zarenki
@zarenki@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Are Nintendo's $80 online game prices a result of tariffs or is Nintendo just using them as an excuse to price gouge as corporations do? 11 hours ago:
too long have we accepted 60$ games with 20$ DLC, I’m glad if this means devs can just charge 80$ for a full game.
Breath of the Wild was a $60 game with $20 DLC when it launched in 2017. Eight years later, its Switch 2 Edition is now a $70 game that (seemingly but not yet 100% confirmed) still has the same $20 DLC sold separately. This is a game that sold enough copies in 2017 alone to earn back about 15 times its development cost, and plenty more in the other 7 years since.
As for Mario Kart World, I’ll be surprised if Nintendo doesn’t announce DLC plans in its upcoming presentation two weeks from now, but that remains to be seen.
- Comment on GameCube Coming To Nintendo Switch Online With 3 Games At Launch 2 days ago:
Nintendo has already been selling a small selection of GameCube and Wii games that run emulated on Switch’s processor (Tegra X1) in 1080p.
- On the Switch itself: Super Mario 3D All-Stars runs emulators for Mario Sunshine (GC) and Galaxy (Wii)
- On the Nvidia Shield TV, which uses the same processor: Twilight Princess (GC), NSMB Wii, Punch-Out (Wii), Mario Galaxy (Wii), Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii). Only available on Shield systems sold in China.
The Dolphin emulator can be installed on Nvidia Shield (Android) and, thanks to modding, on exploitable Switch systems as well.
However, this newly announced library of GameCube games is only for Switch 2, which has drastically more powerful hardware than the 8-year-old original Switch.
- Comment on - Buy Once Software 3 days ago:
Just go through F-Droid or Flathub and look at the long list of apps that haven’t been updated in years.
“not updated in years” didn’t used to be considered a bad thing. Why is it one now?
If something works well for me as it is and runs locally in a way that doesn’t open itself up to remote exploits, I don’t necessarily need it to keep changing all the time. Even if it would be nice if it had more features, the software works fine for me as it is. I don’t need those updates now or this year.
The only true “need” is that it doesn’t stop working for me when the various platforms or compilers change. I used to use a Python2 program, and I could keep using it for about a decade after its last update, but eventually I did need to move past it because Python3 had long since replaced it and distros stopped shipping Python2. A year or two of no updates it’s nothing.
- Comment on The Pebble Has Been Brought Back 2 weeks ago:
Of all possible names, they’re really using “Core 2 Duo”? I feel like anyone who has been following tech long enough would immediately think of the Intel processor when hearing that name.
- Comment on Alibaba doubles down on RISC-V architecture with a new secretive 'server-grade' chip that will put AMD and Intel on alert 3 weeks ago:
I was only talking about high core count and high (relatively speaking) single-core performance. The DeepComputing Framework board is neither. Its JH7110 is only 4 cores and a rather old processor, which seems like an odd choice for a product releasing in 2025. At least the software support is great since distros have been working with VisionFive 2 and Milk-V Mars for years.
It’s also the only currently-available Framework 13 board with fewer than 6 cores, though core count isn’t remotely comparable between architectures. At this price ($209 for lone board with 8GB RAM, $799 for full laptop) I’d prefer to see something at the very least comparable to SpacemiT K1, which has 8 cores and vector support, and is on the Banana Pi BPI-F3 (8GB version is $95).
- Comment on Alibaba doubles down on RISC-V architecture with a new secretive 'server-grade' chip that will put AMD and Intel on alert 3 weeks ago:
I’m only aware of one RISC-V system where I can say the core count is there: the Milk-V Pioneer board and its 64-core SG2042 processor from two years ago. It’s comparable in price to a 64-core ARM Ampere CPU+motherboard (USD$1500 for the board), which seems somewhat reasonable when not considering the performance of each core. Hopefully the C930 core described in this article leads to more systems that aim for multi-core performance.
Most RISC-V development boards are only 4 cores or fewer, with just a few popping up in the last year with 8 cores and nothing higher besides the SG2042. The best single-core RISC-V performance so far is on the SiFive P550 but it’s only 4 cores and comes on a development board that costs USD$500 (plus another $150 for tariffs if shipping to the US). You could easily get a 12-core AMD CPU and motherboard combo for less than that.
- Comment on The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied. 3 weeks ago:
Jerboa has the same lead developers and is part of the same GitHub organization as the Lemmy server and web UI.
The logo for Lemmy itself is the head of a rodent, supposedly a lemming. Most instances use that logo or a variation of it in their web UI. Jerboa and other apps in turn tend to use a rodent in the logo.
- Comment on In Response to Amazon preventing to download books you bought: Some DRM free bookstores and publishers 4 weeks ago:
If you have a rooted Android device or a jailbroken Kindle device, yes, you can still use Calibre DeDRM and KFX Input plugins on the kindle ebooks downloaded on them. It just takes a bit more setup with getting the key you need.
- Comment on Github: Nintendo Submit DMCA Notices to Ryujinx Forks 4 weeks ago:
Unfortunately, DMCA takes an extreme stance when it comes to anti-circumvention. Even personal backup doesn’t have a strong legitimacy case under it, especially not when it comes to the tools that enable it.
Very related to this, LockpickRCM is a tool whose entire purpose is to extract your own Switch keys for the titles you own, and in turn is far more useful for people who want personal backups than those who are pirating the games. Still got a DMCA takedown two years ago, and though it never went to court it’s extremely unlikely any court would have ruled in their favor if it did.
- Comment on Feds Say You Don’t Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books 5 months ago:
This argument is even more ridiculous than it seems. During the copyright office hearing for this exemption request (back in April), the people arguing in favor of libraries talked about the measures they have in place. They don’t just let people download a ROM to use in any emulator they please. It’s not even one of those browser-based emulators where you can pull the ROM data out of your browser cache if you know how. It’s a video stream of an emulator running on a server managed by the library, with plenty enough latency to make it very clearly a worse gaming experience.
It’s far easier to find ROMs of these games elsewhere than it is to contact a librarian and ask for access to a protected collection, so there’d be no reason to redistribute the files even if they were offered, which they aren’t.
On top of that, this exemption request was explicitly limited to old games that have been long unavailable on the market in any form, which seems like an insane limitation to put on libraries, places that have always held collections of books both new and old.
All of that is still not enough to sate the US Copyright Office, the ESA, AACS, or DVD CSS. Those three were the organizations that fought against this.
- Comment on Nintendo Is Now Going After YouTube Accounts Which Show Its Games Being Emulated 5 months ago:
Anbernic devices in particular are known to ship with an SD card that’s preloaded with a fairly large game library. I own a RG351M which did indeed include a cheap card loaded with both the OS and a collection of games by Nintendo, Sega, and many others, plus some strange rom hacks. I immediately swapped that card out for a better one with a better CFW and my own files.
Most other notable names in the emulation handhelds space like Retroid, Ayn, and Ayaneo expect users to be able to provide their own files instead, which I’d say makes more sense.