“mad” is a stretch, I was contrasting analogue’s pocket sales pitch tagline of “no emulation” with an FPGA implementation that is – as usual – markedly less complete than mature software emulation, whether or not it’s narrowly more accurate
most FPGA developers aren’t, like, actively anti-emulation, but the stereotype of reinventing the wheel like this usually rears its head when people try to actually come up with a sales pitch for this stuff
Emulation is one of those things that has an unsavory aura even as it continues to remain popular and relevant because it’s a powerful and pragmatic solution that only fails to solve made-up problems that bother people but barely matter in reality
Like Electron
(dual-action trolling complete)
I guess I don’t think of audio/video playback like I do roms even if it makes sense the same principle. The idea here instead building a program/emulator to complete a task they have to “build” a logic board?
Maybe it is just above my paygrade that FPGA is electronically building a hardware board but I get confused when there is also plenty of software RAM/ROM also happening. I guess it is all 1s and 0s though.
yeah, I mean, fixed-function AV decoding is both similar and not to emulating 6502 code on a generic platform; one difference is that no one would ever suggest that you need dedicated hardware for it, because there are no real latency or frametiming issues, because there’s no user input, audio playback is entirely portable, etc. – the mpeg2 (dvd video standard)-on-fpga implementation linked above is totally academic and there’s been no uptake that I can see.
you can do a lot in software! you have to go out of your way not to! but video decoding is actually illustrative in this regard, if you compare decoding a 4k hevc in software (which uses like 2-3 cores out of 4 on my 3570k for realtime playback) to decoding it in hardware with a GPU that has fixed-function support for 4k hevc (which uses a fraction of a 2W module that’s cheap enough to ship on every GPU with support for a few popular hardcoded video codecs), you can see the advantages of dedicated hardware, and an FPGA is theoretically any kind of dedicated hardware.
also I just reread your post and I think it’s helpful to bear in mind that the “playback” aspect is computationally free on modern hardware, once you have your iframes and waveforms you’re just outputting them to a buffer, it’s the decoding of high resolution codecs that’s analogous to emulation
I also like to mentally locate FPGAs within the history of coprocessors, the same as I do modern GPUs as compared with optional FPUs in the late 80s and early 90s. GPUs can do a lot of computationally intensive operations much faster than general purpose CPUs (in part because they’re just highly parallel and designed to throw off 2-5x as much energy), and even then, the set of operations that have proven worth porting to GPUs to the extent that they work on the average person’s computer is pretty small.
But also because they’re far more efficient per flop I would note. The 5x more energy thing is an instance of the Jevons effect
this is what my brain is hardwired to see on a playstation controller
I’m really slow so I was excited because I thought this was some exceptional controller noted enthusiast offalynne found but then I zoomed lol
I don’t care for the PlayStation glyphs because no one calls 
“cross” and directions to press the “bumper” and “trigger” are better than the odds you guess R1 right. (This is based on my experience watching my stepdad play Detroit: Become Human over my polite suggestions.)
I think I’ve seen some folks say it is bad design but I like the Switch convention of showing a diamond of four circles and highlighting one if you need to show it on screen. On the other hand on-screen prompts are really ugly if you’re using KBM or any custom controller.
Do some people ID the buttons by color primarily? Microsoft must think so because they put four little dots inside the face button cluster on the custom colors. Nintendo must have decided against them following the GameCube.
I had a Scene-It quiz game for the 360 that used the colors to correspond to multiple choice questions on cheap “buzzer” controllers with very faint legends in the buttons. I wish I had those still but who knows if they’d work.
The 360 legends were much better than the Xbox pads since. Little mancala gems.
I guess I must not personally care because I use a 5x12 grid keyboard with blank uniform-profile keycaps (I could go for some homing keys)
Oops
For me personally it’s exactly the opposite, it’s easy to keep track of 1 and 2 but impossible for me to remember the subjective definitions of whatever the fuck a “bumper” or a “trigger” is
yeah I silently resent and am still periodically confused by every xbox convention that replaced a PS1 convention
The trigger is… curved… like a trigger
I don’t think it matters for most of us, like, we know R1 but the experience of seeing those trademark David Cage QTEs with a novice was interesting
Not on a dualshock!
But yeah controller iconography and layout is completely inscrutable to any normal person and whether it’s “1” or “bumper” is really the least of their problems
I always pause to remember when a game instruction tells me to press the “trigger” but have no issue doing a QTE that tells me to press RT
Today I learned that the “B” in RB stands for “bumper”
I have told people to “press the right bumper” before and they have looked at me with a tinge of hate saying “I don’t know what that is.” One of those people may have been my wife. Imagine how successful I was when I said “press R3.”
at least they’ve mostly been consistent about it
Nintendo went from “the Z button is now some bastard lone vestigial mushy shoulder button” to “the Z button(s) are now bonus shoulder buttons” to “the Z buttons are called triggers (again) but are just shoulder buttons”
I’ve had a switch for like two years and I still mess up which is R and which is ZR.
Don’t forget about SR while you’re at it.
Oh well that’s easy, R is switch costume and ZR is jump
