owlbear

owlbear, 1 month ago to retrogaming

Forgot to plug my own work again! I wrote about using Raspberry Pi 5 to emulate consoles that previous models couldn't quite stretch to, as well as our old favourites.

That includes Wii emulation using Dophin and the Open Shop Channel, GBA emulation with mGBA, Dreamcast with Flycast and PS1 with Mednaffe, plus the latest version of RecalBox.

Buy a copy or download the PDF for free at:
https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/issues/138

#RetroGaming #Emulation

baldur, 2 months ago to random

Met this friend while on my mental health walk.

Same long-haired grey and white, tuxedo-patterned cat. This time a bit further away. We can see more of the bench.

owlbear, 4 months ago to random

If you're interested in making #Twine into an FVM engine in spite of itself - which is actually useful for fast #FMV #AdventureGame prototyping - @MichaelKlamerus has assembled all the links for my tutorial on doing just that.

https://virtualmoose.org/2024/02/04/anyone-can-make-a-game-with-fmv/

He's also provided information on full-scale FMV adventure engines.

I'm still sad that YouTube broke its FMV game functionality - years ago now - along with all the games that used it.

Oooh... one could relink their fragments using Twine!

futurebird, 4 months ago to random

What is something you have learned you wish you could have told your younger self... but, you also know your younger self would never believe you?

Here are mine:

• Even if you are a smarty pants you still need to study, probably a lot.
• Brush your teeth twice a day. Not once. TWICE.
• The few things about your appearance you have (some) control over are not very important in romance.
• No, you really do need to sleep.
• Don't just study what's hard & impressive study what fascinates you.

owlbear, 7 months ago to Youtube

Last month, YouTube extended its ad blocker detection to users in the European union.

But privacy campaigners say that the adblock detection techniques used by YouTube (and almost everyone else) could be illegal under the EU’s ePrivacy Directive.

For WIRED, I looked at at the legal and technical arguments and spoke to privacy advocate Alexander Hanff (@thatprivacyguy) and MEP Patrick Breyer (@echo_pbreyer) about their work in this area.

https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-ad-blocker-detection-eu-privacy-law/

#AdBlock #AntiAdBlock #YouTube

owlbear, 7 months ago to random

Who has unpreserved edutainment software from 2001 ready to uploade?

DINO l'Aventurier en Europe, produced by the HobbySoft's Kid's Club marque appears to have been made by a Polish team, based on the directory names.

If there's a manual, I'm sadly missing it, but I do have the complete and unused colouring book set that occupies most of the steelbook case (early example of that case type, too).

Shout if you've ever played this.

#GamePreservation #SoftwarePreservation #Edutainment

Dino l'Aventurier en Europe, a HobbySoft Kids Club titles with a purple cartoon dinosaur with yellow spots, map of Europe and Big Ben on the cover.
Internal view of the steelbook case, showing a CD and a colouring kit with pencils and wax crayons.

owlbear, 8 months ago to linux

On Linux, if you're connected to ProtonVPN and your system crashes or gets hard reset, you may find that you can no longer connect to the internet.

This is likely because ProtonVPN's killswitch has got stuck on. To check and disable it: (on Pop!_OS 22.04 in this case, but it'll work on many distros).

ip route show
nmcli device
sudo nmcli connection delete pvpn-killswitch
sudo nmcli connection delete pvpn-ipv6leak-protection

#Linux #VPN #ProtonVPN

owlbear, 8 months ago to gaming

I'm testing some new hardware for its capabilities when it comes to retro games emulation, which means I'll be playing some Quest for Glory IV.

I don't want to go digging from my character saves, and I'd like to cheese this a bit. To my delight, I've found Blazingstix's QFGImporter, which can import, sanitise, create, export and buff your characters to your heart's content.

Download: https://blazingstix.com/apps/qfgimporter

Source code: https://github.com/Blazingstix/QFGImporter

#AdventureGames #cheats #QuestForGlory

MichaelKlamerus, 1 year ago to random

When people are referring to the era when the adventure game genre was "dead" are they generally referring to 2001-2006ish?

It's post Escape from Monkey Island and sorta creeps into when Telltale and Wadjet Eye started making games, right?

owlbear, 1 year ago to random

I wrote a piece for Rock Paper Shotgun last year and promptly got distracted. I had a lot of fun researching it and hope you'll find it an entertaining read.

I spoke to devs about why their games were delisted from Steam, delved into some rights disputes, and tell you how you can still add delisted free titles onto your Steam account.

Copyright, cost, and ageing code: why some games disappear from Steam

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/copyright-cost-and-ageing-code-why-some-games-disappear-from-steam

#SoftwarePreservation #Steam #RetroGaming