LSD: Dream Emulator must also rank up there, surely? :)

Gorogoa has been on my "pile of shame" for several years now. Perhaps today's the day.

The morality system was a huge disappointment for me. You said most of what I wanted to say, so I'll be brief.

Right near the start of the game, an NPC outlines the Way of the Open Palm vs. the Way of the Closed Fist, more or less the same way you described them. And I was so excited to see a morality system in which both sides were morally defensible positions. But from the very first Closed Fist follower you meet (just minutes later), they may as well all be monacle-wearing moustache-twirlers who punctuate every sentence with "mwah-ha-ha!"

The worst example that I remember is a bootlegger who's essentially holding a town hostage. Far from following either philosophy as described, he's just plain evil, and in fact I easily came up with (IMO solid) arguments for actually swapping the game's morality labels on the player's options. But no, one option is clearly "evil", so that's Closed Palm, while the other is obviously "good", hence Open Palm.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to stick to original hardware, if you already have it or can afford to buy it.

Setting up a Pi or other single-board system as a dedicated retro game emulator is also an absolutely valid choice IMO. It's a fun, generally affordable little project that you can tinker with forever, e.g. changing cases and controllers, UI tweaks, ROM file organization, per-game settings optimization. But I don't think that it's ever been the "best" emulation option for anyone who didn't already have their heart set on "doing something fun and interesting with a Pi".

The smartphone you already have, dedicated retro gaming handhelds, Android TV boxes or sticks, and cheap/secondhand/already-owned PCs (desktop, notebook, or kiosk) all arguably match or exceed the performance and value-for-money of any Pi-based system.

Yet in any thread where someone new to emulation is asking for advice, there's always a flock of folks who suggest getting a Pi like it's the only game in town. It honestly baffles me a little. Especially because almost all of them are just running a pretty frontend over Retroarch, and Retroarch is available for virtually every modern consumer computing platform (and so are a lot of pretty frontends, if that's a selling point).

For context, I've got a dozen or so retro systems, but I prefer to emulate as much as possible.

Yeah, I'm sure that almost all of us have felt this way at one time or another. But the thing is, every team behind every moronic, bone-headed interface "update" that you've ever hated also sees themselves in the programmer's position in this meme.

Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.

Theoretical search: "slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie"
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever "celebrities" have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.

Unfortunately we all know what happens when you tell hackers that something's going to be very hard to break into.

I understand that they were excited about the idea and wanted to share it with gamers, but if they actually wanted to give the system the best chance of success, they should've kept their mouth shut.

Thr34dN3cr0 wrote (14:12 5/17/2019):

Does anyone have a way to fix this in the latest version? I've been looking all day but none of the answers I've found work.

Thr34dN3cr0 wrote (14:48 5/17/2019):

nvm figured it out.

"If you wish to be a writer, write."

Epictetus delivered this burn over 1900 years ago.

Re: the Acceptance stage.

Years ago I worked at a family-run business with a good working environment. The staff were once told a story of how, earlier in the company's history, a manager made a mistake that caused the company a substantial monetary loss.

The manager immediately offered their resignation, but the owner said to them, "Why would I let you go now? I've just spent all this money so you could learn a valuable lesson!"

So yeah, generally, most managers' reaction to accidentally deleting vital data from production is going to be to fire the developer as a knee-jerk "retaliation", but if you think about it, the best response is to keep that developer; your data isn't coming back either way, but this developer has just learned to be a lot more careful in the future. Why would you send them to a potential competitor?

It's a persistent dynamic memory allocation that's accessed by multiple processes! :)

This is a short, interesting video, but there's really nothing here for any competent programmer, even a fresh graduate. It turns out they they update the software by sending the update by radio (/s). The video hardly goes any deeper than that, and also makes a couple of very minor layman-level flubs.

There is a preservation effort for the old NASA computing hardware from the missions in the 50s and 60s, and you can find videos about it on YouTube. They go into much more detail without requiring much prior knowledge about specific technologies from the period. Here's one I watched recently about the ROM and RAM used in some Apollo missions: https://youtu.be/hckwxq8rnr0?si=EKiLO-ZpQnJa-TQn

One thing that struck me about the video was how the writers expressed surprise that it was still working and also so adaptable. And my thought was, "Well, yeah, it was designed by people who knew what they were doing, with a good budget, lead by managers whose goal was to make excellent equipment, rather than maximize short-term profits."

I once had a manager hand me a project brief and ask me how quickly I thought I could complete it. I was managing my own workload (it was a bad situation), but it was a very small project and I felt that I had time to put everything else on hold and focus on it. So, I said that I might be able to get it done in four days, but I wouldn't commit to less than a week just to be sure.

The manger started off on this half-threatening, half-disappointed rant about how the project had a deadline set in stone (in four days' time), and how the head of the company had committed to it in public (which in hindsight was absolute rot). I was young and nervous, but fortunately for me every project brief had a timeline of who had seen it, and more importantly, when they had received it. I noticed that this brief had originated over three months prior, and had been sitting on this manager's desk for almost a month. I was the first developer in the chain. That gave me the guts to say that my estimate was firm, and that if anyone actually came down the ladder looking for heads to set rolling (one of the manager's threats), they could come to me and I would explain.

In the end nothing ever came of it because I managed to get the job done in three days. They tried to put the screws to me over that small of a project.