GabeMoralesVR

GabeMoralesVR, 20 hours ago

@vga256 I have no love or nostalgia for these, but you are awesome for offering these at a discounted price. A while back I went on a kick and rebought a lot of old issues of magazines I had as a kid, and it's surprisingly expensive on ebay. Stuff that used to sell for $1.50 (cheap!) an issue would sell for like $20 on ebay. I sincerely hope these go to someone who will love these, old magazines are awesome time capsules.

GabeMoralesVR, 20 hours ago

@vga256 Might I suggest, if you can't find someone here who is interested, you look into Retromags? its a community of people who rip and archive old magazines online. You could probably find someone on their forums who would be willing to take these and archive them from you: https://www.retromags.com/

GabeMoralesVR, 22 hours ago

@froyok try Lulu.com, it's a service meant for self publishing. However, you can test print any pdf you upload without it checkinf if you have permission to do so. So you can just grab the GPU Pro 4 pdf and make it a private unreleased book on your account, and order a single test print. Their prices are very low. Last christmas I did this with a copy of The Book of Shaders, and my print was only $8.78.

GabeMoralesVR, 22 hours ago

@froyok perhaps reach out to to the author for permission, and offer to send them some money directly. I did this with a website I scraped once to get a physical book printed. Good on you for looking out for the author!

GabeMoralesVR, 22 hours ago

@CindyWeinstein I lost my grandpa to Alzheimers. I am constantly in fear that I will develop it, as I'm the youngest and it tends to skip a generation. Watching my grandpa vanish before our eyes over the years was heart breaking. I hate this disease so much.

GabeMoralesVR, 22 hours ago

@CindyWeinstein people who haven't seen the disease upclose don't realize how demoralizing the disease is. It robs you of your dignity. My grandpa was like an infant by the end. When my grandpa passed, my grandma felt extremely guilty because she said it was almost like a release for her, because she was a prisoner taking care of him. I'm lucky to have been spared watching my own father fade away like that, I don't think I could have taken it. My deep condolences.

GabeMoralesVR, 22 hours ago

@msquebanh @CindyWeinstein My grandpa owned a buisness that supported his family, so when he eventually was too far gone to run it, my dad and I took up the business for him while my grandma became my grandpa's caregiver 24/7. It was so rough because we'd see my grandpa every few days to drop off the books at my grandmas so we got to watch the decline in real time. It was honestly mentally scarring, it scares me so much.

GabeMoralesVR, 22 hours ago

@CindyWeinstein @msquebanh no worries, I'm on top of all that, even the mediterranean diet. I actually need that diet for health reasons beyond alzheimer's (I'm immunocompromised and it's related). My parents were good at imparting the need to catch and treat things early, so I'm not afraid at all of the doctor.

GabeMoralesVR, 22 hours ago

@CindyWeinstein @msquebanh mastodon has been wonderful for helping me cope with the reality of my sickness, finding like minded people honestly very much helps.

GabeMoralesVR, 22 hours ago

@CindyWeinstein @msquebanh someone's gender is of no consequence to me at all, I respect everybody equally and never mind being explained to. Even on subjects I'm well versed in, I have gaps in my knowledge and it never hurts to have things reiterated. No offense taken at all, I appreciate it.

GabeMoralesVR, 1 day ago

@xot oh I very much consider myself a baby when it comes to computers. The ocean is too deep to ever reach the bottom lol.

On the Amiga, the whole system was built around simultaneous access, so DMA is split between time frames, even and odd. On even frames, the 68000 has bus access, on odd frames, the agnus chip has access. So they get around the bus access problem, kind of like preemptive multitasking in general.

GabeMoralesVR, 1 day ago

@TomF @xot the curse of planar graphics in general, 1 pixel 6 pokes lol.

GabeMoralesVR, 1 day ago

@TomF @xot they were pretty much the norm back then, no? CGA, apple IIgs, Even in the console space, stuff like the sega master system and SNES used planar graphics too. Chunky graphics are obviously superior but it doesn't seem like until around 1990-ish that chunky took over, likely owing to ram finally falling enough in price.

I do like the cheap transparency tricks you can do with planar graphics tho.

GabeMoralesVR, 1 day ago

@TomF @xot wasn't the dream of a direct color chunky fullscreen framebuffer essentially the entire reason the atari jaguar and sega 32X exist? lol

GabeMoralesVR, 1 day ago

@TomF @xot @TomF @xot AGA was still bitplaned, the CD32 had a chip called Akiko that was hardware chunky2planar conversion but it was slow.

The Sega Genesis is 4bpp byte packed, so 2 pixels per byte. Similarly, in index mode, the 32X processes at word length, so 2 bytes/16 bit as a time. So even though the framebuffer is 8bpp, it's read 2 pixels at a time, with a 1 pixel horizontal shift register for smooth scrolling. In both cases, you have to treat each chunky pack as 2 pixels.

GabeMoralesVR, 1 day ago

@TomF @xot I actually love the Jaguar, I know the system has problems and it was severely cash starved, but it's like this fascinating train wreck that I honestly adore. I have a skunk board, the jaguar is a tech fetishist dream, so much parallel stuff happening. I unironically love the system, I think those games which used the low color mode in conjunction with heavy gouraud shading still look incredible, like Zero Five and obviously Tempest 2000.

GabeMoralesVR, 1 day ago

@TomF @xot oh yeah, I'm familiar with the story, I have the official atari jaguar strategy guide put out by atari themselves, which is a fascinating read. Midway through the guide, I guess they gave up on actually writing a stragegy guide, and just info dumped a bunch of interviews and stuff from their last winter CES. So like, interviews with Jeff Minter and such. They have this long part with him where he talks about the Konix and Flare II and the creation of the Jag. Super cool stuff.

GabeMoralesVR, 1 day ago

@TomF @xot There was this awesome synergy in game hardware back then, it was so much fun to follow the teams of people making these things instead of the companies. I love that the ZX Spectrum group lived on through the Jaguar, and similarly, I love how many Amiga alumni worked on the 3DO and later Nuon. The old guard of gaming that lived through those wild west days are real-deal heroes.

GabeMoralesVR, 1 day ago

@TomF @xot To bring this around to your original post, I built one of those atari jaguar rotary controllers from a FAQ off of compuserve back in the day (@llamasoft_ox -- did you create the rotary joystick design yourself or was that something atari was going to eventually put out?)

Anywho, the same FAQ was a faq about the enhanced atari joystick port, and it included how there was a bug in the first revision of the jaguar, so the controller port has some features that nobody could reliably use

GabeMoralesVR, 2 days ago

@Linux why would i use this when steam has a superior streaming option built directly into the client? Everything this does, steam has done natively for multiple years now, including web browser invites to streaming multiplayer games WITH current firefox support already rolled out.

GabeMoralesVR, 22 days ago

@JamesBazan or literally every republican in the senate and house? Is this ruling seriously hinging on "you wouldn't dare"?