_NetNomad

i think you’re mixing up a few different things here. beam-racing was really only a thing with the 2600 and stopped once consoles had VRAM, which is essentially a frame-buffer. but even then many games would build the frame in a buffer in regular RAM and then copy everything into VRAM at the vblank. in other cases you had two frames in VRAM and would just swap between them with a pointer every other frams. if it took longer than one frame to build the image, you could write your interrupt handler to just skip every other or every three vblank interrupts, which is how a game like super hang-on on the megadrive runs at 15 FPS even though the VDP is chucking out 60 frames a second. you could also disable interrupts when the buffer was still being filled, which is how you end up with slowdown on certain games when too many objects were on the screen. too many objects could also lead to going over the limits of how many sprites you can have on a scanline, which is why things would vanish- bit that is it’s own seperate issue. if you don’t touch VRAM between interrupts then the image shown last frame will show this frame as well

COBOL is still being updated because, believe it or not, people are still writing COBOL

Unlike other older languages, such as Cobol and Fortran – which are still used, but almost always in legacy projects – Java has constantly evolved to meet new demands while maintaining backward compatibility.

can’t speak on the FORTRAN claim but with COBOL this couldn’t be less true. last i checked the newest Enterprise COBOL LTS is newer than Java’s

seconding Stargate Atlantis. all they needed was one more season, and the outline floating aroind the internet from one of the writers of what that would look like kicked ass

also have to say Super Android Metalder, which is a weird case- the show was cancelled and a rush ending was written, and then the show that was gonna take it’s place had delays so they ended up stretching out that rushed ending. that lead to a very wonky set of final episodes for a show that deserved much better

it’s very telling how there’s a variety of correct answers here

and PICO-8 devs!

0.009144 football fields

deleted by creator

i think threadiverse is the move. partly because it’s already in regular use and partky because it’s very self-explanatory. forumverse could have some legs to it now that more traditional forum software like nodebb and soon flarum support federation now, maybe it could refer to the broader category containing traditional forums and the threadiverse, but i feel like leaving out the “fedi” part kinda defeats the point (threadiverse at least partially maintains it by being a pun on it). maybe fediforums is the way to go?

it’s a whole 'nother can of worms but ironically in my experience the “verse” part of threadiverse is more offputting than the “thread” part because people think “metaverse,” but that’s just anecdotal and the term fediverse itself already has too much momentum to easily fall out of fashion

you spend most of your time “hopping on a quick call,” replying to an email reiterating what you said last time, and doing the needful

calling these “game boy clones” isn’t quite right because they don’t take physical cartridges, but this is a real shame. companies like them and Miyoo and Retroid have been carving out a nice niche of gaming devices between a fully locked down console and a Whole Ass Personal Computer but this tariff situation is gonna kill them in their tracks stateside

i’m definitely gonna wait until hori releases a joycon 2 pro set or whatever before getting a switch 2. even just the regular joycons are an ergonomic nightmare, and my hands are fucked up to the point where that makes the difference between whether or not i can play for more than five minutes. and even if they release a better mouse, if it’s not a vertical mouse then it’s the same issue. you’d think with the huge role computer inout devices play in out daily lives, ergonomics would be a bigger focus by everyone across the board!

longs

I’m reminded of that onion article, “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made An Excellent Point.” on one hand, as an independant musician who has many friends in different artistic fields, we all agree IP law is a net negative for us all. the threat of wrongly being accused of copyright infingement and being punished for it is very real, whereas the threat of having our work stolen is non-existant and wouldn’t matter anyway because we’re making fuck-all money in the first place. and the fact that we can’t legally iterate on existing music the way humans have for as long as we’ve had music until very recently is just criminal. it makes me absolutely sick

on the other hand, if IP law exists to protect small creators but in actuality protects corporate interests, and suddenly corporate interests think IP is bad, then we should be very worried. i said earlier that the threat of our work being stolen is minimal because we’re not making money, but with all this generative AI bullcrap, they’re using our art as raw fuel to displace artists entirely and burn the planet to a crisp. it makes me even more sick

not for nothing, the one-standard-multiple-manufactuters thing has been done before with sony and microsoft both involved. the real truth of this article is that the people yearn for MSX

joking aside i’d love to see something like that come back, because you get the convienence of a set standard that makes games Just Work like they do on consoles while offering way more options to consumers. i guess once the floodgates open on third party steamOS machines we’ll be halfway there

i’m personally the other way around- i live for FM soundtracks and can’t stand how muffled the SNES sounds compared to even other sample-based systems. beauty is in the… ear? of the beholder