but I was going to ply cuba/father torque with liquor in branson and talk them into buying you a computer just so you can make us an arma campaign based around a triple frontier-esque heist scenario
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oh man small unit tactics are my specialty in arma and the shit I could dream up based around that premise would make you never want to play any other shooter again
idk as long as youāre preserving and running the original instructions all this obsessive effort to reproduce the machine behaviour makes me uneasy
like it takes so many millions of cycles that itās the kind of thing no one would ever put this infinite effort into if it werenāt the Super Nintendo
I think if you have the skill to be that obsessive about recreating the behavior of a Super Nintendo you should probably be encouraged to do that instead of like, programming missile guidance systems or something psycho
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why is it bad tho
if your argument is that itās a waste of cpu cycles then why do you like python so much lol
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post canāt be empty
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āFPGA SUCKS! (or does it???)ā
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I like it when they use FPGAs to make audio devices I cannot possibly afford
https://chordelectronics.co.uk/product/dave/
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So FPGA is a chip that simulates hardware and software because consoles certainly also have software stuff.
Can the Super NT handle the crank?
Perfect results are based on perfect knowledge, they canāt just look at the circuit boards and draw them.
FPGA emulation/cloning is still reverse engineering, reliant on the decades of work already done by software devs. Kevtris doesnāt have a magic photogrammetry scanner.
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Next-frame (sometimes/mostly) input and (better than) perfect crt output has been attainable with Groovymame on windows, for a while. Currently that entails having an at-least small-desktop sized computer with a good single-core performance cpu (fans); and setting up, running and maintaining a windows install + bespoke drivers; using a keyboard and mouse and typing shit for hours at least at first and probably forever. I wonder what the limits are on no compromise performance and size + maintenance ease setup are?
There is no chance of anything like the MAME library receiving FPGA implementations, but if youāre into the stuff that exists and will existā¦
How much does a turnkey Mister crt setup run a feller? $300?
I never realized FPGAs had a finite re-write limitation? Like, we talking thousands? Millions?
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weāve got some FPGA implementations that are as accurate (logic) as the best software emulations, but do we have any that are more accurate?
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Why would you think this would take alcohol
(I canāt spend hundreds of $$ just to play cool shooter campaigns though my wife would destroy me and justifiably so)
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clearly this is going to take some alcohol since it sounds like youāre still a little iffy about your wife destroying you for the sake of a videogame
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The automobile will never work because thereās no such thing as a TRULY FLAT surface
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Today on Sally Jessy Raphael, the stories of wives who play Ikaruga and the husbands they destroy.
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so, iāve got a MiSTer.
MiSTer in 2020 is probably, at present, the best happy medium between the expense and maintenance of real hardware and the convenience and flexibility of emulation. there are some clear lines to draw and expectations to set, however. if you are not someone who is bothered by input latency or other typical software emulation quibbles, MiSTer is probably not necessary for you. itās a specific solution for specific issues, not a quantum leap. that said, i am impressed thus far.
in the interest of really getting to the bottom of the (aforementioned in this thread) fpga āhypeā, iāve been doing some direct comparisons between my real hardware setups and the MiSTer cores.
i invested in a real genesis console over the summer, and have been playing it religiously the past few months. i have arguably one of the worst-sounding consoles, the MD2 VA0 board, and the moment i put on Shining in the Darkness, the difference was pretty noticeable. The MD2 VA0 sounds extremely hissy, with incorrect PSG volume levels and other annoyances. the MiSTer allows you to set custom filters and pick between YM2162 and YM3438 implementations, but the defaults sound absolutely divine. i keep putting on soundtracks and just marvelling at how clean it is. to be fair, iām using a cheap Fiio amp with the MiSTer to pull out the optical audio, as the 3.5mm line out audio is extra noisy - even noisier than my model 2 genesis.
comparing my HD Retrovision equipped US SNES (non-1CHIP) with the MiSTer core, again MiSTer comes up ahead. visually, the most common SNES models have a very soft output, (particularly horizontally), as well as a telltale faint vertical line where the output is slightly brighter - mostly visible in dark scenes e.g. the earthbound logo. MiSTerās video quality over the analog out, using VGA-to-component, is impressively crisp by contrast. the music playback for the SPC chip is nearly indistinguishable, but comparing darius twinās soundtrack, the MiSterās optical audio is just less noisy than the SNESā multi-out via RCA cables.
iāve felt no appreciable latency in anything iāve tested. things like flicky (arcade) feel immediately improved over running them in fbneo with runahead on the crt-pi setup - it is ultimately somewhat subtle, but the MiSTer still feels more responsive. there is a difference!
anyway, iāll continue to write about this. itās more exciting to me than i expected it would be
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an area where MiSTer represents a meaningful difference from real hardware and even Analogueās implementations: you can just plug whatever the fuck USB controller into this and it Just Works. robust remapping is also available. there is a script that enables 1000Hz polling if your controller supports it, which all the 8bitdo stuff seems to do gracefully (M30, SN30 Pro+, N30 arcade stick v1)
on my real genesis, i had to buy a specific dongle to get stuff working, and i still am stuck with needing the game to let me remap, or else hopefully one of the various modes of the M30 will have the right mapping - itās not always the case, however rare. the MiSTer sidesteps this issue in such a meaningfully better way. itās also such a refreshing feeling to have the convenience of what would normally require everdrives and the like, while also having the performance of real hardware.
i just put my real genesis away and iām wondering if the mega everdrive pro i ordered a few weeks ago wasnāt an act of futile hubris on my part. itās only advantage over the MiSTer is savestates, and those are surely looming for most cores.
currently, GBA is the only core with working save states, but GB and GBC implementations are in beta. Fast-forward, too, including options to try and keep the audio pitch consistent and another to mute audio entirely only during fast-forward segments
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all emulators should have this!!
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