On eBay that one is currently going for 6x the price of the earlier version. ; )
I hadn’t been paying attention to DC mods because I didn’t think I had a way to dump GD-ROMs. Looks like nowadays you can do that via an SD card adapter plugged into that funky port next to the a/v port and under the power socket on the back of the DC! Have ordered an SD adapter 'cause it sure would be nice to have a fallback (ie emulating via Flycast; don’t think I’d worry about a GDemu thing*) for the inevitable day the optical drive croaks. ^ _^
^ * Hm well currently we’re at +2 frames delay via emulation; we’ll see how I feel about it whenever the day comes–maybe by then things will be better ^ _^
Update – see five or so posts down but once I actually tried my own test, I got the opposite: 5 frames of delay on the DC, vs only 3 in Flycast. = ooo
Blizzard Entertainment is one of the most profitable videogame companies in the world. They last developed an original game in 2016, Overwatch. Before that, their last original game was Diablo in 1997. They have released 15 full launch products since Overwatch and every single one of them is a sequel of some kind. It’s a bad world.
One thing I think about a lot is the time I mentioned Lost Vikings and my friend said “oh yeah the space-shooter minigame in the barcade in Starcraft 2 right? I played a ton of that”
I got curious about a popular little program and third-party driver claiming to remove 3ms of input delay from a DS4 used in Windows, so I gave it a shot. According to another popular little program, using the first program to increase Windows’ USB polling rate or whatever of the DS4 did indeed reduce its delay from 3.5ms to 0.5ms.
And the USB port began emitting a faint, high-pitched whine.
nobody ever noticed because usually the sound of the whine is covered up by the sound of fighting game players complaining about some other issue with the PC setup
Been thinking about how I feel about video games the same way I do the menu at Taco Bell.
Like, I’m very aware it’s just the same dozen or so ingredients being rearranged into a handful of configurations that combine familiarity and novelty into an appealing package, but like, that doesn’t mean I get tired of it. Just as every couple of weeks I could go for a Doritos Locos Taco, a few times a year I’ll play a metroidvania or something. They’re both enjoyable in the moment and pretty quickly forgotten until the next time I get that hankering, out of nowhere.
how even by the standards of their contemporaries mgs1+2 in particular are contrary to the way they might be advertised or cut for trailers actually pretty cumbersome games to actually fight any enemies at all in to such an extent combat is best circumvented when that’s a choice… military sci-fi action games where every gunfight is unwinnable except for selected miniboss or boss encounters
nonvideogame thing I think about a lot: you and I are the people on this site most familiar with Bill Hicks’ entire ouvre (all one and a half albums of it) and for me it’s because I’m an edgy white boy and for you it’s because you’re Texan
Oh. Ordered one from Amazon and turns out it’s being shipped from China. Should’a paid attention to the expected delivery date (5-7 weeks in the future) on the item listing, probably.
Man, free shipping goes far these days.
I wonder what percentage of Amazon listings are based in China.
That “+2 frames delay via emulation” was what I picked up from reading a few scattered Google results. But in my own just-now preliminary rough test, in JP SoulCalibur I got 5 frames of input delay on DC, and 3 frames of input delay in Flycast on my laptop.* Used HRAPV 2017 stick for both.
Well heck! That was with vsync off of course, so there’s some tearing, but jeez I’ll take that, that’s nuts. Stays the same in Flycast even if I turn on widescreen and crank up the internal resolution to the 9x max it allows me (7680x4320). This is mind-blowing. If I can get the games I could conceivably want to play dumped (SC, JoJo’s, CvS1&2, MvC2, GGX), Flycast will be my Dreamcast and my actually DC’ll be a laptop stand** and standby GD-ROM dumper.
*I might be adding a frame or so in my count; what really matters to me is the comparative score. I’m starting counting delay after the first full frame AFTER the button on the stick is fully depressed, 'cause not having a wired-up LED, that’s kind of the earliest sure sign I can read in the ~60 fps cell phone video I’m counting from: so button down, advance a frame, no more downward movement, that’s frame “zero,” advance a frame, and then this is the frame I count as 1 frame of delay, and so on.
**(The DC has been just about perfect as a laptop stand; even the slight convexity of the lid probably aids laptop cooling ^ _^ – I don’t use the actual laptop keyboard so the rounded wobble doesn’t matter.)
Oh shoot if it’s really able to drop the input delay below DC levels I’ll have to try DC Double Impact and 3rd Strike too; those have cool additional options on DC hardware but at least several frames more input lag than other platforms.
the starfield 60 vs 30fps bs seems like continued insecurity over being compared to film, like 30 = good cause films use low framerates and films are a more elevated medium and 60 is bad because it looks ‘too much like a videogame’ (do films get critiqued for looking too much like a film?)
feel like the mainstream view is that framerate, or just ‘imperfect representation’ itself is something to look past or a hinderance to the pure transmission of game design that is apparently what the ‘goal’ of the medium is-- u see this sentiment a lot generally i think ie whether controls should be seamless interfaces for pure will / flow vs it being more like controlling a creature and wrestling with the parameters as object.
at this point i think it mostly comes down to how widespread variable refresh rate screens are?
so long as there’s a healthy motion smoothing mechanism in there: basically the quicker you want me to do things, the tighter i need i/o response to be
i have always maintained that framerate is an important part of a work, and with intentionality, can be used in interesting ways. this view is vanishingly rare, though, even here; i tried to argue about the potential for games to use restricted framerates as effect and the response was unenthusiastic, to say the least xD
a lot of this comes from my experiences with Stunt Race FX, Wave Race 64, and Banjo-Tooie. there are these sort of dreamlike qualities that low framerates can manifest, and they are interesting and valuable.
it’s like technical craft in music. you can play a metronomic arpeggio with precise articulation - there are some “objective” qualities to the “craft” which can be graded - but i get much joy from a “sloppy” arpeggiation just the same. my problem is the conflation of low framerate=bad. as if framerate is something that ideally climbs ever higher and any decision to restrict that inflation is a technical failure
