On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 18:16:41 -0400
Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe@semitwist.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 16:58:44 +0200
> "Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Thursday, 19 September 2013 at 11:53:50 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > > Unfortunately I don't have much (any) time for hardware tinkering these days :(
> > 
> > yeah... I never did real hardware - too rich for my blood -
> 
> It does tend to be a much more expensive hobby than software. :/
> 

Almost anything is a more expensive hobby than software ;)

On Fri, 20 Sep 2013 03:40:09 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote:

> .... even more off topic lol
> 

I love offtopic. they're always the most interesting! (Maybe I'm just
burning out on code... :/ )


> On Friday, 20 September 2013 at 01:02:59 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > Phantasy Star
> 
> man, great series there. 1,2, and 3 were kinda slow moving.... I think I had to grind over to like level 8 before I dared venture more than ten steps away from the town in phantasy star 1!
> 
> PS4 is one of the best games ever made though. It's like they looked at the best parts of all three, put them together, then saw the glaring flaw: you walked too bloody slowly - and fixed it!
> 
> Great game, it's the reason I had to have a Genesis.

I've mainly just played the first one. I figured "Nick, just tackle one at a time or else you *know* you'll never get anywhere in *any* of them."

I got a good way into the first (before I got distracted and stopped), and I find it very impressive considering it's on a system that competed with the NES.

Very good game overall. (As long as you have some graph paper and a pencil handy ;) ). And I really like what I've seen of 2, 3 and 4 so far. Definitely want to get around to them.

I could never really get into Phantasy Star Online though. Maybe it was the lack of tiles. Tiles excite me :)

On Fri, 20 Sep 2013 12:32:09 +1000
Manu <turkeyman@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 20 September 2013 11:02, Nick Sabalausky < SeeWebsiteToContactMe@semitwist.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 23:07:42 +1000
> > Manu <turkeyman@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Atari 2600 was the only scanline renderer I know of from that time, and it certainly was made to be cheap!
> >
> > It's a genuinely impressive feat of minimalistic engineering. And it makes Pitfall all the more impressive.
> >
> 
> That it was. I'm still amazed someone actually thought it was a viable
> games platform, and even more amazed that so many developers made
> games for it!
> Fancy only having a couple of hundred cycles in the vblank, and just a
> couple more cycles each hblank to perform 'game logic' ;)
> 

And the game logic (or at least the game-specific graphics kernel) often *involved* no-ops as part of the logic! Just to get the TIA into the desired position.

Counting cycles takes on a whole new meaning in that machine. They're not just about performance, they're part of the logic.

> 
> The SMS was an awesome little piece of hardware... perhaps my
> favourite vintage platform :)
> The took the popular TMS9918 video chip (used in colecovision,
> sg-1000, msx, and a bunch others), and with just a couple of minor
> tweaks made the system WAY better than any of the others listed.
> All they did was added a few bytes for a user-specified clut (rather
> than a hard-coded colour table), made use of an unused bit in the
> tile gfx table to select between a second clut (doubling the number
> of available colours), and added a horizontal+vertical scroll
> register for the tilemap. The difference this made in practise was
> huge, and it's barely any more gates in the chip. I always wondered
> why TMS stopped so short of the mark... I suppose adding a
> user-defined clut is more than 16 bytes though. Fixed clut will just
> switch between some hard-wired resister circuits, a user-clut
> requires some more video output circuitry, but resisters are cheap...
> even back then.
> 

Fascinating. I had no idea.

I never did know much about the SMS. Even at the time, I only knew one person who had one (which, at the time, was the only reason I even knew it existed).

> 
> Aye to that; I had a lot of problems with the gnd circuit on vintage
> hardware. They were very poorly isolated, and the gnd circuit would
> often feed-back through all manner of surprising places.
> A capacitor will smooth it off a bit, maybe protect you against some
> suddenly flipping bits, or at least delay it until after a bit value
> sampling tick has happened.
> Considering how tricky that stuff is in practise, I'd like to know
> more how it extends to modern circuitry. surely modern hardware must
> be better isolated...
> 

A good question, I'd be curious too.

I understand that at physical scale of modern hardware they actually have to take quantum phenomena into account. Which is kind of mind-blowing. I have no idea how much that might relate to gnd isolation though.

Maybe this just shows my naivety, but I wonder if modern clock speeds might actually help dealing with gnd isolation. Ie, not enough time for the signals to bounce enough to cause trouble? I'm probably just speaking total BS though.

On 20 September 2013 14:10, Nick Sabalausky < SeeWebsiteToContactMe@semitwist.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Sep 2013 12:32:09 +1000
> Manu <turkeyman@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Aye to that; I had a lot of problems with the gnd circuit on vintage
> > hardware. They were very poorly isolated, and the gnd circuit would
> > often feed-back through all manner of surprising places.
> > A capacitor will smooth it off a bit, maybe protect you against some
> > suddenly flipping bits, or at least delay it until after a bit value
> > sampling tick has happened.
> > Considering how tricky that stuff is in practise, I'd like to know
> > more how it extends to modern circuitry. surely modern hardware must
> > be better isolated...
> >
>
> A good question, I'd be curious too.
>
> I understand that at physical scale of modern hardware they actually have to take quantum phenomena into account. Which is kind of mind-blowing. I have no idea how much that might relate to gnd isolation though.
>
> Maybe this just shows my naivety, but I wonder if modern clock speeds might actually help dealing with gnd isolation. Ie, not enough time for the signals to bounce enough to cause trouble? I'm probably just speaking total BS though.
>

Heh, yeah.. nar, I don't think so.
I'm not an expert either, but I'd say just because the signal graph is
compressed horizontally, doesn't really make it simpler :) .. Timing is all
relative.
I think as your clock rate increases, you need to deal with MORE problems,
like resonance, and electromagnetic effects on neighbouring circuits.

On Thu, 2013-09-19 at 21:43 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote: […]
> I've always felt text rendering engines should be able to automatically fallback to another font for any characters that aren't in the selected font. (Ideally with a user-configurable chain of fallbacks, similar to CSS, but selected on a per-character basis.) Because showing the right character in a mismatched font has *got* to be better than not showing the character at all and a generic "missing font" glyph.

Cairo and Pango already do effectively this based on Fontconfig don't they?

[…]

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Friday, 20 September 2013 at 03:47:57 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>
> I got a good way into the first (before I got distracted and stopped),
> and I find it very impressive considering it's on a system that competed
> with the NES.
>
That's some classic 6502 vs. Z80 right there.  Master System especially set itself apart by having way more memory and better video hardware.  In general, Nintendo won by simply having better games (also, I prefer 2A03 sound to SN76489, though the YM2413 on the Mark III smokes both of them on the games that actually use it).

But the real kicker with Phantasy Star in particular, is it came out three days _before_ Final Fantasy, yet if you compare them side-by-side it's not even a fair contest.

-Wyatt

On Friday, 20 September 2013 at 14:07:36 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> Final Fantasy

oh god, great game. I *still* play FF1 on the NES somewhat regularly - the classes and flexibility in the order that you do the fiends gives it a surprising amount of replay value. (well I was playing Phantasy Star IV a few weeks ago too; one of the reasons I haven't played many new games this century is that they had already achieved gaming perfection in the 90's and I'd just prefer to replay them!)

Anywho, FF1, the graphics are beautiful and the music, needless to say, legendary. It really amazes me how much magic they did with a random noise channel and three beeps.

Fantastic game, and probably THE reason I really got into playing in the first place.... and wanting to clone it is the main reason I got into programming.

On Fri, 20 Sep 2013 16:07:35 +0200
"Wyatt" <wyatt.epp@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday, 20 September 2013 at 03:47:57 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> >
> > I got a good way into the first (before I got distracted and
> > stopped),
> > and I find it very impressive considering it's on a system that
> > competed
> > with the NES.
> >
> That's some classic 6502 vs. Z80 right there.  Master System especially set itself apart by having way more memory and better video hardware.  In general, Nintendo won by simply having better games (also, I prefer 2A03 sound to SN76489, though the YM2413 on the Mark III smokes both of them on the games that actually use it).
> 

Plus better marketing. The only time I'd ever heard of SMS (or SG-x0000 for that matter) was from a friend who had it *after* the Genesis/MegaDrive was already out. But NES was all over TV and such.

> But the real kicker with Phantasy Star in particular, is it came out three days _before_ Final Fantasy, yet if you compare them side-by-side it's not even a fair contest.
> 

Yea. (At least in a technical sense, I haven't played FF1 for more than a few minutes.) FF1 looks only a little more advanced than an Apple 2 game, but PS1 looks much closer the TG-16/PC-Engine that came way later. And the 3D dungeons? There's Genesis games that had that and still didn't look as good, and NES has *nothing* like it IIRC unless you count Shadowgate, which was a completely different approach anyway (albeit fantastic).

I didn't know PS1's/FF1's releases were three days apart though, or that PS was first. That's interesting.

Although, I wasn't really into RPGs at the time, but I've heard
that Dragon Quest was the *major* RPG series at the time, not Final
Fantasy. From what little I've seen of both, that sounds about right.
But even still, Dragon Quest still seems almost Apple 2 in comparison
to Phantasy Star.

On Fri, 20 Sep 2013 16:24:21 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> one of the reasons I haven't played many new games this century is that they had already achieved gaming perfection in the 90's and I'd just prefer to replay them!)
> 

Two words:
Rayman Legends

On Friday, 20 September 2013 at 14:24:22 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> Anywho, FF1, the graphics are beautiful and the music, needless to say, legendary. It really amazes me how much magic they did with a random noise channel and three beeps.

I hope you've heard of OCRemix.org. Tons of remixes of classic video game music.

I'm a big fan of Final Fantasy 6, and their new album "Balance and Ruin" is incredible.