Have any cool games ever been made in CHIP-8?
there are (of course) Arma mods for this from years ago
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I swear this isnât some sort of underhanded Linux proselytizing, but - is there a good reason my games have almost consistently run better since swapping to CachyOS than they did when I was using Windows 11? Is all the background stuff in Windows really that heavy? Or did I somehow really fuck up my drivers in Windows?
Iâm not complaining (apart from some stuff I just canât get working like I used to), but I guess Iâm surprised is all.
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It felt very Punch-Out to me
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thatâs more or less how the fight or die system in Borderlands works; in order to stop players from gaming the system, you have less time to score a kill on every successive down
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One potential reason is that Windowsâ strong backwards compatibility does come with a cost. A lot of routines are bloated with extra branch instructions to cover every possible eventuality on niche hardware/software. This does not always matter, but it can affect real-world performance if the weakest link in your hardware is the CPU.
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I thought the shims were applied dynamically, when the kernel detects a matching application was launched, and patched onto no-op instructions. so for most software workloads itâs transparent. for hardware & drivers, for sure itâs definitely bloated
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Yeah. But realistically though, even in Microsoft-authored code, I wouldnât assume itâs totally free still. With the vast number of possible back-compat bugs, some of them will be handled with extremely well-engineered solutions with no noticeable performance impact, others an exhausted programmer will be like âlet me just add an if statement here and close the bugâ
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it is somewhat unusual that they would consistently run all that much better â most new games especially should be slightly to significantly more performant in Windows and there was probably a problem with your setup otherwise â but the overhead of running translation layers has come down progressively over the last decade between better semaphore sync and native Vulkan backends and trivializing the load from having one thread doing ABI mapping. there are a lot of documented cases where Linuxâs implementation of older DX9 stuff is absolutely no worse than Windows drivers that are now functionally emulating it too, for example.
and, of course, itâs still hard to recommend a platform that has near performance parity when it might still have unsupported or unmaintained compatibility issues. but the amount of work thatâs gone into Wine and Proton and Crossover totally rules, and itâs great for devs that no one needs to build for non Windows targets anymore.
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Others feel free to respond but @Felix I know you have the most particular opinions about 16bit SRPGs. Where texturally does Shining Force 1/2/Gaiden (same game) fall between Fire Emblem/Ogre/FFT. As a huge Sega fan I carry an unnecessarily sharp knife against Shining Force. I think because Sega fans hold it up. I fully believe it fails as an entertaining game.
The levels are too big and outside of one stage (the one with the laser canon) it is never the point that it takes 6 turns to your first engagement. The AI is dumb as hell and engaging your brain cells even a little you see its little patterns. Then it becomes the most route trying to maximize experience and kite enemies into your guys. That last part is SRPGs but it should be fun.
The Shining Force games look great and they have wonderful to stare at characters with that lovely icon menu system.
I guess I can also ask the forum are Fire Emblem or FEDA 16bit good games?
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the 16bit fire emblems are The Good Ones
I thought FEDA was the successor Not-Fire Emblem but its successor Not-Shining Force. What am I thinking of?
feda seems cool because if you fight evil-like youâll get sexy evil party members (judging by the portraits) instead of the usual doe-eyed honorable clowns
could regret these words fast depending on the actual context of the game
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Should probably just check Kurisuâs blog again for all the answers.
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are you thinking of Tear Ring Saga, the not-FE from one of the FE creators that was FE enough that Nintendo sued
they probably shouldnât have tried calling it Emblem Saga
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someone just dropped this user title on the ground, wow
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Tactics Ogre is by far, by far the best of the 16 bit SRPGs in terms of story and mechanical complexity and is pretty widely regarded as such as at last. there is not, imo, a huge quality delta between the others⌠Fire Emblem has always had a real famicom mindset through the years that Nintendo has more or less kept up, making it at least initially pretty tight and punishing, so even as itâs stayed pretty simplistic, itâs challenging enough. I agree Shining Force is pretty slack in comparison and is not super worth playing at this point; most of what it had going for it is that Sega actually bothered to localize it in the early 90s unlike almost everything else of that era (Langrisser, Front Mission, etc).
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Shining Force is carried by
- that camera angle during battle actions (especially for spells)
- The sprite art
- The legions of characters
Everything else is pretty whatever to bad
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Maybe the fights in Shining Force could have been redeemed with a way to check turn order, but as it is, turns feel like they come randomly and thereâs little way to engage with the battles meaningfully, even compared to its early japanese TRPG contemporaries
I really like moving around in Shining Force though, the graphics + blocky square by square movement are lovely. But I get the same simple joy from Metal Max Returns which is much better
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shining force 3 has beautiful polygons and a âbuild your own character shipsâ game mechanic
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