Pixels are not Square

Iacus · December 9, 2016, 12:08pm

I was just going to post about the awful typography, particularly the logo

Father.Torque · December 9, 2016, 4:12pm

That melted, clawed, Lovecraftian Samus

azurelore · December 9, 2016, 4:18pm

Yes, exactly.

Also, are those, uh, genuine game players on the cover?

u_u · December 9, 2016, 4:39pm

…maybe it’s the editorial staff?

u_u · December 9, 2016, 5:02pm

this is a true tangent, and for that i apologize, but the weirdly intense copy in that magazine article reminded me of this thing that has been going around on twitter recently. i can’t look at it without laughing.

Brooks · December 9, 2016, 5:06pm

Yeah that has it all

Brooks · December 9, 2016, 5:07pm

Language owns

lune · December 9, 2016, 6:27pm

comics had to be invented so that jack kirby had somewhere to put all his ideas

The_Blueberry_Hill · December 9, 2016, 6:42pm

GanjaHess · December 9, 2016, 9:43pm

There’s so many potentially awesome band names on that map.

botagel · December 9, 2016, 10:51pm

“Strange Fire Area” speaks to me.

GanjaHess · December 9, 2016, 10:56pm

I’m a fan of ‘Insect Revolution’ myself.

boojiboy7 · December 9, 2016, 11:02pm

Kangarat Murder Society tho

GanjaHess · December 9, 2016, 11:09pm

Orangutan Surfing Civilization.

I absolutely have to check Kamandi out now, because this seems too awesome to have ever existed. I wonder if the Thundarr creative team was inspired by this?

lune · December 9, 2016, 11:57pm

wasn’t kirby on the thundarr creative team?

Iacus · December 10, 2016, 1:25am

It’s kind of amazing how much this is like a six year old invented it

(tell me I wasn’t the only kid drawing stupid maps like these when they were six)

GanjaHess · December 10, 2016, 2:12am

Huh, so he was! I had no idea.

That show suddenly makes sense now

Hojulas · December 10, 2016, 11:53am

To kinda sorta link your tangent to the original topic, the feeling I get from pixel perfect old games is a lot of like seeing old comics reprinted without the artifacts of older/cheaper printing methods. Visible moire is the scanlines of print.

azurelore · December 10, 2016, 4:02pm

Calling for a ben-day emulator filter.

Victor · May 31, 2017, 10:02pm

Wanted another smaller setup to play vertical games on, and happened across a 2005 1.4ghz eMac on Craigslist. Was fairly filthy upon arrival, gave it a cleaning and some wet-sanding + buffing with the trusty Porter Cable 7424XP. Went ahead and upgraded to the max addressable 2gb of ram, and added a bluetooth receiver.

It’s running 10.5.8, the latest OS revision to support its G4 PPC. Currently using SDLMAME 0.155 and 0.168 (still haven’t settled, .168 being the latest available PPC build) and an older revision of the QMC2 frontend, which is a bit of a pain.

One of the things I didn’t realize before driving out to pick this 50 pound hunk of sweet shiny plastic up is that apparently the 17" displays in these only sync up to ~72khz signals - I had just assumed it could handle down to 31khz stuff like most PC CRTs, but no dice. With such a small window to work with, the eMac display can’t do nice and tidy double refresh rates to hit the low resolutions, gotta use super-high weird ones.

I’m using SwitchResX 4.0 to create the custom modelines, it’s a pretty handy tool. Still haven’t finalized how I’m going to handle passing resolutions from the/a frontend to MAME or what the workflow is going to be there, but for now I’m just manually switching to a 2560x240@256hz super-res. Interesting looking closeup, this is a more typical shadow mask tube as opposed to the aperture grilles of Trinitrons and Mitsubishi sets.

I’ve always liked the way these machines look, a great peak plastic Apple take on 60s future-modernist tubes.