Should you bother with... mini PCs?
DdCno1 @ DdCno1 @beehaw.org Posts 39Comments 963Joined 2 yr. ago
DdCno1 @ DdCno1 @beehaw.org
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They are essentially like gaming laptops in this regard.
You might be interested in this ROM hack, which enables GBA enhancements that the developers themselves came up with for later re-releases.
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3462/
If you're using an emulator, use this patch on top:
Since my last experience with anything Pascal was decades ago and hardly in-depth, please excuse the noobish question: Would it be as simple as modifying the files with the right IDE or is there more to it? I'd totally be down to translating the game.
Apparently, it depends on whether or not a specific BIOS setting is available. I don't think there was on this board, but I might be wrong, since I already had the plug lying around and immediately used it when QuickSync refused to work. If you haven't had any experience with this before, it can definitely be annoying though.
There's just a big ol' heat sink covering most of the board. Even under sustained 100% CPU load, I've never had it getting any hotter than 72° C, which is not even close to the maximum operating temperature of 105°. It's sitting under a desk in a corner with practically no air flow, almost completely enclosed from all sides.
You might need some limited active cooling if you are using the device for gaming, like a large and slow fan as shown in the video, but I wouldn't be surprised if you can get away without it.
Take this seriously, people. I've been there and it caused tons of issues on an older server of mine. That's why I was very adamant about my current system having built-in error correction for its RAM.
Not to one-up you, but I'm doing the same with an Odroid H4+ board (no case yet, although I'll probably 3D-print one), which has the exact same transcoding feature as part of its Core i3-N305. It can handle multiple 4K HDR streams just fine (at least in theory - I'm only serving three users at once at most and none of them are using 4K HDR) - all while being passively cooled and using about three smartphones worth of power. Note that I had to use a dummy HDMI plug in order to get the hardware decoder to kick in, since I am using this as a headless server.
I paid €240 for it new, which is a steal (although you have to get SODIMM DDR5 memory for it, which isn't that cheap). On the official website, it's available for $139, but that's without shipping and import duties from South Korea.
Granted, apart from the transcoding feature, general-purpose performance is not even close to your i7, but I'm using less than half as much power for the same job. If you have an i7-1260P, you're about 70% ahead in synthetic benchmark, but my little i3 is still an 8-core CPU that has about 25% more CPU processing power than an old i7-4790k that I was using on my main PC (including for gaming) until last year. Since I am limited by my storage array going through a single SATA cable anyway, that's fine by me, especially since this thing replaced a significantly less performant Intel Atom-based mini PC I was previously using for the same purpose. My priorities were having multiple SATA ports, being low cost, efficient, quiet and small - and in that order.
People have also used the same board as a normal PC and reasonably capable low-end gaming/emulation machine, by the way. You can get a case that looks like a Nintendo GameCube straight from the manufacturer. Here's an overview video that includes it being used for this purpose.
Not a bad guess, but this is actually a freeware turn-based strategy game from ~2004 (at least version 1.1 is from that year, according to file dates).
Essentially a slightly enhanced computer version of Risk, set in Europe and played against three other human or AI players, the former either in local hot seat or e-mail multiplayer. You conquer countries with your troops (there's only one type of unit). Larger countries provide more funds per round, which are needed to maintain your existing troops (a large army can quickly drain your coffers), train new ones and build factories in countries so that you can troops closer to the front lines. The unique mechanic is that the success of your troops in battle is determined not just by numerical superiority, but also by how much support they are enjoying in the country where the fighting is happening. You start out with 100% support in your starting alliance of countries, but every other country will have 0% support for your noble cause at first, which means your troops will suffer high losses against the entrenched neutral (don't attack, don't replenish their troops) and AI players. Only after you have conquered a country (by reducing its defenders to 0), you can slowly increase your popularity through occupation - the more troops there are in the country, the quicker your population will grow. Hearts and minds and all that. What you end up doing is forming chains of troops marching from one country to the next each round (visible as arrows in the screenshots below), because factories are expensive and also because you want to maintain a large number of troops in countries close to the front lines. You'll primarily produce in your starting factories in the beginning and then send them from e.g. France to Germany, Germany to Poland, Poland to then maybe a few other European countries you're defending or attacking.
It's simple, yet addictive. The AI is just competent enough at the highest difficulty to not be a complete pushover. If you're anything like me or my friends back in the day, you'll want to play "just one more round" a few times in a row. Blue Empire II was developed by a young brother-sister team. It was only ever available in German (hardly an issue, given how self-explanatory the game is) and primarily distributed as a free bonus on gaming magazine discs - at least that's how I got it.
Here are two playthroughs, a single- and a multiplayer game, documented on a German Civilization forum (with screenshots):
https://www.civforum.de/showthread.php?69914-Blue-Empire
https://www.civforum.de/showthread.php?66664-Blue-Empire-II
I have seen it offered on freeware games sites in its heyday, where it used to occupy top spots with tens of thousands of downloads (the Internet was small back then), but those appear to be all down at this point. Since there are literally no downloads of it available anywhere anymore (the above two playthroughs are the only mention of the game I could find - and not even with all search engines), I've decided to uploaded it to the Internet Archive for preservation:
https://archive.org/details/blue-empire-2
In order for it to run on operating systems newer than Windows XP, enable compatibility mode for Windows XP SP2. Don't be alerted by your task bar briefly flickering on startup - that's "normal". It should work on Linux through Wine, although I haven't tested it. Inside the zip file, there's a "spielregeln.htm" file that explains the rules and provides helpful hints. Use a translation service of your choice, if necessary.
Advance Wars and its sequel, by a country mile. Someone recommended it to me about 20 years ago. Since I didn't have a GBA, I downloaded a relatively early emulator that barely ran on my PC at the time. It had some sound glitches and performance issues, but otherwise, it worked just fine. I was initially put off by the anime presentation (since I associated it with kids shows back then, I had no love for anime - be kind, I hadn't seen a single Studio Ghibli film yet) and it didn't look particularly great blown up on a 17" CRT either, but the outstanding gameplay and fun campaign quickly pulled me in. Who knew war could be this lighthearted and at the same time so devilishly hard? Within ten minutes, I was hooked and it quickly became one of my favorite strategy games of all times, right up there with the likes of Age of Empires II (and the incredibly obscure Blue Empire II - I doubt there's anyone here who has even heard of it).
Since then I have revisited AW every few years. It was one of my most-played games on my first Android smartphone (2010) and once again, the emulator barely ran on the device. Oh, and that phone didn't have multitouch yet, which however wasn't an issue with a turn-based game. A couple of years later, I bought a PSP, relatively late into its lifecycle - and instead of using it for PSP games, it became an emulation machine, by which I mean that I primarily played two games on it: Advance Wars and, for some reason, Activision Tennis for the Atari 2600/VCS from the lovingly made Activision Hits collection. One of the best tennis games of all time, even though it's what feels like two dozen pixels in total, including animations.
Soon after, I discovered Advance Wars By Web, which is an unauthorized browser-based online multiplayer clone of the entire Advance Wars series that is still around. I have no idea how they have managed to survive Nintendo's wrath. There are no animations nor sounds, which did put me off though. My old account is still alive, so I might get back to it though.
I finally bought something resembling an actual GBA as my Xmas present to myself, the rather nice Anbernic RG35XXSP emulation console, which is an affordable and completely open copy of the Advance SP - based on an ARM CPU and running Linux. If anyone else is looking for a decent replacement/supplement to their original GBA SP or just a neat little emulation system that fits into a (men's) pants pocket, one can do much worse, especially given how remarkably good IPS screen, buttons and battery life are. Guess which game I've been playing on this device the most? Good guess, but no, it's a port of 2048, which feels awesome with physical buttons, but Advance Wars will probably take its rightful crown back soon. The one downside of this system I've discovered so far is that annoyingly, ROM hacks rarely work, no matter the emulator.
After this needlessly long text on my boring emulation journey with AW, you might be wondering what other Game Boy games managed to pull me in? Barely anything. I've tried a few, but none of them got me hooked, with the sole exception of what only called the official demake of Max Payne for the GBA, which is shockingly competent. Who knew that the iconic third person shooter actually works as an isometric title on the GBA of all systems? It's not some cheap knock-off that has the same title as the big PC and console title, like so many other mobile games over the years, but a truly faithful replica of the PC classic that actually feels like Max Payne, down to the most minute details. Even level design and comic book cutscenes are mostly preserved - with voice acting! The isometric presentation does sometimes result in invisible enemies shooting at you, but that's pretty much the worst I can say about this title. Here's a video of it in action.
As for the rest, I was excited for Golden Sun after all of the praise it's been getting over the years, but so far, the annoying to navigate introduction managed to scare me away every single time - and it's close to doing the same this time again. Someone please tell me to hang on. I think I tried Metroid: Zero Mission ages ago, but it didn't click, just like every other Metroid and every other metroidvania, with the sole exception of VVVVVV (PC, but open source), which remains the best metroidvania in my humble opinion, in large part because instead of collecting items that unlock previously inaccessible areas, it's the player getting better at playing the title that achieves the same thing. I've never seen any other game doing it this well. Not a Game Boy title though, so I'll stop gushing about it.
I randomly tried out Super Mario Land for the original Game Boy yesterday, primarily to toy around with shaders that simulate the handheld's terrible screen - and surprisingly, I really enjoyed it for a few levels. This is an excellent 2D Mario that feels absolutely perfect to play, despite the limited hardware it was originally developed for. What's weird is that I don't actually like 2D Mario games, but this one has somehow managed to endear itself to me. I've also played a few minutes of a ROM hack that colorizes Pokémon Red, which is neat, and randomly tried out Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance for the GBA. This probably forgotten RPG (I've only ever heard people talk about the totally different PS2 version, which was a technical marvel) oozes atmosphere, but I can't tell for how long I'll play it yet.
Thank you, I'll check these out.
Starfield is good. It's not the next Skyrim, it's not the greatest RPG ever made, but it does more than enough things right to be worthwhile. It's fine to not like a good game, by the way - but this doesn't make it terrible.
Which games would that be?
Keep in mind that Sega isn't just a developer, but also a publisher. They are relatively big in the strategy genre, for example, as publishers of the Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, Total War, Valkyria Chronicles and Endless Space series. They are also PlatinumGames' publisher, own Atlus, etc. pp.
This doesn't mean they are necessarily big enough to be able to successfully pull this off, but we'll see.
With the filter
Which one? There a dozens commonly used ones. All of these games are from the CRT era and were developed on and for CRT monitors.
Might and Magic Book One
Notice the dithering pattern on the characters in this screenshot:
This was only done for CRTs, since it results in blended pixels.
Heroes of Might and Magic 2
More CRT dithering everywhere, just two generations later and with more colors and fine detail - but it's still the same technique:
Carmageddon
https://www.mobygames.com/game/367/carmageddon/screenshots/dos/887670/
Notice the color banding on the textures? CRTs blend that together, resulting in a much smoother look even with software rendering.
Elder Scrolls Arena
https://www.mobygames.com/game/803/the-elder-scrolls-arena/screenshots/dos/305893/
Our old friend Mr Dithering makes an appearance once again.
I hope I've made my point clear. It's fine if you prefer the clean pixelated look of LCD displays, but it's clear that this is not what these games were meant to look like.
A cash grab is what they did with the sloppy re-release of Chrono Trigger, which is vastly inferior to the original game on original hardware - or running a ROM Hack with bug fixes (or even just the game as it released originally) in a cycle-accurate emulator.
Remaking a game from the ground up with AAA production values is a costly and complex endeavor - and a risky one too, even with a titles as popular as Final Fantasy VII, since there is no guarantee fans will enjoy it. Almost the same kind of high risks as with any other game production of this sort of scale apply here. And while I haven't played these remakes, their reception seems to indicate that they are anything but cynical cash grabs.
Thanks for the reply. I might come back to you at some point.
A quick heads up: For some reason, this reply does not appear in my Inbox here on Beehaw. No idea why, maybe it's worth looking into.
All I'm saying is... BIGDADDY.
Any cool webcomics you can recommend? Doesn't matter how obscure or weird they might be. I haven't read any, not even xkcd, in ages.
The motor that pulls in the filament is ridiculously strong on this printer. It has never been unable to feed, even if it had to drag the entire printer or a full filament roll across the table. It has broken filament holders and arms, to the point that I had to modify the current solution with a metal core so that it wouldn't snap apart. I'm feeding from a filament dryer and I had build a crazy contraption that fixes the thing in place so that it's not dragged around by the sheer torque of this motor - and after this mishap, I have clamped the printer down with metal profiles. My worry is that the next time a filament roll gets stuck sideways in the dryer, the printer will tear itself apart or at the very least dislocate the print head (or destroy the plastic housing of the dryer). We'll see.
Either way, I adore this thing. With careful calibration and the properly dried and stored material (mostly that, I have to admit), I've been able to exceed the print quality of printers more than ten times as expensive, make complex functional prints within days of setting the thing up for the first time. It just took two or three times as long per print.
You'll quickly realize that this place isn't fundamentally different from reddit from an end-user perspective. The same highly opinionated people who think they are better than you (I'm not excluding myself from this, but there are quite a few others here who tend to lean far more left politically than your typical reddit user, sometimes until they fall on their knees and kiss Stalin's boots), the same kind of moderators with god complexes as in every other forum ever since forums have existed, the same misinformation and propaganda, the same potential for people to ruin your day by showing their true colors. The best intentions by the creators don't really change all that much, because they are flawed human being like all of us and because it's ultimately still just the same flawed human beings who make up the user base, people who are not suddenly behaving differently, just because there's some vague rule to "bee nice" in the sidebar.
Make a decentralized copy of reddit and you get people behaving like they are on reddit, it's as simple as that.
You can totally have nice time here and I have managed to get my own blood pressure back down to the usual far too low levels by blocking a few communities with the worst moderators and users (or with topics that showed less flattering sides of their personalities and beliefs) and spending more time on topics that offer less potential for conflict, but ultimately, it's the same ol' as smaller subreddits or smaller forums of old. The best thing you can do is use Beehaw like a smoker would use an e-cig: As a (hopefully) less harmful detox from social media that ultimately leads to abstinence. I'm not there yet and might never get there, because it's still social media and still addictive.
Either way, welcome to smaller reddit with bees and lemmings. Sorry for the slightly less upbeat introduction and I hope you'll still enjoy your stay.
I had a nice day playing board games with my family (Dorfromantik ftw!) and wrestling with my cheap 3D printer (Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro) - which is strong enough to lift itself, not exactly light at 8.1kg, almost entirely off the table on a filament string. Can you believe it? I wish I had taken a photo of this mishap.
There are already integrated graphics that can handle the most demanding games, like the ray-tracing-only Indiana Jones and the Golden Circle.