Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

There's a weapon in Final Fantasy 9 which can only be obtained by reaching a lategame area in less than 12 hours of play time, or 10 hours on the PAL version due to an oversight. Alternatively you can just leave the game running for two years until the timer wraps around. Slow and steady wins the race.

https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Excalibur_II_(Final_Fan...

View on HN

Am reminded by this quote from Ferdinand Porsche:

"The perfect racing car crosses the finish line first and subsequently falls into its component parts."

Games fit this philosophy, compared to many other pieces of software that are expected to be long-lived and receiving a lot of maintenance and changes and evolve.

The Porsche quote reflects a wider design philosophy that says "Ideally, all components of a system lasts as long as the design life of the entire system and there should be no component that lives significantly longer. If there is such a component, it has been overengineered and thus the system will be more expensive to the end consumer than it needs to be.". It kinda skips over maintenance, but overall most people find it unobjectionable when stated like this.

But plenty of people will find complaints when they try to drive their car beyond its design specs and more or less everything starts failing at once.

When the design spec seems to be a 3 year long lease I can see why people get bothered.

Consumer protection laws prevents businesses following this to it’s extreme. For many businesses the ideal would be to just sell stuff that immediately breaks down as soon as it’s sold. It has the fulfilled its purpose from their point of view

I run sous vide cookers 24*7, and they uniformly break within 90 days or less. But they don't like to admit their smaller duty cycle, so they don't, and keep sending me warranty replacements instead. I keep buying different brands looking for one with a longer life. I'll bet most people do that when their gadgets die, and purposely making products that die as soon as sold isn't often a successful business model.

That’s not a small cycle count for a normal household. 90 × 24 = 2,160 total hours.

I sous vide now and then, about twice a week for 6 hours each, so around 12 hours a week. That works out to roughly 15 years of usable machine time for the average person.

Not bad at all.

Assuming linearity, which I doubt is the case.

You think a measly 360 uses at your 6 hours typical operation is even remotely acceptable for a glorified heating element?

And yes, 15 years is bad. I don't want to replace my entire household every 15 years FFS.

Photography is the same way. Most SLR / DSLR / mirrorless cameras have a mechanical shutter which is expected to last around 200k-1m activations. I've had a camera for a bit over a year. I've used it quite heavily, and my shutter count is at about 13k photos. At this rate, the shutter will probably last for 20+ years - which seems fine. If I'm still using the camera by then, spending a few hundred dollars to replace the shutter mechanism sounds totally reasonable.

2160/12 is 180 weeks, or roughly 3.5 years, not 15 years

Well from an evil business perspective their options are either

- the product doesn't break and you don't buy a replacement from them because you still have a working product

- the product breaks and there is a greater than 0% chance that you will buy a replacement product from them

Of course in practice it's more complicated but I wouldn't be so quick to declare that the math doesn't work out.

Are there not industrial ones meant to last longer? Maybe you can buy a used but good condition one of those.

There are, and if you really have the workload that you need to cook stuff 24/7 (what in gods name is OP cooking btw?) then you should definitely get one of those. Maybe not even secondhand but just a new one. The cheap consumer grade ones are meant for people who use them once or twice a year.

This is a fine example of what I meant about people complaining when they use products beyond their design parameters.

It is easy to have to run a bunch of sous vide cooker 24/7 if you have a small restaurant or food delivery business.

In which case one shouldn't be using consumer-grade kitchen equipment.

Call it vibe cooking.

I got one that seems to be kind of in the middle, it's better built than most of the consumer models but not quite as "industrial" feeling as some of the commercial models. I use it a few times a week for a few hours each.

I'm on a mostly carnivore, mostly ruminant meat diet and for costs tend to do a lot of ground beef... I sous vide a bunch of burgers in 1/2lb ring molds, refrigerate and sear off when hungry. This lets me have safer burgers that aren't overcooked. I do 133F for 2.5+ hours.

I also do steaks about once or twice a week. I have to say it's probably the best kitchen investment I could have made in terms of impact on the output quality.

If the manufacturers keep replacing the machines because they're within warranty isn't this cheaper for OP?

Definitely -- get something meant for a lab. I worked in one that had a 150F water bath running day and night.

A friend of mine gets new headphones/headsets every six to eighteen months, and hasn’t bought a pair entirely out of pocket in years. For him it’s all down to buying the Microcenter protection plan every time they’re replaced. They fail, he takes them back, he gets store credit for the purchase price, and he buys a new set and a new plan. He doesn’t even care about the manufacturer’s warranty anymore.

Personally, most of my headphones I look for metal mechanical connections instead of plastic and I buy refurbished when I can. I think I pay about as much as he does or less, but we haven’t really hashed out the numbers together. I’m typing this while wearing a HyperX gaming headset I bought refurbished that’s old enough that I’ve replaced the earpads while everything else continues to work.

Computers and computer parts often have, in my experience, a better reliability record competently refurbished than when they first leave the factory too. I wonder if sous vide cookers would.

What do you sous vide 24*7? It sounds like it would be party grounds for bacteria. Also curious if the bags and other components break as well.

Beef, lamb, sometimes pork. I have a daily meal of a cheap, tough cut of meat cooked for 48 hours at 150F.

Sous vide is generally not a bacterial growth risk above 140F. At 150F throughout, you get decent pasteurization in under two minutes. Two days of that is such extreme overkill that I'm concerned about the nutritional effect of over cooking.

The Food Saver style vacuum sealers fail fast for me, so I bought a $400 chamber sealer, and I'm on year 5 with it.

I think I love you? This is great. Do you have them running in arrays of 3? What’s your favourite cut? What’s the best cost:deliciousness cut? What bags do you use to minimize plastic leeching?

It's just me, so I only need one running at a time. Every day I take one serving out and put another one in. I clean the tank about once per week, or if something breaks. My favorite is short ribs, my daily drivers are chuck roast or shank. The prices have skyrocketed in the last few years. I buy in bulk on sale and portion it into bags with a chamber style vacuum sealer. It goes straight from the freezer into the tank.

Do you take pride in knowing that you eat cooler than anyone else, because you should.

Short rib is shocking where I am. Even chuck is pushing past $15 a pound.

What are you doing for sides/sauce? Generally when I think braise/sous-vide I think some rich, flavourful sauce, but that seems unpractical for daily consumption.

Chuck on sale is now $8 a pound, more than double since Covid started. I am eating less of it and more ground beef, pork and eggs.

I crisp it up in an air fryer before serving. Here's the full ingredient list: meat, butter, salt. After five years I still look forward to every repeat.

I just replaced an air fryer that lasted two years of daily use, a personal record. I was ready to replace it anyway, because they accumulate grease where you can't clean, and the smell gets interesting.

Try a Breville PolyScience... https://www.breville.com/en-us/product/csv750

Or if you want something even beefier: https://sammic.com/en/smartvide-xl

It looks like the Breville is the most affordable at $600. Currently I'm paying optimistically $45/90 days or $0.50/day. For the Breville to match that it would need to survive for 3.29 years. Will it?

Maybe... the Sammic is made for a high volume commercial kitchen

Anyone can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to barely build a bridge.

Alan Weisman's lovely book World Without Us speculates a bit about this, basically saying that more recently built structures would be the first to collapse because they've all be engineered so close to the line. Meanwhile stuff that already been standing for 100+ years like the Brooklyn Bridge will probably still be there in another 100 years even without any maintenance just on account of how overbuilt it all had to be in an era before finite element analysis.

There was an aluminum extrusion company that falsified test records for years. They got away with it because what's a few % when your customer's safety factor is 2. Once they got into weight sensitive aerospace applications, where sometimes the factor is 1.2, rockets starting blowing up on the launch pad.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/aluminum-extrusion-m...

Should have resulted in jail time. A monetary fine is no deterrent.

It did result in jail time. The linked document states that the testing lab supervisor was sentenced to 3 years. (Not sure how much of that time was actually served, apparently he was suffering from dementia.) More info: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/08/company_supervis...

Also a correction to GP: They were payload deployment failures, they didn't blow up on the pad. More here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/nasa-finally-conclud...

This is a great quote for the topic, but the quote is normally about a bridge that barely stands.

I'm chuckling at the thought of barely building something. (All in good fun, thank you.)

In my county, a company asked the Mayor if it was possible to improve some bridge because they need to carry 40t and the bridge had a sign telling it would only allow up to 32t. Their proposal was to do the construction and get tax rebates.

After two weeks, the Infrastructure department changed the sign allowing up to 45t.

Porsche was talking about racing, where the primary focus is reaching the finish line faster an anyone else, and over-engineering can easily get in the way of that goal. Back in the real world, no race team would agree that their cars should disintegrate after one race.

> Back in the real world, no race team would agree that their cars should disintegrate after one race.

Wasn't F1 teams basically doing this by replacing their engines and transmissions until the rules introduced penalties for component swaps in 2014?

Yup, cigarette money enabled all kinds of shenanigans. Engine swaps for qualification, new engines every race, spare third cars, it goes on. 2004 was the first year that specified engines must last the entire race weekend and introduced penalties for swaps.

F1 income is way way higher than the 80s.

> cigarette money enabled all kinds of shenanigans.

It still does. New Zealand has a crop of tobacco funded politicians.

>New Zealand has a crop of tobacco funded politicians.

when they leave politics do they just rapidly age and dissolve like that guy in the Indiana Jones film?

If you go back further than that, teams used to destroy entire engines for a single qualifying.

The BMW turbocharged M12/M13 that was used in the mid-eighties put out about 1,400 horsepower at 60 PSI of boost pressure, but it may have been even more than that because there was no dyno at the time capable of testing it.

They would literally weld the wastegate shut for qualifying, and it would last for about 2-3 laps: outlap, possibly warmup lap, qualifying time lap, inlap.

After which the engine was basically unusable, and so they'd put in a new one for the race.

Current examples would be drag racing cars that have motors that are designed and used in a way that they only survive for about 800 total revolutions.

Even today F1 teams are allowed 4 engine replacements before taking a grid place penalty, and those penalties still show up regularly enough. So nobody is making "reliable" F1 engines.

You can see this really on display with the AMG ONE. It's a "production" car using an F1 engine that requires a rebuild every 31,000 miles.

Don't highly optimized drag racers do this? I mean, a clutch that in normal operation gets heated until it glows can't be very durable.

There's a quote in the bible that says something similar:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

(John 12:24)

So the invisible 12h timer runs during cutscenes. During Excalibur 2 runs, I used to open and close the PS1 disc tray to skip (normally unskippable) cutscenes. Never knew why that worked.

(I also never managed to get it)

> Never knew why that worked.

I'm guessing the game probably streams FMV cutscenes of the disc as they play, and the fallback behaviour if it can't find them is to skip rather than crash.

I’m going to wager that the cutscenes are all XA audio/video DMA’d from the disc. Opening the disc kills the DMA and the error recovery is just to end the cutscene and continue. The program is in RAM, so a little interruption on reading doesn’t hurt unless you need to time it to avoid an error reading the file for the next section of gameplay.

That’s a solid guess. And if that’s the case, that’s actually pretty good error handling!

I recall that handling disc eject was an explicit part of the Tech Requirements Doc (things the console manufacturer requires you to comply with). They'd typically check while playing, while loading and while streaming.

This is a significantly better handling than the previous game (final fantasy viii). My disk 1 (it had four disks) got scratched over time (I was a child after all), and the failure mode was just to crash - thus the game was unplayable. The game had a lot of cutscenes.

Oh yeah. The sword you pick up in Memoria. The problem there is that the PAL version runs slower; the way PSX games "translated" between the two video systems was just to have longer VSync pauses for PAL. So the game is actually slower, not interpolated

Longer vsync pauses but larger frame time deltas so it’s basically the same speed of play. The only thing that was even noticeable was the UI lag.

Erm. No, like lots of games during the era quite a lot of stuff is tied to the frame rate, so the 50Hz region game just runs slower than the 60Hz one as next to nobody bothers to adjust for it. The clock for the hidden weapon does run at the same rate for both unfortunately, hence it being harder to get in 50Hz regions.

Wouldn't a slower tick make it easier as you get more wall time to do the same challenge.

No? Wall time (that the challenge runs on) is unchanged, game time (Vsync) is running at 83% of full speed (50Hz vs 60Hz), so if something tied to frame rate (animation, walking speed etc.) takes 1 second to do on NTSC, it'll take 1.2 seconds to do on PAL etc.

Incorrect. I’m looking at the source code. It’s not perfect but it’s not just “slowed down to 50hz” like people claim.

When you say looking at the source code, what do you mean here?

AFAIK the source for FF9 PSX (and all the PSX ff games) has been lost as Square just used short term archives

Also, FF9 does not run at a constant framerate. Like all the PSX FF games it runs at various rates, sometimes multiple at a time (example: model animations are 15fps vs 30 for the UI)

In terms of timers, the bios does grant you access to root timers, but these are largely modulated by a hardware oscillator

(Incidentally, the hardware timing component is the reason a chipped PAL console cannot produce good NTSC video. Only a Yaroze can support full multiregion play)

It’s definitely not lost…

What code are you looking at?

FFIX for PSX would have been written in C (or possibly C++) with PSY-Q. It will not be one program - those games were composed of multiple overlays that are banked in / out over the PlayStation's limited memory.

From what I know the PC release was a port to a new framework, which supports the same script engines, but otherwise is fresh code. This is how it can support mobile, widescreen, Steam achievements etc.

FF VII-IX were reimplemented under a custom engine.

Except I’m looking at the original source, not the remake, the crappy C/C++ Square engine. Not C# unity code.

There are a number of timers and things used. But the claim that it runs slower is absolutely false. It’s just perceived that way because it’s “drawn” slower.

Firstly, could you elaborate what code you're looking at? Square have never shared the source code for these titles and were not even practicing real version control at this time (see: Eidos FF7/8 debacle)

Secondly, it absolutely will run slower. Animations will take longer to complete; FMVs will play at a different rate ; controller sampling will be reduced.

My scepticism isn't coming from hearsay or ignorance: I have written PlayStation software, and PSX software is not parallelised, even though it can support threading and cooperative concurrency. The control flow of the title is very locked into the VSync loop, from your first ResetGraph(0) right to your final DrawOTable(*p).

In addition, I have done a bunch of reversing work on the other two PSX games, and they are not monolithic programs. They can't be because there simply isn't enough RAM to store the .TEXT of the entire thing at once. So when you say "the source code", I'm inclined to ask - for which module? The kernel or one of the overlays?

Good for you. When I say the source, I mean all modules, the kernel, the graphics, everything. Cheers. While we didn’t use version control the way we do today, we still had it… some of us also made copies.

It’s not lost except to maybe Square Enix’s corporate but they don’t know where anything is.

Lord have mercy fandom really has become unbearable with the ads and pop ups.

Install an ad blocker.

I opened this on an iPhone which has fewer adblock options. Desktop is better locked down.

Regardless I can still complain about how intrusive the ads are.

There are many ad block options on iPhone. I currently use Wipr 2, but in the past I've used both 1Blocker and AdBlock Pro with success.

I just opened this my iPhone with 1Blocker installed. I saw no ads. It’s been around since iOS 8

Never heard of it, appreciate the recc!

Edit: ah only works on safari

You are on iOS. There is only safari. Any other "web browser" is just a skin over safari

Yes I know everything is wrapped around safari. But I like having Firefox syncing across devices.

Edit: ah forgot my vpn was off, usually clears all that up for me. Much better now

Just a note: If you have a Windows computer, Apple has a plug in for Firefox and Chrome that syncs bookmarks to iCloud and Safari.

Linux machine but maybe it works anyway?

Don't accept devices that limit your ad blocker options.

Does this discussion strike you as one where I’m deliberating whether or not to chuck my smartphone and buy into a new ecosystem to avoid ads on fandom?

These types of comments are always very unhelpful.

No, that's just a reminder that you had a choice, and chose empty talk about “ecosystems” over ability to control what you can see on “your” screen. You've stepped on a rake once, you got some experience, why repeat it over and over again?

Or another option: we could remember that the ultimate offender here is Fandom.

My choice of device is irrelevant when assessing their crappy site.

We should rally together to force game companies to use 32 bit timers rather than 64bit ones so we can keep finding these fun little glitches. The time to protect overflows is now! ;)

So that's why it's called Excalibur 2!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com