MenhirMike

Oh, there's plenty of good uses for it, but I was specifically wondering why the previous poster cared for it being RDNA 2 instead of RDNA 3 since I don't think it makes a difference outside of gaming, and it's a pretty bad gaming GPU because of the low core count.

So I was curious if there was anything else that RDNA 3/3.5 would offer over RDNA 2 in such a low end configuration.

Yeah, I have several GT 710's which also came in a PCIe x1 variant so I could keep the x16 slot free for something better. Glad that's no longer needed - the built-in GPU is a legit good thing.

Good point. Makes me wonder if they'd consider a Threadripper version that uses that chipset, since the Non-Pro Threadripper have been in a weird spot ever since Ryzen went up to 16 cores. An AM5 Threadripper might not make sense because one of the appeals were the much bigger amount of PCIe lanes, but I wonder if they would pair the X870E with a new socket for Zen 5 Non-Pro Threadrippers.

Non-Pro Threadripper 7960X/7970X/7980X are Quad Channel. (The Threadripper Pro's are Octa-Channel)

But yeah, Desktop Ryzen's are all Dual Channel.

Given that there are only 2 CUs in the GPU (and fairly low clock speeds), does the architecture matter much? Benchmarks were kinda terrible, and it looks to me that the intent of the built-in GPU is for hardware video encoding or to run it in a home server system, or emergency BIOS and the like. Compared to the desktop CPUs, even the lowest end mobile 8440U has 4 CUs, going up to 12 CUs on the higher end. Or go with Strix Point, which does have an RDNA 3.5 GPU (with 12 or 16 CUs) in it.

I guess you _can_ game on those 2 CU GPUs, but it really doesn't seem to be intended for that.

If you follow people of certain hobbies - for example, retro computing - then it's a great way to discover others sharing the same interest. You can check their timeline to see if that's someone you want to follow or just choose not to. And if you really dislike someone, you can just block them. I think that retweets/boosts become a really good discovery mechanism here.

If your hobby is e.g., NFL Football, then yeah, the signal/noise ratio makes retweets a terrible thing that just clutters your feed.

That makes it harder to find new accounts to follow though. I would say that the vast majority of accounts that I follow were discovered because other people that I follow retweeted (or boosted in the case of Mastodon) them.

Indeed it was! https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

I'm not aware of any direct copier, most disk duplicators that were sold to regular people were just a bunch of floppy drives with regular disk copy software.

These days, there is the delightfully named Greaseweazle (https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle) and similar devices to _read_ disks at a magnetic level, but I'm not sure if there is something to _write_ disks. I don't see any reason why such a thing couldn't exist, I'm just not aware of it.

Tech Tangent has a good in-depth video about imaging disks for archival purposes if interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxsRpMdmlGo

That makes sense, I do remember some Commodore 64 games that even a Nibbler couldn't properly duplicate, and how some people modified their 1541 drives to have a different timing to work with some of that stuff.

Still could be worse. For example, the King's Quest 8 Master CD-ROM contained a copy of King's Quest 8.

Yeah, Duplication Houses usually duplicate the disk sector-by-sector, instead of on a file system level. (This makes a lot of sense, because it allowed the disk to contain any file system). But that also means that data that was still on the physical sectors of the disk got copied as well, regardless of whether the file system on the disk was still referencing that data.

It did apparently happen with quite a few games, where the Master Disk wasn't a brand new disk but some random disk that someone formatted and sent over to duplication. There are other games where cut content or early source code was recovered that way because the duplication house didn't work on a file system level but duplicated the entire disk as-is.

And if the 2020 remake* is anything to go by, this should be amazing. If you want to play Myst, get the 2020 version.

*not to be confused with the 2000 Masterpiece Edition, the 2000 remake RealMyst or the 2014 remake realMyst: Masterpiece Edition.

Yes, yes it is.

> I also remember it being pretty fast on the G3 Mac's when they first came out.

One of the comments that Steve Jobs made in the Boston 1997 speech was "No one at Apple has reached out to Adobe to ask how to build the ultimate Photoshop machine" - and in the next few years, Photoshop benchmarks were a key Mac vs Intel comparison during his keynotes.

I don't know if Jobs already had influence on the original beige Power Macintosh G3, but he really seemed to care about Photoshop performance when he arrived.

40 years of the Rumpelstiltskin puzzle (that also depends on a misspelling of the character as Rumplestiltskin). Thankfully, that puzzle was optional at least, unless you wanted to full score.

I can't say that I love or even like any of the King's Quest games, but it's undeniable how important they were for an entire industry, so cheers to that!

Yes! Anytime you see a function signature like "int timeout", it's safe to assume that the unit is in femtoseconds and pass a gigantic number while you curse out the incompetence of the developer. Either name your variables correctly (timeoutZeptoseconds), or use a proper data type (like a Duration or Period in Java, TimeSpan in C#, or a user-defined literal in C++).

So, a bit like docker container commit but actually good?

> defining constants for 0-999

That person might just be an old school Java <5 developer.

Plot twist: Ray Tracing was the name of a person that was very important to both of them and unfortunately passed away, so they named their son Ray as a tribute.

Could name the building "Grenfell Tower S.F.".

Someone already mentioned Mike Bison, but FWIW, in the fighting game community - which includes people from Japan and outside of Japan - those characters are generally called "Boxer", "Claw", and "Dictator" specifically because of the localization changes, to give them unambiguous names.

At least Sagat kept his name, though "Tiger bullshit" would've been a great moniker, and no, I'm not salty about losing to his projectile once too many.

Somebody also just recently discovered that Shin Akuma is playable on the SNES version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF2AiG2MN2I

Between this and the SA-1 fixes for Gradius III and Super R-Type, we live in a golden age of improving SNES games :)

That's actually a pretty good question. The NTR-031 IR cartridges were used for a few games, and there was also one for Motion Sensors and a TV Antenna.

From what I can see, it looks like even though they can't extend the functionality directly, they do still interface with the system in some way. Perhaps they are more like a device connected to a serial port would be? So far less capable than the full extension cart, but still possible to communicate with through a standardized protocol? (The DS Cartridge slot has 8 data pins rather than the full address/data bus, but seems to have a protocol: http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#dscartridgeprotocol)

So, I need to correct myself, they nerfed it first with the DS, before then switching to being pure flash chips with the 3DS when they switched to XtraROM (which has potential lifespan issues: https://gbatemp.net/threads/nintendo-switch-3ds-cartridge-li...) - and that seems to not allow much custom functionality: https://www.3dbrew.org/wiki/Gamecards#Protocol

(Though if someone with more knowledge can correct me, please do so. I thought that DS/3DS/Switch are pure flash chips, but was wrong at least about the DS)

Some Details on the Doom Wiki (https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Super_NES):

Randy Linden, the port's sole programmer, initiated the port of Doom for the Super NES on his own initially, as he was fascinated by the game.

Since Doom's source code was not yet released at the time, Linden referred to the Unofficial Doom Specs as a means of understanding the game's lump layout in detail. The resources were extracted from the IWAD, with some (notably sprites such as the player's sprites and the original status bar face sprites) unused due to technical limitations.

According to an interview, due to lack of development systems for the Super FX, Linden wrote a set of tools consisting of an assembler, linker, debugger, dubbed the ACCESS, on his own Amiga before beginning development of the port proper. For the hardware kit, he utilized a hacked Star Fox cartridge and a pair of modified Super NES controllers plugged into the console and connected to the Amiga's parallel port. A serial protocol was used to further link the two devices.

After developing a full prototype, he later showcased it to his employer, Sculptured Software, which helped him finish the development. In the interview, Linden expressed a wish that he could have added the missing levels; however, the game, already the largest possible size for a Super FX 2 game at 16 megabits (approximately 2 megabytes), only has roughly 16 bytes of free space. Linden also added support for the Super Scope light gun device, the Super NES mouse, and the XBAND modem for multiplayer. Fellow programmer John Coffey, himself a fan of the Doom series, made modifications to the levels, but some of those modifications were rejected by id Software.

I do really like how cartridges on the old systems were essentially equivalent to a PCI Expansion Card in a PC. It was directly connected to the Bus and could do essentially anything. Sadly, that practice ended after the GameBoy Advance, and everything since the Nintendo DS has been purely data storage.

This leads to crazy modern enhancements like a Raytracing chip[1], or the MSU1 enhancement chip that is AFAIK not available as an actual physical chip, but only in software emulators. But it would be theoretically possible to manufacture, so you could have an actual physical SNES Cartridge of Road Blaster[2].

On the article itself, I noticed that his list has "Street Fighter Zero 2" as a USA ROM - that should be incorrect, since Street Fighter Zero is what Street Fighter Alpha was called in Japan. So Zero 2 should just be the Japanese version of Alpha 2. (Also, thanks for linking to the MVG video that debunks the myth that the delay before each round is caused by decompression)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jee4tlakqo

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvIXUOr4yxU

In the US, the people that were born in the 1950s got to spend their teenage years not knowing if the Soviet Union is going to start World War III (the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was definitely a forming event for many teenage minds), then got to go through the 70s with an energy crisis and the potential draft to Vietnam, and then another energy crisis, and then got to experience the Chernobyl disaster in the 80s, wondering if they should re-watch "Duck and cover" and wonder why that hole in the ozone layer gets bigger and bigger.

Every generation has its ups and downs. For my generation, I have to deal with sky-high real estate prices, but I also have access to an unprecedented amount of free entertainment, free knowledge, the cheap supercomputer in my pocket allows me to stay in touch with anyone that I want, and when I go to the doctor, I probably won't see people in iron lungs anymore. I can travel to anywhere in the world for ridiculously low prices, and if I don't speak the language, a live translation app will do the work for me.

No, it's not all sunshine and roses, and people are right to call out issues with the current state of the world because things are NOT alright. But it's not like things were sunshine and roses for our grandparents generation either.

From the comments, it even seems to account for some instructions needing an extra cycle when crossing page boundaries, nice! This seems pretty comprehensive then.

> You just copy office 97 and can't go wrong with it.

Clippy had its debut in Office 97, so let's please NOT copy that one. Other than that, yeah, I agree. Anything up to and including Office 2003 really, those were all great. (Also includes one of my favorite, underrated Office Apps, InfoPath)