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vidak

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Posts posted by vidak

  1. Posted

    This is awesome! I'm just getting into homebrew development, and Stella is a huge tool for getting the job done! The better the tools, the better the games! This will be an enormous help for the homebrew community.

     

    Thank you so so much.

    • Like 1

  4. Posted

    I'm a pretty big fan of bass. A lot of sound hardware including HiFi doesn't have standardized high pass filters and can be all over the place. Most equipment also low passes around 20kHz, typically a brick wall filter in case a ADC is used. Presence of any harmonic content above half the sample rate of an ADC can cause nasty artifacts in the audible range. I myself can hear 12-17000 Hz, quite high for a 36 year old male. I can still hear those ringtones and stuff that only kids and teens are supposed to detect, largely because I didn't ruin my hearing with junk earbuds like much of the iPod generation that came after did.

     

    On the low end, 20Hz high pass is typical on HiFi equipment, but most TVs and consumer electronics with crappy speakers use smallish caps to protect the speakers which protect them by limiting excursion. Many flat panel TVs don't produce much of anything below 200Hz. Terrible sound quality. Did the bass guitarist not show up to the gig? Because it certainly sound like they are absent. Back to high pass, Certain classical instruments do excurse down below 20Hz, specifically large pipe organs with fundamentals extending down to 16Hz, which need special subs to be appreciated, as well as large kettle drums which can feel like a punch in the chest when performed live. Five string bass players got nothing on the pipe organist. I've still yet to hear a speaker system that is capable of recreating the sound and feeling of live drums or cannon fire, but I am sure they exist.

     

    I think Apple got a lot of flack from audiophiles some years ago with early gen iPods because they cheaped out on the caps protecting the headphone output, and listeners who used low impedance studio listening over the ear style headphones were greeted by a distinct lack of bass. But you wouldn't notice using the cheap earbuds they came with...

     

    THX certification is even crap since they dictate an 80Hz active Xover. Sure you can disable bass management on your sound system by setting the speaker type to "large", which works great for music, but 5.1, 7.1 mastered movie scores already siphon the sub 80Hz content to the bass channel so you're still only getting THX sound even if you have HiFi speakers that exceed this capability on all 5 channels. And "upmixed" stereo content sounds like crap anyway, fun but not a faithful reproduction.

     

    Years ago I had a surround sound system with crappy cubed satellites and an overcompensated sub, which overall led to a boom boom sound yet totally lacking in midbass. Then I got some real Polk Monitor 40 speakers (MTM "D'appolito" design) with ample highs and lows, none of the "shouty" mid-tones like most small full rangers have, clean, undistorted sound coming from a single pair of 2-way speakers, passively crossed at 2.3kHz, flat response from about 45Hz to beyond human range on the high end, and an 8" sub with speaker level inputs, barely on, low-passed around 60Hz to cover the bass region down to around 20Hz. That Sony 50w sub is small but packs a punch, and I can hear (and feel) the fundamental frequencies of organ music when played back, despite the 28Hz factory spec it goes much lower. Don't trust nameplates; they are rarely accurate since each manufacturer uses their own standards. My Sony solid state stereo amp is rated 10Hz-70kHz but still displaces woofers if I run 5Hz even down to 1Hz tones through it. Inside it's got four massive can caps in conjunction with the speaker outputs. Cinema and movies sound great in HiFi stereo too. Do I miss the LoFi surround? No I do not. I'll take 2 great sounding speakers over 5 crappy ones any day.

     

    I'm gonna get off my soapbox now... :music:

    this is a bloody awesome post!

     

    I just bought a pair of 6 inch bookshelf speakers and they've done wonders for movies. I am noticing things in all my favorite movies I have never noticed before! Good sound makes all the difference.

  9. Posted

    To elaborate on my previous post, there are good number of fairly high profile retro gaming YouTubers I subscribe to. MetalJesusRocks, Classic Game Room, Radical Reggie, and John Hancock to name a few. I watch almost all their videos, but it occurs to me that how I feel about them really comes down to whether or not I already own the games they're discussing in any given video.

     

    If they're talking about a game I already own and like then my feelings on the matter are always "That's awesome that they're doing a video on this game, more people should know how good it is!". But if the video in question features a game that I know I want but don't own yet then my reaction is generally "Oh great, now it's going to jump up massively in price."

     

    Case in point: I've been meaning to pick up a copy of Wendy: Every Witch Way for the Game Boy Color for a few years now but was never in any rush on it because it had always been a $8 to $12 game for the last decade or so. But then over the course of the last year a few very popular YouTubers mentioned that it was a "hidden gem" in some of their videos and now it's selling for $30 minimum. This sort of thing seems to happen with most obscure games that popular YouTubers bring up in their videos, and it creates this annoying sense of urgency when it comes to collecting where I feel like I have to rush to get copies of all the obscure games I'd like to own before a YouTube personality mentions it and causes the price to quadruple.

     

    Luckily the systems I mainly collect for (the Game Boy and Game Boy Color) aren't terribly popular so they haven't seen as much price inflation across the board as some of the more universally appreciated systems, but they still don't escape unscathed. I'm still ticked off about Shantae jumping up to $300+ for a loose cart, and I know I better put down the $75 for a copy of Kid Dracula before the YouTubers take notice of that one too and it suffers the same fate.

     

     

     

    Indeed it is possible. https://www.pricecharting.com features a "Show Chart" option for every game tracked on the site which will display a graph of the average sale price history of the game all the way back to 2008. All you need to do is take a look at when a game began to spike in price and do a YouTube search to see if any of the major retro gaming YouTubers did a review of it around the same time. For the sake of being a decent human being I'm not going to provide any specific examples of "who caused which games to jump in price", but it's not difficult to put two and two together with a little research.

     

    Oh gosh. That's enough to establish causation, I'm sure. I can't believe it. Kind of makes me want to get into making reproductions. The only way to bring down the price is to increase supply of retro games, because they're in fixed quantities with increasing demand as time goes on, unless people make new carts...

     

     

     

    Well, yeh, anything that gets commercialized and monetized becomes dumb and stupid. Focus is shifted away from putting coolness into the product to expending effort in marketing and selling it. R&D and art and creativity become unimportant. And then cost-cutting comes into the picture and products devolve to the point they become disposable and break too easily. Or till it becomes uninspiring.

     

    Commercialization and monetization are good till they're pushed too far.

     

    I'd go one step further. Capitalism (money and commerce) are bad full stop. The only way they can succeed is by always going too far and becoming monopolistic and hegemonic.

  10. Posted

    It seems sensible to me to conclude that retro gaming prices have skyrocketed due to the increased exposure of retro gaming on youtube, but is it possible to get any hard empirical evidence on whether that is true? Because the increased prices of retro gaming objects may have come about for another reason. Just because youtube and ebay events seem to correlate doesn't mean that one event caused the other. You need hard evidence to prove that is true.

     

    I remember what I bought 5 Megaman cartridges for in 2012, and I just checked the prices of individual carts on eBay. I have absolutely no hope of ever affording to collect original carts in boxes unless I double my income. I wonder what the real causal factor in deciding eBay prices for retro games is. I wonder who we can ask about this issue.

     

    On Youtube and retro gaming... I think it's dreadful. Youtube is all about making money. Google designed and implemented a central algorithm driving the exposure of youtube videos to viewers. When it comes to making value under capitalism, economies of scale are all where it is at. Big channels make the most money for advertisers the most efficiently, so they are promoted ahead of small channels. The search engine on youtube is built into this exposure algorithm, so you will only ever find the videos Google wants you to find on youtube.

     

    Because youtube is all about making money, it's all about quantity over quality. It's all about hocking and selling commodities instead of developing an artform. The research says you will only get subscribers and likes if you ask, but the research never questions the morality of this practice and how disrespectful it is.

     

    Whenever media platforms get controlled by the Hollywood-industrial complex, they become centralised and the content of their media becomes thin and meaningless. I was watching the Simpsons episode from Season 5 where Homer goes into space (ALL HAIL THE INANIMATE CARBON ROD!!), and it satirises how idiotic and cheap cable TV was in the mid-90s. Youtube is exactly the same because it is no different in organisation from cable TV in the mid-90s. All the successful channels are monetised and plugged into the centralised structure of networks and marketing agencies. The appearance of independence of "content producers" (I hate that term) is an illusion. You just work in your own home now for less pay. All my favourite Youtubers work insanely long hours on their monetised channels for much less than they should be receiving.

     

    The problem with Youtube is capitalism. If we had a platform geared more towards collective ownership and virtuous personal characteristics, we would have a much friendlier and less cut-throat world of video gaming.

     

    PS. I mean look at the way Atari started. Atari was a huge multi-million dollar company, but their platform was almost completely open. Single people could program a game in a matter of months for the VCS2600. There was no lock-out chip copy protection, and the costs of production for games was very very low. The small game development companies that sprung up around the VCS2600 were organised along communist lines, with everyone pulling their weight and being justly rewarded for their efforts. Capitalism got in the way of the openness of the Atari days. It turns out having a tight-fist and a centralised hierarchy to game licencing works a lot better (see Nintendo and the NES).

    • Like 3

  11. Posted

    I'm just getting in to homebrew development. I guess I have a different view on copyright and property. When I make games, I'm going to release not just the binaries but the source code as well. Both will be covered by a "copyleft" licence, which means if anyone ever distributes my games, they will also have to distribute the source code.

     

    Personally I think if you're making a product, you should give it away for free, but I don't have an issue with charging money for a commodity, so long as you also distribute it with its source code. Its then up to that person who bought the commodity to distribute it at whatever price they want.

     

    I think if you've licenced your games under traditional copyright, you should have your property respected, but I think you shouldn't have property in your games at all. The concept of copyright is what this seller is hiding behind in order to produce repros and pass them off as originals.

     

    If you release your games under a copyleft licence, like the GPL or a permissive licence, like the BSD licence, you'd have a way of suing this morally bankrupt seller because he would be claiming private property contradictory to a free software copyleft licence.

     

    Just on the topic of "killer collections", I personally think the value in software (games) is in their function and not their status as objects with rarity. Rarity is just mystical nonsense. Marx called it commodity fetishism. I personally see "counterfeits" and repros as the same as "originals" because they have the exact same ROM data and same function. Repros might even be superior to originals because they may last longer.

     

    But by all means, no one should be allowed to stop you from collecting rare objects, as long as you're not harming anyone.

  12. Posted

    I'm a huge fan of the original Atari joystick. I grew up with a PS1 digital controller and I hated it. When I got an N64 a few years later I was so relieved to use its optical-based analogue stick.

     

    But coming to use the VCS2600 when i was about 9 or 10 changed everything. I really enjoyed the simplicity of the design.

     

    I realise it's quite a primitive design, and that we've come a long way in controller design, but I feel like Atari really got something right with the original joystick. I feel like modern controllers are too cluttered.

     

    I am a huge opponent of current gameplay styles and concepts, and I think current controllers only serve to further those kinds of games. A key example I have is the new Yooka Laylee game. I am a huge fan of 3D platformers, but current XBOX One controllers are horrible for the gameplay metaphors in this genre of game.

     

    In terms of simplicity and parsimony, I think the original VCS2600 controllers are really, really beautiful. I wish we had the same inventiveness and imaginativeness about game controllers today.

  14. Posted

    Yo! I'm working on my first homebrew game, and I've been following the excellent tutorials made by SpiceWare, Kirk Israel and others. (Are there more?? I feel like I want to construct a database to centralize all the tutorials)

     

    I want to make a game where a character runs vertically up the screen on a scrolling playfield. I can find a couple of examples in batari BASIC (one interesting one from 2009), but I want to use assembly.

     

    Following SpiceWare, I can construct asymmetric playfields, and I know how to count scanlines and machine cycles.

     

    If BASIC is the best language to effect vertical scrolling, I'll use BASIC!

     

    (As an aside, there are so many amazing resources for learning 6502 assembly online. My favourite is a video series by a man named John Dale on YouTube. His channel name is Oldskool Coder.

     

    In many ways assembly language is easier than BASIC because it's just plugging data into registers with a whole load of branches and tricks.)

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