_NetNomad

+1 for Bandcamp. they often run a “bandcamp friday” event where they waive their cut of all music sold that day, so almost everything (payment processors still take a cut) goes to the artist. there are also self-hosted alternatives to bandcamp like faircamp

thank you!

can anyone recommend a good read into the actual developments happening with ATproto as of late? i’ve seen a lot of insisting lately that things are changing/have changed but no one’s saying what exactly is or has changed

i dunno, you really think people would tune in weekly to watch a show about a four-person team going through a portal? seems like a stretch

the history of the xbox layout is fascinating and frustrating. i got a little carried away, so wall of text incoming, sorry! TL;DR the XBox layout is the SEGA six button layout with two buttons chopped off

once upon a time, SEGA released the SG-1000, which had two buttons on it’s joystick. it didn’t have a D-Pad because it came out the very same day as the NES, but future revisions- the SG-1000 II and the Master System- would come with a joypad very similar to Nintendo’s. The numbers were not labelled on the SGs, but on the Master System and SK-3000 computer they were assigned 1 and 2, with 1 corresponding to B (and also labelled start) and 2 corresponding to A.

the Mega Drive/Genesis was backwards compatible with the MS in a few ways, one of which was controllers. the Mega Drive controller is mechanically a Master System controller with two extra buttons, one being Start and the other being… A. despite 1 and 2 mapping to B and A in Nintendoland, SEGA relabelled those buttons B and C on their new controller- plug your MD controller into a Master System and A does nothing! notably the MD also reverses the letter order from right to left to left to right, so it goes A B and C.

i’m not sure what was in the water that generation, because SEGA was not alone in their malarky. the SNES had A and B buttons right where you’d expect them but for NES ports and sequels often used X as B and B as A. despite the fact that perfectly good A and B buttons in the same orientation as the NES II and Gameboy were right there. sorry muscle memory! the Virtual Boy retained the regular A B layout, so one wonders if button position was a contested point for Miyamoto and Yokoi.

but i digress- the MD later tacked a second row of buttons, X Y and Z, to a second row above A B C and this carried over to the Saturn’s default and analog controller. the analog controller was based on the Micomsoft (not Microsoft) XE-1AP, a third party analog controller for the MD and JP microcomputers that retained the Nintendo A and B position and bizarrely has E1 and E2 buttons on the left hand side in a mirrored configuration. the Saturn analog controller however used the familiar MD/Saturn right hand six button array.

so here we are, and SEGA is collaborating with Microsoft (not Micomsoft) on their next generation console. everyone at SEGA had their own pet theory for why the Saturn didn’t take over the world and one that kept coming up is that the controller was too convoluted. the undisputed winner of last generation used the same four-button array used by the SNES, which overtook the MD at the tail end of the generation before. the obvious move would be to mimic that, so despite the C button being the first and main button on the SG-1000, the “real A button,” it and the Z button above them got the boot, creating the Dreamcast controller. when the Dreamcast failed, Microsoft decided they weren’t out of the fight just yet and early plans for their DirectX Box included backwards compatability with the Dreamcast, leading it to have the same button layout but with a size more akin to the Saturn analog and XE-1AP controllers. Nintendo would return to the SNES layout the next generation for the DS and Wii Classic Controller, and things have been steady for the in the two decades since

and that’s why we’re stuck arguing which layout is “right” until the end of time!

most people join the fedi to get away from shit like bluesky, so until they become actually decentralized i think most fedi instances should block/ban bridges if anything. the current status quo of bridges being around for those who want/need them but are easily ignorable for the rest of us is probably the best case scenario right now

but at least your drunk uncle won’t boil the oceans in the process too

i think you’re mixing up a few different things here. beam-racing was really only a thing with the 2600 and stopped once consoles had VRAM, which is essentially a frame-buffer. but even then many games would build the frame in a buffer in regular RAM and then copy everything into VRAM at the vblank. in other cases you had two frames in VRAM and would just swap between them with a pointer every other frams. if it took longer than one frame to build the image, you could write your interrupt handler to just skip every other or every three vblank interrupts, which is how a game like super hang-on on the megadrive runs at 15 FPS even though the VDP is chucking out 60 frames a second. you could also disable interrupts when the buffer was still being filled, which is how you end up with slowdown on certain games when too many objects were on the screen. too many objects could also lead to going over the limits of how many sprites you can have on a scanline, which is why things would vanish- bit that is it’s own seperate issue. if you don’t touch VRAM between interrupts then the image shown last frame will show this frame as well

i think threadiverse is the move. partly because it’s already in regular use and partky because it’s very self-explanatory. forumverse could have some legs to it now that more traditional forum software like nodebb and soon flarum support federation now, maybe it could refer to the broader category containing traditional forums and the threadiverse, but i feel like leaving out the “fedi” part kinda defeats the point (threadiverse at least partially maintains it by being a pun on it). maybe fediforums is the way to go?

it’s a whole 'nother can of worms but ironically in my experience the “verse” part of threadiverse is more offputting than the “thread” part because people think “metaverse,” but that’s just anecdotal and the term fediverse itself already has too much momentum to easily fall out of fashion

you spend most of your time “hopping on a quick call,” replying to an email reiterating what you said last time, and doing the needful

longs

i definitely agree with the sentiment, but “USians” looks very awkward and “youessians” is even more awkard to say. i’d rather get rid of the name america altogether, both for the country and the two continents, and use indigenous names for everything instead of honoring someone involved in early colonization. granted there are many indigenous languages between both continents so finding something that works for and respects everyone might be difficult but if we could it’s two birds with one stone

the reason they don’t combine into the worst no no word is because of an integer overflow

you can just subscribe to them all. that way, if one instance goes down, or dies out, or makes nonsensical moderation decisions, you still have the others. it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

hi it me john mastodon can u send me 200 vbucks so i can keep making website

EVERY

VILLIAN

IS

LEMONS

i wrote out a whole big thing and then my phone ate it so here’s the sparknotes: game design, both hardware and software, is a dialogue, with ideas bouncing back and forth between companies. none of your examples exist in a vacuum or were “never before seen,” nintendo just tend to be the ones who strike gold when they try something. with SEGA out of the game and sony and microsoft focusing solely on horsepower, the hardware dialogue has mostly stopped. it took a while to be noticable because consoles start developement way before they’re released, so it’s only catching up with us now. with new (sort of) entrants into gaming hardware like steam and retro handheld manufacturers entering the fray, things will likely get interesting again- but just like how we’re only feeling the drought now, it’ll take a while for existing hardware to catch up with the dialogue

i imagine they have a judiciary system, what with all those scales