On one hand even the Nintendo Switch is just a modified Nvidia shield so this task would be a simple one for most states. On the other hand: Sanctions and insane corruption. I‘d be surprised if they manage to release anything that could keep up with Consoles from 2 generations ago.
Violent crime has decreased since the 1990s as video games (including violent ones) have continued to grow in popularity. If anything, this establishes that violent video games prevent violent crime.
Sure, but they’ve only ever had correlational evidence to suggest video games cause violence. Their own correlational evidence does not support their conclusions, and that should be called out and ridiculed.
I don’t think its as much as microsoft lost its just that all the consoles are the same, and pc and steam deck by extension plays all the games anyway for cheaper.
This is how you challenge actual pirates and grow your real enemy, while you punish innocent civilians. Pirates will pirate, regardless of what Nintendo says, wants or does. The real losers are loyal customers who pay lot of money.
When I got banned from online play on the Switch for using homebrew I stopped paying them for games on the platform. A lot of people are former pirates, and they’ll only accept so much before they decide the grass was greener.
And the loyal customers don’t care else they would have switched to a deck ages ago (like I did).
Nintendo doesn’t care and neither do its customers apparently. We can throw a hissy fit here on Lemmy but the cold hard truth is nobody outside Lemmy and reddit cares.
I don’t personally like Nintendo’s actions, but I’m not sure why this article is trying to imply Nintendo miscalculated and don’t know what they’re doing - as if bricking consoles will somehow lose them money.
From Nintendo’s perspective, turning the used market into a minefield of bricked consoles can only be a good thing, because it encourages people to buy new, and buying new is money in Nintendo’s pocket.
And the conclusion that people won’t buy the console for their kids because of this? “Sorry kids, but Nintendo are bad so we cant play your favourite Mario - you’re getting a steam deck instead!” Like heck! A small minority maybe, but people will generally buy their kids what the kids ask for.
While true, I think it’s important to note that many buy the Switch for other reasons. My kids wanted a Switch, but I didn’t get it until there were enough games my wife and I really wanted to play. My wife was bummed about Kinect dying and was Ted a replacement for her exercise games, and I had been missing Zelda games, so I got the Switch, some Just Dance games, Ring Fit Adventure, the two Zelda remakes, and a couple games for the kids. The kids have kind of taken it over, but it still fulfills our purposes in getting it.
My point is that the Switch has a lot more appeal than just shutting kids up for a bit. It’s a good console on its own, and the only console I’m willing to buy. The PS5 and Xbox Series has nothing I’m interested outside of a few exclusives, so my wife and I just play on our PCs and my Steam Deck.
One thing Phil Spencer does not seem to care about is emulation. There are already Xbox and PlayStation emulators that allow access to more of both platforms back catalogues than any of the current generation consoles are capable of…
Xbox could build cloud based emulators off the open source tools already available and make their entire Xbox back catalogue accessible to current users to stream. They could help improve the tools to ensure greater and greater compatibility for titles and then it would be there forever.
The reason it doesn’t happen is money. They dont see money in game preservation so they dont bother beyond a few big name nostalgia hits. Muse AI isn’t about game preservation, its about game development - they’re just pissing around with game preservation to feed it content as a punt on the future for it somehow making game development cheaper.
I can’t say I buy this fully. From a marketkng standpoint, it seems like a huge win: “Subscribe to game pass ultimate and you get thousands of games old and new, up by thousands from last year”. From a financial standpoint, running those emulators should be a lot less compute heavy than current games so it should be cheaper.
The only real issue I see here is legal. Licensing the rights to distribute the games via streaming for their entire back catalogue can’t be easy.
Trying to fill a 24-hour news cycle requires a lot of bullshit, and Fox, NBC, CNN, CBS, and your favorite news outlet are happy to shovel it.
Stop watching partisan, billionaire-owned news outlets and start consuming international news and non-partisan sites. (Like the AP and Al Jazeera)
Also, watch moderate people on the other side of the political divide. It may annoy you in some ways (like how I can’t listen to Maher when he gets on the topic of Israel), but you’ll learn more and you’ll have more nuanced views, which will benefit you in ways you can’t fully understand until you’re able to think about things in a different way. I’m a leftist, so for me, it’s been Bill Maher, Chris Williamson, or Jon Stewart. More people need to learn what they don’t know that they don’t know.
I started working in local TV news 17 years ago. I figured out pretty quickly there’s enough actual news happening to fill the 24-hour cable channels, but sending out reporters and photographers (maybe even producers) is expensive. It’s much cheaper to just have somebody in the studio blabbering on about a few things and trying to stoke reactions from the audience. It can even build a bigger audience than actual news.
Sports radio and TV is an even bigger (though less damaging) example of this. They have a lot of time to fill when games aren’t on, and a lot of times they just put someone on who will give the dumbest take possible just to get the audience mad and have an argument with someone else in the studio or even let the audience call in to argue.
I’m mostly amazed that NBC or another outlet didn’t somehow look at Mangione’s first name and make some insane attempt to link his violent acts with a Mario Bros. game.
heavy breathing from Nintendo’s Legal Dept intensifies
Guess what other obscure old system used rectangular pixels? The IBM PC.
CGA and EGA used resolution modes that were multiples of 320x200 (PAR 6:5). VGA’s 16-color hi-res mode was the first to support square pixels at 640x480, and it would become a standard for years to come because TempleOS and Windows used it (you can even force Windows 7 to run in this mode!)
The NES and SNES had PAR 16:15 8:7 (oops) (which is often ignored in emulation), and so did the most common NTSC DVD-Video mode (none of the commonly used ones had square pixels but you only really notice it with subtitles - you cannot correctly display them at native resolution on an LCD).
And that’s just the successful systems I know off the top of my head.
Soviet personal computers failed for other, obvious reasons. They struggled to copy the latest chips, and the economic incentive was minuscule despite the government’s investment - very few people could afford a computer in the Eastern Bloc, and they could not be exported due to patent infringement and being years behind. The economy collapsed after USSR broke up and nobody wanted to invest to rebuild the industry.
That being said, people in the Eastern Bloc were very resourceful with what they had (mostly clones of Atari’s 8-bit home computers and IBM PCs). A blind person from Czechoslovakia made a speech synthesis sound card for an IBM-compatible PC, which functioned well enough to allow him to be employed as a full-time programmer. At least one of the three exemplars works to this day.
The story is way more interesting. Cannot dig the article, but dropping soviet originated hardware had to do also with programming languages. Western entities started with heavy lobbing, often dressed as grass root movement, for languages that for western based systems. Not sure how well supported this thesis was, but it was interesting that preferences of engineers got used for market absorption.
Not a new thing by today’s standards.
Russia has own computers on own processors produced on Micron(not to be confused with Micron Technology). But they are expensive as cast iron bridge and hard to get.
Didn’t the NES produce non-square pixels? Like pure data wise the screen was square but at some point in making it NTSC it gets stretched horizontally to 4:3?
Data-wise, the screen is 32x30 tiles, which is 256x240 pixels, or 280x240 including the border. (The height is set by the modified NTSC standard at 240p60, and the width of 256 was chosen to simplify 8-bit arithmetic, plus 24 pixels for a border.) With square pixels, the aspect ratio would be 16:15, or 7:6 including border. The video timing was chosen so that this fills the entire TV screen, which is 4:3. As a result, the pixels have an aspect ratio of (4:3)/(7:6)=8:7 (varies a little between TVs). However, the NES could only flip sprites and not rotate them 90°, so this could be taken into account when creating the rotated versions.
Another successful system with non-square pixels was the IBM PC, whose CGA and EGA cards had a 320x200 resolution (or multiples thereof in other modes), which resulted in PAR (4:3)/(8:5)=6:5. Square pixels first became available with VGA’s hi-res mode (16 colors at 640x480), adopted by systems such as Windows 3.1 and TempleOS.
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