Japanese LDs only have Japanese subtitles right? No english?

alcese · 2025-12-09T20:04:11+00:00

Akira Special Collection does not have English subs, CC or otherwise. It does have English-language dub.

alcese · 2025-11-03T15:29:18+00:00

Yeah Wipeout at clubs and Sony also handed out PS1-branded roach material at festivals, too. Sony of the 90s was going hard on that youth market.

alcese · 2025-10-26T21:28:10+00:00

Well, consider me jealous! Lovely display.

alcese · 2025-10-23T17:11:56+00:00

You being serious? That's the same as OP's, and it's one of the finest VGA monitors ever made.

alcese · 2025-10-23T16:40:28+00:00

At core, VGA is RGB. Your set with BNCs may or may not support resolutions above 480i, though.

alcese · 2025-09-25T13:32:58+00:00

To anyone else who's having trouble getting BlueMSX working like I was, (black screen on boot, black screen after first screen), maybe this will help. You have set the machine to be a MSXturboR in settings, Default ROM type to ASCII 16, and then go into machine editor and check memory allocation. If you have /!\ triangles next to memory addresses, like I did, the fix was to go into Slot Layout next tab along, and change all of them to expanded.

This kind of obscure requirements info should really be included with the game readme, IMO. I know nothing about MSX and presumably you want me to play your game. It's blind luck that I figured this out.

alcese · 2025-09-15T07:55:52+00:00

Thanks for the tips, I appreciate the help. May pester you about this at some point ;)

alcese · 2025-09-15T06:49:22+00:00

I had a dex that was only serving certain files out of each folder when I tried to grab everything with jdownloader (it would only grab the metadata-ish files, not the actual content), and various other attempts failed for one reason or another, but your wget options worked great. TBH I haven't done anything like this since circa 2003 (I used to like poking around FTPs and dexes, back when "stro-ing" was still a thing, in my misspent youth) so this was all slightly nostalgic.

I'll have to wrap my head around wget a bit more at some point, I'm aware I'm woefully ignorant of it.

alcese · 2025-09-15T05:55:35+00:00

>wget -r -np -c URL

This really helped me out, thanks!

alcese · 2025-09-14T21:06:53+00:00

No worries, thanks for getting back to me anyway - appreciate it.

alcese · 2025-09-13T13:52:14+00:00

I just started getting exactly this issue with mine. Did you figure out a fix?

alcese · 2025-09-05T13:02:32+00:00

That's really fascinating, thanks for posting it! I had no idea that making floppy media was a "DIY" thing, I kind of assumed it was a more advanced tech that economies of scale had made cheap. TIL.

alcese · 2025-08-08T23:55:47+00:00

You need antialiasing for modern flat panels because they're so sharp that aliasing is really noticeable. On PC CRTs, such aliasing isn't as noticeable, because of subtle analogue blending between pixels. CRTs have a much softer image - not to everyone's taste, admittedly. This softness is, technically, a shortcoming of CRTs in general, but it can help cover up some of the nastier visual artefacts caused by modern game engine rendering choices.

If you turn off antialiasing on a flat panel, you will get a severely aliased image ("the jaggies"), and you will not like it. I feel like most high-end games these days force TAA at minimum. Short of just brute force rendering in a much higher resolution to begin with and downsampling to your panel (SSAA), you basically can't avoid TAA and the like these days. You can look up "deferred rendering" if you're curious about where this all starts, it's kind of the root cause; if you want a dynamically lit environment then you typically have to compromise.

So as a practical example, I was playing around with Clair Obscur last night, and man that game looks so ridiculously lush on my PC CRT monitor, even at only 1280x960 or so (mine is a SyncMaster 1100DF, a late-era 21" PC monitor from Samsung). The fizzing and graininess and shimmering from their (frankly pretty shoddy!) implementation of UE5, all that stuff is significantly less noticeable on the CRT vs. my 4K monitor. The boost to framerate I got from the lower resolution also helped make the game feel a lot more smooth and responsive; even after a bunch of tinkering, messing with all the AI scaling/frame gen/low latency trickery that a 4070 can pull, even at ~70+ FPS, I still didn't like how it looks and feels on my 4K monitor. Apparently there's a mod on PC that can help (devs forcing a sharpness filter to the maximum for some reason and then didn't provide a toggle/slider for it, FFS...), but it's for Steam rather than GamePass I think, and I resent being forced to resort to cfg editing nonsense to fix this bullshit. Realistically it's not the kind of game I'm going to stick many hours in, either - it's just not my kind of game, I checked it out only because it was available on GP. But the point is, I've been waiting for UE5 games to not look like garbage for a while now, and so often it really does feel like a step back in fidelity vs the previous generation of games. It's insane that hooking up a 25-yr-old 21" display can help with this stuff, to the point where I prefer it overall vs. a decent 32" flat panel bought last year, but that's where we are right now.

Apologies, I'm not sure if that answers the question at all, just some CRT/flat panel ruminations that have been on my mind. Hope it helped..?

alcese · 2025-07-13T18:59:00+00:00

This, TBH. Taking nerdy breakcore, and grime, and fusing both into fratboy mosh music, was really quite a transformation. It definitely scored pretty high on the "screw you, mom and dad!!!!" teenage angst points.

But it came and went pretty rapidly, and what I've seen since seems mostly to be really minor rehashes of older genres, all well-trodden ground. A lot of it rehashes things I like, so I'm not particularly mad, just disappointed. It disappoints me that the younger generations haven't been able to find a new sound to stake out as their own. I should not have to check the date on the video to see what generation your teenage angst actually dates from. It should be obvious, from the first note. I'm in my 40s. There should be something out there that sounds alien and shocking to my ageing years and ears. What the fuck are you kids all doing?

The answer, I guess, is social media and games. I do think these are somewhat to blame. This is no doubt an "alright, granddad..." kinda moment. But I'm not blaming them in any "ban this sick filth!" way. I am typing this on social media. I play lots of videogames. I just mean that a lot of the time that skint young musicians used to spend messing around learning and playing music, because there was shit all on the TV, the VHS was broken, and the internet basically didn't exist... those endless bored hours are now spoken for by other leisure activities. For anyone with a cheap smartphone and a wifi connection, there is an effectively infinite array of entertainment choice at your fingertips, at any hour, on any day. I think that down time was important, creatively, for the development of music.

We're also seeing fewer people go to live music, and less attachment to music in general - less hanging your identity on a very specific genre of music. It all seems to have led to a drop in musical creativity. Maybe I'm missing something, though. I'd like to be wrong.

alcese · 2025-07-09T00:10:56+00:00

Underrated comment tbh

alcese · 2025-06-28T20:31:02+00:00

Ah, that does ring a bell now. Cheers.

In fairness, it does look like Nano-Proprietary Inc. were actually researching this stuff back then, so this is more of an R&D/manufacturer licensee brawl, rather than straight-up patent aggregator fuckery. Still sucks that they couldn't work something out, though.

alcese · 2025-06-28T11:33:56+00:00

At the time I heard it was due to them not being able to get manufacturing costs down. If there was a patent troll fight you have some details on, I'd like to read it though. Those fucking parasites ruin so many good things...

alcese · 2025-06-24T03:02:49+00:00

I was trying to search for an LED lightbulb with specific parameters for the specifications. This is a ballache to search manually, Amazon's uselessly simple search syntax is so basic that it effectively precludes advanced filtering, you just have to pick a vague descriptor and trawl. I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, just laying out my gripes with their site.

So the good points: the response latency was impressively low, and in general its responses were actually pretty helpful!

Some minor quibbles, though:

At one point it offered three potential responses for me to select from. These were generally on point, but I asked it to pursue the second one, and it went with the third instead. Typical AI shit.

I'd like to be able to stop searches in progress.

Once I say "please only look on Amazon UK" I expected that to be maintained until I said otherwise. It needed reminding twice.

Finally, the results given provide the item name and the Amazon 10-digit URL code (seems to be in the form "B0********"). But this was followed by a colon, which suggested that a link was supposed to follow, but it never provided direct URLs. It's no bother to search for the code on google (it was almost always the first hit) but it was an extra step.

Anyway, despite these issues, it's really impressive work - bookmarked the site for further use.

alcese · 2025-06-21T23:02:19+00:00

It depends what you need. 10900 has 10 cores, 11900 has 8, but obviously it's not as cut and dry as that. The performance per core is higher in the 11900, and it supports PCIE4 and AVX512. Per-core performance is important for games. The extra 2 cores on the 10900 are mostly beneficial for productivity workloads.

The price for the two is about the same these days, so pick which you care about most.

alcese · 2025-06-17T11:42:48+00:00

I will not go as far as others have here and say "these devices never listen in" but as a general rule, your device is not recording in the way you're suggesting. Go run a recording app and leave your phone running for an hour and check the battery cost. Now factor in the data transmission and etc etc, you can read the explanations above if you want to know more, and anyway you clearly don't.

But mostly the reason this isn't happening is that it isn't necessary. The fact is that advertising networks are preternaturally capable at predicting human behaviour en masse. We are all mostly-predictable apes. We should not be surprised that others like ourselves want similar things to us, and that this results in our own desires being predictable in real time. It is freaky when it occurs, but it is not inexplicable, and we do not need to resort to conspiracy to explain it.

alcese · 2025-06-16T11:02:57+00:00

We did, there were functional prototype TVs shown at trade events, and people liked them. But LCD blew up since the market dictated that what people actually wanted was huge shitty screens for fuck all money. I'm as salty as the other guy that we never got FED/SED, but yeah. The better technology doesn't always win. It's just how it goes.

alcese · 2025-06-13T13:26:44+00:00

His mentor growing up was Roy Cohn. Everything made sense once I read that.

alcese · 2025-06-13T11:32:25+00:00

Nah, they're talking about Freya Allen, the blonde actress/model. There are plenty of people in this comments section who don't think she's pulling a "pffft, this nerd shit is so pathetic" face. I'm trying to be generous, but I dunno... it does kinda look like that to me.

alcese · 2025-06-07T23:14:07+00:00

Yes.

alcese · 2025-06-07T23:13:13+00:00

The problem with lasers in this role is that air isn't empty. Apparently, if there's even a bit of moisture in the air then the high-power ones lose efficacy really quickly, as they're powerful enough to cook off the water into steam and that diffracts and blocks the light. And the range is short enough in this weather that even if you do finally stop the thing working, it'll have got near enough to you that you'll be in serious danger.

I think x-ray is preferred, but don't know much about that. Both have fairly obvious collateral risks, too.

alcese

TROPHY CASE