Totally anecdotal and only tangentially related, but I've been to Tokyo three times since 2009 and the change in availability of American craft beer as well as Japanese microbrews was honestly staggering. As a Coloradan, it was almost comical to see so much specialty beer from home so far away.
Soon after returning from my most recent trip, I happened to sit next to an employee of Left Hand Brewing (Probably the most weirdly ubiquitous Colorado beer I saw there that trip) during lunch, and it turns out some beverage exporter pays the freight on the kegs to and from Tokyo just to bring Left Hand overseas. I have to imagine this marks some sort of change in tastes and economics, at least in the big city.
I get the intention, and this is gonna sound kind of reductive and shitty, but there's no social contract on the internet. If you built it this way, you gotta put in the moderation/engineering work, tighten it down, or quit your bitching.
Awesome, awesome project, but for the purist please keep in mind that 8-direction joysticks can be a bit tricky on games that were built for a 4-direction joystick. For example, I popped a convertible 4/8 direction joystick into my home cabinet because Ms. Pac-Man is nearly unplayable with a purely 8-direction stick.
Just a caveat though, this project is definitely a great, inexpensive arcade-at-home solution.
Agreed on the 4-way vs 8-way. Anyone playing Pac Man, Ms Pac Man, Donkey Kong or other classic 4-way games will be very handicapped with an 8-way joystick without a restrictor plate. I've successfully used Ultimarc controllers that are 4/8 switchable using a restrictor plate and the controls are amazing.
Other than that people should be aware that there's no way this runs many arcade games using MAME. I've had desktop computers choke on a lot of arcade games for lack of CPU resources so I can't imagine this plays many games without lag especially since he mentions sluggishness right in the article.
Games like Pac-Man expect the joystick to read Up,Down,Left or Right only.
8-Way joysticks either output combinations of the two directions (Left+Up=Northwest), or totally unique outputs that read as nothing to the 4-way game.
In either situation, gameplay gets clumsy or non-operational when the diagonals are hit. And some people like smoothly rotating the stick from Left to Up, let's say. That would look like Left...Idle...Up to Pac-Man. And that means certain doom if a ghost is behind you.
I agree with the organizational sentiment, but almost everything else reads of woeful naiveté for a 32 year old person in the work force. Not trying to hard hearted, and I sure as hell don't know the rest of this guy's story, but I think maybe his expectations were a bit overblown to begin with.
I agree. Welcome to being a contractor. In this case, since the skill required was very low, the reward is low. If you were a high skilled contractor you would be paid handsomely, but the hours would still be awful in most cases.
Very cool. Just earlier this week I was wondering how someone could take some of the unique storytelling ideas from the likes of Borges and adapt them to modern media. The definitely feels like a step in that direction.
I know precious little about hardware stuff and I was curious, how true an emulation does this sort of methodology produce? I remember reading this article (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...) about the difficulties inherent in true software emulation and I was wondering if someone out there could relate the two in a way a hardware/emulation newbie could understand.
It's implemented on an FPGA, it's more-or-less recreating the original (digital) hardware. The author pointed out, implementing the original CPU instructions per the spec isn't that challenging. In my 2nd and 3rd year computer engineering courses we implement CPUs which are similar in complexity. Admittedly, getting them to run in hardware versus simulation is a bit of a hurdle sometimes.
The thing is, game designers are all about juicing functionality. If they could take advantage of something that isn't in the spec ( like the extra instructions the author mentions ), they probably did. So you have to find all the common mis-behaviours, some of which might have been side effects of analog components included in the console. Similarly, the analog hardware on your FPGA board is probably nothing like what the original console contained; the sound and video output are hard or impossible to get right.
In short, you can avoid the conditions that they discuss like deadlocks more easily in a VHDL design, but things like the colours in the video may be impossible to get right (the author points this out as well).
On a side note, I don't fully agree with the linked article's 'twice as accurate, twice as slow' hypothesis. A lot of the cases they discuss are either analog effects which are expensive to reproduce in a digital emulator, or just hardware edge cases which don't add a lot of processing overhead. Basically, recreating a quirk can be very expensive or pretty cheap computationally, and there's no reason to say they'll average out over time.
Does she like rollercoasters? I feel like it's a show for people who like extreme tension and the catharsis of relief, cause my wife and mother-in-law totally dig it.
Exactly, the women in my life like it, but it makes me very anxious. I certainly appreciate it but I can only watch in small doses as it's just super tense.
