RG351V with 351elec firmware.
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Having a desk has given me mad dreams.
Is there any functional difference in 2021 between a monitor and a TV? What should I be looking for feature wise.
Might jump into the hardware thread soon.
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Yes. TVs tune their processing to display video as well as possible whereas monitors prioritize things like text legibility, color accuracy, input delay, and response time.
What are you going to use the monitor for? e.g. work with spreadsheets/docs, photos, video, games (what kind), are you going to connect a console?
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Editting podcasts, emulators, watching movies, as this will be the second screen in the house somehow figuring out how to get basic TV out of it would be the dream.
OK, in that case the key questions are:
- size (most commonly 24" or 27", sometimes 32")
- resolution (1080p as a floor, 1440p as a nice-to-have step up for more āroomā with multiple windows especially on a 27")
- I/O (what output does your computer support? do you want more than one HDMI port for consoles? do you want built-in speakers or a 3.5mm jack? do you want a USB hub?)
Beyond those youāre talking about qualities like contrast, color space, etc. that are very hard to perceive if youāre not comparing monitors often.
Almost every monitor sold today has at least one HDMI port and most have on-board audio processing so getting a second āTVā out of it is easy.
Also, I know you are on the record as a frame rate not-seer but thereās a wrinkle for emulators where using āblack frame insertionā (also marketed as āultra low motion blurā or āextra low motion blurā) helps give a more CRT-like illusion of motion. The display strobes the backlight or inserts a black frame every other frame to mimic how a CRT draws in each line so the eye perceives it more fluidly.
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glad to see last remnant get a recommendation as it was also on my radar but i couldnāt tell if it was weird and cool or weird and dreadful. seeing as i own both dragonās dogma and ys 8 i think i should put some time into those first, but if i get a real hankering Iāll keep last remnant in mind.
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The Cotton Saturn Tribute Collection (which isnāt exactly a ācollectionā as they are all separate releases apparently) comes out in a few days so Iāve been checking them out to see what the deal is, and am a bit confused. It seems that rather than being both completely different games with similar gameplay, instead Cotton Boomerang is something of a āremixā of Cotton 2 with the same levels / bosses etc but plays very differently? Cotton 2 seems to have some interesting and complex mechanics in it, while Boomerang is a more straight forward shooter with a team mechanic (or something).
so I think my question is, how ādifferentā are they exactly, is it worth getting both or is one of them rendered obsolete by the other?
(and I guess question 2, should I get Guardian Force?)
Is apple arcadeā¦ any good?
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there are a handful of really decent games on there, but even then theyāre crowded out by the amount of forced whimsy apple funded indie developers to crank out, and even many of the good ones are made worse by the small screen of an iPhone, which is the most worth-owning apple device for most people
I liked mutazione a lot though
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basically I would say that dollar for dollar, appleās approach to production design is overall worse than most others trying to make a subscription model work (as with Apple TV), but that doesnāt mean thereās no good stuff
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A big plus is that theyāre mobile games guaranteed to be rid of ads or āenergyā (time/mtx) systems. Those have all but disappeared otherwise.
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Itās really weird how thereās this abundance of titles and despite living in an Apple coverage bubble, no one has ever hyped up any of them (edit: actually thatās not true, the Frenzic sequel is the only one that has, mostly because it comes from a long-time Mac developer)
I can only really name 2-3 things Iām vaguely interested in, and it just feels like such a weird high variance environment that I canāt bring myself to even start the free trial for it
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Amazon used to have this app store called Amazon Underground that advertised all their games would be free and have no micro transactions, and they were all modified versions of grindy micro transaction laden games with some sort of infinite money button so you could ābuyā the micro transaction boosts as much as you wanted. It was really weird.
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Amazon Underground sounds like a similar ripped-out-of-context as playing arcade games on mame. Just like press F12 to insert coin. I wound up doing psychological accounting (like, Iām not good enough for a 1CC yet, but Iāll still limit myself to 5 credits this session to keep the game reasonably balanced)
If I set no coin limit the result in games like Metal Slug 3 would get really weird. Like in the late game it was tempting to die on purpose to get grenades refilled to 10 and kill the bosses a little faster
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I got a free 3 month trial of Apple Arcade when I got a new phone, and I wasnāt impressed. Thereās a real curation problem there ā a TON of random games Iāve never heard of, and no real way to know where to start. It seems like the vast majority of games on there are perfectly mediocre. Granted, it would help if people I knew or journalists I follow ever paid any attention to it, but as it is I just donāt ever hear about anything interesting on the platform.
Fantasian was an OK way to play an RPG when I was on vacation and only had my phone for gaming. I fell off of it before finishing part 1, and I canāt be bothered to return to it now that part 2 is out.
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Mini Motorways is very good and is better on a touchscreen.
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The thing about platforms with a curation problem is that they quickly acquire a quality problem as well. Putting myself in the shoes of a developer, it probably feels pretty demotivating to invest blood, sweat and tears to make a really sublime game if itās just going to get lost in a sea of twee regardless
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I been kinda messing around with using Reshade with Windows pixel games. CRT Royale, Lotteās, various other Retroarch-popular CRT-sim shaders have been ported over to work in various degrees. CRT Royale in particular has been a little disappointing as there doesnāt seem to be an easy way to downscale/feed it the actual low-res stuff it is expecting to do its variable beam height magic, yada yada yada. But the other less sophisticated type ones function as-expected.
But anyways, I bought a hardware edid emulator hdmi dongle to simulate having a 4k monitor, which I do not own, plugged into my computer in order to 4k Steam-stream to my 4k Samsung TVās native Steamlink app, which after some fiddling gets a nice enough 4k 70-80mbit picture going. But itās just not enough 4k data to cleanly render all them scanlines and shadow mask stuff, stuff just wreaks pure 4k havoc on a poor codec, without artifacting.
Look, the solution is def. just buy a really long HDMI cable and figure out how to route it. But. But, like, say, just talking out loud:
If a feller Steam streamed from one windows pc to another windows pc, could he jigger up Reshade to run on the client-instanceās window? Does it have itās own exe? 
I could just be typing this into google, sure, yes; or just like, trying it. Maybe this would be simpler with one of them other stream apps.
reshade runs through a games dllās so I think as long as youāre streaming the game the image is going to be at the mercy of streaming video compression, and thereās no way to have the affect only applied after itās made itās way to the 2nd display unless somebody invents some crt shader thing you run independently thatās just applied to your entire monitor all the time
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youāre probably right for 3d stuff, but on the client computer I just pointed Reshade at the conveniently named streaming_client.exe in the Steam folder and itā¦ just worked.
i donāt even know if this surface pro 1 bad boy can even output a 4k video signal let alone grunt through decompressing a 4k stream and running a reshade filter at the same time fluidly, so perhaps not immediately useful, but interesting.
also, i mean, using an entire additional windows computer to run the stream and do the filtering, probably actually all the 2D stuff that Iād want to play with a crt shader could run natively on any computer strong enough to stream+filter it, anyway? maybe not. probably. gotta really squint to see the use case.