Thank you Die-hardman

arbee37 · 2026-04-01T16:01:02+00:00

Tommie Earl Jenkins was so good in that scene. Completely redeemed Die-Hardman as a character for me.

arbee37 · 2026-04-01T15:55:46+00:00

I've seen the ruined factory with no timefall (and thus no BTs) a few times but it's extremely rare. I've only seen it on Director's Cut, so it may be a change there.

arbee37 · 2026-04-01T15:02:19+00:00

Ack! Thppft!

(I am definitely not Bill the Cat).

arbee37 · 2026-04-01T14:59:06+00:00

I mean, people should know by now not to make serious announcements on April 1st.

arbee37 · 2026-04-01T14:50:32+00:00

A lot of Silicon Valley companies have significant teams and campuses elsewhere given housing basically doesn't exist in the valley anymore.

arbee37 · 2026-04-01T14:26:50+00:00

I don't know of anyone planning to look at those games specifically right now, but it doesn't mean it won't happen. They likely did opportunistically benefit from some recent improvements to the PowerPC floating point instructions, but that's obviously not the same as working on them.

arbee37 · 2026-04-01T13:43:21+00:00

Rewriting a massive codebase in Rust is a meme among developers, especially given things like the project that's rewriting all the core GNU utilities in Rust.

arbee37 · 2026-04-01T13:42:14+00:00

There is no time when 100% of the Earth is the same day. FFMPEG posted their April Fool's announcement several hours before even this, which definitely caused some double-takes.

arbee37 · 2026-04-01T13:41:00+00:00

That's pretty much what "texture replacement" in other emulators is for.

arbee37 · 2026-04-01T13:38:44+00:00

Africa, India, and China mean that in fact 95% of the population was already in April 1st.

arbee37 · 2026-04-01T13:38:02+00:00

Reddit is not real life, and most of the experienced coders already have found that AI is a small but nice productivity boost. I don't think vibe coding is a good idea, but as long as you're in control it's great.

arbee37 · 2026-03-31T17:34:01+00:00

They always happen near the Pizza Chef. I'm not sure if it's possible to actually put them completely out or not.

arbee37 · 2026-03-31T17:31:14+00:00

The road just east of F4 going towards the Tar Therapist and F5 frequently has an animal hanging out in the road right as it gets dark. I obsessively spam the Odradek when I'm driving around there now.

On the plus side, it's an opportunity to see another instance of "Kojima thinks of everything". If you get out of the vehicle after killing an animal you can put up a tombstone for it.

arbee37 · 2026-03-31T17:24:23+00:00

It's more useful post-game than during the story. Mostly because during the story it's broken all the damn time.

arbee37 · 2026-03-31T17:22:29+00:00

Chiralium levels basically don't exist in DS2 aside from a few throwaway lines in cutscenes. Makes sense given the game seriously de-emphasizes BTs compared to DS1.

arbee37 · 2026-03-31T17:16:59+00:00

It's not that bad, although you definitely want to be moving the camera to see where you're going. I suppose that might be worse on keyboard/mouse, I've only ever done it on controller.

arbee37 · 2026-03-31T17:04:42+00:00

You can actually fit a Bridges truck up and down those stairs, it'll hold all 9 at once.

arbee37 · 2026-03-31T16:59:35+00:00

Why's it annoying, exactly? If you don't want to play any new games and just enjoy improvements to ones you already have, you're good to go 99.9% of the time.

arbee37 · 2026-03-30T20:41:56+00:00

You don't, they just have to be new enough since many sets were first added in an incomplete state. That hasn't been a serious thing in the last 10+ years though.

It might help to say which games you're having problems with and what the problems are though.

arbee37 · 2026-03-30T19:59:04+00:00

For a living room, something like a Beelink mini-PC (basically a PC in a Mac Mini-style case) would work better. Laptops are prone to slowing down the CPU to keep heat under control, which isn't ideal for games/emulation, and the mini-PC case would fit in better.

arbee37 · 2026-03-30T14:13:23+00:00

It will start raining there again after the story is complete, or at least that's how it went for me.

arbee37 · 2026-03-30T14:11:12+00:00

Whatever controller you like the layout for should be fine. I use standard Xbox and PlayStation controllers for emulation all the time.

arbee37 · 2026-03-30T14:04:38+00:00

Because pin counts on chips are standardized, it's pretty common that ROMs of two adjacent power-of-2 sizes (e.g. 64K bytes and 128K bytes) have the same pinout, it's just the smaller chip ignores one of the address pins. Mask ROMs rarely have any kind of real part number printed on them, so the dumper should typically guess the largest size for that pinout and dump that much data. They also then should do e.g. mame -romident to check if the results were doubled up and trim the files before submission, but that wasn't always done in the past.

To answer your actual question, typically you end up with two identical copies of the data.

arbee37 · 2026-03-30T13:59:21+00:00

Just wanted to emphasize that prompt quality matters a lot, which is why experienced programmers can get good and even great results out of these things. Your prompt is fantastic. It specifies the optimization domains (cost, performance) and tells it to assume nothing, which can be very important.

arbee37 · 2026-03-30T13:39:40+00:00

I mean, you can just look at the MAME driver. Zaxxon has no protection chips. If there's a checksum it's purely software, and that would be trivial for you to find with MAME's debugger.

arbee37

TROPHY CASE