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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • Could be that their audio playback is done by hardware reading from a low address buffer in parallel to the rest of the logic and just relies on that logic to update pointers otherwise it will run through the entire address space.

    Or it could be their way of implementing a full address space dump on a crash without large amounts of storage available and that just includes the ROM because it’s a part of that address space. But in the video, they were able to get a 100% match for the ROM using an emulator, so this isn’t it unless they didn’t mention chopping off a RAM section.


  • It’s all data, whether that data is text, an image, audio, or a binary containing computer code.

    Raw audio data is just a series of amplitudes. It has a bit depth (which says how many bits are in each amplitude sample) and a frequency (what is the change in time going from one amplitude to the next). Using those, you can convert it to an analog signal that can be played on a speaker. And if you use the same values to convert that signal back to digital, you end up with the same input signal (though with some random noise added and if you get unlucky and your sample phase lines up with the player’s transition phase, you won’t be able to extract the original signal, though it might sound similar). The multiple recordings help mitigate these issues.

    Given that data format, any arbitrary file can be treated as raw sound that can be transmitted as analog audio.

    The only real difference between this and other transfer methods we use to transfer files is that this involves a less reliable conversion from digital to analog back to digital because it wasn’t designed to do that like USB, COM, wifi, etc connections are.



  • Even with good internet infrastructure that can handle the bandwidth, I’m not really interested in cloud gaming because of the latency.

    Though I do think that it’s a better way to handle anti-cheat than allowing the companies to install rootkits in your kernel. And you can’t really get around the latency issue with online shooters, either you run the game locally and have cases where it looks like you hit on your end but didn’t on the server’s end, or you have a case where you hit the trigger on your controller when the shot was lined up but don’t see the shot go off until it’s no longer lined up. Ultimately, I think the latter is a bit better because then you at least see reality on your screen, even if it’s more frustrating to interact with. Better than a more interactive reality that is more like a hallucination.













  • Yeah, it feels kinda like OP is really wondering if what’s there now is just as good as what used to be there because it might still be labeled “art”. Not all art is equal, and I’d much rather have nice looking art than art that says “this used to look nice but now it’s just dicks”. But, given that some asshole decided to just paint over it with monocolour, I’d rather have that “fuck you” than to see it left blank.

    I hope the 2nd artist has the determination to put it back if the owners try to get rid of it again, but the patience to wait until they stop watching it so they don’t get caught. Or make them spend money on a surveillance system and someone to monitor it but still put it back one or two lines at a time. Until the owners have an aneurysm and it eventually ends up in the hands of someone more chill.


  • Just generally rambling about reasons why companies might not want to adopt user-authored changes in their main game.

    There’s copyright that applies to code (which would cover copy/paste). There’s parents that apply to ideas (which might still cover cases where you didn’t use copy/paste). And there’s precedence where if you do something one way one time, others might expect you to continue doing it that way even if you intended it to be a one-off (which might overlap with both of those).


  • Oops thanks for putting that out, corrected.

    For the first point, it might be more of a patent thing than copyright, because you can patent improvements you come up with for someone else’s invention.

    Though another angle might be that game studios want to avoid encouraging a freelance game improvement market where people look to financially gain from swooping in and making improvements to their games. It might result in improvements they already planned to make but hadn’t gotten to being blocked by patents and license demands. I don’t agree that this is something that should be avoided, though I don’t think current IP laws would make this a desirable system for anyone other than lawyers.

    That’s not to say that it’s legally impossible to figure out how to navigate pulling in community changes to the main game, there’s just complications involved that so far Bethesda has preferred to avoid. They might even just want to avoid a case going to court to set some kind of precedent because it might involve paying royalties to modders. IMO they would deserve to be paid if their work gets pulled into the game directly or indirectly, and even just as modders adding value to the base game I think maybe they deserve some compensation for their efforts.