Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made
twitter.com
twitter.com
I saw it before and probably on HN itself, but was left hidden in some place in my memory, it is an amazing project!
Super interested in how that works. Do they literally map out the chip at a transistor/gate level?
My understanding was that the "perfect" landing was first, using the old version of the chip. Then the new chip changed the physics calculations and the demo replay became a crash landing.
So the "crash landing" cartridges are the newer revisions and I'd guess the motivation to change the ship was a simple "update this dependency to the newest version".
Which, ironically, would be an early example of forced automatic updates messing things up.
Come on Nintendo.
Also, my copy of Pilotwings the Biplane crashes, always thought it was weird that the demo would do that. Guess I'm gonna have to find a copy with the other chip.
For me the difference is 2d flight sim from the 16bit era vs the much more advanced 3d polygon driven flight sim of the later games. Think Mario World vs Mario 64. The original Pilotwings has a charm of its own that isn't in the other games.
---
> I had a Genesis instead of an SNES around that time
One thing I miss from that era of gaming, households were typically one or the other, at the time I didn't know anybody that had both Nintendo and Sega. I had to sell my NES to upgrade to SNES (I was 7, it was a big deal to me).
If you called Pilotwings 64 a reboot of the original Pilotwings you wouldn't be wrong.
As a game, Pilotwings Resort is definitely a worthy successor to the N64 version.
Does your emulator have to have knowledge of every single game, and what mappers and/or "helper" chips each had, and emulate just the ones appropriate for a given game?
See past HN submissions about the extreme lengths BSNES goes to in order to get this data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3675123 , "In order to extract these programs from most of the DSPs, we had to decap the chips, scan them in with an electron microscope, and 'tweak' the processors to allow us to dump their protected program ROMs."
NES mapper numbers were standardized among emulator authors. Look for "NES mapper list". Some very early games didn't use a mapper (that's what mapper 0 is).
That brings up another interesting point. foone says the ROM data dumped would be identical, but that’s disingenuous. The DSP firmware is part of the cartridge, too, and it is clearly different. byuu has proposed catenating the DSP image to the base ROM for this reason. Of course, the Pilotwings case was unique, being the only game to ship with two different DSP firmwares.
If you're talking about an MSX game, then yes. Nothing about the carts are preserved in the ROM images, and you need a per-game database, or you'll need some kind of "cartridge type" list that the user has to choose from when booting the game.
If you're talking about the NES, sort of yes. People stick a fan-made "iNES" header at the top of the ROM data, but they made the format before all the details of the NES were known. So using that information is not enough for many titles, and so you need a database for those titles to work properly.
For the SNES and Genesis, the games have internal headers that tell you most of the details of the games, but not enough for complete emulation. SNES emulators in the past have been able to add bizarre tricks that just so happen to line up with the existing commercial games to not need a database, but it really turns out to be a mini database disguised by being obtuse. Example: "if the ROM is larger than 2MB, and has save RAM data, and has 32K bank granularity, then map the save RAM data to a smaller area of memory." Rather than "if the game is Fire Emblem, treat it differently than Ys 3."
For the Game Boy Advance, emulators and flash cart tools will scan the ROM looking for signatures from code libraries from Nintendo that handle save memory, like "FLASH512_V", "EEPROM_V", "SRAM_V", etc. Developers wised up and started including fake strings to fool them, so once again ... you end up needing a database.
There's very, very few cartridge-based systems where only the ROM dump is all you need. If I had to name one, I'd say the Neo Geo Pocket is one.
There are even cases like Mega Man X (Japan), where they made a mistake with the copy protection, and to fix it, resorted to wiring a resistor right onto the back of the PCB of every cartridge released to change the memory map.
And databases + heuristics fall apart when it comes to homebrew, fan translations, ROM hacks, etc.
True preservation requires games include a detailed description of the entire PCBs of these games, not just the ROM chips. But unfortunately, after trying for 15 years, I've not been able to come up with a stable, simple format for every system in the world that doesn't rely on emulator-specific design decisions.
I mean, how do you represent every possible circuit board configuration on the planet in a text file, that isn't going to make emulator authors for just the NES or just the Game Boy balk?
>Pilotwings came out a month after the SNES, not a year.
>ROM as in a file copy of the contents of ROM chips is not technically short for "ROM dump" because, though it is a ROM dump, the usage of ROM to describe it does not originate with usage of the term ROM dump.
Star Fox had a 2D/3D chip called Super FX that sounds a lot like a GPU. It’s pretty cool that console games of that era could augment your existing hardware to support their requirements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_...
It's essentially the same exact chip as the SNES's main CPU. Except three times faster.
Imagine buying a game for your 3ghz PC that ships on a flash drive. And that flash drive also contains a 9hz (edit: whoops, 9ghz, haha) Intel Core i9 CPU.
One floating point calculation for a human would probably take on the order of 2 minutes. That's 1/120 FLOP. Let's round it to 1/100. It's not like we're accurate here.
Let's say a GPU is 1 TFLOP. That means the GPU is 100 trillion times faster than a human. With 10 billion humans on earth (again, let's just round these numbers), that makes the GPU 10000 times faster than the combined power of all humans.
I don't think computational requirements scale linearly with resolution, but let's just assume it does. Your regular 1080p screen has roughly 100 times the pixels compared to your 160×120 screen. 10000/100 = 100, which means that the framerate of your manually computed game will be 1/100 of the performance of a regular GPU playing in 1080p.
I welcome someone else to make the same calculation. It'll be interesting to learn if I'm close to a reasonable answer.
It's about using the right tools for the job, and in this case, a regular long form blog post or a video is a much better tool than a ton of chained Tweets.
(Someone will always complain about this on HN whenever there is a twitter thread posted here, though I do get why the author gets annoyed with these complaints.)
He uses twitter for shorter, quick posts. A "micro" blog, if you will.
threadreaderapp.com can help: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1126996260026605568.html
First impressions matter.
A stupid name might do well on search engines for example (as in, those names could be easily searched)
Furthermore I don't really consider the name to be stupid. I don't quite really know of many other ways of succinctly highlighting resilience as a property in a name.
I just wish it wasn’t all on Twitter.
Why not put the text, plus pictures and whatever else (links?), into a blog posting, or just some HTML page with basic formatting? And then link to it with just the first Twitter post. Provide an RSS feed if you feel extra charitable (which is the way I enjoy most of the content related to this that I read).
On Twitter alone, it’s just terrible.
That being said, while the format is terrible, the actual content here is brilliant, especially in that level of detail, and exactly what I’m looking for on Hacker News.
Thats the why, since you asked
There is a patreon page linked right on his twitter page. He may not be exchanging time for food and shelter, but he is playing the same marketing game as anyone else for a personal high score.
linking to a blog he has to maintain would drop engagement off a cliff
Why not put it elsewhere? Twitter is our place. And we like when content is natively published there. I have no interest in Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Tumblr but I don't insist all the content in those places shouldn't be there. If all those people came to Twitter it would be a nightmare.
Low text density, atrocious typography, breaking of standard grammar, arbitrarily-spaced interruptions, no inline images (for mobile), limited external links and quotations, no headings, no custom formatting, random interruptions from other users.
I really can't fathom an argument that Twitter is in any way optimal for reading content of any length. Value added is exclusively in convenience and social factors.
And it's fine not to like Twitter or not be savvy with it or not be interested in becoming savvy with it. But when you see an absolute position that one's values are the only correct ones it should set off loud bullshit alarms in your head whether it's someone else making the argument or it's you. Especially if it's you, because you have more to gain by remembering your own humility than helping someone else find theirs.
And especially with replies, twitter has very strong opinions about what to show you and 'savvy' doesn't override that.
And defaults matter. Complaints about the standard client are valid complaints.
This nearly never happens these days. About the only time I see it is from the President.
This is literally everyone in these comments authoritatively deciding what the best way to consume content is. It's absurdly self-serving.
The author sees all that very differently from how you do.
Additionally, there are numerous others, myself included, who see it differently.
Frankly, I am quite happy to take it however an author feels they can share it. Often, that brings context of value to me as well.
Not all of us care about optimal when reading. It is just reading. No big.
They have the compelling story and publish as they see fit.
You read, or not, because non optimal.
They still have the compelling stories, still publish as they see fit.
Audience either way, because compelling.
Thought experiment for you:
There are two radio stations. One airs compelling content at low quality. Usable, but not produced optimally.
The other demonstrates production excellence, but just is not all that compelling.
Which do you listen to? Which do most people listen to and why?
That is what is happening here.
I personally prefer reading a blog too, but I realize that some people who have adaptive issues (the OP has severe ADHD and only writes effectively on Twitter, something basically no one criticizing him has looked for despite it being posted in these very comments) prefer this form, and some young people just hate blogging and prefer the tumblr/social media methods.
The content is being created, which is more than we can say for the majority of people bitching about how it is created.
Just saying :D
Made a decision during the early 00's: embrace the new. Flow.
Basically, I am willing, and often do the work to remain able to return comms to me, or that I encounter, using the same transport, norms and style.
This has not been all that tough. Often, doing it is super interesting too.
I have had entire emoji / gif conversations with younger people, for example. I found out having a pen on my phone gave me superpowers too. Uber decorations! My 3 yr old granddaughter can't read yet, but does understand emoji and texts then to me all the time.
What will the norms be when she comes of age? I may live long enough to find out! And it will be fun.
The thing that got me moving this way is time spent with my own kids online. Old era chat. Being with them was like immersion.
One day, I dropped a string of typical chatter on a forum where us parents were talking about kids online. I translated it to make a point.
That point was lost amidst a ton of meta from parents:
YOU CAN READ THAT?
Yes, and could speak it then too.
I had broadband, most homes did not. I would come home from work to see a pile of kids all doing stuff online on the old machines I kept setting up. Had a few older workstations as Internet stations.
Edit: side note, those kids used Win NT, Win 98, Linux, IRIX (lol, an indy) and did not care, other than for how to launch a browser and find a file, or make a picture. /side note
Until that moment, I had no idea there was such a profound chasm and that many people have trouble getting across!
Truth is, the younger peeps among us are often where the fun stuff is. And nobody has to know you are old on the Internet.
:D
My inner 12 year old is always pleased when I find myself on the occasional lark into strange lands online. Younger family members know this. They will reach out, and when I respond in like kind, they share. More people should try it.
At any given time there is a sea of younger people seeking to establish their norms and identity online, and the difference between now and back then is everyone doing that fresh (so many getting online together), where today many have done it and have solidified some, leaving newbies to their play more isolated.
This appears to work just like music used to.
Anyone old enough, pre Internet basically, remembers decades of music. Most imprint during their teen years. And they sort of lock in, quit exploring.
Interestingly, I love experiencing new music so much that I also made a similar decision in the 90's having felt music begin to move on without me. That is to sample the new and talk to people during their formularive years for insight as to where the trends are. New music is fun! (And can be strange, annoying, beautiful, all that)
TL;DR: We all get old, and getting older sucks. If we do the work to retain our sense of play, getting older sucks a lot less.
Play. You will live longer and have more fun and likely not get an optimal output from your life too. But you will have had fun and will likely improve on the net happiness in the world.
Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?" CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT.
The short story is they are quite open about having ADHD, and that's what causes the long twitter rambles, but also what makes it very difficult to assemble it into a blog post. Every once in a while foone's wife will edit a popular thread into a blog post, examples: https://foone.wordpress.com/
If this seems like a particularly good story to you, maybe you'd like to edit it into a draft for a blog post and gift that to foone?
In particular, text messages.
I can't tell you how many stories have been told between myself and family and friends that are just one lost device away from oblivion.
Apple should have an official app to let people save their text with photos and videos, because they are really family heirlooms.
I suspect they are one of the primary reasons for icloud, and the new apple seems pretty "practical" in this respect.
It's a lot harder to go back and read text messages, and I only can because the old phones I kept still function. I started transcribing a few text conversations manually though because those phones won't last forever.
If you read his explanation, he'd actually never write it at all if you forced him to blog. So the answer is not as simple as you make it seem.
I can understand someone young and non-technical bring lazy and writing whatever it comes to mind on a series of Tweets, but someone with this level of technical knowledge not being able to understand how unintuitive it is to write a blog post on a series of 140 characters...?
Mind boggling.
But I agree with you, I think it’s more enjoyable to read it on a single page. I built Threader, a Twitter client that allows you to read these threads in an article format, without advertising clutter and fake news suggestions at the bottom:
Great story!
Ftfy
Seriously twitter is one of few things I hate with a passion. Everything about it stinks. I don't even use twitter but I randomly get rate limited: "you can't see this content because your rate is too high" - first time I click on twitter link in two weeks.
It's just mind boggling how it became so big while being so absurdly terrible.
Tell me more !! How? Do a YouTube video on this ! Hell, Netflix will pay for a ten episode series on hardware hacking easy!