reassembled

A friend of mine made a program like that for his kid: https://deftware.itch.io/newbietime

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!

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.

Everything except Windows 7 and XP that is.

A testament to how well designed and executed the ESP-IDF framework is. Paired with VSCode I’ve found it a joy to work with IDF and my ESP32-S3.

Is there a reason why a few AMD motherboards have Thunderbolt 4 on them but most do not? I believe I’ve only seen it on the workstation class boards, I could be wrong though. Is there a reason why it’s not more broadly available on AMD mobos?

I know there is at least one ffmpeg fork with Rockchip mpp and rga support, although I haven’t tested it myself yet: https://github.com/nyanmisaka/ffmpeg-rockchip

I have tested the mpp SDK a bit and the code is easy to work with, with examples for encode and decode, both sync and async.

You can use Arduino libs via ESP-IDF. The IDF environment comes with a lot of libraries on its own but it is a development environment first and foremost. The design of IDF is very open and easy to understand throughout the stack. It is very easy to integrate external libraries via CMake as well.

Meanwhile, to my knowledge, ATT is actively pulling all existing DSL service with the only hard line alternative in many markets being a 1Mbps “UVerse” connection over the same copper phone lines. My 6Mbps DSL was suddenly turned into a 1Mbps UVerse line last year, with no warning. This has been happening to my neighbors as well. In some instances, after a big storm knocked out phone lines, ATT took the opportunity to cancel some folks DSL lines under their new policies. If you go to the ATT DSL page you will see that it is no longer being offered as a service.

Fortunately we were able to get Starlink soon after but it’s not a perfect replacement, particularly for gaming, due to the periods of short downtimes we still experience.

I worked in game testing at two major Japanese game companies in the Bay Area for a few years before switching to doing QA in the video industry. As game testers we’d write up a ton of bug reports but generally only the most egregious crashes and console manufacturer’s standards violations would get fixed (think using the wrong Sony or Microsoft terminology or symbols in the game UI).

By the time most games reached our offices for testing they’d already undergone most of the core testing in Japan or at their developer’s studios. We were essentially just there to make sure last minute bugs didn’t slip through the cracks. Management rarely prioritized gameplay or even functionality bugs to be fixed, unless it was easy to reproduce and clearly prevented overall progress in the game.

We shipped one big fighting game and wrote up a bunch of bugs that clearly showed that online play was nigh-unusable, and nothing got fixed. The game came out and was ripped apart in reviews for the low quality of its net code. But it had a bunch of single player modes that were rock solid so they let the online modes slide. This was a few years before fighting game developers started seriously considering the importance of online play, and taking major steps to improve its quality.

And did you find the great grandfathers grave?

Typo, max/msp

My recollection is that by default the ESP32 DAC isn't very high bit depth and so the sound quality is limited. It is recommended to interface it with an external DAC chip via I2S in order to achieve higher than 8bits per sample (maybe 12bit? Someone please correct me).

Japanese arcade cabs typically have control panels that can be swapped out with different button layouts to accommodate the particular game in the cabinet at the time. So the same cab can go from accommodating two players side-by-side playing Street Fighter with two sticks and 6 buttons per player, to a setup with three buttons and only one stick for shmups.

Did Atari have a haunted house game with a physical screen overlay? My mom’s late brother, Robert Padilla III, used to work at Atari in the 70s and she seems to remember him bringing home “an Atari” to play “pong” and “haunted house”. She said there were overlays that you would stick to the screen. But perhaps he brought home an Odyssey console? Sadly I’m not able to ask him to clarify as he passed away after a long later career at NVIDIA.

Wow! That is a very impressive feature set. I’ve used Deflemask but this seems to have a much bigger chip roster.

Would be nice to have it at the top. :/

Thanks for providing some details!

This is something I've been thinking about lately with regards to the early arcade game developers in Japan, not just in regards to the artwork and music but also the decades of technical knowledge and R&D that have gone into creating bespoke arcade boards. Individual game companies developed or commissioned unique hardware dedicated to playing sometimes a single game in an arcade setting. The MAME devs have done a lot of great work unraveling these boards. Some books and websites have compiled artwork, interviews and technical info from certain arcade developers. I just wish the world could see more from that period of time.

I think about this same kind of thing with regards to the company I work in. We create video hardware and so much of the development knowledge will be lost to the sands of time. This is inevitable but a sad part of any large creative undertakings.

I’ve been doing development on a Rock 5B and it’s really powerful for a ~$200 SBC. I’ve been using as my aarch64 CI machine and test system as my company starts to add ARM support to our software stack.

Also, OBS runs great on it, although it’s not taking advantage of the on-board MPP media accelerator (H.264/265 and other codecs). Apparently GStreamer has support for it though and some folks have experimental FFMPEG forks adding support.

In my current job I was forced to learn Vim and a lot of the other Unix command-line tools as we mainly do embedded Linux development. For a while I scraped by with VSCode and it’s integrated debugger as a crutch, and I do still use it via the SSH remote extension but some systems I work on are just too lightweight on resources to set that up, particularly for shorter tasks.

My advice to other novice programmers would be to learn the tools that your job requires when it becomes a priority, but always keep yourself at least somewhat familiar with tools outside of the scope of your current task. You never know when you will need to quickly get up to speed with a new tool set or language. Part of the keys to success is also gaining an intuition of when the need to learn new tools and skills is on the horizon and when to start practicing in anticipation of needing to use them.

In my experience building large applications in Python becomes delicate due to the lack of static typing, as well as overlooking issues of scope in variable usage. It can be avoided with diligence but I’ve definitely shot myself in the foot and let errors slip through in Python programs I’ve written for the above reasons, which ended up compromising the validity of the program (mainly automated test scripts that were used to test other software and hardware).

I’ve only been programming for about 5 years in earnest. I held on to Python for dear life in the first days of my career, but have since transitioned to full-time C/C++ development, primarily in embedded and hardware interfacing applications. I feel like my large programs are much more manageable and maintainable now. Some of this is of course due to having grown as a programmer as well.