The Northwest Repair Discord server is pretty active with people sharing techniques, tips, technical info and gear advice. While NWR's YouTube channel is mainly focused on GPU repair, there's a lot of good knowledge in their vids, and in their Discord channels.
The RK3588 is actually quite powerful. It is capable of running much heavier video workloads than this. OBS runs very well on it although it does not yet make use of the RockChip’s built-in media accelerator. It’s capable on paper of 16 streams of 1080p30 H264. Check out this blog post (not my own): https://jas-hacks.blogspot.com/2023/01/rk3588-decoding-rende...
I recently decided that I wanted to relive the PII/3dfx glory days went a little bit overboard buying up parts on eBay. I ended up with an Abit BH6, PIII-800, 768MB RAM, dual Voodoo2 cards and an Asus 3800 TNT2.
Just this week a PC port of the 360 version of Sonic Unleashed was released that was accomplished via static recompilation techniques. It plays flawlessly and is really quite an impressive release. If this is possible now then emulation of these consoles might not be the only avenue to preserving their history.
There's no meaningful technological difference between what that static recompilation tool can do for you vs. what hacking up Xenia can. I'd also hazard a guess that that port's GitHub repo will get DMCA'd eventually, and rightfully so.
I really don't know why people keep doing this to themselves and to the communities they claim to love. This is about as far from a clean-room reimplementation and porting effort as humanly possible. It's not a forward-thinking, sustainable preservation effort at all.
Yes, but the graphics system for the game was completely reworked by people familiar with Sega's proprietary Hedgehog Engine. A straight recompile would have been unplayable.
Interesting, I didn’t know that. I suspect many casual observers don’t either. So you’re suggesting they did this work with proprietary info they’d gained through work with Sega and thus broke their NDA?
Not necessarily -- a lot of external hobbyist work has gone into reverse-engineering Sonic Generations, which has an official PC port and is based on the same engine as Unleashed.
Funnily enough, one of the most famous Generations mods is a project that ports over a bunch of levels from Unleashed. IIRC they changes the graphics pipeline to look and work more like the Unleashed one, too.
I was a QA tester on Noby Noby boy at Namco. It was really more of a toy compared to Katamari but it still retained much of Keita's signature weirdness and style. It was also the first game he made with network functionality. NNB is still relaxing to play around with every once in a while. It's a shame it was only released on the PS3, as it would be a good candidate for mobile devices.
A couple of years ago I had my 6Mbps ATT DSL reduced down to less than 1Mbps, to the point of being absolutely useless. I had no forewarning or notice that my service had been compromised. Every attempt to obtain support from ATT was met with attempts to get me to switch to cellular internet.
Fortunately I was able to get accepted into the StarLink early access around that time and managed to cancel the DSL. Even though ATT clearly did not want my business anymore, they still made sure I had to jump through countless hoops to finally disconnect and terminate billing. I had to sit on the phone for a couple of hours, being transferred between phone reps and managers until I finally got one person with the authority to shut my account down.
Wow. In the EU, canceling subscriptions must be as easy as signing up for them by law.
My personal longest issue with ISP's was when the software config once went wrong in their side, took me a month and allmost daily phone calls until I got to 4th line support that was an actual techie who fixed it in 10 minutes.
Arcade collectors are practically liquidating Japan of many valuable arcade cabinets and PCBs. Nobody cared about much of these items 10-15 years ago. The YouTube and Reddit subcultures have grown a new younger audience for retro gaming, who often have a lot of money to throw around buying up rare items. There are also IG accounts of folks in places like Dubai, who clearly have wealth, amassing large collections of Japanese retro game tech.
If Japan, Sony or any other individual wanted to save this CRT for themselves, it would have been snatched up by now. The fact stands that the creator of the video is the only person on earth who did the detective work and put boots on the ground to make it their own rare CRT. Good work, I say!
>Arcade collectors are practically liquidating Japan of many valuable arcade cabinets and PCBs
Funny you say Japan when same thing is happening to US Arcades :) Here an interview with Euro importer:
'453: Resurrecting Arcades: Meet Europe’s Biggest Arcade Importer - The Retro Hour EP453' - The Retro Hour (Retro Gaming Podcast) 1 Nov 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzfVLY5Ag3s
One of the stories is him buying out half of Las Vegas rare arcades auction for pennies because he was the only one willing to sit all night clicking on bids.
Rockstar will fall behind if GTA6 isn’t fun, not because they failed to adopt C++17 or higher. This article is bordering on ridiculous and almost reads like a subversive ad for Unreal Engine or Unity (moreover Unreal).
Many game engines eschew the C++ STL and latest language features in favor of rolling their own performance optimized platform, data structure and algorithms libraries.
I work at a large player in the video hardware industry and we roll all our own performance-sensitive video processing code in C99 or C++98 (we only recently adopted C++11 because, why fix what ain’t broken?). It doesn’t seem to be holding us back.
Sorry, Bob, but your damaged Apple iEye was cryptographically tied to your iBrain account so a transplant of a generic SeeWorld eye is not possible. We still don’t have wetware right-to-repair laws on the books in 2124.
I believe Valve dropped official Windows 7 support in Steam because Chromium did and they weren't going to fork it.
I empathize if you don't like any version of Windows newer than 7 or XP, but it's time to let the dream of running them forever go. It's not weird when software doesn't support the 2009 version of an operating system anymore in 2024. If they never dropped support, it would be difficult to take advantage of improvements that occurred in the last 10 years, because we'd forever be stuck in baggage.
Of course when it's feasible everybody loves software that really never does drop support, like 7-zip, which I think happily still works on Win9x without KernelEx... but I'd rather 7-zip stopped having serious security issues than continued to work on old Windows versions.
Windows 7 was great and I'd love to go back. If I really had my druthers, Windows 2000 was peak and XP was just a vulgarized version of 2000.
However, it is Microsoft more than anyone else that has decided to stop supporting those operating systems. Windows XP does not have support for any modern version of TLS (only TLS 1.0). There's no good way to support a browser-based app like Steam on a platform that cannot natively provide a secure connection to a modern web server.
There is not such a hard reason to drop Windows 7 support (again, except that Microsoft no longer supports it) but there are security-relevant APIs that are only available starting in Windows 10 which means special patches would have to be maintained just for Steam on Windows 7 to continue working securely.
