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.
This whole article is dumb because this is the same as it ever was with Switch 1. Resold switches could be banned from online play, how is this unique to the Switch 2? If you're going to buy used, go for a reputable source.
Now, it’s very easy for me, someone who is not building a political action campaign around this topic, to tell someone like Scott that he needs to do better this time. But I’m going to do it anyway. I want this to work. I want the needle to move faster towards preservation of our gaming culture and towards the fulfillment of the copyright bargain with the public. So, please, let this go better this time around.
Ross devoted a year of his life (so far) to making this thing happen, purely out of his own passion for games. He gave it his all and the thing almost failed due to factors outside of Ross’s control. And then you want to turn around and tell him “that wasn’t good enough, do better next time” while sitting on your ass writing your shitty little tech articles for your shitty tech blog? dude even acknowledges how cowardly it sounds, and then proceeds to say it anyway. fuck all the way off.
Completely agreed. Nothing was added by this blog post, for anyone who wasn’t following it, but it was a decent enough summary. Then that last paragraph comes out of left field.
Ross has championed this for all our benefit, at great personal cost.
I just hope he learned from the first time and gets some people involved that can make a loud splash about this. If they just repeat what they did, it'll die in the crib.
Oh that has already happened. Second generation blizzard nepobaby PirateSoftware, misunderstood the goals of the initiative, started spouting personal hate towards Ross and made a video out of his stream for his large following months ago. People aren’t exactly a fan of the guy because of another controversy. He generally never likes admitting he’s wrong and apologizing for it. Always doubles, triples, quadruples down.
So that video he made got added to the list, big name drama/gaming news channels picked it up and got the ball rolling.
Kinda worried that nothing comes out of this because Ross did mention that he is aware of some amount of botting and, people making mistakes and also fake ones. Which is why reaching that 1.4 mill goal is important. The initiative has technically reached the goal but not 100% of the signatures are legit.
it can suspend all kinds of services on your console, up to and including bricking it completely.
No, just online services.
Xbox and PlayStation have the same terms & conditions. Why is Nintendo being singled out?
Xbox:
You will not attempt to defeat or circumvent any Xbox Console, Kinect Sensor or Authorised Accessory technical limitation, security or anti-piracy system. If You do, Your Xbox Console, Kinect Sensor or Authorised Accessory may stop working permanently at that time or after a later Xbox Software update.
The second part simply isn’t true. Look at the ToS wording (US version). Nintendo added a clause specific to the device’s functioning, not only to online services.
“This shitty company has been shitty for 20 years, why do we care” is one of the most fanboi, dickriding responses possible. Why are you riding for Nintendo so hard given their shitty anti-consumer practices?
Agreed. Permanent hardware bans have been a thing since the PS3/360 era.
I’m not saying it’s a good thing that they can unilaterally disable hardware you purchased (although I certainly understand the reasoning wrt cheaters and pirates) but the author here is acting like the idea is some completely new scheme from the diabolical industry villains du jour.
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