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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Look, I don’t know what to tell you here. You’re downvoting me (or someone is) because you’re not understanding the point of what they’re doing. That’s ok, but it’s not ok to claim victory here because you don’t understand the point of what they’re doing, or you’re not knowledgeable about the intricacies of the retro gaming/emulation world.

    It’s not to make an emulator for the general public. It’s to take an original board, and put it into a SFF (Small Form Factor) and have a perfect, 1:1 system that can play any Saturn game. Any game. No chipset issues. And it looks like an original Saturn, just smaller.

    This appeals to a very specific set of people who care about compatibility and functionality of the games they’re playing.

    It’s not a general emulator or general device. If you want one of those, you can already build one.

    It’s a thing that does exactly what it says it does. And it appeals to a very specific type of crowd. Which is, apparently, not you. That’s ok. But don’t trash it just because you don’t understand it.





  • Not exactly. Emulating the board and chipset is where a lot of emulation issues show up. ROMs are generally pretty easy to serialize/copy around. It’s the chipset/boards that are tricky and generally requires the boards being destroyed when reverse engineering them to figure out how to emulate the chipset features.

    This would be a “perfect” emulation of any Saturn ROM/Game/whatever.

    That can only be done with original hardware. Emulators get close, but all they can ever get is “close”. New versions of the emulator chipsets come out to address and fix bugs or API issues that are discovered later as additional games are played on the emulator.

    It’s why not all games run on all emulators. There’s a lot of subsets based on chip compatibility and specifically, how close it is to the original thing that will only work on some subset of games; and you might need a different emulator to run the other games for a platform because of compatibility issues.

    So, again, this is not an emulator.

    This is the real deal. Just smaller.

    Running a ROM on it is not emulating. It’s running a game file on the original hardware, and the compatibility will be 100%, instead of some smaller % that an emulated board/chipset would have.


  • I heard Skillet live once at a metal show. They were opening for a band I was actually there to see.

    I didn’t realize they were a “Christian Metal” band until halfway through, when I turned to my buddy and was like:

    Jesus, these guys suck.

    And they did. They really did suck. Their music is mediocre at best, and their on stage presence was atrocious. He kept trying to whip the guitar around as some flashy on stage thing; but he smacked himself in the face with the guitar, and then tried to recover by laughing it off, while everyone was cringing.

    Just, imagine for a moment, a band full of people, who are trying to imitate a band type that they can’t ever actually become, and it’s like…well, it’s like the Reagan movie that just got released.

    So much cringe.








  • Unfortunately, those of us that make games in Unreal Engine are stuck writing a lot of C++, unless we want to do everything in BPs (no thanks, they’re fine, but it’s not coding, and it’s difficult to maintain and refactor for complicated projects, they’re good for taking C++ components and building bigger components out of the base C++ functionality though).

    With that said, UE’s support for C++ is decent. Which is, that as long as you tag all your fields, properties, methods, classes, etc. with some UnrealEngine attribute filter (like UCLASS or UPROPERTY), Unreal will handle the memory management of those constructs for you. Which is nice.

    Unfortunately it has some other limitations to the C++ language that you can’t work around, like disallowing pure abstracts because every C++ derivative class based on any UE construct (Actor, Character, Pawn, etc.) has to be instantiatable in the editor. So no pure abstracts and such.

    In general, I’d give it a 6/10.

    It’s still mostly C++, but some of the things suck less.