@davetansley@lemmy.world
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davetansley

@[email protected]

Dice maker, gamer nerd, developer, Dolphins fan. Reddit refugee (maybe).

Still fighting the 80s 8-bit wars, one port comparison at a time.

Me on Mastodon

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davetansley, (edited )
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Wait, hold the front page! There’s one more to consider… and, predictably, it’s probably one of the best.

The Sharp X68000 version of Final Fight

I don’t know much about the Sharp X68000, but judging by this version of Final Fight, it certainly knows its onions. By which I mean “ports”. Because this looks and feels pretty much identical to the arcade. Same everything. It almost doesn’t feel like a port in the ZX Spectrum sense. It doesn’t feel compromised in any way.

You know, it’s somehow less fun playing ports like this. They’re just effortlessly wonderful, so it’s hard to find anything to write about them.

As such, I’m still giving the port of the week to the GBA ;)

davetansley,
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Yeah, the Spectrum does put up a good show in static screenshots… but don’t be fooled. It’s a clunky old stinker when it gets in motion.

davetansley,
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It’s weird, but the answer I came up with for ALL those categories… was Dark Souls. Even Sports.

davetansley,
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I’m always vaguely jealous that I missed out on NES culture first time around.

In the UK, consoles weren’t really a big thing until the Megadrive and the SNES, and the NES seemed to be nowhere at all, at least where I grew up. A few people had Master Systems, but mostly it was Spectrums and C64s.

I’d see the NES in magazines occasionally, or in game ads in American comic books I got my hands on, and it always looked so cool.

davetansley,
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Yeah, until about 1990… I’m not sure why, but I suspect it was because of the relative price of console games. It was a lot easier to swing 8 quid for a game than 30 quid for a NES game. Plus, there was an underlying delusion that parents were buying their kids a tool that could be used for learning if they bought a computer over a console.

Consoles were a niche thing that occupied a couple of pages in the multi-format magazines of the late 80s.

davetansley,
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Yeah, me too. From a consumer perspective, music streaming (not just Spotify) has managed to remain a worthwhile offering, the kind we all said we’d be happy to pay for if it just existed back in the piracy age…

Contrast with video streaming, where you now need to have five different subscriptions just to have a hope of watching half the things you want, where the content changes all the time and geo-limitations abound.

Take my extra quid, Spotify!

davetansley,
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I did this in 1997 on the day that Final Fantasy VII came out. Just straight up walked out and didn’t come back for a few days. If I’m perfectly honest, nobody noticed. I’m not sure whether this means it was acceptable or not.

davetansley,
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I mean, it’s worth a try… what else could have possibly caused such a steep downturn in Twitter’s fortunes since Musk took over and started enacting his policies?

not seeing any non negligible difference between 60 and 120 Hz, am I weird?

Just got a new phone (OnePlus Nord 3), turned refresh rate HUD in developer settings and I see some parts of the system and some apps display 120 Hz but I have problem noticing any difference, same with my wife’s Redmi Note 12, i have to look very carefully and maaaybe I notice some different, not sure

davetansley,
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I find that I’m always perfectly happy with my current monitor or phone screen, until I see something better. Ignorance is bliss. For this reason, I deliberately try to never see any better screens, this way I always seem to remain endlessly impressed by my 75 quid Philips 1080p panel!

Vigilante: A Home Port Comparison (i.imgur.com)

Vigilante was a 1988 Irem coin-op, a kind of spiritual successor to 1984’s Kung Fu Master/Spartan X. Like the 1984 title, Vigilante had a simple premise - you walk to the right and beat up fools in front of you and behind you. There’s no pseudo-third-dimension, no in and out, it’s just straight up single plane brawling,...

davetansley,
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A lot of it was also down to the interpretation of the individual devs… they often had limited access to original source code or assets, and ended up relying on simply playing the arcade game or even watching VHS footage of someone else playing the game.

This is why the early 8-bit ports often felt like they were inspired by, rather than ported from the original games. It sometimes amazes me they got as close as they did.

davetansley,
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I tried so hard to find the ST version for this comparison, but I couldn’t find it anywhere! It’s like it has been erased from history or something.

davetansley,
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There’s a sweet spot, right? Popular enough to be viable; not so popular that the quality decreases.

davetansley,
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I really wish they’d drop the YouTube Music aspect of this and just do an ad-free YouTube sub. Happy to pay content creators for their work; less happy to give Google money for a music platform after what they did to Google Music.

davetansley,
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That’s cool. I’m not saying they should only offer it without YT music, just that they should offer an alternative way of supporting YouTubers without buying a service you don’t need.

davetansley,
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They actually did a trial of such a sub in various Scandinavian countries, cost about five quid a month or so, which is entirely reasonable. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere.

davetansley,
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It’s probably improved a lot since the early days. I remember it being significantly worse than the Google Music it was replacing.

davetansley,
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I’ve been coding for 40 years, it’s both my job and my hobby, and I still feel old and out of touch when reading or taking part in coding conversations outside of my sphere :)

This is not meant to be discouraging - even the smallest amount of coding you could learn will be immensely rewarding - more to say that coding is vast arena with a breadth of complexity that can often feel overwhelming. So don’t be put off when you teach yourself some JavaScript and then still feel adrift in a conversation about C#.

I don’t have any specifics to recommend, but I would say that you should start small. Don’t aim to write the next Flappy Bird as your first project, or the next Mastodon. Just concentrate on making a web page say “Hello world!” or changing the colour of some text. Back in the 80s, most kids got their first taste of programming by having a computer shop C64 print “Dave is rad!” on an infinite loop! :)

Good luck!

When did you first get "hit" by music?

Do you remember the first time you really clicked with music? I remember being on a family vacation at 9 or 10, getting some sort of random Beatles “Hits” cassette tape at whatever gas station, and playing it nonstop in my off-brand Walkman. That was the first time I really felt music in my bones, and to this day few things...

davetansley,
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I was 16 in 1991, browsing through my dad’s vinyl collection, hoping to find another album that had a saucy gatefold cover like Queen’s Jazz… instead, I found myself drawn to Marillion’s Script For A Jester’s Tear album and decided to listen to it. Instantly loved it, played it over and over, started listening to more of my dad’s stuff (Psychedelic Furs, Pink Floyd, Genesis).

Discovered music that would define my tastes for the next 30 years, and also discovered that my dad was actually a really cool dude.

Rastan Saga: A home port comparison (lemmy.world)

If fur loincloths and large axes are your thing, then the eighties was a hell of a time to be alive. It seemed like barbarians were everywhere. In movies, there was Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja and Beastmaster; on TV we had He-man and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon (Bobby was technically a barbarian!); and in videogames you...

davetansley,
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I stumbled on this post and tried it out on a whim… and I really like it. Kind of has a Nick Drake vibe in parts, fascinating to learn the story behind Dazed and Confused. Stand out track is “Wish I Was Anywhere Else” - love that repeating melody.

What was your first experience using Linux? How old were you? Stick around or did you go back to windows before eventually circling back to Linux?

I’ll go first, I took my mom’s college textbooks which came with discs for a couple distros and failed to install RHEL before managing to get Fedora Core 4 working. The first desktop environment I used was KDE and despite trying out a few others over the years I always come back to plasma. Due to being like 12, I wanted to...

davetansley,
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1997, I was 22, it was m68k on an 030 Amiga 1200… for some reason.

I seem to remember I had to buy an FPU to plug into my 030 accelerator, specifically to get this to run. I have no idea what I wanted it for, other than curiosity. I got it working, played around with it for ten minutes, then deleted the partition.

I tried Linux on and off many times after that, but always bounced off it. The last time, 2021, I installed Linux Mint and it has finally stuck.

davetansley,
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I guess that explains why they’re going to such great lengths to convince us that talking about Game of Thrones around a water cooler is such a tremendous benefit to humankind…

davetansley,
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All workers are required to enjoy 30 minutes of mandatory social engagement at a designated “Fun Area”. Enjoyment activities can include: hearty laughter, corporate value appreciation, appropriate camaraderie. If the enjoyment you wish to experience is outside of these allowed forms, please speak to your department’s Enjoyment Adjustment Officer.

Golden Axe: A home port comparison (lemmy.world)

In the UK, we have a peculiar turn of phrase: “to make a good fist of” something. It means to put up a good show, to make the best of what you have, to succeed despite your challenges. And if you ever need to demonstrate to a non-English speaker what this means in practice, you can show them the 8-bit micro ports of Golden...

Super Off Road: A home port comparison (lemmy.world)

Ivan ‘Ironman’ Stewart’s Super Off Road is a 1989 arcade release that plays kind of like a fancy Super Sprint. It’s a single screen game where three players race their trucks over a number of courses, picking up nitro and money, and upgrading their vehicles between races. It’s fast, goofy, chaotic and a lot of fun. The...

davetansley,
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Leaving Twitter for Mastodon barely had an impact. I was just about done with that whole place, with or without Musk in charge.

Reddit is different… I still loved using it. I had my subscriptions honed, all my interests represented. I suffered none of the toxicity that others saw. Not sure if that was just because I mostly used smaller, niche-interest subs or because I mostly lurked and seldom posted? It was all friendly, knowledgeable and entertaining, a stream of consciousness that I could dip in to whenever I wanted to.

So I’m not leaving Reddit because of the experience, but more on principal (both the API kerfuffle and a general aversion to ad-revenue models, which are clearly harmful to society). Principals sadly don’t give me something to read over breakfast…

I hope Lemmy can become that stream of consciousness in time. I’m trying to do my bit by being an active contributor rather than a lurking grazer.

davetansley,
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Me too. I always saw Twitter as the internet's "stream of consciousness" and I use Mastodon in much the same way. Now that I'm all set up, the only real difference is that the stream is somewhat more sedate and far less likely to encounter a section of rapids.

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