Redkey
@Redkey@programming.dev
- Comment on Have win7 laptop. What to play on it? 23 hours ago:
The same places you get old console games. Online auction and classifieds sites, and thrift stores, mostly. Flea markets and garage sales too, but they’re more hit-and-miss.
- Comment on Have win7 laptop. What to play on it? 1 day ago:
Back in the olden days, when we used kerosene-powered computers and it took a three day round trip to get IP packets via the local stagecoach mail delivery, we still had games even though Steam didn’t exist yet. :b
We used to transfer software on these things called disks. Some of them were magnetic, and some of them used lasers (you could tell them apart because for the laser ones it was usually spelled “disc” with a “c”).
Anyway, those dis(k/c)s mostly still work, and we still have working drives that can read them, and because the brilliant idea of making software contact the publisher to ask if it was OK to run had only just been invented, we can generally still play games from the period that way. Some people kept their old games, but others sell them secondhand, which I believe the publishers still haven’t managed to lobby successfully to be made illegal, unless I missed a news report.
Even if you can’t get the original physical media for a game, sites like GOG sell legal digital downloads of many old games, which are almost always just the actual old software wrapped in a compatibility layer of some kind that is easy to remove, so you can usually get the games running natively on period hardware/software. Finally, some nicer developers and publishers have officially declared some of their old games as free for everyone to play.
There are still legal options for playing old games on old systems.
- Comment on TOEM is an amazing game, here's why 1 week ago:
The Steam Deck is a handheld Linux-based PC with a built-in game controller. The special Steam version of Linux (SteamOS) comes with software (Proton) that lets you run a lot of Windows games, and Valve have put some effort into helping/encouraging developers to get their games working with it.
The Nintendo Switch is a closed system that can only play official Nintendo-licensed software. Even if you “jailbreak” a Switch, I don’t think that there’s any realistic way to get modern Windows games running on one.
- Comment on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Cavia's Magic at Full Display 1 week ago:
I bought this back in the day, and played it through to the end. I vaguely recall somewhat enjoying it overall, but the strongest impression that I have now is of frequently being bombarded with unrepeatable, dense, plot-critical dialogue (usually from teammates via radio) during intense action scenes when I was busy trying to sneak around, evade, beat up, or have a shootout with multiple enemies simultaneously. This often seemed to be by design, with enemies spawning at the same time the dialogue begins. As a passive viewer watching a show, it’s cool when the characters have intense philosophical debates during fights, but as an active player I found it extremely difficult to follow both at the same time. I don’t even remember what the story of the game actually was, because I missed so much vital information that I gave up trying to follow it. That was a real disappoment for a big GitS fan.
Also, many of the missions can seem very open initially in terms of how the player can approach them, but quite soon I got the feeling that there’s exactly one “right” way through each challenge, and it’s up to the player to find it, sometimes with very few hints.
I’ve tried several times over the years to give it another go, but somehow I never seem to make it past even the first mission before I put it away again.
- Comment on Patient Recommendation: Waking Mars 1 week ago:
It is available on mobile BUT I encourage you to get the PC version on Steam because the mobile one doesn’t include the pretty decent voice acting
That’s odd; I was sure that I played some of this on Android with voice acting, so I searched my records and discovered that I also got it from Humble Bundle. I just downloaded and installed it to check, and aside from a warning that it was written for an older version of Android, it seems to be working fine, full voice acting included. There’s an option to turn it off, but it was on by default for me.
Maybe there was an issue with your specific device?
- Comment on Older patient gamers: what is your preferred gaming platform? 2 weeks ago:
Perhaps similar to OP, I gravitate toward whatever’s handiest. That’s usually my smartphone or one of a number of old-ish Linux laptops. I have a handful of smartphone games that I play pretty much every day, and I’ve got controllers for both, so there’s also lots of emulation of older games, and also some newer indie games on the laptops. After that I have a “gaming” PC (nothing amazing but it does enough for me) for more current games, although I’m finding that I don’t turn that on as much as I’d like to, lately. Then I have a handful of less-old consoles that my other devices can’t emulate well, but I can’t even remember the last time I used one of those.
- Comment on Evercade easter egg on Full Void 2 weeks ago:
Ha ha, it certainly does look like it, doesn’t it? Kind of like how Sega would put their consoles into various games for fun, like as parts of the robots in the Virtual On series, or the backpacks in Typing of the Dead.
- Comment on Play GB games 3 weeks ago:
- GBA or GBA SP, you’ll get a backlit screen as well (around the same budget?)
Careful! The original (landscape) GBA had a similar, unlit, reflective screen to the Gameboy Colour, and even the GBA SP was frontlit for most of its run. Only the later GBA SPs had the bright, backlit screens.
I modded an original GBA with an aftermarket frontlighting kit back in the day. I didn’t like the GBA SP as it made my hands start to cramp up after only a few minutes.
- Comment on Should I get an NES, Master System; or an Atari 7800? 1 month ago:
OP must have a phone, tablet, or computer, since they’re posting here; they could even just use that.
- Comment on Hey, I'm new to GitHub! 2 months ago:
Yes, I think that most of us realized from some of the self-aware wording that this is a parody. But like many parodies it’s a real trope taken to a silly extreme, so we’re talking about users who fit that trope (including ourselves, sometimes!).
- Comment on More believable for a Linux OS 2 months ago:
Oh hell, you gave me a PTSD flashback!
It’s the late 90s. My mother suddenly discovers File Explorer on her refurbished commodity Wintel box and decides that all this messy clutter has to go. Never mind that the drive was 80% empty when delivered and I didn’t expect her to come close to filling it before it was replaced. Fortunately I had already backed up everything that looked important or interesting.
One day she calls from the office, “I don’t need this ‘Windows’ any more, do I?”
“What? Wait! Don’t do anything!” I walk in and she’s got C:/Windows highlighted and the cursor is hovering over “Delete”.
“I already have Windows installed on this computer, so I don’t need this any more, do I?” Spoken more as a statement than a question. It took several minutes of forced calm explanation to get her to accept that this “Windows” directory WAS the Windows that’s installed on the machine. She still wasn’t happy that she could see it in File Explorer, though. So untidy!
- Comment on Paying people to work on open source is good actually 2 months ago:
That XKCD reminds me of the case a year or three ago where some solo dev that no-one had ever heard of was maintaining a library that a couple of other very popular and major libraries depended on. Something somewhere broke for some reason, and normally this guy would’ve been all over it before most people even realized there had been a problem, but he was in hospital or jail or something, so dozens of huge projects that indirectly relied on his library came crashing down.
What upset me most was reading the community discussion. I didn’t see a single person saying, “How can we make sure that some money gets to this guy and not just the more visible libraries that rely so heavily on his work?”, even though the issue was obliquely raised in several places, but I did see quite a few saying, “How can we wrest this code out of this guy’s hands against his will and make multiple other people maintain it (but not me, I’m too busy) so we don’t have a single point of failure?”
- Comment on You should try Ico 2 months ago:
I played this on the PS2 and it’s s fantastic experience.
Interestingly, the PAL version (and probably the Japanese version, too) has content that wasn’t in the NA version. There’s an extra puzzle, a semi-hidden alternative “funny/happy” coda after the main ending if you play through a second time, and some extra in-game options that are unlocked after you finish the game for the first time, including understandable subtitles for ALL characters, even ones that are normally speaking an unknown language. I’m not sure if the hidden weapon you can get in the middle of the game becomes a light saber on the second playthrough in the NA version as it does in the PAL version, but it may.
This was before video streaming sites, so there were many arguments on forums about how these things are in the game, no they aren’t you trolls, yes they are here’s a picture, that’s obviously fake… and so on. It was interesting that once people figured out that the NA and PAL versions were different, there was a vocal core of NA players still insisting that it was all fake for quite a long time afterward.
- Comment on Sometimes I want to call malloc, just as a treat 2 months ago:
It’s a persistent dynamic memory allocation that’s accessed by multiple processes! :)
- Comment on What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk? 2 months ago:
I’d argue that you do need to be good at math to be an effective programmer, it’s just that that doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it means. You don’t need to know all the ins and outs of quadratics, integrals, and advanced trigonometry, but I think you do need to have a really solid, gut-level understanding of basic algebra and a bit of set theory. If you’re the sort of person whose head starts to swim when you see “y=3x+2”, you’re going to find programming difficult at best.
- Comment on Functional Programming vs. Object Oriented Programming 3 months ago:
Whatever it may have become in later years, Alan Kay, who is often called “The Father of Object-oriented Programming”, outlined the message-passing idea as the main concept he was driving at, originally.
He also says that he probably misnamed it.
Here’s a discussion in which the man himself makes a (small) appearance: …stackexchange.com/…/so-what-did-alan-kay-really-…
- Comment on Functional Programming vs. Object Oriented Programming 3 months ago:
I am currently working on a game for the Atari 2600, and you just gave a good outline of my code. And I love it.
- Comment on Best distro for linux gaming? 4 months ago:
I haven’t used it for a while, but the last time I was using Lakka I don’t think it had been ported to Pi yet. It worked great and was very much for PCs. I don’t know about interfaces though; my install booted straight into RetroArch which isn’t the slickest-looking thing but worked fine for me.
Make sure to check compatibility lists for the emulators you want to use. You may be surprised by how many games don’t run/can’t be finished/have major glitches on later systems like PS2, PS3, and GameCube. Also, there’s no PS3 RetroArch cores, so you’ll need to use the standalone version of RPCS3.
- Comment on Do any of y'all know where I can get a retro box? 4 months ago:
Yep, this works well. I used to have a cheap, old, secondhand ultralight notebook that I used for work, and I installed Lakka to a tiny bootable USB drive so that on evenings when we planned to gather at one colleague or another’s house after work, I could just throw the drive and a couple of controllers in my bag and we could have a nice, clean, 100% emulation-focused system to game on. Even a 10-year-old laptop with Lakka should smash a Raspberry Pi 4’s cost/performance ratio.
I usually plugged in power and a display, but of course as a laptop it was fine for using on the go, too. Not quite a handheld, but still very portable.
Another option is one of the cheaper ARM-based handhelds with a USB port and HDMI output, so you can still play on a big screen at home. I later got a Retroid 2 for this, which also worked well, but needed a bit more technical fiddling than the Lakka laptop, and couldn’t emulate a few things at full speed. The Retroid 3 should be better, or there are other options such as Ambernic, Game Park, and PowKiddy.
Now, I just use my phone with a Bluetooth controller, and optionally an HDMI output dongle when I’m at home. If your phone doesn’t support HDMI over USB-C natively (mine doesn’t), look into a DisplayLink compatible USB dongle. If you check specs carefully you can even find some that work over USB 2.0 for older/cheaper phones. They have a free app for Android phones.
- Comment on Never trust a programmer who says they know C++ by Louis Brandy 4 months ago:
I thought that this was going to be a play on the phrase, “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” but it’s just a very short piece about Dunning-Kruger aimed specifically at some C++ concepts.
- Comment on PC spec for retrogames 5 months ago:
If you want to emulate those systems, then yes, you’re going to need a fairly beefy computer. You could, as others have suggested, buy a good secondhand system and upgrade it with a GPU and more/better RAM.
But I want to pass on a warning as someone who also loves emulation and wishes they could “have everything in one place”: a lot of emulators just aren’t there yet, but some people are eager to kid themselves and others that they are.
16-bit systems and before typically have outstanding emulators available. Some systems from the next couple of generations are also very reliable (e.g. PS1, Dreamcast), while others mostly work well with minimal tinkering and only a small handful of exceptions (e.g. N64, Saturn). But after those, the reliability of emulators drops off fairly smoothly. Even the venerable PCSX2, for example, will run almost every known PS2 game in some fashion, but many games outside the biggest hits still have problems that make them terrible. And I don’t mean picky things like, “Three notes in the bassline on this background music are slightly off,” I mean, “The walls aren’t rendered in most areas.”
I really recommend having a good look at the compatibility lists for emulators you’re interested in before you dive too deep down this hole. It’s one thing to have a powerful PC already and think, “why not give it a go?” but another thing to build a new (to you) PC specifically for emulating these systems. I suspect that you may have been spoiled a bit by that fact that even the RP4 only has enough power to run those more stable emulators for older systems.
- Comment on Sega Saturn Model 1 in Shenmue 5 months ago:
It always bothered me that Ryo has a Saturn in a story set before the Megadrive had come out. Even the Mark III (later to be rebranded as the Master System) was released a mere 13 months prior to the murder of Ryo’s father.
- Comment on Finished Rewiring, Very Happy With The Results 5 months ago:
I see that white PS2 slim poking out at the corner there. If you’ve modded it, I’m curious to hear what you’ve done to it.
- Comment on Which controller did you start with? 5 months ago:
Me too. I started with the little brown first-party stick that came with the Pro Pack, but soon switched to an inexplicably beige Quickshot II.
- Comment on Real quick question about the "break" 5 months ago:
Assuming C/C++, dare we even ask what this teacher uses instead of switch statements? Or are her switch statements unreadable rat’s nests of extra conditions?
This is a good life lesson. We’re all idiots about certain things. Your teacher, me, and even you. It’s even possible to be a recognized expert in a field yet still be an idiot about some particular thing in that field.
Just because some people use a screwdriver as a hammer and risk injuring themselves and damaging their work, that’s not a good reason to insist that no-one should ever use a screwdriver under any circumstances, is it?
Use break statements when they’re appropriate. Don’t use them when they’re not. Learn the difference from code that many other people recommend, like popular open-source libraries and tutorials. If there’s a preponderance of break statements in your code, you may be using a suboptimal approach.
But unfortunately, for this course, your best bet is to nod, smile, and not use any break statements. Look at it as a personal learning experience; by forcing yourself sit down and reason out how you can do something without using break statements, you might find some situations where they weren’t actually the best solution. And when you can honestly look back and say that the solution with break statements is objectively better, you’ll be able to use that approach with greater confidence in the future.
- Comment on Voyager's 15 Billion Mile Software Update 5 months ago:
I absolutely agree. And the video didn’t discuss how any of that actually happens, except to say that they send the update over radio, and to give a brief description of how the storage system on Voyager works. That’s what I meant by “really nothing here”, “here” meaning “in the video”, not “in how the Voyager probe works and updates are carried out”.
- Comment on Voyager's 15 Billion Mile Software Update 5 months ago:
This is a short, interesting video, but there’s really nothing here for any competent programmer, even a fresh graduate. It turns out they they update the software by sending the update by radio. The video hardly goes any deeper than that, and also makes a couple of very minor layman-level flubs.
There is a preservation effort for the old NASA computing hardware from the missions in the 50s and 60s, and you can find videos about it on YouTube. They go into much more detail without requiring much prior knowledge about specific technologies from the period.
One thing that struck me about the video was how the writers expressed surprise that it was still working and also so adaptable. And my thought was, “Well, yeah, it was designed by people who knew what they were doing, with a good budget, lead by managers whose goal was to make excellent equipment, rather than maximize short-term profits.”
- Comment on Does this compiler exist? 5 months ago:
Some of the things you mentioned seem to belong more properly in the development environment (e.g. code editor), and there are plenty of those that offer all kinds of customization and extensibilty. Some other things are kind of core to the language, and you’d really be better off switching languages than trying to shoehorn something in where it doesn’t fit.
As for the rest, GCC (and most C/C++ compilers) generates intermediate files at each of the steps that you mentioned. You can also have it perform those steps atomically. So, if you wanted to perform some extra processing at any point, you could create your own program to do so by working with those intermediate files, and automate the whole thing with a makefile.
You could be on to something here, but few people seem to take advantage of the possibilities that already exist, and combining that with the fact that most newer languages/compilers deliberately remove these intermediate steps, this suggests to me that whatever problems this situation causes may have other, existing solutions.
I don’t know much about them myself, but have you read about the LLVM toolchain or compiler-compilers like yacc? If you haven’t, it might answer some questions.
- Comment on JavaScript's days are numbered 5 months ago:
Of course! There’s already a proposal for a replacement Temporal object.
- Comment on JavaScript's days are numbered 5 months ago:
The definition of the Date object explicitly states that any attempt to set the internal timestamp to a value outside of the maximum range must result in it being set to “NaN”. If there’s an implementation out there that doesn’t do that, then the issue is with that implementation, not the standard.