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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Okay, but if we take care of the problem that people have, legal regulation would not be necessary. We wouldn’t have to have a trillion laws stipulating all the various minutae of what we should or shouldn’t do because of how harmful it is or isn’t, people would be able to figure this out on their own. Less laws in general is better, when the population is intelligent enough to understand that you don’t drink bleach because a computer screen showed those words to you in that order.

    Opiates wouldn’t need to be illegal because people would be intelligent enough to know how harmful it is and thus wouldn’t use it. A law wouldn’t need to be created listing every known or unknown opiate derivative that is banned or for whatever use. People would just be smart enough to know.

    Basically, too many people aren’t using their own brain. AI is definitely a helpful tool, but not if you’re an idiot and believe it to have any actual intelligence. Its not there to replace your doctor or teacher, it is there to help you with word processing, pattern recognition, or other such language based tasks. AI used as a tool is queried for things like “check this passage for overly repetitive terms and suggest improvements that keep the same meaning.” AI used by an idiot is queried for things like “what do my lab results say about my health?”

    I suppose this is too far advanced for humanity at this point. Laws are important, but too many laws begins to speak about a general decline in intelligence.




  • Japanese games primarily designed for use with NEC PC-88 and PC-98 computers that came on floppy disks had an even worse problem:

    In order to save your game, you have to write to the floppy disk, usually wash disk needed to write somesort of data. Unfortunately, this means that the disk cannot be read-only protected. You probably see where this is going, but this sadly led to some players having uncompletable copies of games because they wrote to the wrong disk and accidentally ended up overwriting game data with save data.

    Some games came with manuals that warned of this, and some games spent the cost of disk space to store actual in-game warning screens to try to prevent this.

    EDIT: It has come to my attention that most people reading this probably don’t know this because they are too young, but these games that came on more than one floppy disk usually required you to insert at least 2 disks at the same time, one into both of the available drive slots. Then you would swap one or both out, depending on where in the game you were and if you needed to save or not. Each drive only appeared as a letter to save (usually A: and B:, which is why computer harddrives often start at C:, fun fact), and sometimes it didn’t prompt you to make sure after you selected one of the drive letters from the ingame menu that showed you nothing but the letter of the drive. So if you selected the wrong one, that sucks for you because they sometimes didn’t bother to check if there was already data on that disk or not before writing, which could cause data corruption, usually towards the end of the game.



  • Yeah, I don’t think the mods removed the last one by accident.

    Not only is this wrong, it is harmful. This is not something anyone “should know,” and infact everyone should know the opposite.

    Medicine is real, and when taken properly, is good for you. Medicine is designed to help your body with functions it may be deficient at, either temporarily or permanently, or in some cases to stop your body from being too proficient at something to the point it could lead to harm. Refusing medicine without reasonable grounds, such as religious beliefs or allergies, goes beyone ignorance into negligence.

    Sincerely, an American that hates having to see doctors and take medicine. I may hate it, but I still recognize its benefit and value.


  • I only preorder a game if I know I want to play it right when it comes out and want to be able to preload the game, and if it comes from a developer I know will not disappoint me (FromSoftware, Kojima Productions, anything from Yoko Taro, etc.).

    In the past I used to preorder to reserve a physical copy as soon as it was released, but there is generally no need for that anymore. This makes me both happy and sad, because for all the hassle it was, I kinda miss some aspects of the simpler times. In some ways, I do wish the world could rewind to the 2000s.

    Early Access is different from preordering because you gain access to the product instantly, and generally can influence the direction of the game in a hopefully positive way. Providing feedback on what works and what doesn’t is an important part of playing and early access game. A lot of people seem to ignore this.






  • There were a very small number of grey carts with 1.0 on them but most 1.0 carts at least in America are gold. Most grey carts are 1.2, but some have 1.1 as well. 1.1 is a general bugfixed version but also rare, while 1.2 is where all the censorship came in. Unfortunately for Europeans, all PAL versions are based on the censored 1.2 build. Due to this, grey carts are generally safe to assume are 1.2, because it is the most abundantly available build of the game, having been manufactured and sold the longest.

    There are some reports of 1.1 having partial censorship as well, though these may be due to someone swapping the physical carts shell from a different version of the game.


  • I currently use an HP EliteDesk SFF (the middle size one) and use a DAC for DisplayPort to RCA.

    DACs generally add less than 1 frame of lag. Youre thinking of scalers. If the adapter applies any sort of processing other than simply converting from digital to analog, then it adds more lag. But simply converting will usually have nearly imperceptible levels of lag. I can try to measure it when I use it next and see, but I can say that I don’t notice any “awful lag.” I am not a fighting game player, but timings in Shenmue for QTEs and Legend of Dragoon for combat don’t feel off or bad.

    If you wanted, the EliteDesk Mini has a proprietary expansion slot in the rear for modular video output, and one of the available modules is VGA. VGA to RCA is just a cable adaption (analog to analog) and intoduces zero extra lag, so that could be an option if you for whatever reason feel like DAC conversion introduces too much lag.




  • My only reason for not suggesting one and instead suggesting a mini PC is the lack of general availability when I went to get a Pi 5. And the cost, when I looked an Pi5 cost about $80, and for its price I figured a mini PC like an Intel NUC or even easier to find an HP EliteDesk mini, would vastly outperform it for a little higher cost.

    They can regularly be found online or in person for $120 or less. I got a secondhand EliteDesk mini with a 9500T for about $60 USD, including a 256GB NVME and 16GB RAM, which is plenty for retro gaming in general. You can also get just the regular SFF and add a SFF GPU for PS3/Xbox 360 emulation at a pretty low cost as well. I put one together with a base PC cost of $99 for an i5 7500, 16GB RAM, and 500GB HDD, and added an AMD RX 6300 2GB for just $75. It easily handles PS3/X360 emulation at native resolutions. Sure it cant run most modern PC games because its an RX6300 designed for business PCs and not gaming, but that doesnt mean it cant run older stuff really well.


  • Being a genuine hardware owner and enjoyer myself, I know it might seem bad to recommend an emulation setup over genuine hardware. But in my experience, I find I spend a lot more time playing on a mini PC with emulators I have connected to a genuine CRT it 1x internal resolution than I do playing on the real hardware I have. Its a big hassle. Sometimes I pull them out for guests or jids or whatever to get to experience how things used to be, but for me I want to play the games and the genuine hardware is just extra steps.

    Of course, using genuine hardware is going to give a more immersive and nostalgic experience. But if someone is wanting to actually play the games and not just experience nostalgia for a week before the hardware starts collecting dust, emulation is clearly superior.

    The thing about genuine hardware is that constantly getting up to reset it when a glitch happens, or when you want to change games or change consoles, etc, gets annoying pretty fast. Eventually you figure you don’t have enough time or energy for it and thats when it starts collecting dust. I say just skip that step altogether and go the emulation route. Then if you really want a genuine console, buy a cheap one first and see how long you last playing on real hardware. I give you a week before you go back to the emulator.


  • My suggestion might seem sacrelige, but hear me out.

    If you want something to actually use that is convenient, a mini PC that emulates them all is far better than genuine hardware. Kinda like how I will always say that driving a replica of an expensive car is better than driving a real one out on the road. Set up takes a lot longer, but in the long run it is far cheaper and much more convenient.

    • modern TV compatible output
    • modern CRT shaders very closely approximate actual CRT look especially at 4k with HDR (I have real CRTs to compare, and they do look similar)
    • you dont have to unplug and plug in multiple consoles, wearing out the tv input port when you want to change consoles
    • only takes up one tv input port
    • some games can run at better framerates than the original hardware could handle, giving a more consistent experience
    • no physical space lost to game boxes and multiple unused console accessories
    • expandable storage to include all games from each console’s library
    • can play handheld games on a TV without needing overpriced genuine hardware like the GameBoy Player for the GameCube ($75+ is ridiculous)
    • you get to play games you will literally never be able to thanks to speculative buyers and collectors making the real thing too expensive (~$1,000 USD for Panzer Dragoon Saga NTSC should be illegal)

    You could potentially invest in console themed controllers, so the inputs match the controller you are holding. Sure, the integrated graphics might not be good enough to PS3 on some older ones, but it’s hard to beat that at ~$150 USD for up to 6th gen. Lots of genuine hardware now is that price or more thanks to speculative buying and “collectors” ruining the hobby for people that actually want to play the games instead of just hoarding them.