MachineCode

I enjoy healthy foods but find them to be affordable only when preparing them myself. One thing that definitely helped me was drinking pretty much water exclusively with the occasional soda or iced tea. But not even every week with that

70s Heart 6.5 out of 10 but I haven’t listened to any full albums. Solid and creative musicians though. 80s Heart, blech. Even Heart didn’t seem to like 80s Heart

10 minutes ago, trj22487 said:

Basically the same deal with their first game, Arch-Rivals, really shouldn't have been ported to the NES, but they tried.

Arch-Rivals. I haven’t heard that name in a minute. I think I might know that game more from Tyrone being part of the Video Power team vs actually playing the game.

1 hour ago, BortLicensePlate said:

I have no problem with difficult games, I enjoy difficult games. But if theres one thing I cant stand its button mashing. I would either use turbo or not play the game.

I feel ya. My wrist hates me after a long run on 1942 in the arcade.

51 minutes ago, trj22487 said:

NBA Jam 16 bit versions, particularly SNES. I can't believe as a kid I didn't notice how much it sucks compared to the arcade and even Genesis game. I thought it was pretty much all the same when I was 6.

Oh no! I love the Sega version of TE and still play from time to time. I think I played the arcade version maybe twice in my life but now I’m gonna have to seek it out. Let’s hope this isn’t one of those glass shattering moments for me where all of a sudden you notice all these flaws that you were oblivious to and can no longer overlook them.

Wow. Thank you so much for your reply and all the info. I’m excited to check all of this out. I’m sure I’ll definitely have some questions for you along the way as game focused programming is a little newer to me. It was always to goal from day 1, but after 20 years I ended up in the more boring fields of web and iOS app development.

Perhaps we need more evidence to go off of. Do you have or are there already online any recordings of you speaking? Can’t really say whether or not you sound ladylike without knowing what you sound like.

24 minutes ago, 0xDEAFC0DE said:

There is still is the need for tech artists and programmers to keep the hundreds of artists in check for how many triangles or pixels they cram into unnecessarily large models and textures. Even besides that, there still is plenty of work for engine and graphics programmers to meet performance goals (but I'm probably showing my bias here).

Of course it’s not 100% what I had said. After all, only a Sith deals in absolutes. But it does seem to have trended in that direction.

Out of curiosity, what drives your bias? Do you program game engines for modern games? If so, does the part about work for engine designers still apply as much to individual games in an era where a large portion of games all run on the same 2 3rd party engines? Clearly you can’t make a game without programmers, no matter what engine you use.

 I’m super curious about engine design. It seems so hard to find good information about engine programming from scratch. Everything I find seems to leverage 3rd party engines or heavily rely on 3rd party libraries.

14 minutes ago, Hangoin said:

At least you didn't pass it up for Quest 64. True story.

Oh you poor poor thing. There should be a victim’s compensation fund for people who bought that game.

On 11/6/2019 at 2:51 AM, peg said:

It always gives me a good laugh when these ignorant dummies say using autofire is cheating in shmups.  After all, it's a "cheat device", right?  Like these low-level bottom feeding scubs that can't even clear a single game on 1 credit are shitting all over the Japanese world record holders and elite players that have spent hundreds and more likely thousands of hours into these games.  But these clowns that take 50 credits to "beat" Gradius or Raiden, they totally have it all figured out.

Hey man, there’s a reason they used to refer to them as thumb breakers back in the day.

Same here. The reason I became a programmer was the desire to know what made my favorite games tick. I love when people push the limits of systems. Modern AAA gaming is just so homogeneous that it bores the shit out of me. And cheeseburger macaroni is delicious.

On 10/25/2019 at 4:16 PM, KokiriChild said:

Being born and raised in CT, I grew up going to Six Flags New England and Lake Compounce. I'm a big theme park nut. I have been to both Busch Gardens, SeaWorld, every Six Flags in the country at least once, Disneyland/CA Adventure, and WDW and Universal in Orlando. 

I actually was a WDW Cast Member for a year and worked at Epcot. It was pretty sweet. Which Busch Gardens are you going to? If its the one in Tampa, you'll be about 15 minutes from my house haha.

The theme parks I would love to go to that I haven't yet are Cedar Point, Knott's Berry Farm, and King's Dominion.

I grew up in CT as well. I only went to Six Flags NE when it was still called Riverside. Some friends of mine and I got thrown out of Lake Compounce in the 8th grade because one of them decided to kick an Odie mascot in the butt. For us, everything driving distance that wasn’t Six Flags Great Adventure was a consolation prize at best.

1 hour ago, a3quit4s said:

I get the vinyl music comeback because of the audio quality I guess, but weren't cassettes the worst media to have? The sound wasn't that great?

You would be correct. It’s kinda funny because the CD is capable of better quality, but the desire to maximize loudness at the expense  kinda ruins that.
 

Vinyl has a physical limitation where if you tried to achieve that level of loudness, the cutting lathe would jump the grooves when making the master. That built in hedge against the loudness war is what leads to the better quality. Vinyl as a medium seems to impart a sound that people, myself included, seem to enjoy. But it does have drawbacks.

Also, the angle of the groove matters for quality. The outside grooves are a more gradual angle than the inner grooves. The stylus makes a better contact with the groove towards the outside of the record and as a result sounds better. This is why records during the vinyl era tended to have the singles as the first track of each side.

Cassettes on the other hand were just a compromise all around. Low track width coupled with slow record/playback rate (1 7/8 ips vs a minimum of 7.5 ips for professional open reel formats, more commonly 15 or 30 ips) lead to poor audio quality. Again, it does impart a sound on the audio that some people may enjoy. But you are actually better off with mp3 than cassettes, and mp3 is not a quality format.

I honestly think that we’ve reached a point where the clever programming is no longer the star of the show. Hardware is cheap, powerful, and plentiful. Gone are the days where guys like John Carmack are dipping into Assembly to streamline routines in order to get Doom to run on our lowly 3 and 486s. The modern mentality is to just throw hardware at it and move on.

It’s become a 100 person art project where the majority of the project is spent making 3D models and textures. Since they also tend to aim for realism, diminishing returns is becoming more and more of a factor the closer we get. The early 3D games were SO far from realistic that each step closer seemed huge. Now it’s more just fine detail.

3 hours ago, MegaMan52 said:

I really liked Mega Man 2 when I was a Kid, and of course I still like it now (Mega Man is my favorite video game series). But, the game does have several flaws and doesn't deserve all of the praise it receives.

One other problem that this guy didn't mention: if Mega Man gets hit when there's lots of flicker, he actually moves back farther than he normally does.

Blasphemy!!! You shall be taken to the village square and stoned!

But on a serious note, which is your favorite in the series?

17 hours ago, BriGuy82 said:

I think you meant to say it drives me "kerrrrr-ray-zay!" Lol, I'm just kidding. Try talking like the Allstate guy next time. Are you in good hands?

Khakis...

I have 3 shoeboxes full of old school hip hop tapes. Just careful as unlike vinyl, tape WILL degrade to an unplayable state. The binders in the tape will degrade and will lead to sticky shed where the tape physically starts to stick to the heads and breaks up, leaving fragments on the heads.

To combat this issue in the professional realm with regards to master tapes of albums, they bake the tape (exactly what it sounds like) to reset the binders and get a few attempts to get as high quality of a digital transfer as possible before putting it away.

Nintendo - NES

Sega - Genesis

NEC - TurboDuo

Sony - PSX

Microsoft - XBox

Atari - Idk, Lynx?

If backwards compatibility is a factor then change PSX to PS2 with a guarantee that it will work correctly (system was built like shit) and change XBox to 360

9 hours ago, Richardhead said:

I came here to say this. I’ll add that it gets even worse every time I try to play a damn 64 game.

I thought that only once about the 64 like 10 years ago but it was due to playing it plugged straight into an LCD. The awful scaling and input lag just ruined it. Early 32bit and N64 require CRTs to have a chance of being enjoyable 

But I will concede that Goldeneye is nowhere near as good as we thought back in the day. SLOOOWWW!!!

16 minutes ago, Jono1874 said:

Sonic 1 is definitely paced weirdly and the lack of spin dash kind of messes up the game.  The Switch version tries to fix these problems by adding in both the spin dash and the drop dash, but the levels aren't designed with them in mind so you have to basically memorize the stages for them to be truly effective at gaining and keeping momentum. Forget even trying to use either in Marble Zone or Scrap Brain Zone.

I love Sonic 1, but you're definitely right.

I’m the odd man out in that Sonic 1 is my favorite, even without the spin dash. It just has a certain vibe to it that the others (especially 3) don’t. I love the levels, the chunkier assets, the music, all of it.
 

IMO, I think Sonic CD absolutely sucks to replay. The time travel mechanic just ruins the pace and the level design sucks. No flow. Sad because it had everything it needed to be the best, but the gameplay is just crap.

Same here for Atari. I start my retro gaming at the NES or Commodore 64. I like the original arcade games, but Atari VCS is just too rough for me. Pitfall being the only exception 

Ramtron FM1208s-200CC

Thats the F-Ram chip that’s in the cartridge. Part costs about $4 and change. Simple swap and you’re good to go, provided you can solder.

Mine still seems to work for now, but I almost always full run it. The save feature is just nice if I get interrupted and have to go do something. I’ll try and look into this more and see if I can come up with a solution for you and I guess eventually all of us

Unless NESMaker has a reputation for churning out crappy quality games, it seems no different than someone asking, “Did you make this in Unity?” about any computer game that gets made nowadays.

The save feature is in the Sonic 3 cart. S&K doesn’t have it’s own save feature as a stand alone. When locked on to Sonic 3, it goes from 6 to 8 save banks and saves the S3&K game. Check Sonic 3 by itself and see if it has the same problem first.