Anybody have anything good to say about the first two Call of Juarez games? I’ve played the fourth (Gunslinger), which I really enjoyed, and I think I remember hearing the third (Cartel) was dire. But how about those first two? I can get them as a bundle for $1.49 on Fanatical
the first one is kind of shitty but bound in blood is ok
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is anyone using a nutrition tracking app that doesn’t send all of the information you enter to data brokers? i’d like to start tracking that stuff but a pen and paper workflow has a high start-up cost, while providing information to the adtech industry gives me hives
fuck it, pen and paper workflow
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For personal data organizing I usually go with the most popular open-source app. For me the main motivation is data portability, in case I eventually find a better solution or they raise their prices.
I haven’t done nutrition tracking myself but a quick github search turns up GitHub - kcal-app/kcal: the personal food nutrition journal as the most popular nutrition-specific one, as well as a number of general-purpose fitness+nutrition apps.
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oh this is cool. i might try running this on some heroku-like platform that still has a free tier
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I am going to a big retro enthusiast gaming thing called Midwest Gaming Classic. If I wanted to get into “retro gaming” what would be cool to do?
I mostly emulate everything so kinda unsure. Arcade sticks? Those flat hitboxes? Art? I honestly don’t know but I wanna buy things
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i would just buy what looks interesting and not spend too much money, because retro gaming has gotten so much more expensive in the last 5-10 years or so and these cons can really eat away at your wallet. as a relatively poor person, the most fun i had going to the Long Island retro gaming expo the past couple years with @isfet was just seeing what they had set up there to play, including a lot of old obscure computers and consoles. so i assume there will be equivalent things there. if you have any interest in retro game youtubers or whatever sometimes the spectacle of the panels they have there can be fun (and other times it can be incredibly depressing… lol).
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time to get into the x68000
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Get a Mister.
Alternately you are asking a far too big question are you interested in the games? Making games? What era? The criticism both modern and contemporary? The sickos that are buying PVMs or Retrotink4ks? Making an of the time desktop?
A gap I’ve found is actual criticism and cataloging of all the romhacks for specific games. I know this quickly pecludes becoming a sicko who is impossible for the outside world to understand. I keep trying to do this with hacks for NES Castlevania then get distracted.
On this very forum we had a big Game Boy thread 2 years ago, we managed to play and catalog EVERY PC Engine game last year, and currently @extrabastardformula is playing every Lynx game.
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Mister is cool.
I am still interested in making games.
I kinda want something that takes an analog input and outputs to HDMI all nice, but I also… don’t really need to? As I said I’m happy with emulating. My living room is nice and clean. Anything I buy will be for show, I guess.
Maybe I’ll look to try out modern PC controllers that are neat?
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This is the Retrotink 4K if you got 700 dollars, and either the Retrotink 5x or OSSC if you don’t.
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non-sickos should generally just get a Retrotink 5X Pro. upscaling 240p games to 4K… like. it’s sharp! but the damn thing is 700 dollars and the output of an RT4K is going to be utterly indistinguishable from the output of an RT5X to the vast, vast, vast majority of people.
like. honestly. can one even tell which is which in these screenshots without looking at the labels? https://twitter.com/retrotink2/status/1683238082232086528
it does matter what display you are using. some TVs have shitty upscaling or weird input latency on non-native res so you’d really want a native 4K signal… but i don’t think this is a huge factor overall, for most people.
5X Pro costs $325 versus the 4K’s $700. like… i am personally one of those absolute sickos, but even i still use a 2X Pro because it’s just not worth the extra dosh for what is ultimately a pretty minor IQ improvement. that, and it feels like tilting at windmills anymore, since the mister’s clean digital out looks better than nearly anything captured from original hardware, especially unmodified hardware
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Those pics just convinced me that emulation is in fact the correct way to do my retro gaming.
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i should mention that the RT4K does do very convincing CRT filters, and the 4K res is what really makes that sing, but like. do i want to pay 375 dollars more just for better CRT filters?
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Dumb question for a PC gaming newbie: after ages of beating my head against trying to figure out why Control looked/played like shit on my modest but OK (Ryzen 5600 + RX 6600…it can juuuuust run PS5 tier games, a little) PC, I opted to use DirectX11 instead of 12 and…it’s perfect? Textures actually load, the game doesn’t chug, it’s great! Is there a quick layman’s explanation as to why that is, or is it just a case of “running the newest thing is not always the best option”?
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AMD is not good at novel API implementations (because Nvidia has more money than god and AMD is usually an implementer after the fact)
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Makes me wonder how many PC games I’ve written off have just been ones I’ve been running on the wrong settings. I was cranking down the rendering resolution and texture quality and all kinds of settings to try to get it to run close to 60 fps in DX12, and it’s all on Ultra in DX11 at a steady 60.
the boring version of this is you only need to turn on DX12 in Control if you want raytracing and if you’re on an AMD card, you don’t want to turn on raytracing
otherwise, It Depends on the game (AMD is really performant in Starfield! Nvidia has a crushing lead in the Spiderman ports!) and generally AMD is pretty competitive on raster (read: no raytracing) performance on similarly positioned SKUs
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DX12 reframes the definition of various graphics operations to better fit newer GPUs. By being a closer match to the underlying hardware, it not only unlocks more features but also means the hardware can be used more directly and efficiently.
The mirror-image of that is if you’re using it on an slightly older GPU, certain DX12 calls the game uses might have no direct hardware equivalent, and require the driver to patch together a sequence of different hardware operations.
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