Redkey

@Redkey@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your preferred way of buying games? (digital/physical/physical digital)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My main concern is getting games in a form that I can store locally for 20 years and then reasonably expect to boot up and play. A secondary concern (ever since I moved permanently to another country) is going digital whenever possible because shipping stuff long distances is expensive. I had hundreds of physical books that it pained me to give away, but it simply wasn’t economical to move them to my new home. I kept my physical games, CDs, and DVDs, because they’re mostly thin discs and air-filled plastic cases (often replaceable once paper inserts have been removed) and I was able to bring them over affordably.

  Over the last few years I’d say I’ve slowed down on physical retro collecting and only bought a couple dozen retro console games. More often I sail the high seas looking for them because morally there’s no sane argument decades after release that paying $50-100 to a private collector or dealer today has any impact on the developer’s or publisher’s profits in terms of secondary or tertiary sales. The physical game media and packaging have ceased to be games and have become artifacts, almost independent of their content, like other vintage or antique items. Of course that doesn’t apply if the game has been rereleased in more or less its original form, in which case I either buy it (if the price is reasonable) or don’t play it at all (if the price is unreasonable). I actually have such a game in digital storage that I’ve been meaning to play for years, and I learned that it’s quite recently been put up in GOG, so now I’m morally obligated to buy it if I still want to play it, heh. Luckily for me the price seems fair.

  And speaking of GOG, the majority of my recent game purchases have been split pretty evenly between GOG and itch.io; about 95%. I basically haven’t bought anything directly from Steam for more than a decade. I understand that many games there are actually DRM-free, but I’m not interested in trying to research every game before I make a purchase. If each game’s store page indicated its true DRM status clearly (not just “third-party DRM”), I’d consider buying through Steam again. As it is, whenever I learn about an interesting game that’s on Steam, I try to find it on itch.io or GOG, and if I can’t, I generally don’t buy it; I’ll buy it on Steam only if it looks really interesting and it’s dirt cheap.

  Whenever I look at buying “leasing with no fixed term” anything with DRM, I assume that it will be taken away from me or otherwise rendered unusable unexpectedly at some point in the future through no fault of my own. It’s already happened to me a couple of times, and once bitten, twice shy. I know that everyone loves Gabe Newell, and he seems like a genuinely good guy, and he’s said that if Steam ever closed its doors that they’d unlock everything. However the simple fact is that in the majority of situations where that might happen, the call wouldn’t be up to Gaben, even for games published by Valve.

  So yeah, I may put up with DRM in a completely offline context, but in any situation where my access terms can be changed remotely and unilaterally with a forced update, server shutdown, or removal, that’s a hard pass from me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Renovation was right—and we're ahead of schedule⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Gain Ground and Arcus Odyssey both got many hours of play on my Mega Drive back in the day. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Old School Rally scratched our ‘90s arcade racing itch... then promptly disappeared⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe we could treat the appearances of recognizable, non-living entities in games (cars, buildings, airplanes, etc.) the same way we treat musical scores; the producer would be legally obligated to pay some reasonable, small, fixed fee per use to the original creator, and that creator wouldn’t be allowed to object. And this wouldn’t entitle the producer to use any trademarked brand or model name, just the form.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Wii The Size Of A Game Boy Cartridge Finally Released Open Source⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Because the Gameboy logo check and the actual display of the logo happen separately, there were ways to pass the check while still displaying a different logo on the screen. Given that I bought cartridges from major retailers that did this, I’m guessing that Nintendo either didn’t know about them, or didn’t like their odds in court.

  Sega was doing something conceptually similar around the same time, and that did get tested at trial (Sega vs. Acclaim), where the court ruled that Sega could go suck a lemon. So there’s some doubt as to whether any of this is enforceable anyway, although Sega kept including a similar system in their hardware up to and including the Dreamcast.

  Of course, a company as large as Nintendo could just bankrupt a lot of smaller companies with legal fees via delaying tactics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the games you played in your youth that you still play today?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Apparently the original game and Brood War expansion are free to install through the Battle.Net launcher these days.

  If you have the original discs, the later official patches added the ability to copy the “mpq” files from the CD into the game’s directory, so you no longer need the disc in the drive. Of course, you’re still going to need a drive for the initial installation. That should work for single player (it’s been a few years since I last did it) but I don’t know about online multiplayer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hypothesis: Modern retro-inspired indies are much more enjoyable than the retro games themselves⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t kept up with anime much for many years now, but I can easily imagine that this is the case. There had been mecha anime with angsty pilots and behind-the-scenes politics before, but Evangelion pushed it all to a whole new level by adding mysticism and psychological dread into the mix. I know that almost immediately following the initial release of Evangelion we got Gasaraki and RahXephon, both of which bear obvious influences from Evangelion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hypothesis: Modern retro-inspired indies are much more enjoyable than the retro games themselves⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I had a mini movie night with two colleagues, one is around middle age like me, and the other in their twenties. We were going through some DVDs and Blurays, and Die Hard came up. We two older folks said we liked it but the younger said that they’d never seen it. Well obviously we had to watch it right then.

  Afterward, the young colleague said they found the movie boring and unoriginal. Talking it over, we came to the conclusion that while Die Hard had done so much in fresh and interesting ways at the time, it had been so thoroughly copied from by so many other films that it offered little to an uninitiated modern audience, looking back.

  Although I haven’t played it myself, to read someone saying that Ultima 4 is derivative and lacking in originality feels a lot like that experience with Die Hard. Additionally, I think that the real old games usually expect a level of imagination and willingness to put up with discomfort that even I sometimes find a little offputting in 2025, despite the fact that I grew up with many of those games and had no issues with them at the time. If I don’t remind myself of it, it can be easy to forget that old hardware wasn’t limited only in audio-visual power, but also storage size and processing power.

  I still search through old games, but I’m looking for ideas that maybe didn’t work well or hit the market right the first time, but still deserve further consideration, especially in light of technological advantages that have happened in the intervening years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Resident Evil fans, meet your Victorian cousin⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I played this on PS2 and I remember thinking at the time that it was extremely adequate. As you say, the reviews at the time were lukewarm but I think it’s worth a look for anyone trying scratch that itch who’s already finished the bigger names in the genre.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does Super Metroid get any better?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never played the GBA games, and I still found Super Metroid bland.

  I didn’t have an NES or SNES growing up, so I came to those games a little later on. However, Super Metroid was still the most recent game in the franchise when I played it. There were plenty of rave reviews even then, so I looked forward to playing it once I got my hands on a copy. I even bought a new controller for it.

  Initially I actually found the game somewhat frustrating, but once I got used to Samus’ momentum and how the game had been designed to be played, I found it to be very well balanced. But I never felt like there was any real reason for me to go on other than to open new areas. Since it wasn’t referenced in any way (that I noticed) outside of the manual, “The Mission” didn’t seem important. And while the graphics were gorgeous for the time (and still are), that wasn’t enough for me. People often talk about the haunting and creepy feeling of the game’s world, but I didn’t get that. I felt that way about the Prime games, but Super Metroid just seemed empty and abandoned to me, not atmospheric.

  A few years ago I was able to play AM2R and stuck to it all the way to the end, even 100-percenting it, and enjoying it thoroughly. But I don’t think I ever finished Super Metroid. I just put it down one day and never got back to it. And I don’t feel like it’s something I need to tick off some gaming bucket list. If you’re not really enjoying it, stop playing and don’t feel bad about it. There are already more good games in the world than anyone can complete before they die. You can’t play them all, so stick to the ones that resonate with you personally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kool-Aid Man (1983) for the Atari 2600⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been trying to research the various glitches and variations between versions because I’m working on something that uses some undocumented features and precise timing. Unfortunately, I don’t have one good link that explains it well.

  The issue stems from how player objects (the 2600 equivalent to sprites) are placed horizontally. For good and interesting reasons which are also technically involved and complicated, programmers can’t just send an X value to the graphics chip. Instead there’s a two-step process. First, the program sends a signal to the graphics chip when the TV raster is at approximately the desired horizontal position on the screen. Then, because it’s often not possible to nail the timing of that signal to the exact pixel position, the graphics chip has a facility to “jog” the various graphical objects left or right by a very small amount at a time.

  According to the official programmers’ documentation, this final “jog” should only be done at one specific time during each video scanline. If we only do it this way, it works correctly on pretty much every version of the console. However, doing it “correctly” also introduces a short black line at the left side of that scanline. If we instead send the “jog” signal at certain other times, no black line appears. Additionally, the exact distances moved change depending on when we send the signal, which can be worked around or are sometimes even beneficial.

  Kool-Aid Man uses these undocumented “jog” timings, as several games did. But it displays a score counter at the top of the screen by using the player objects placed very close together. It seems that the console versions in question (later 2600 Juniors and some 7800s) are more sensitive to the timing being used, as you can sometimes see the parts of the score flicking left or right by one pixel.

  The Atari 2600 also has a hardware collision detection system, which reports when any two moving screen objects overlap with each other or the background. Once a collision occurs, the relevant flag will stay set until the program clears it. Kool-Aid Man uses this system to detect when the player character touches enemies. But the program only clears the collision flags once, at the bottom of each frame, and the same player objects are used to draw the score. So when the two parts of the score flicker into each other, it registers as a collision between player objects, which the game interprets as a collision between Kool-Aid Man and a Thirsty.

  As you mentioned, I’ve read that setting the console switches a certain way can prevent this issue, but I’m not sure why. My guess is that setting some switches one way rather than another causes a conditional branch instruction that checks the switches to branch rather than fall through, which takes one extra instruction cycle (or vice versa), which is then enough to stabilize the score display and stop the parts from colliding.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kool-Aid Man (1983) for the Atari 2600⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a… not exactly a bug, but an unannounced change, in the graphics chip in some later versions of the Atari 2600, which has been named after this game by the fan/homebrew community. On most 2600 console versions, it’s possible for a game to perform a particular graphics operation at an unintended time and get an undocumented but consistent and useful result.

  On the differing consoles, the result is slightly different, and because of the way this game is written, it often causes a chain of actions that end up making Kool-Aid Man bounce around continuously as if being hit by enemies, even though nothing is touching him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When all you have (or you try to convince others that all they need) is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I guess this shows that it isn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Batocera] Is there any way to enable multiplayer gaming on Game Boy Advance using two locally connected controllers?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As a handheld console, the GBA hardware was explicitly designed to support exactly one player. To play multiplayer GBA games on real hardware, either the game must have some kind of “hotseat” mode, or you need to have multiple consoles connected via link cables.

  A “hotseat” game should run just fine on an emulator without any tweaking, so I’m guessing that’s not what you want.

  That means you’re wanting to emulate multiple GBAs at once. But RetroArch is designed to run only one instance of one emulator at a time. I’m somewhat surprised to learn (although I suppose I shouldn’t have been) that someone has created a RetroArch core that emulates two Gameboys/Gameboy Colors at once. But it doesn’t look like anyone’s done the same for the GBA. So AFAIK your only option is to have two separate Batocera devices (one for each GBA) connected over a network (if that’s possible with your Pi and the emulator supports it).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There was a special magic to the 3D Renders of the N64⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Who else remembers seeing images like this – that would’ve taken a few seconds to a few minutes to render even on high-end graphics workstations of the time – presented in gaming rags as examples of what PS1/N64/Saturn and later PS2/GameCube/DreamCast/XBox were “going to be capable of producing”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game Boy Advance: Incredible tech on just 2 AA Batteries⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, I put an Afterburner mod in mine back in the day and got the best of both worlds: a screen you can see without standing outside at midday, and a comfortable, wide layout that doesn’t make your hands cramp up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How is nobody talking about the fact that The Simpsons Arcade Game got home ports to DOS and Commodore 64 but not NES, SNES or Genesis -- and didn't arrive on console until Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even crazier, the C64 version was only distributed in North America, ignoring the majority of potential buyers. And it apparently runs OK on PAL machines without modification.

  One of the big draws of the game was all the detail in the backgrounds, and the little touches of animation. The C64 version being disk-only allows it to retain a surprising amount of this. As a tape game, the already long inter-level load times would’ve blown out and ruined the game.

  I don’t think that an NES or Master System port could’ve covered the game even as well as the C64 version. But I agree that it is strange that there was no Mega Drive or SNES version. The SNES in particular could’ve replicated a lot of the arcade’s scaling effects with a minimum of trickery.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Found a brand new, unused Pong console from 1979 in an Edinburgh charity shop for 20£⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  These “home pong” consoles were very common at the time. They don’t really do much, so their main value is historical interest, and this isn’t a particularly famous model. A quick eBay search seems to indicate it might go for GBP 80 at most, but probably more like GBP 20-40. So OP got a good deal, but they didn’t find a lost Vermeer. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Found a brand new, unused Pong console from 1979 in an Edinburgh charity shop for 20£⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They probably did. It’s not exactly honest, but the system is technically outputting a colour signal, and it was released at a time when that wasn’t a given. They didn’t say “full colour” anywhere on the box, did they?

  Let’s call it a mix of lower expectations for the time, and a bit of marketing deception.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Found a brand new, unused Pong console from 1979 in an Edinburgh charity shop for 20£⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Found in an Edinburgh charity shop, so while it’s not impossible, it’s unlikely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Atari 2600: The Atlantis of Game Consoles⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, they’ve changed the Pitfall image. Originally they were using the first image from CrayonRosary’s post.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apparently it was in the manual, but I'm just learning it now.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Gamer sites on the early Internet were full of these “Easter eggs” that were really just non-obvious things with clear explanations in the manual.

  One that I found particularly irrimusing (and seems to keep popping up forever) was that holding some combination of buttons on the Gameboy Advance when you turn it on “plays a secret, alternative start-up sound, then it just sits at the Gameboy logo until you press a button. That’s all it does.”

  Except if you read the manual you’d know that holding that button combo overrides the normal start-up and forces the GBA into multi-play download mode, so you can play those games without having to take the cartridge out of the console. Pressing a button in that mode cancels it and resumes normal start-up, loading a game from cartridge if one is inserted.

  I’ve seen some people insist that their manual didn’t say anything about this, but I have trouble believing them given that it was written in the manual for the GBA which I bought on launch day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apparently it was in the manual, but I'm just learning it now.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because in the English version of MGS that’s not “hidden” in the manual (or on the back of the box). You get the Major calling on the radio every ten seconds during that fight, virtually screaming at you “Hey you dumb kid, switch to the second controller port already!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You never forget your first⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In some places, the ZX Spectrum vs Commodore 64 war was epic. Likewise for Amiga vs Atari ST. Magazines for one fanbase would regularly mock the other. And I don’t know what the TRS-80 was going up against, but I’ve seen it called the “Trash-80” more than a couple of times.

  What can help proof someone against this excessive dedication to one platform isn’t which platform you start them on; it’s starting them on multiple platforms as soon as possible. Getting them interested in the individual games rather than the fan club nonsense.

  As human beings we naturally oversimplify things. So when our entire experience has been A, and the people around us frame the world as a choice between A and B, we’re naturally going to defend A with our life. That’s because without really thinking about it, we’ve bought into the idea that A is either right or wrong, with no middle-ground, and we hate to be wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You never forget your first⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That is just inviting people to start throwing out names of lesser-known systems. Can we narrow it down to Western (including South America), Eastern European, or South-east Asian before we start?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Here's a very good reason to emulate J2ME (pre-smartphone Java games)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, you got it basically correct. I bought a few of these games back in the day, and while I think you could do most of it by texting codes to premium SMS numbers, I did it by setting up accounts on the distributors’ websites. I paid by credit card (my phone plan didn’t fully support premium SMS billing), and they sent a special MMS with the game package attached (not as a link; this was in virtually pre-phone-Internet days). I had to make sure that my phone had enough MMS space free to receive the message including the bundled game, or I wouldn’t get it.

  One advantage of getting the games through a website account was that I could have the game resent to the same number as many times as I wanted. Since I didn’t know any easy way to back up the game locally from my phone at the time (or how to reinstall it even if I could), this let me free up precious space by deleting the MMSs and uninstalling games without losing my purchase.

  I played some games on a lower-mid-range Motorola flip-phone, but mostly on an nGage. It was like chalk and cheese. The experience on the flip-phone was stuttery and the controls were almost always painful to use. But Nokia was the biggest phone manufacturer at the time, and they even published guidelines for how to make games for their various categories of phone. So a lot of developers supported those specific requirements because they were common and well-documented. The nGage could run S60-targeted games flawlessly, and often the controls were pretty usable (obviously). The only real negative was that since even S60 phones usually didn’t have multi-press keypads, a lot of developers didn’t write their games to support them. So if a game needed diagonal movement or the like, I still had to use the keypad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Use same SD Card between devices?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have an RP2+ so I don’t know if it’s exactly the same, but with most Android devices, if you’ve configured the SD as an extension of internal memory, then no, it won’t work (and might screw some things up on the old device if you remove it). But if you’re just using it as external storage, I don’t think there should be any problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Atari 2600: The Atlantis of Game Consoles⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not bad overall, although I don’t know where they got that “Atari 2600 Pitfall” screenshot. Not only is that not what the game looks like, the 2600 couldn’t display that image. It looks like someone who mostly remembered the game drew it from memory in MS Paint.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The History of 120 Star's Early Era⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you might be interested but don’t want to click a random link without knowing what it’s for, this is a video about the history of a Mario 64 speedrun category, 120 stars, which involves collecting every star in the game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Most under-utilized consoles?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ha! I was a Mega Drive fan as a teen, and I got really angered by this… until I realized that you were speaking about the Mega CD and 32x specifically. Yep, there really weren’t many good games for either of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Most under-utilized consoles?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the DC had the technical strength to go up against the PS2, not just early on, but for quite a while. The PS2 is incredibly flexible in theory, but looking at its library it seems like most developers just used Sony’s default rendering setups. If you ignore the quickie PS1-to-DC ports and only compare titles which got equal effort from developers, it can be hard to tell the difference, and in some cases I’d even say the DC version looks a little nicer.

  In this alternate universe where the DC didn’t get killed off prematurely, what might’ve eventually turned the tide for the PS2 would be having between 1.5 and 2 times as much RAM (depending on how you account for different distribution), although that advantage may not have existed if it weren’t for the large gap between their release dates.

  But Sony could afford to delay for two years; consumers waited for them. Sega couldn’t sustain launch-pitch marketing for that long, especially with an actual console on store shelves that people could experience firsthand, as opposed to teaser videos of what the console “might” be capable of. Few publishers or consumers wanted to invest in a console before the clear winner of the previous generation had entered the market.

  All that being said, I don’t know that the DC was really under-utilized, in technical terms. I feel like a good proportion of the games in its library are using almost all of the power it had under the hood. Perhaps Sega’s management and engineers had learned their lesson from the Saturn, because the DC seems very straightforward from a programming perspective. It’s almost ironic that it lost to the PS2, which took flexibility and parallelism to heart at least as much as the Saturn did, if not more.