ashinadash

tags: google, cool, android, alphabet

I tried to make the proportions and positioning consistent with the other emojis in The :Cool Series(TM). I just hate Google and think everyone else should too.

ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!

GSPLUS seems pretty cool at first, and I can download a .hdv image of a hard drive and run lots of GS stuff, but I cannot run Wizardry: Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord. If you use the F4 menu to put it (BOOT.DSK, 143kb) in the appropriate slot (S6D1) the "check startup device" screen appears. (coincidentally the Wizardry manual does not contain any instructions that I see, there's no LOAD "*",8,1 or anything like that) I can also boot into PRODOS8 and try PREFIX,S6,D1 or whatever to no avail. No earlier version of PRODOS boots in this emulator either.

I know this is something I'm doing wrong because the same image boots just fine in AppleWin which I built in arch. I don't understand why this doesn't work; most internet resources confidently state that you can jam an Apple ][ game into a 5.25" drive on a IIGS and boot it happily. Not so with GSPLUS. Is it not at all capable of running Apple ][ games? Any help is appreciated.

EDIT: As a comedy bonus, if I take the same BOOT.DSK and fire it into the version of GSPLUS in Batocera, it boots the game fine there. Incredible stuff. As a bonus it won't get past the title screen, but that is probably a Batocera thing.

EDIT 2: No progress on standalone GSPLUS but both Mame (in r*troarch and standalone) as well as the libretro GSPLUS core will boot Wizardry if the disk is read-only, both in the computer's file system and in the emulator. Amazing.

ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!

So every time I post my incredibly funny bit about this stupid AMD netbook not booting on 7.1 and newer Linux kernels, this is what I mean. There's some kind of mess with the support flags that indicate whether Southern Islands (Radeon 7000, GCN 1.0, coded as "si") and Sea Islands (Radeon Rx 200, GCN 1.1, coded as "cik") should boot AMDGPU or not. It's all very silly. Here is a collection of links about the issue.

As a bonus I tried booting other random Linux 7.1-using live images on this system, and they fail the same way, so I don't think it's any stupid config thing of my own doing.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=314176

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/work_items/5465

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2026-April/143044.html

EDIT: bro u just gotta restore nutmeg bro it's ez bro

Applying only "drm/amd/display: Fix preferred link rate for NUTMEG" on top of v7.1.3 restores VGA output with DC enabled (link trains, CRTC active at 1360x768@60); stable across repeated reboots.

God I wish that were me etc

ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!

Official post (which disavows Roger Craig Smith)

Seriously why. Sonic and the Black Knight was the last one and it was also the last time you could beat the final boss to a kickaas buttrock theme song. Why don't we have this anymore?

Unmitigated fucking nerd question

More broadly this is part of the "what did FromSoft do before 1994" question, which in the anglosphere is a question nobody knows the answer to. What business software, motherfucker???

But the delightful and low-poly models and environments in 1994's King's Field made me extremely curious. The game has that janky photo-cd texture look, but I couldn't really find out what FromSoft's development pipeline looked like at the time. The PlayStation is the first 3D capable console that truly mattered, and its japanese launch games interest me because a lot of studios struggled to move to 3D games. It was a big time, famously Square Soft spun up basically their own entire 3D rendering division based on a bunch of expensive SGI Onyx systems and shit to make Final Fantasy VII.

Is it possible that FromSoft just used 486 PCs or Amigas running Lightwave or Cinema 4D or whatever? Very much so, but for a company that had spent a bunch of time doing random business software, (maybe they were into CAD stuff?) and specifically cited the lacking ability of PCs to do polygons well when talking about moving to the PlayStation, it seems like the modelling tools and stuff they used to make basically Ultima Underworld But More would be of interest. Despite that, I can't find anything about it. Did they make their own whole 3D rendering program like Capcom? I thought From was pretty small back then...

Oh, and don't say Sword of Moonlight. Cool program but From was not using a DirectX-accelerated Windows program before Windows 95 came out. It is true that Armoured Core and presumably Shadow Tower were built on the same core "engine" as King's Field, at least, akin to the internal company "engines" of devs like the british Climax.

EDIT: thanks to @h0ll0w5p4c3 digging up an obscure magazine page, it has been discovered that FromSoft (founded in 1984, mostly doing "OA software" or Office Automation, primarily automated livestock sorting for a Japanese farm consortium!!!) was prototyping a fully-polygonal dungeon-crawling mecha game called ZAMS-K3 for the PC-98, which is nuts. Most commercial 3D games for PC-98 run poorly, so the move to PS1 makes sense albeit porting the code probably made less sense :) but the tech underlying ZAMS-K3 served as the basis for King's Field (initially cited in english magazines as "Crystal Dragon") and eventually Armoured Core. While this does not reveal every inch of From's dev environment, it sheds a lotta light which I like. ZAMS-K3 itself reminds me of the PS1 game Crime Crackers (lol) which was also a launch window game.

Sources, found by searching "ZAMS-K3" after seeing the translation of magazine pages h0ll0w5p4c3 linked:

https://www.lost-town.com/dossier-d80-p1-kings-field

https://www.stayforever.de/podcast/king-s-field-ssf-94 (god I wish I could listen to this)

Choice quotes from lost-town:

This gave him so much enthusiasm that it was decided that the box would make this prototype [ZAMS-K3] a commercial product! We are then in 1993 and unfortunately for From Software the popular consoles of the time such as the Super Nintendo do not tolerate 3D very well, ask to be programmed in a special assembly language and also require very high costs to be authorized to be released by Nintendo! In real life... Even a PC-98 release is a bit hot because the game is incredibly ahead of its time with a dozen mecha that rotates 360 degrees, the ability to fight against another player, a palette of 256 colors and the ability to fire lots of missiles at high speed in complex dungeons with even a system to block hits! In short, the game only ran on PC-98s modified to have even more internal memory and the game seemed to be extremely difficult to complete... [...]

In addition, Sony was asking for much less money to develop on their machine and the devkit wouldn't even be that expensive! Only 2 million yen, which seems laughable compared to the famous Silicon Graphics stations that could cost up to 30 million yen! In short, a golden opportunity to convert ZAMS-K3 to a home console although... In fact, the machine was not powerful enough to run the game properly, this project was really TOO ambitious with its realistic mechs that required too many polygons.... As a result; it was decided to take the dungeon assets of ZAMS-K3 to do something else.

Doesn't seem like their 3D workflow was that advanced...

In fact, From Software was a very serious company but their total inexperience in video games meant that they discovered everything day by day. Even something as simple as a polygon counter, an essential trick at the time to not impose too much on the machine had not been developed and they counted everything by hand!

Moreover:

Already the Playstation did not have a few devkits with particularly finalized development libraries and the team did not have access to Sony's memory card which forced them to test everything since the start of the game every time!

This possibly means they were using the MW.3 standalone devkit described here instead of the ISA card setup Sony later used.

Looks like JPEG XL is BACK ON THE MENU BAYBEE!!

Not really news I guess, you already have JXL in some form in current Firefox but YIPEE etc

EDIT: I have become the JPEG-XL joker. When I make the news, the https://jpegxl.info/ url will be in my manifesto.

You got a Max Derrat video, that's a complete non-starter. Watch the Archagent Everlasting video about that guy instead.

Next there's Scribble Retrospective's video, which opens with an "absolute power corrupts absolutely" diatribe followed by a "WE HAVE EXAMPLES IN THE MODERN DAY OF AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES" zinger. Holy hell. I mean, that type of shit is consistent with the game's message, at least. Ramza is so naïve that it tilts into active malice, particularly because he's a nepobaby of the nobility who spends the game basically putting down peasant rebellions and coup attempts, but still has the absolute gall to lecture people like Balk with bullshit like this:

"A real human being"? Don't make me laugh!

How valuable is a "freedom" you don't earn yourself?

'Equality's not something you're given! It's something you fight for!!

which is a banger for the ages if you ask me. I kept expecting Ramza to have a "oh shit what am I doing" moment where he turns against his adoptive-noble line, but nah it never comes.

So I'm on the lookout for non-pukeworthy videos about FFT, not necessarily because I expect any of them to share my comically extreme take, but because I want a balanced and informed second opinion on it, I guess. But goddamn, video essays fell off. The Kbash one is probably the closest to "good".

Touching grass must kick so much ass if you live in Shanghai.

So the HP Envy 2 in 1 I have which runs Endeavour OS is one of those Ryzen machines that uses the Sensor Fusion Hub [1022:15e4] to rotate. This sensor fusion hub has been around since the first mobile Ryzen gen and is still used in the Ryzen 5000 mobile machines, mostly convertibles. But it don't rotate.

Setting KDE's tablet mode does nothing, iio-sensor-proxy is installed but will not return anything, monitor-sensor --accel just waits infinitely. Force starting iio with systemctl and checking it shows No sensors or missing kernel drivers for the sensors. Exiting and deactivates. Modprobing pcie_mp2_amd gives FATAL: Module pcie_mp2_amd not found in directory /lib/modules/7.1.8-arch1-3 which is cool. You can also modprobe amd_sfh to no avail.

I found this totally useless archbbs thread full of dead links, and funny enough I was dual booting Windows 10 on this machine, but no amount of rebooting nor disabling Fast Boot in Windows nor entirely reinstalling EndeavourOS fixes this. A live image of Cachy OS behaves the same.

If you know anything about amd_sfh or pcie_mp2_amd I am begging you, just let me rotate my screen automatically. Or y'know, if you wanna write a patch to make it work, together. Totally.

Bugzilla thread about this gamer hardware issue

EDIT: after a bit of research I see that the Linux kernel has been fighting for its life against AMD's shitass SFH driver... For over six years...

The monk/ninja hybrid really is the ideologically correct answer for everything in this game, isn't it? Ramza's been a monk for a while but I did some grinding (game is a grindfest) to make him a ninja after the fort city encounter with Malak. Ramza is hitting for 192 damage times two on Wiegraf and his subsequent demon form. For the first phase, you just have to bait him into range and then deck him once. Owned. Demon form has more HP but with some Lancers and Agrias helping he goes down in two turn cycles.

Other classes that would be cool include Engineers, (firearms are nowhere near as strong as in Tactics Ogre, but the range is almost the whole map) Holy Knights, (only for Agrias, the ranged attacks like Lightning Blade are clutch) and Lancers (whose spears remove Counter from the equation and whose Jump attack is basically free damage) but mostly since every single map in this game is smaller than any throne room in Tactics Ogre, combat shakes out to something like character max damage output ÷ character mobility or something. It's always just a contest of who can deal the most damage the fastest.

Right?

(Or a smattering of observations about Mystery Dungeon: Red/Blue Rescue Team)

Part of the reason that pro-anarchist furry propaganda Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is so effective is because it frequently carries over the series tradition of Pokémon being referred to as "it", rather than more commonly-associated people pronouns (he/she/they) which of course children who are, for example, not yet aware of being an it/she canid therianthrope react to very normally. (positive connotation)

Combined with many other things you see in PMD...

one can't really end up surprised when gay autistic children grow up to be happy transgender furries, is all I'm saying. Game where you (the person reading this!) get turned into a Pokémon and get to go on cool adventures and wag your tail and just vibe. In the Pokémon world. Y'know. Certainly it's a little strange that all of this is wrapped around a gamrplay loop in which you fight other Pokémon, and I'm uncertain of how exactly this factors into people wanting to fuck Pokémon, but the point is waow Pokémon Mystery Dungeon sure is neat!

I didn't realise that the one tumblr account I saw posting about it was a film festival dork. It's probably out now, so how is it anyway? Big shoes to fill, even though I wasn't that into World's Fair.