Or if you really want the feeling of playing those original CARTS on new hardware funny playing sells a GBC fpga board, shell and buttons for about $100. You just can’t play GBA.
If your concern is “value for dollar” you wouldn’t be buying an FPGA console in a limited edition material. Seems like a weird comparison. You can also get an R36S for like, $30 on AliExpress that will play everything from N64/PS1 and earlier.
A standard Analogue Pocket is much cheaper, this is just an option for those that really want a metal shell. Also, a metal “unfolded” shell for a GBA SP (which is I’m sure is what inspired this offering) is like $150 so it’s not even that crazy a markup.
It’s honestly very sad how corporations can just throw their work in the trash if they think it will make them more profit there. I’m glad Deery was able to release it on his own for free so the game won’t be lost, but it’s unclear if all the developers will be able to do that.
I can’t imagine how frustrating and disheartening it must be as an artist to create something to share with the world only for it to be essentially buried underground because someone decided they could make a little extra money if no one ever sees what you made…
Ooo, that’s interesting. I was looking at “Deery clarified that the game will be pulled in the next 60 days.” and thought that meant the publisher had exclusive distribution rights and was choosing to destroy the thing. From that site it looks like your interpretation is correct, which is good! Sometimes it’s good to be wrong 😅
I’m curious what uses you have in mind–anything that’s an online competitive (i.e., you compete against other players–doesn’t need to be esports sweaty) game I don’t think there’s a strong case for allowing injected code, since that’s an avenue for gaining an unfair advantage and thereby worsening other players’ enjoyment, and anything offline I can’t see it being worth a company’s time and money to prosecute.
I think the problem is that the ruling now establishes that overlays and injected code are a copyright violation. Therefor any overlay or injected code is now illegal unless you have permission from the authors if the game.
This. Nintendo is one of the least ethical videogame companies out there. Even when they come up with something new and innovative, it’s so locked down you’re better off waiting to play someone else’s copycat of it.
It's not like they can really avoid it. AI assisted tools will become a standard in the future ("productivity has to go up" after all) and there's a good chance Valve already received some feedback from AAA publishers on that matter, since they'll be the main players utilizing such tech.
The good thing here is the exsitance of a disclaimer on store pages, as it will allow people to decide for themselves, and the ability to report content straight from in-game overlay.
I’ll add that a blanket ban isn’t necessarily a positive thing, either. AI could be a component of developing unique NPCs, evolving bosses, changing economies, missions/quests, or procedurally generated levels (for example).
Obviously, at least some of that content would still need to pass human play testing, so it’s not like humans would be completely removed, but imagine if players had gameplay experiences that were entirely unique to them or changed based on non-RNG factors.
I agree, though, that reporting the use of AI and how it’s utilized is important for people to make informed decisions about how they spend their money.
Personally I'd love to see a new take on Daggerfall using AI for features you mentioned (though it would have to be an "all in" affair as Bethesda's approach to randomly generated content these days is... not particularly impressive).
This is going to be important for maintaining the legacy of old video games.
Like, emulators are fine, but access to recompilation makes it much easier to keep things in a generally useful format.
Honestly one of the reasons I don’t play emulated games much is that the extra step of configuring and running the emulator is a hassle, and sometimes it straight up doesn’t work.
Edit: Anyone who thinks access to the source code is somehow worse than the original executable code, just ask yourself, what is the legacy of say, Doom, for which we have access to the source, versus literally any other closed source game of that era that requires DOSBox to be run? Doom is a meme that “runs on anything” and has a thriving modding community, and it’s hard to think of examples of DOSBox games because you never think about them. Source code is important.
C code that reproduces a running binary on an up to date compiler is worse than a machine code binary for a legacy machine of which complete Emulation is not guaranteed?
Yes, because machine code for the legacy machine is how the game was made, you can’t be 100% sure that recompiling it for other platforms won’t introduce bugs because of the difference in platforms. For example, the original Space Invaders used the CPU to it’s maximum to render all of the invaders, they weren’t normalizing by the dt between one frame and the next like we do today for most games, so this results in the game running as fast as possible, which in turns translates to the less enemies on screen, the faster they move. If you recompile that binary for a modern system it’s game over in less than 1 second, because current hardware can handle all of those spaceships as if it were nothing.
I’m not the person who wrote the original comment, but again go back to my example of Space Invaders, if it had been archived that way it would now be essentially lost, because running a copy that was archived that way would cause the issue I described on my other comment. So I don’t understand your point, this is objectively worse in terms of preserving games, it might cause unwanted behavior that you’re not predicting, an emulator is not perfect, but can compensate for these things by emulating the hardware.
it’s not a valid comparison really. this is an alternative to an emulator than a ROM.
If you used this to compile a native version of space invaders that ran incorrectly it would be no worse than if you used an emulator to run space invaders that ran incorrectly. in either case you treat it as a bug in the emulator/recompiler and fix it and re run the process.
Nobody is suggesting deleting their roms and keeping only the current copy of a recompiled game. I don’t think that would even work… as far as I know you still need the original ROM to load inside of the recompiled executable for the non-code assets.
First of all this is a chain of replies to someone who said that this would be the way to maintain games for the future. So that’s the argument that’s being attacked here.
Secondly with an emulator you can emulate hardware, so recompiling space invaders would cause the issue I mentioned and you wouldn’t be able to fix it because it’s a “bug” in the original code (not really a bug, but rather using hardware limitation as a feature), and my point is that you don’t know what sort of similar issues you might find here, therefore this is the worst format for preserving old media, ROMs and emulators are better for preserving (which again is the discussion here)
While I agree that ROM + emulator is best for preservation, you absolutely can fix the space invader bug because you have the C code which would let you add in delays. Just like there are many versions of Space Invaders for different consoles an none of them use emulation but play like the original. I’m a fan of si78c, a memory accurate reimplementation of the 1978 arcade game written in C.
Of course Space Invaders wasn’t written in C so this new tool doesn’t apply.
But the article does talk about how the decompiler sometimes introduces bugs and how they were manually fixed before compiling.
So you were right but the problem you brought up has already been addressed. (And will continue to need to be addressed as more cross compiling bugs are found in each game.)
I interpreted the word “legacy” the OP used as the fandom for old games rather than perfect preservation.
Right, but it’s not just pushing a button to get the recompiled code, there’s still translation work to be done. Crucially, a framerate will need to be chosen, so you can just choose to base the framerate on the processing done.
Sure, the ROM is “original” but I’d argue that accessing the source code - or an analogue to it - is a more fundamental way of archiving the original, since without that source code we don’t have access to how it was originally made.
The point is not that it competes with ROMs or replaces them, but it adds to them and makes the archive that much more complete.
Also for games where emulation doesn’t work or isn’t practical, recompilation can allow us to maintain games that otherwise couldn’t be.
It was tricky both because the website that retrogamecorps linked sometimes didn’t work and there are many variations of the SM64 ROM that all play identically but the website that reads your ROM only works with one particular version. I downloaded several before I found one that worked.
Note that SM64 (and OoT, but I don’t think that’s on Android yet) are special cases. These have been reverse engineered by the community to the point that they’ve manually decompiled the entire game, and then separately ported to modern platforms. The project in the OP is different, as it’s made for games that don’t have this effort behind them
Big win for consumers, at least in the US. People tend to do better in courts here than they do in arbitration (where one side pays the judge(arbitrator)).
The article states that the PS5 is responsible for significantly more gaming hours, so a large number of PS4 users are likely mainly using their device for streaming or similar. Hell, I still have my PS2 and 3 in my closet since they're my only dvd and blu ray players.
I have yet to buy a PS5 because there isn’t a game I want yet. Also, Sony tends to release improved consoles with lower price points and smaller footprints after a few years.
For some reason that doesn’t surprise me. When I got a PS4 there were like at least 10 exclusives I wanted. This gen seems it’s mostly remasters and remakes. So ignoring that Sony games come to PC now it doesn’t even meet my criteria of number of exclusives to justify picking one up.
I don’t get why anyone pays attention to these wannabe Hollywood producers like him or Todd Howard. The most interesting and innovative things in gaming are NOT happening in the AAA space.
Honestly AAA studios don’t even exist anymore. Is there any gaming studio making multipe $60 games per year you can name where you would vouch for the quality of their games solely on the basis of who made it?
Maybe some first party console games(and even then only some series), but nothing for PC.
I’d be very worried if a studio was pumping out several full-scale games a year. Did you mean publisher? I find following publishers to be pretty hit or miss, they usually deal with a multitude of game studios whose output will vary wildly. The days of EA making a bunch of EA games is over, now people care whether it’s Dice, Respawn or BioWare, and what the specific game is like.
Studios still just making games do exist. Kojima Productions, Santa Monica, Guerilla, Remedy, Fromsoft, Square Enix, Larian, Id Tech, Insomniac, Sucker Punch, CDPR…
They’re just relatively fewer and farther between as so many studios have pivoted to spending years and years working on one live service title or another, and the rest of these you only really hear from once in several years, when a game comes out.
For publishers, Devolver and Paradox come to mind.
I’d like to think Firaxis and Sid Meier still hold water for Civilization at least, but I do get your point. Most of the games I go back to now and enjoy are nowhere near the ballpark of “AAA”.
It’s a sold game not a live service, as long as they deliverer all updates who cares, the media also had this discussion with Manor Lords decaying numbers, after it sold millions…
It really does feel like that’s what happened. Is WBD going to can something every time they lose an expensive bet?
To add insult to injury, I don’t think anyone was clamoring for an online-only looter-shooter version of this game. If they had just let Rocksteady do their thing, it probably would’ve been a hit. WBD (probably) meddled hard with what would’ve been a solid game, and now a bunch of smaller developers are paying the price…
That does not feel like a good way to build brand loyalty. Especially because no artist is going to want to give their work to a corporation who will throw it in the trash first chance they get.
This is just the same thing EA did with Mass Effect: Andromeda. Exec management wanted out of AAA singleplayer games, so they set the ME:A team up for failure, and then used that failure to justify the change to the shareholders.
WB wants out of large budget games, so they created a flop to justify it.
This is just the same thing EA did with Mass Effect: Andromeda. Exec management wanted out of AAA singleplayer games, so they set the ME:A team up for failure, and then used that failure to justify the change to the shareholders.
If that was the case, then games like Jedi: Cal Kestis and the upcoming Dragon Age and Mass Effect games wouldn’t even exist, even with the surprise success of Jedi: Fallen Order. But also, that’s not even what happened with Andromeda. What happened is that BioWare’s A and B teams screwed over the team that was making Andromeda constantly. That team (henceforth referred to as the C team) before had only had experience with the wildly considered to be worst DLCs of ME:3, and was working with an engine that was known for being incredibly hard to work with and temperamental with any game that wasn’t a first-person shooter.
Even so, they had to struggle without the help of the significantly more experienced team leads and were bullied constantly without resources. After the game failed, the C teams were then dummied out of the company to other sections of EA. BioWare then went on to make Anthem… without the C teams help who by that point were experienced enough to probably deal with some of the growing pains. Andromeda and Anthem were two games that were made entirely by the behest of BioWare, with little to no involvement from EA, because at that point, they were still the starling studio of EA. In fact, as an aside, the only involvement from an EA exec for Anthem was one of them was playing a vertical slice that ended up deciding the rest of the game because all the Exec said was that it was fun.
"Specifically, the named Plaintiffs won binding decisions from arbitrators rendering Valve's arbitration provision unenforceable for both lack of notice and because it impermissibly seeks to bar public injunctive relief."
So none of these stupid clauses are valid? FOO FYEAH!
arstechnica.com
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