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I forgot to post this yesterday. Anyway, hope everyone had a good weekend. I made some major breakthroughs in Balatro this week, unlocking several of the few remaining Jokers I haven't unlocked, scoring over 100 million points (probably could've have gotten to e score if I had been smarter with my DNA joker) and also chipped away at my DS3 SL1 run, beating the Demon Prince fight after about 4 hours of head bashing spread out over the past week, so I only have Midir, Halflight, and Gael before I've officially conquered Lothric at level 1. Have a good week everyone

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by riseuppikmin@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net
 
 

Here are some educational resources/explanations for the games community about emulation and other game-related tools.

Note: Check my top-level replies in this thread as I ran out of text in the post

[Informational Resources]

Reddit's ROM Megathread - Unaffiliated with this site

Emulation Wiki

[Emulation as a field]

Emulation is the process of re-implementing the functionality of something (hardware and/or software) in a separate software environment. You're probably most most familiar in the term as it relates to game system emulation- like the Dolphin Wii and Gamecube emulator, but it's actually much broader than that.

While emulation does cover physical systems, it can also cover things that strictly exist as software. If you've ever played on WoW or any other MMO private servers, the actual underlying software that was being run was likely a server emulator (or in rare cases the actual official server software itself may have leaked or released).

These server emulators are created by analyzing the network information exchange (packets) sent from the game client to the server and those received by the client from the server. A painstaking and brutal process of analyzing these packets allows server reverse-engineering projects to then re-implement the functionality of the official servers, and then we can point the game client towards our reverse-engineered private server (that speaks the exact same "language" as the official servers). This then allows the private servers to provide additional or changed functionality (for example, more exp per quest) which allows a much more customizable experience.

Emulation can also be used to re-implement vendor solutions like the Steam API which provides various utilities like DRM (which the emulator could choose to ignore). A great example of an emulator in this regard is the Goldberg Emulator.

Let's say you've acquired (through legal purchase only of course) the clean steam files for a game and want to run it offline. Normally you wouldn't be able to because the steamworks DRM check wouldn't be able to authenticate against the official steam servers. If we instead replace the steam_api.dll (this could also be named steam_api64.dll depending on the game) with the one provided by the Goldberg Emulator, when the game makes the check for the steamworks drm authentication status, the Goldberg Emulator's implementation of steam_api.dll will simply return true and let us play our game offline. The game itself just knows that it asked for a DRM verification check to a service, and the Goldberg variant of steam_api.dll looks (to the game) exactly like the "real" version, except that it always returns that the steamworks DRM has been verified.

Refer to the readme within the Goldberg project for more information about what to do with specific games. Also take note that this only works with games that only use steamworks drm (most of them) and games using other/multiple DRM solutions won't work with this method only for offline play.

[Console Emulators]

All of the emulators listed below are my personal per-console pick. Each is at least in the recommended section of a great general emulation resource, the Emulation Wiki

Game Platform | Emulator Name | Emulation Platform | Comments

Nintendo Consoles

NES | Ares | Windows/Linux/Mac

SNES | Ares | Windows/Linux/Mac

SNES | bsnes-hd | Windows/Linux/Mac | Widescreen modifications for some SNES games

N64 | Simple64 | Windows/Linux | Soon to be replaced by Gopher64 by the same developer (26/3/2025) N64 emulation has a lot of viable candidate emulators, check the page here

GC | Dolphin | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

Wii | Dolphin | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

Wii U | Cemu | Windows/Linux

Switch | Ryubing Ryujinx Fork | Windows/Linux/Mac/ Android/iOS | Continuation of the Ryujinx project by some of the original contributors

Switch | Yuzu | Windows/Linux/Android | Killed by Nintendo 3/4/2024

Nintendo Handhelds

GB/C | mGBA | Windows/Linux/Mac

GBA | mGBA | Windows/Linux/Mac

DS | MelonDS | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

3DS | Azahar | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android | UPDATE 2/28/2025 Pablomk7 and Lime3DS forks have joined to work on Azahar

Sony Consoles

Playstation | DuckStation | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

Playstation 2 | PCSX2 | Windows/Linux/Mac

Playstation 3 | RPCS3 | Windows/Linux/Mac

Playstation 4 | ShadPS4 | Windows/Linux/Mac | Heavily experimental and not for casual use yet

Sony Handhelds

PSP | PPSSPP | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

PSVita | Vita3K | Windows/Linux/Mac

Sega Consoles

Sega Master System | Ares | Windows/Linux/Mac

Genesis | Ares | Windows/Linux/Mac

Saturn | Mednafen | Windows/Linux

Dreamcast | Flycast | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

Microsoft Consoles

Xbox | Xemu | Windows/Linux/Mac

Xbox 360 | Xenia | Windows

Apple Phones

iOS 2.x | TouchHLE | Windows/Mac/Android

[Graphics Packs]

A lot of emulators have texture replacement capabilities built into them. What this means is that users can manually and/or AI upscale textures from the game into higher resolution or outright replace them with other textures. There aren't currently (that I'm aware of) area that have consolidated links to these things, so you'll unfortunately have to search individual project forums and look for texture or graphic packs links.

Some known graphics packs repositories:

Dolphin Forums

Citra Forums Killed by Nintendo 3/4/2024; waiting for the dust to settle for recommendations

[Graphics API Translation Layers]

Sometimes there are scenarios where a game may only use DirectX to draw it's rendered graphics to screen and we may not want this. This could be for performance reasons (maybe the Vulkan graphics api has better performance, maybe DirectX isn't available on our OS, or maybe the DirectX version is really old and not properly supported by our OS/GPU/Driver combination). In these instances we can use translations layers to translate DirectX graphics api calls into Vulkan calls using utilities like DXVK . Explaining which files to copy over depends on a per-DirectX version basis, so you'll have to use a combination of the PCGamingWiki and DXVK documentation to figure out which files to replace.

[Graphics Post-Processing]

With a utility called ReShade we're able to inject various post-processing effects into the final stage of the graphic rendering pipelines of games. This allows you to adjust color curves, inject path-traced global illumination (a method like ray-tracing), and add a bunch of other effects to DirectX9/11/12/Vulkan games.

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Sorry in advance but, this might be a bet vent-y

Marvel Rivals fans always try to justify the character designs for the female characters (which I'll admit, can be a bit goonarbait) by bringing up either Daw or Amari from Concord and literally ONLY THOSE 2 and going like "you see what happens when you don't have attractive characters" but they often forget that

  1. LITERALLY NOBODY ASIDE FROM SONY EXECS WANTED CONCORD

  2. Mei from Overwatch is also kinda bulky and a lot of people love her

  3. just because your game has attractive characters doesn't mean it'll do well or be good. look at First Descendant. it's lost nearly all it's playerbase going from a 270,,000 peak to a 9,000 player 24 hour peak. having attractive characters didn't help that game

4 . When bringing up concord. It's not the the characters were unattractive. It's that they looked bad. Those are in fact two separate things. I don't think anyone is going to tell me the cast of Team Fortress 2 are hot. But they look great as characters. Each is fun to look at, expressive, oozes personality, and is easily identifiable. Concord's designs just looked like a shitty Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff . Porting the body and face of an OF model into the game wouldn't have changed that.

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The player base for this game really does mostly suck doesn't it; good to know at least Paradox isn't chuddy at least.

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Hey, did you guys hear about the one about the console gamer and the girl? Neither did we. A little lesson in love, gentlemen: chicks don't dig guys who are behind the times. Sorry. But the good news is, when enhanced with a 3dfx Voodoo graphics accelerator, the performance and effects on your PC will kick the snot out of your console. Thus bringing you ahead of the times. So pick one up. Oh, and lose the headgear. They hate that too.

Imagine if Nvidia or AMD still made ads like this nowadays. If you don't buy an RTX 5090 that means your DICK is SMALL

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While kids in most parts of Japan are obsessed with Pokémon cards, the children of Kawara are clutching to something a little closer to home.

They are playing a trading card game (TCG) where the stars aren’t fantasy creatures, anime heroes or even famous baseball players, but ojisan (middle-aged or older men) from the local community of Saidosho.

On the surface, this Ojisan TCG looks like any other collectible card game. As of March 18, there are 47 different cards in the collection, including 28 featuring local men with stats and special abilities.

Take the Firewall card, for example. It features Mr. Honda (74), a former fire brigade chief who helped keep the town safe for decades. Then there’s Soba Master Mr. Takeshita (81), who runs a local soba noodle-making class and now holds legendary status among the town’s youth.

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If you're just getting into DMC because of the Netflix Anime, the game you should skip is DMC2 for a few reasons:

  1. The original director of DMC1 (Hideki Kamiya) did not return for the sequel.

  2. The person they replaced him with did not like Dante, nor had any experience in the genre (DMC combat exists because of a glitch from Onimusha and being able to "juggle" enemies)

  3. Itsuno (director of DMC 3-5) came in towards the end of the development (it was clear the game was struggling) and added some things to improve the quality

  4. take all the above, you have a game that doesn't have the characterization, tone, finesse, gameplay of the original- and just a bad game at that

5/ To make matters worse, the game ended on a cliffhanger that is never brought up again or resolved in any following games. It was chronologically supposed to be a game that takes place later in his life, but literally now just takes place after DMC1**___**

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The publishers of Drug Dealer Simulator are suing Schedule I because it's a better game.

apparently they are mad that game kind of has a similar theme.

Here is one of the latest player reviews: "Game was mid at best when it first released. Lots of empty promises that were never delivered. I also can not support a company who would rather sue an indie developer than actually fix their damn game."

"we are obligated to perform this investigation"

No you are not. It's bullshit. Use your resources making better games, instead of being cooperate asshats and suing people who do

"It is not our intention to prevent TVGS from selling or developing their game"

where have I heard that before? oh, maybe when Nintendo/TPC tried to sue Palworld/Pocket Pair

And to say "there is no Lawsuit" but then continue to explain why they are investigating (to build a lawsuit) is not a good look.

Sorry Byterunners, but I will be boycotting anything handled by Movie Games, this is ridiculous.

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there are a lot of video games and of course i know every video game ever but other users might not so it might be helpful to include them on screenshots or meme posts idk thought it was helpful

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