I accidentally misclicked this article and reported it as spam while I was trying to report some prescription drug spam. Hopefully it’s not adversely affected. I wish there was an Undo on that action.

Happened today, and for those with governments that actually regulate (the EU) his AltStore is also up.

One has already been pulled, though seemingly for unrelated copyright issues?

That said, I’m surprised that things have gotten to this point, I suppose time will tell once the property holders get involved how committed Apple is to this whole change, there’s still a lot of room to interpret the clause about conforming to all laws for the content that is being run in the app.

Given that I didn’t think ANY emulators would make it into the Appstore, I’m going to retract my position. However, I think that we’re still in the “Fuck around” stage of things and there may yet be some “Find out” to come.

Agree to disagree.

Dolphin requires JIT compilation and that is still verboten under these new guidelines.

Further, the rule change says that these apps are allowed to “Download” ROMs, it doesn’t say that they can just play anything they want, it in fact says that they have to provide an index of everything their software might run and where it is downloaded from. The rules are not going to allow emulators as we know and love them. It says specifically that the software offered under the guidelines must be offered via In App Purchases, so in all,

A) Emulators can exist

B) They can download ROMs

C) You have to comply with all applicable laws while you offer an emulator that allows people to download ROMs ಠ_ಠ

D) “Software offered in apps under this rule must: use in-app purchase in order to offer digital goods or services to end users.”

Which in whole means that they’ve allowed (for example) Sega to offer an Emulator app that will run ROMs of games that Sega owns, but they have to sell the ROMs to you individually via IAPs.

Feel free to read their guidelines at https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#third-party-software, because there isn’t any way in my reading to interpret those rules as allowing something like Higan to exist on the app store, the new rules are such a narrow carve out that it’s hard to imagine that anyone is able to provide an emulator for iOS any time soon. They’ve opened a door that basically nobody could walk through and the people who could walk through it wouldn’t need to because they could just distribute the ROMs with the emulator to begin with, it’s business as usual for Apple.

At this point they’re only wagging their fingers to make it appear as though they’re considering regulation.

Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors. What are the left supposed to do? Pull a Trump and pretend that the laws and systems that make our country don’t exist and just say that what they want is law and ignore that half the country is electing morons who will fight them at every turn? That’s not how it works and frankly I wouldn’t want it to work that way because it’s just incredibly dangerous. They’re trying to work within a system where the right has learned they can con half the country into believing they’re doing their job while they sit back and do their damnedest to ensure that the government doesn’t function at all because that’s the only way that conservatives can stop progress at this point with their platforms being as unpopular as they are.

The left is definitely more open to considering regulation. It’s not even close. The right thinks that regulation is a four letter word and they’re generally not a fan of those either. It’s disingenuous to both sides everything. Much of the time where the left allows a carveout for vampirism, it’s because it’s the best compromise they can mange to a given end given that the right is out there swabbing their throats and getting all hot and bothered waiting for daddy Drac to come and give it to them, not because it’s their preference that we allow unfettered late-stage capitalism to destroy lives. Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors (and I am well aware that there are exceptions that prove the rule on both sides of the isle, so 🤷‍♂️)

…and lest anyone think that this problem isn’t solved with government regulation, I invite you to look at the medication situation in nearly any other country in the world where by and large they are not afraid of regulation for the same drug companies that are fucking us sideways in the US and see how much cheaper and better their access to medications is solely because they’re willing to support that maybe there is a greater public good than shareholder profits.

This is of course their MO. They were making Insulin for pennies per vial for years and selling it for hundreds of dollars per. It’s funny how they’re allowed to keep doing this to us and they probably always will because the US right thinks the immoral thing is not letting vampires have a suck whenever they want it. Obesity and Diabetes are a couple of the largest killers around, to say nothing of the losses in Quality of Life they cause. It’s just insane that we refuse to regulate prices for drugs that would relieve immeasurable suffering and death because CEOs gotta have a nicer Yacht or how is life any fair?

It’s a pretty great game. Really good music and one of those gameplay loops that is easy to pick up and difficult to master. If you like Tetris and the like, Lumines is worth your attention.

Lumines

The original Game Boy Color has a screen that is only 160 pixels x 144 pixels at a 6bit color depth. That color depth means it can keep track of 6bits of color information for each pixel (technically the GBC screen CAN display 15bits of color information, but it’s limited in software to 6bits absent certain tradeoffs.)

This isn’t exactly how it all works, but I’m going to just do some quick and dirty math really quickly that sorta simply illustrates how this works. To adequately display a 60fps image on the GBC display at the 6bit color depth of the screen, we’d need to be able to process 23,040 pixels (each with 6 bits of color data) every 60th of a second. To simplify further, there’s 138,240 bits of data to process every 16.6ms just to “drive” the display, or put another way 138,240 bits of data to process to ensure that the display gets all the information it needs to build a complete picture every 60th of a second.

So for a 1600x1440 display, you’re looking at 2,304,000 pixels, and the Analogue Pocket has a 16bit color depth, so you’re going to need to be able to process 36,864,000 bits of data every 16.6ms to “drive” that display.

Getting a GPU/CPU/FPGA that can handle 138,240 bits of data every 16.6ms is a fairly easy task these days. Getting a GPU/CPU/FPGA that can handle 36,864,000 bits of data every 16.6ms is also a pretty easy undertaking these days, but it’s much more power intensive and it’s going to cost a bunch more. All of which is beside the shader calculations the Pocket adds in to do things like emulating the pixel fade of old LCDs or other effects that further emulate the properties of the original displays which requires further processing.

The tradeoff is that you can build a more detailed image with all those extra pixels, but you’re going to pay for it both in electrical power spent, heat generated, and costs sunk.

Honestly the 1600x1440 screen on the Analogue Pocket and the ability to drive it is what you’re paying for when you buy it.

There’s not going to be a device that can drive all those pixels at less than the Analogue Pocket’s price for some time yet. Sure, none of the Game Boy systems used anywhere near that many pixels, but the fact that the Analogue Pocket screen is so ridiculously pixel dense it can emulate the original attributes of the OG screens from the devices that their FPGA is mimicking means you’re going to pay a premium for that (or any) device doing full hardware replication at that level.

Honestly seeing the Analogue Pocket emulate the way that the original DMG GameBoy screen pixels seemed to slightly hover over the background (slightly casting a shadow) was mind-blowing. You can’t get that unless your screen actually has those original pixel attributes or you’ve built a display with enough resolution to emulate what those characteristics looked like. See: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/PXL_20211213_155424062.jpg (Seriously, zoom in and notice the mimicry of the shadows under darker pixels, it’s just crazy to see in person.)

I’d recommend that you get these ones, but you can pick them up plenty of places that aren’t Amazon too, just make certain you get the ones made by Gulikit, any others are probably as cheap as your originals and you’ll have to come back and replace them again in short order. The Gulikit ones use Hall Effect sensing rather than resistive contact pads that will eventually scrape down and break.

That kit at Amazon comes with all the tools to do the job and as the sticks are Hall Effect based, they’ll theoretically never drift unlike the ones that ship with Joy-Cons straight from Nintendo.

iFixIt has the process for doing the work: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Left+Joy-Con+Joystick+Replacement/113182 and https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Right+Joy-Con+Joystick+Replacement/113185

They had to have seen the writing on the wall at least a year or two before they brought this to market.

I seem to remember that at about a year before launch there was some reporter (Jason Schreier?) who had an inside tip that they were changing some stuff in the face of the realization that GaaS were not the money maker they were thought to be once upon a time, but the tipper also said that they were too locked into the GaaS paradigm to make the sort of meaningful changes that would salvage the experience. I don’t think there’s any rescuing this one if they knew they were in trouble a full year before delivery and still couldn’t shape it up into a product worthy of attention.

I’ll be honest, I could sometimes find a helpful answer there, but for about the last 2 years it has taken 3 reloads of a page at least before it actually loads any content, otherwise it just sits there at a plain white page showing their logo and I usually give up rather than try to get lucky with a page actually loading.

Yeah, this is the real rub here. Without the co-op it’s not really anything special, there are even games out there doing Action RPG better these days so I can’t imagine why you’d choose to not embrace the couch/online co-op crowd that’d put this back at the head of the pack.

Yeah, I own Collection of Mana and Trials of Mana and played it both ways. Trials in particular has got me very excited for Visions, but I really hope that they’re doing multiplayer and ideally 3 player to throw back to the greatest aspect of Secret.

So much talk about “what makes a Mana game” in there, and yet for me the one thing that made Secret of Mana a game that I cared about was the 3 player co-op that absolutely ruled. Still no indication that this game even has 2 player action. I was super disappointed when I could finally play a fan translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 on PC back in the day and it was only 2 player, and lately I’ve been increasingly disappointed as everything since has been a single player affair.

Call me crazy, but the series hasn’t been great (it’s still been good, just shy of great) since the SNES outings and I am really wish they’d get the game back to the multiplayer that made it great.

My favorite Libertarian society experiment. I mean, it’s the only one that I’m aware of, but that it ended about as well as you’d expect is just fantastic.

I’m not the original owner of my Mazda either, I had the upgrade done well after the original sale of that vehicle. I had also looked into the software modding scene but decided that an official upgrade costing only $400 wasn’t worth the potential headaches of hacky homebrew updates I had to service myself.