FM Chiptune Musician | DX Complex Staff | SEGA, MSX and Retro Tech Dork | He/Him

Formerly _NetNomad@kbin.run
Microblogging at _NetNomad@oldbytes.space
https://netnomad.dxcomplex.com/

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • 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









  • 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