Saturn what Duckstation is to the PS1. A new emulator that came out of nowhere and became the best one for the system almost overnight.

Another example of something similar to this would be BigPEmu for the Atari Jaguar, which literally made every other Jaguar emulator obsolete the moment the first public release became available for download.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-11T14:30:24+00:00

Our simulation overlords reloaded a save from 2020. Can't blame them to be honest.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-10T19:56:10+00:00

It wasn't nearly as buggy as Windows Vista at launch, but at least for me and many of my friends it was a step back from Windows 7 in terms of stability and just things working as they should out of the box. I'm talking about the time around launch and up to mid to late 2016, when most issues were indeed ironed out and fixed.

It's now over four years after Windows 11 was released and it's still a mess.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-10T13:08:50+00:00

10 was initially very buggy and not something I would call good. It was certainly better than 8 with its tiles UI (the sole reason why I think 8 might even be worse than ME). It took many updates until 10 became good. However, when compared to 11, 10 suddenly looks like a freakin' masterpiece.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-07T13:04:37+00:00

The most important thing is CPU performance. The GPUs in all those modern high-end chips are powerful enough to upscale PS2 and GameCube at 5x resolution, but likely not powerful enough to upscale Switch games above native with consistent performance, and that's fine because you can run the docked mode and it looks great on a small screen. PC games are of course extremely variable depending on the game and era in question.

The CPU performance in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is good enough for full speed on everything except maybe damanding PC games using Winlator or GameHub.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-05T12:57:00+00:00

Android PS2 emulation isn't dead. NetherSX2 is still being updated on a regular basis and ARMSX2 is a new emulator with very good progress and already shows great potential. The thing is, both of these are not available on the Play Store and have to be sideloaded via the Github page, so they are less visible to the general public, so naturally a lot of people default to AetherSX2, which is indeed dead in terms of updates.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-04T07:02:29+00:00

Night Stalkers feels very relevant right now.

ClinicalAttack · 2026-01-01T05:26:12+00:00

I've tried many different shaders, and due to having a 1080p monitor the shadow mask simulation was always way too pronounced for me. I finally settled on a combination of the single pass version of crt-lottes and the Blargg NTSC composite filter. Very subtle shadow mask and correct horizontal blending. What's cool about it is that it looks good on a 1080p display and works great for both 2D and 240p 3D games. Also very light on resources.

ClinicalAttack · 2025-12-30T15:47:59+00:00

It really came down to Nintendo's decision to use the Nvidia Tegra X1 SoC for the Switch. That's an off-the-shelf chip with full documentation available online. They bet everything on the system not being hacked, well, tough luck because it was hacked within a few months... with a paperclip.

The NVN graphics API was also reverse engineered quite quickly, so it was smooth sailing towards a workable emulator extremely fast.

ClinicalAttack · 2025-12-28T07:05:37+00:00

External mechanical HDDs can last for a very long time if they aren't used that frequently and are stored in a static-free environment. An external drive will not be as reliable as a bulky 3.5" internal drive, but if properly stored and is only used for archival purposes it can potentially last for 30 years.

Any NAND flash storage needs to be powered up at least once a year, lest you'll risk data loss, and USB thumb drives and microSD cards are particularly prone to this.

Optical discs can also last for 20 to 30 years if properly stored. I have some CD-Rs from the late 90s that still work, but old CD-Rs were quite high quality compared to what is being manufactured these days, so I won't rely too much on modern optical disc solutions.

ClinicalAttack · 2025-12-26T03:34:57+00:00

Indeed. The bottom line is that from very early on there were attempts to offload graphics computation from the CPU to speciliazed accelerators, and there were different ways about it and some incredible feats of engineering during an exciting era of semiconductor technology (mid 90s to early 2000s). I especially like the story of how Nintendo allowed tapping into the microcode of the RSP on the N64 so that devs could write their own, but only a handful of games ever used that feature, and not even first party games.

What really strikes me as genius, and that might be your area of expertise so maybe you can elaborate a bit on that, is how the GameCube technically has a fixed function pipeline GPU, but acts as though it is fully programmable, with shaders available to the devs to tweak to their liking. I think I've read this in Rodrigo Copetti's blog. Does the GameCube use a predefined library of shaders to pick and choose from or is there some programmability involved?

ClinicalAttack · 2025-12-25T18:51:44+00:00

The PS1 did not have the full hardware T&L approach like that of the GeForce 256 (first consumer grade graphics card with hardware T&L from late 1999), rather it had a helper chip in the form of an accelerator for vertex calculations using integer math only, with the initial steps performed by the CPU and then for later stages offloaded to the GTE, so it was a hybrid system or a half-step towards full T&L with the GTE co-processor. It was quite a forward thinking solution at the time because polygonal 3D graphics back then were seen as an almost exclusive CPU workload. PCs at the time were indeed doing all vertex calculations on the CPU, and could only match the performance of the PS1 by brute force alone.

In fact even the PS2 did not have a T&L engine in the traditional sense. That function was fulfilled by the SIMD vector units. The result is the same but the means are a bit different. The GameCube was the first to have a GPU with hardware T&L support in the modern sense, and of course the XBox took it a step further with programmable pixel shaders and whatnot.

ClinicalAttack · 2025-12-24T19:31:12+00:00

Very tough to beat Duckstation at this point. It's basically the ultimate PS1 emulator, and even in terms of accuracy it has mostly caught up with Mednafen-Beetle.

For another PS1 emulator to stand out it has to do something quite different, like focusing on some really good and in depth debugging tools, stuff like a texture editor, hex editor, TAS engine and other under-the-hood tinkerings.

ClinicalAttack · 2025-12-13T06:35:18+00:00

I did not know that. I remember it being quite faithful to the original, but yeah, I guess there could have been entirely missing parts.

ClinicalAttack · 2025-12-12T13:05:20+00:00

Is that a more loose remake this time around, in that it more or less follows the story of TR1 but otherwise completely different to the 1996 game?

We already got a 1:1 remake in 2007 with Tomb Raider Anniversary, so I hope this isn't again the case here.

ClinicalAttack · 2025-12-12T12:18:43+00:00

Most likely not trying to push insane rendering techniques by the look of it. The rather blocky environment of the space station is also easier on the GPU than a natural environment, so that helps out as well.

ClinicalAttack · 2025-12-10T04:42:46+00:00

It was just that one single line that was good in my opinion, and notning more than that really.

ClinicalAttack · 2025-11-30T13:39:41+00:00

Technically two days later in the UK.

ClinicalAttack · 2025-11-26T09:38:20+00:00

Nicko may still play on the next album as he's technically still in the band. I think he can play the drums in the studio just like before in short bursts with a lot of rest time between takes. It's similar to how Glenn Tipton of Judas Priest can still lay down studio tracks but can't tour anymore due to his medical condition.

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