I’m with you. In fact I’ll say even retro operating systems were better (no bloat, no spyware, easy to understand/configure/mod/hack around), as well as retro Internet (no Javascript crap, no browser fingerprinting/tracking, simpler HTML, super easy webdev) and retro computing (no soldered-on components, PCs were more modular and easy to repair)… heck, planet earth in general was better back then. We’ve been on a downwards spiral since the 2000s. Everything sucks now.

You could make yours a Geocaching app with fog-of-war. They’ve got an API for third-party apps too, so it should be easy enough to develop, and actually fun to play.

If you’re feeling ambitious, add some RTS elements like from Age of Empires - eg if you add someone as your ally, you can share their line of sight. Finding certain types of caches, or POIs, increases your resources (gold/stone/food/wood - maybe visiting Pizza Hut gives you extra food lol). And with these resources, you could build virtual structures like castles etc. Other players could spend resources to take it down (but they need to be physically at that location), and you could spend resources to defend your building.

Kinda like Ingress basically, but with medieval/RTS elements and geocaching thrown into the mix. How’s that for a challenge? :)

I game on my bed too, and use a flat right-angled USB adapter. Basically, something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Duttek-Degree-Adapter-Extender-Support/dp/B0C244K2HC/

I use a similar but magnetic version with my phone and other USB-C devices, and it’s been a game-changer.

That’s incredible. Your son has far, far, more patience than I ever did. I still haven’t managed to clock most of the games I grew up with, such as Dangerous Dave, Prince of Persia 1 & 2, Wolf3D, Doom 1 & 2, Crystal Caves, Aladdin, Lion King, Jazz Jackrabbit, Mario (NES), Pokemon Red (GBA), Crash Bandicoot (PS1)…

Every now and then I try to clock one of those old games, but then I get stuck and/or lose interest, and move on to something else. Even among recent games, I spent over 400 hours playing BotW and only managed to do two of the divine beasts. I also have over 200 hours in TotK and still haven’t gotten to the first major spirit quest. Similarly, got several hundreds of hours in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, but never actually completed any of those games.

I think the only game that I recall beating would be the Bio Menace trilogy - which I finally managed to complete as an adult, and that too thanks to DOSBox’s save states. Oh, and Diablo II too, it someone had the perfect mix of action + story + game length, to keep me interested till the end.

Honestly I’ve no idea how people manage to stick to one thing for so long and see it thru till the end, without losing interest or getting distracted by something else.

That’s going to change in the future with NPUs (neural processing units). They’re already being bundled with both regular CPUs (such as the Ryzen 8000 series) and mobile SoCs (such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3). The NPU included with the the SD8Gen3 for instance can run models like Llama 2 - something an average desktop would normally struggle with. Now this is only the 7B model mind you, so it’s a far cry from more powerful models like the 70B, but this will only improve in the future. Over the next few years, NPUs - and applications that take advantage of them - will be a completely normal thing, and it won’t require a household’s worth of energy. I mean, we’re already seeing various applications of it, eg in smartphone cameras, photo editing apps, digital assistants etc. The next would be I guess autocorrect and word prediction, and I for one can’t wait to ditch our current, crappy markov keyboards.

• Summarising articles / extracting information / transforming it according to my needs. Everyone knows LLM-bssed summaries are great, but not many folks utilise them to their full extent. For instance, yesterday, Sony published a blog piece on how a bunch of games were discounted on the PlayStation store. This was like a really long list that I couldn’t be bothered reading, so I asked ChatGPT to display just the genres that I’m interested in, and sort them according to popularity. Another example is parsing changelogs for software releases, sometimes some of them are really long (and not sorted properly - maybe just a dump of commit messages), so I’d ask it to summarise the changes, maybe only show me new feature additions, or any breaking changes etc.

• Translations. I find ChatGPT excellent at translating Asian languages - expecially all the esoteric terms used in badly-translated Chinese webcomics. I feed in the pinyin word and provide context, and ChatGPT tells me what it means in that context, and also provides alternate translations. This is a 100 times better than just using Google Translate or whatever dumb dictionary-based translator, because context is everything in Asian languages.

Given the current pace of development, how long would you reckon it might take them to get rid of the bugs, at least, the annoying game-breaking ones? I don’t mind incomplete content, but game breaking bugs is something I don’t have the patience to deal with. Like, I pre-ordered Cyberpunk but dropped it on day one cause of the bugs, and didn’t touch it until three years later, whem it was finally in a playable state (for me). Just wondering if Star Citizen would reach that sort of bug-free stage within the next couple of years.

It’s not in the opposite order, it’s just flipped around in the photo lol.

Looks like this might work: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005094002506.html

If it’s just for personal use, why not just use Tasker? Judging by what you’ve written, it could be easily done without needing any Android coding experience.

But Bethesda could very well release a Skyrim Extra Special Edition in the interim, and fans will lap it up, no doubt. Jokes aside, there are many large fan-projects in the works which fans are looking forward to, such such as OpenMW, Skyblivion and Skywind, not to mention more “normal” mods for Skyrim itself, so I doubt the interest in the franchise is going away any time soon.

I’m one of the foolish ones that actually pre-ordered the game. Was super hyped for it too, did a countdown till midnight so that I can start playing at launch, and I even live streamed it (and also had a few other streams going on two laptops). Took the day off to play the game as well.

The clock hit 00:00 and less than 30 minutes into the game, I ran into my first bug. I stuck was in a dialog loop and couldn’t get out no matter what I tried, so was for forced to load an earlier save. Then I got stuck somewhere else, or something funky would happen. I’d never been so utterly disappointed in a game until Cyberpunk came along. So anyways, I was so put off by it that I’d decided not to play it any further, until they patched it all up. So the first patch came along, but this time I decided to read the reviews first - still plenty of bugs. Thought I’d wait for the next one, noope, still buggy. And the next one. And the next. And then I decided to ignore the game completely, until not only they fixed the bugs, but also added QoL stuff into the game. Like better AI, better peds, better driving etc. Make the city more immersive. I mean, I had waited for so long, so might as well wait and play until it’s at it’s best version.

So, not only will I not play now, nor when 2.0 comes out, I’ll play it only when Phantom Liberty is out, and will enjoy the game, for the first-ish time, the way it was meant to be played.

Assuming of course that Phantom Liberty isn’t a dud, but having learnt from my previous experience, I might wait a bit after it comes out and see if they release a post-launch patch or something first.

Never again pre-ordering a game… unless it’s a Zelda.

It’s not like you’ll be installing it in there permanently. If you’ve got a Framework laptop or PC case for instance, you could also use it in there. Basically it’s a BYOM (bring your own mobo) situation, so when you’re not gaming on the go, instead of wasting that piece of idle hardware, it could be put to good use. Or vice versa. Maybe you already have a Framework laptop and want to convert it into a handheld gaming device.

The exciting part here is the shell, not the insides. Indeed the Intel boards aren’t that great for gaming, but once Framework start shipping the AMD boards next month, this thing would become a real contender to the Steam Deck, ROG Ally etc. Load up something like ChimeraOS on it and you’d get a near-Steam Deck like experience.

To be fair, that’s the case with Linux and laptops in general right? Unless you’ve got a mainstream/popular model (or a brand known to work well with, or officially supports Linux), issues like sound, battery life and even suspend, wifi etc are fairly common. Which is why one of the most common Linux questions (besides “which distro”) is “which laptop”.

Depends on the hardware. If it’s an x86 then that’s most certainly a yes, if it’s an ARM then YMMV.

From @SuperIce@lemmy.world:

If the PoS supports tokens, it’ll use unique tokens for each payment. If the PoS doesn’t support tokens, the phone has a virtual credit card number linked to the real one, so if it does get stolen, you can just remove the card from your Google Wallet to deactivate it. Your real card number is never exposed.

Even then, credit card numbers on their own aren’t that useful anymore. Any online payment needs the CVC and PoS devices usually require chip or tap cards, which don’t use the number. On top of that, credit card companies have purchase price restrictions when using swipe because of the security risks vs chip (which is why most PoS devices don’t support swipe anymore).

There are plenty of HDMI switches or splitters out there that support audio extraction, just use one of them to sit between your monitor. Like this one: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00XJITK7E

??? The output is provided by whatever box you’re connecting to the monitor - set-top box, Android TV, Apple TV etc.

As I mentioned earlier, use a soundbar or dedicated speakers (most TV speakers suck anyways). Also, for a reasonably priced monitors, look for monitors marketed as “commercial displays” - they’re generally the same price or even cheaper than a similar spec’d TV.

Yes, Viewsonic for instance is one company that makes them. Although, they’re typically advertised as a “commercial LED display” or something like that. Basically look for “display” instead of “TV”.

Just get a monitor. The only real difference between a monitor and a TV these says is the lack of a speaker, and “smart” stuff. But TV speakers suck anyways so you’d be better off using a soundbar regardless.

Awesome, thank you. Guess that’s my weekend sorted. :)

Finished Mass Effect 2 and loved it

Did you play it on PC or console? If it’s the latter then how were the controls? I’m planning on getting it on console, but I suck at playing FPSes with a controller.

Katamari Damacy - The objective is to roll a ball-like thing called a katamari, to roll up objects, and make the katamari bigger and bigger. You can roll up anything from paper clips and snacks in the house, to telephone poles and buildings in the town, to even living creatures such as people and animals. Once the katamari is complete, it will turn into a star that colors the night sky. Sounds weird, but it’s super fun, trust me. Plus, it’s soundtrack is kickass.

My bad, you’re right - Metroid Fusion was indeed on the GBA. I was playing Prince of Persia 1 on the Genesis - there’s a ROM hack for it which fixes all the issues with the port and makes it behave pretty much like the OG DOS version, with the added graphics of the Genesis version of course.

Sadly the Miyoo is a bit underspecced for the N64 and Gen 6 consoles, so the PS1 is the highest it can emulate. For newer consoles, you’d be looking at something like the Retroid Pocket 3+ or the upcoming Anbernic RG405V, but of course, they’re bigger and more expensive. The main reason I prefer the Miyoo is because of how lightweight it is, which allows me to game for hours if I felt like it, and it’s size makes it easy to carry around too. But I guess it won’t be long before we get to see a future Miyoo, or an alternative in the same form-factor, having the specs to emulate m Gen 6 consoles.

I did the TV -> projector swap last year, got myself a 4K projector that sits above my bed and projects a massive 100" image on the wall opposite my bed, and it’s awesome. I’ve got my PS5 and Switch hooked to it, and I’m currently living the dream of being able to game and watch movies on a giant screen, all from the comfort of my bed. Some games really shine on such a screen and you see them in a new light, like TotK, Horizon series, Spiderman etc and it’s 100% worth the switch, IMO.

Now I also have a regular monitor - a nice low latency QHD 16:10 monitor with HDR, hooked up to my PC, which also uses a 6600 XT btw. Main reason I use this setup is for productivity, running some PC games that don’t have console equivalents, plus the colors look much nicer compared to my projector. Maybe if I bought a laser projector and had one of those special ALR screens I could get nicer colors, but all that is way beyond my budget. Although these days I’m not on my desktop as much as I used to be (I also have a Ryzen 6000 series laptop that I game on btw), I still like my desktop because of the flexibility and upgradability. I also explored the option of switching to a cloud-first setup and ditching my rig, back when I wanted to upgrade my PC and we had all those supply chain issues during Covid, but in the end, cloud gaming didn’t really work out for me. In fact after exploring all the cloud options, I’ve been kind of put off by cloud computing in general - at least, the public clouds being offered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft - they’re just in it to squeeze you dry, and take control away from you, and I don’t like that one bit. If I were to lean towards cloud anything, it be rolling my own, maybe using something like a Linode VM with a GPU, but the pricing doesn’t justify it if you’re looking any anything beyond casual usage. And that’s one of the things I like about PC, I could have it running 24x7 if I wanted to and not worry about getting a $200 bill at the end of the month, like I got with Azure, because scummy Microsoft didn’t explain anywhere that you’d be paying for bastion even if the VM was fully powered off…

Anyways, back to the topic of CPUs, I don’t really think we’re at the cusp of any re-imagining, what we’ve been seeing is just gradual and natural improvements, maybe the PC taking inspiration from the mobile world. I haven’t seen anything revolutionary yet, it’s all been evolutionary. At the most, I think we’d see more ARM-like models, like the integrated RAM you mentioned, more SoC/integrated solutions, maybe AI/ML cores bring the new thing to look for an a CPU, maybe ARM itself making more inroads towards the desktop and laptop space, since Apple have shown that you can use ARM for mainstream computing.

On the revolutionary side, the things I’ve been reading about are stuff like quantum CPUs or DNA computers, but these are still very expiremental, with very niche use-cases. In the future I imagine we might have something like a hybrid semi-organic computer, with a literal brain that forms organic neural networks and evolves as per requirements, I think that would be truly revolutionary, but we’re not there yet, not even at the cusp of it. Everything else that I’ve seen from the likes of Intel and AMD, have just been evolutionary.

To be fair, on modern systems it does open quickly in spite of it’s size (probably because most of the shared libraries for UWP apps are already loaded in memory). And at the moment, the new Notepad doesn’t offer any additional features which are common in heavy duty editors, so the “bloat” is mostly from an engineering standpoint. Well, I guess with the recent unwanted addition of Bing search, we’re now starting to see signs of actual user-facing bloat.

Notepad++ is nice, but a bit bloated IMO. I’m personally a big fan of Notepad2 and Notepad3 - they’re just standalone portable EXEs which don’t need to be installed. On most of my installs, I replace the OG notepad with this, so when I type “notepad” from the run dialog, it launches Notepad2.

They actually didn’t update it at all. The Notepad app that ships with Windows 11 (and recent Win10 builds) is actually a completely rewritten, bloated, UWP (aka “Modern”) app. The old Notepad is now an “optional feature” that needs to be manually installed.

Interesting. My interaction with them wasn’t really helpful. Not for this issue, but I raised an issue that the macro function doesn’t allow you to replay certain buttons (like ‘+’), which limits it’s usefulness. I reached out to them and they said they’ll pass the info back to the team and never heard from them again. I bought this controller specifically for the macro feature (and specifically for being able to replay ‘+’), and without that functionality, the controller is completely useless for me. I already own a Switch Pro controller and I prefer it’s ergonomics/shape much more over the 8bitdo.

Unlike the rest of the answers here, I’ve been mostly retro gaming this week. Got my new Miyoo Mini Plus handheld emulator and it’s been awesome, playing mostly SNES, GBA, Sega Genesis and PS1 games.

Games that I’m playing right now:

• Mega Man 7 (SNES)
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (GBA)
• The Lord of The Rings: Two Towers (GBA)
• Metroid Fusion (GBA)
• Prince of Persia 1 (Genesis Romhack)
• Crash Bandicoot 1 (PS1)

The awesome thing about the handheld I’m using is that it supports instant saving and game switching, so if I’m getting bored I just press one button and switch to a different game, and jump into exactly where I left off. Or just press the power button and it’ll instantly suspend, and pressing it back is again an instant resume. Other modern handhelds are more involved or not pocketable, so this has been perfect for me (especially considering the low weight of the thing). I think I’ve gamed the most this week compared to any other weeks this year, because of how convenient it is to game on the Miyoo.

Unfortunately. The i7-6700 is like 8 years old now, and yeah not really that great for anything but basic tasks or playing old school games. Even if you get a modern GPU, you’ll be held back by the CPU. And in case you decide to upgrade to Windows 11/12 in the future (say once Microsoft ends support for Win10), you will need to upgrade your CPU and therefore everything else. Might as well do the upgrade now and switch to AMD for both CPU/GPU as it’ll work out cheaper, and AMD is a better option for gaming anyway.

I just checked this page and none of the games that I’m playing currently are on it (Diablo 4, Elden Ring, God of War, Jedi Survivor etc). It’s not like the games I’m playing are obscure or brand new either. Not to mention some of the console exclusives that I’m also playing, like TotK on the Switch and Horizon FW on the PS5, but of course, I understand that the cloud provider can do nothing about that.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite enthusiastic about cloud gaming as well and looked seriously into it a while ago, because I wanted to upgrade my PC but the upgrade costs were looking pretty high (this was during the peak of the supply chain issues during COVID), also I wanted to break out of the constant and expensive upgrade cycles.

But everything I looked at had some or the other limitation, either they didn’t have the games that I was playing, or the service wasn’t available in my country (eg Shadow PC), or it didn’t allow you to bring your own games (Stadia), or it was working out to be too expensive (Azure VM), or had other limitations such as not supporting ultra-wide resolutions at 60+ FPS. I think for me, being able to play my own games is a big fan requirement for it to work, and the pricing of things like Shadow could work out for me, but those sort of services have limited availability, and rolling your own VM on a public cloud can turn very expensive if you’re a heavy gamer, as I’ve experienced first-hand in Azure.

Therefore, IMO, cloud gaming, while is the future, just isn’t there yet.

$10

I’m assuming you’re talking about GeForce Now? If so, don’t they have the problem of being able to play only limited number of games?

I actually like exploring the universe, but I’ve been pretty disappointed from what I’ve seen so far. They tried to add space-sim elements to it, but did a half-assed job at it. To make things worse, the planets are mostly barren and not worth exploring either.

In saying that, it is a Bethesda gene, so I’m expecting some beefy mods that add more content and immersiveness to the game, and once that’s done, I may consider buying it when it goes on sale.

In the meantime, I’m really looking forward to finally playing Cyberpunk as it was meant to be, with the new Phantom Liberty DLC.

Which is why in, say, Mass Effect it works well, because you get to explore your ship and talk to the crew between missions and that’s fun, while the travel is minimized

This is exactly what I was expecting. I mean, I’m not asking of hours of travel thru endless space, they could’ve employed wormholes to cut the travel time, but still make the distance seem… distant, a bit more believable and immersive. It could only be a few minutes of travel if you take the wormhole into consideration, but there’s so much you can do to fill that time. Like the spaceships are vast, so you could be assigned activities to do around the ship, like maintenance and minor upgrades, or maybe you could access the ship’s various computer terminals to do stuff - could even have various mini games, or just a mini spaceship RPG type elements, similar to some of the Star Trek games. Just because space is vast and empty doesn’t mean you’re just sitting there and staring at darkness.

Or maybe I had my expectations too high and was expecting a space sim, which this clearly isn’t.

A mission might send you to the other side of the vast starmap, but the actual travel time between systems is always the same (and the poorly explained fuel system, which is actually just your range, isn’t much of a limitation). When I discovered that so much of space flight is effectively a series of non-interactive cutscenes, it largely shattered the illusion of exploring a vast universe. It’s impossible not to compare Starfield to the way you freely enter and exit planets’ atmosphere in No Man’s Sky, so it’s a bit of a letdown every time you see a planet and remember it’s just a picture of a planet you’ll never be able to reach by flying toward it. It’s something that happens a lot.

The fact that you can’t fly over to planets and land, and that you get around the vastness of space by simply fast traveling, is disappointing. This seems less space-y, and more like Fallout-y to me.

As someone who isn’t really into FPS games these days, I think I might give Starfield a skip.

I’m not sure about the price/performance ratio of the actual SoCs, but if you take the Pi Zero 2 W for instance ($15), it can comfortably emulate most consoles up to the 5th generation (PS1, Saturn, N64). The performance is equivalent to that of it’s direct competitor, the Miyoo Mini Plus ($80). If you want to upgrade the Miyoo Mini, you’d have to buy a whole new device, but with the PiBoy you only need to update the Pi (which will only be $15). So sure, it may still need a few upgrade cycles to match the value, but if you treat the original purchase as an investment, spending only $15 for an upgrade doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Especially when you consider the resale value - the Miyoo Minis are already cheap, so the value of an older model wouldn’t be much if you were to sell it off on say eBay or something, since most folks would prefer buying a newer model which can handle emulating more recent consoles. Whereas the Raspberry Pis - even older ones sell well, one reason being a perpetual supply shortage (just look at all the people in this thread treating buying a Pi like finding unicorns), the other reason being a Pi is always useful - even the first Raspberry Pi can still be used today for things like basic home automation tasks, or even as a tiny web server, as a home security system, or wherever - hundreds of projects out there which don’t really need the computing power of a current gen Pi. Since the PiBoy is targeted at DIY-ers, no doubt there would be a significant portion of it’s buyers into DIY stuff and could make use of a Pi around the house. As DIY-er myself, I can never have enough Raspberry Pis, and always carry a spare Pi or two around with me when I go around - you never know when it may come in handy. For instance, when I recently visited some relatives overseas, I used one of the spare Pis in my backpack to convert their old printer into an wireless printer, so they could now print directly from their phones - and saved them from buying a whole new printer. Raspberry Pis always come in handy like that at unexpected times and places, so you can never have enough of them, but if you do, there are plenty of folks who’d be glad to take the Pi off you for their own projects.

Regarding the display on the PiBoy, I doubt you’d want to upgrade it that many times, I mean, it’s just a tiny 3.5" display used to play mainly 8bit and 16bit games, getting something like a higher resolution or vibrant display would make no difference, since most of these games are low res with a low color pallete. In fact, most of the OG displays of these handhelds had shitty displays by modern standards, so any modern display in itself is a big upgrade compared to what gamers played on back then. At the most, an upgrade which may be worth could be a brighter display or an OLED panel or similar, but even then it would be a one-off upgrade and really, it doesn’t add that much value when you’re mainly playing retro games on there. A display upgrade for a retro console is just one of those “nice to have if you’ve got the spare change” kinda deal.

Also, here’s the main thing: with competing handhelds like the Miyoo Mini Plus (or w/e) there’s no guarantee that there will be an equivalent upgrade. They could change the form-factor in the next Miyoo Mini, or change the material of the chassis, like say switching to a metal chassis, which may make it heavy for you. For instance see the Anbernic devices, although they’ve been around for a while and have released many devices, a new Anbernic may not necessarily be an upgrade for your current one, with so many different form factors to choose from. Like the RG351MP, which felt like a good upgrade on paper, but in reality, most users felt it’s metal body made it quite heavy, making it unsuitable for even moderate length gameplay. So the decicison to go all metal was actually a downgrade, making the earlier plastic versions better. So companies may pull stunts like this, messing around with the form factor or changing features, and then you’d need to look for some other manufacturer who may not have an equivalent, they may use Android for instance, which may result in poorer battery life and performance, so it may not be an upgrade for you.

Also, there’s the problem of support - most of the official firmware on these devices are never updated by the OEM, and they also kinda suck, so most SBC gamers prefer to use a custom firmware, like OnionOS, GarlicOS, ArkOS etc. And these community built firmware may suddenly decide to drop support for older devices, for instance, see how the very popular ArkOS dropped support for the still-popular RG351M/P devices, and users were forced to look for a different firmware. Now this is where the Raspberry Pi shines - not only are there several gaming-oriented firmware you can choose from (such as Retro Pie, JelOS etc), the fact that this is basically a full-fledged computer and a Pi means there are several generic distros you could always switch to, like the official Raspbian for instance, and then just set it up to boot directly into Retroarch or Emulation Station or w/e to get a similar experience as a custom gaming distro. And that’s where the Pi really shines, it’s massive community support and the plethora of software (and hardware) options. A device like the Miyoo Mini may be popular now, but it’ll soon be forgotten, like the poor RG351M/P, and turn into e-waste, whereas a Pi lives on practically forever, if not as a gaming SBC then maybe as something that’ll turn your coffee machine into a smart coffee machine.

That’s the true beauty of a Pi - it’s worth cannot be simply compared in terms of dollars.

Of course. The main advantage of this is upgradability. Say you wanna play Gen 6 consoles in the future and there’s a Pi Zero 3 out, you could just swap out the Pi to upgrade your handheld. Or maybe someone comes out with a better shell, maybe even a different form factor with a 16:9 display or something, you could just swap out the bits instead of buying a whole new handheld.