Lurker > Yellow

What does this mean for Risk of Rain?

Oh. That's incredibly racist when you consider that they know they're lying.

Lokarin posted...

Bridge collapses due to ship collision; ship had no or unstable power and could not navigate

Conservatives: Clearly a DEI problem!

Got a link?

TheGuiltySpark posted...

Does consciousness, awareness = life? An A.I. question

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iuw6UvU_sw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtZG8jzFDZ8

That's the CPU fully implemented. It should in theory currently be able to play SMB1/Ice Climbers/other mapper 0 games without graphics/sound.

I had an idea for features, I'll create an interface In Godot that will let you swap out your playable character with another. Say you want to play as princess peach in SMB3, the emulator will hook into behaviors and override sprites/movement code, and allow the code/graphics to be implemented with C# instead of the limited NES assembly. That's some potential for going viral right there, lots of YouTuber challenge videos, so I'll have to be careful about copyright else I get nuked. Should I consider getting DMCA'd by Nintendo a badge of honor?

She's an American artist that's from Japan.

She could also be considered from Turkey and from America, but originally from Japan.

I'll take 20.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I've got two packages coming tomorrow that say they'll be delivered by 10pm. I'll let you know when they arrive.

Gee, I sure can't wait until your packages get there

Sahuagin posted...

I don't think what you've said about floats and bools is correct. floats are 4 bytes/32 bits. doubles are 8 bytes/64 bits.

bools are in many places 4 bytes/32 bits, except in arrays they are 1 byte (each).

I don't have a hexdump of memory to confirm this, but some quick tests do seem to confirm it: https://ideone.com/4ELLjh

Hmm, ok, that probably checks out, but I'll have to look into it later. I hope you're at least a little bit impressed by my habit of assuming everyone else is wrong about something basic except me (I swear it's not an ego thing). "I'm not wrong the compiler is" syndrome.

Sahuagin posted...

hmm, I sort of know what you mean, a real "fork" is meant to permanently diverge.

but from my past understanding the last time I used github to contribute it is necessary to work on a fork, I think. I fork your repo (on github) and then I clone my fork. I keep my fork updated against yours, and I keep my local PC updated against my fork. I then push to my fork (since I have write access to it and not yours) and then I make a pull request to your repo from my fork. (I don't think you can make a pull request from CLI git? or maybe you can? in that case I don't know why I'd use a fork then. (didn't get it to work))

the "fork" in this case is just a temporary place to give me write access to github and a place on github from which to send a pull request.

let me know if I have a part of this wrong.

I will try to do something simple today and you can reject it if it's not working for you.

Yeah forks are necessary if you don't have permission, if you accept the organization invite you should be able to push directly to the repo. Then you can ask for forgiveness and not permission.

I'm about to make a YouTube video essay on why you should never never never use float. In response to this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kCFkFi0Cc

What takes up more space, float or double? What about a float[100] and a double[100]? What about a bool[100]? Ask any programmer and 95% of them will tell you the wrong answer. All of them take up the exact same amount of space, array or not. A bool, something that's either true or false, takes up 64 bits in memory.

A bool[3] in memory looks like this;
00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000001 true
00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000001 true
00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_00000001 true

An int[3] in memory looks like this;
00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_11111111_11111111_11111111_11111111 0xffffffff
00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_11111111_11111111_11111111_11111111 0xffffffff
00000000_00000000_00000000_00000000_11111111_11111111_11111111_11111111 0xffffffff

And these tests prove that they're not more demanding;
https://pastebin.com/3MVXpUik

So why would you ever use float? You wouldn't. You would only assume you are suffering from Dunning Kruger because literally everyone gets this wrong. float is a relic of 32-bit machines. double, originally took up 2 address spaces. Today it only takes up one. And your CPU does work on all bits synchronously, so it literally does not matter how many of those 64 bits you use in regards to speed or memory usage.

Likewise! long is objectively superior to int, another type that (if not for legacy costs) should not be used anymore!

Why is it that every top voted answer on StackOverflow suggests saving memory/performance by using int/float??? All these valuetypes are lies, each and every one of them is a long on your 64-bit machines.

Why is it that modern game engines still use float for X/Y/Z? They should absolutely not. The only engine I know of that gets this right is Unreal Engine.

To "fix" starfield you have to modify the assembly of the engine and force it to use double instead of float. Then you can have planet sized worlds. You will have to patch it a lot but it's not impossible.

I sent you an invite to this org as an owner.
https://github.com/MNES-Emulator

This is the "forum" (this is preferable to Discord imo since everything is search indexed)
https://github.com/orgs/MNES-Emulator/discussions

Anyone can post here but you and I are maintainers of the org.

el_cheato posted...

You're probably safe unless you're stupid about it like Yuzu was by selling cracked copies of games. If Dolphin can keep going strong for 20+ years with barely a whiff of legal trouble you're probably fine to continue.

Yuzu didn't sell cracked copies, I think at worst some mod or developer linked to a pirated copy in their discord. They also took a settlement, which doesn't really set any precedent or even confirm they would have lost. Another thing is that they had an LLC set up, so most likely no developer is going to pay a dime.

The lesson to be learned from Yuzu is that you don't take $30k a month emulating superior ports of Nintendo's games on day 1 and then immediately fold in court because obviously they're going to put pressure on you. But most likely they were a bit screwed because of one or two off handed comments made by developers in the discord involving piracy, and they worked out a mutually beneficial deal where the developers wouldn't suffer real consequences while scaring the emulation community as much as possible. The whole "keys" thing doesn't even hold water, they didn't do anything wrong there, it was just a settlement.

Sahuagin posted...

hmm. a hobby C# NES emulator...

FYI I will be strongly tempted to contribute, or at least make suggestions, though I have very little time and energy, and I'm not terribly familiar with the etiquette of coding with others.

(I think I slightly overdid it the last time, but I'm not sure what to avoid or not avoid. maybe I should just work on a fork that I keep updated and not worry about merging my changes into yours.) (last time I was relatively new to git but have been using it quite a while now.) (due to the limited time and energy I may not be able to do much even if I want to.)

Having had some experience developing with others on community projects, I am opposed to fork/branch spam lol. It's the real rookie mistake.

The optimal workflow for a small casual team is on the same branch kept in sync as often as possible with minimal oversight from one single person. Forks are for entirely new repositories that are not meant to merge again. Branches are either for large reworks/revisions, or keeping a version of the source available from different points in time, like a "release" and "development" branch. That said a forum where short frequent casual messages can be sent is very useful for communication, like discord. I'm just going to set up a forum real quickly here where we don't have to spam PotD

I've had to deal with a lot of devs creating 6 branches for each person, and then they get upset when their work got lost here and there and came to me to fix it (even though they could go into the git history and fix it the same way I ended up doing). I ended up managing everyone else's work, which took time out of implementing the core of the code myself.

I find it much easier to review and merge smaller commits instead of one massive branch. I didn't discard any of the changes you made last time at any point, btw. I'm not a snob about commits or formatting or anything. I've accepted lots of commits by "junior" devs and usually spend a lot of time helping them improve, because community projects are all about having a good time anyway. Not to imply that you're a junior dev.

If you want a rundown on how the code works, it's actually very simple at the moment and I'm trying to keep it more "legible" than "genius level", if that makes any sense. Don't worry about screwing anything up, the history is right there and I can just as easily fix it anyway. Any time you feel like working on it I can easily point you in the right direction, an emulator is easier to coordinate since it's a very objective goal.

Sahuagin posted...

Seem to be missing types in the namespace MNES.Core.Machine.Log
Nullable disabled in MNES.Core?
Are you ok with file-scoped namespaces?
do you have any particular coding conventions that I should adhere to such as braces, etc? (I will try to use 4 spaces though I am used to 3)
let me know if I'm too annoying (as soon as there's a second dev things get a lot more complicated so if it's too much definitely let me know and I'll just work separately)

Yeah any namespace issues you describe are accidental on my end.

I've mostly stuck to the formatting that you used last time since I really liked your style of fitting as much stuff on the screen as possible. I've stuck to that idea ever since. Idk how I feel about using 3 space indents, but sure, let's do that. I liked everything else you did last time.

If () {
}

Sorry I had to go to sleep lol. I am nocturnal ATM, will be able to reply more later.

I just made the repo public since it's getting some actual progress done
https://github.com/jamieyello/MNES

Sahuagin posted...

I know what you mean yes. I usually follow the rule of thumb "premature optimization is the root of all evil". once something works, then profile it and optimize it (if necessary).

Idk if it's because C# is a higher level language but I generally write keeper code off the bat so I don't have to do it again. For the NES, I really don't have to worry about optimizations outside of obvious mistakes like looking through a big list every frame, since it's not demanding anyway.

Here's an example of not optimizing that's just bad practice, 3 years ago I attempted an NES emulator. It's much sloppier and worse written. Instead of indexing all opcodes and their methods in an array to be called directly, I just created a giant switch statement with all opcodes. This is surprisingly very common practice for NES emulators.

Old;
https://github.com/jamieyello/JNES/blob/master/NES/Machine.cs#L415

New;
https://github.com/jamieyello/MNES/blob/master/MNES.Core/Machine/CPU/Cpu.cs#L151
(which then gets indexed here)
https://github.com/jamieyello/MNES/blob/master/MNES.Core/Machine/CPU/Cpu.cs#L792

Sahuagin posted...

I mean though that you would have to also implement the APU instructions, which would require playing 8-bit audio on a modern system, somehow. (or something, not sure). same with graphics, you will need to have a graphics library and render to a surface and present it to the screen, etc.

I'm pretty familiar with MonoGame/Godot, and graphically I think both of those will be adequate enough to use without even writing shader code. At worst I'll have to do a palette swap shader.

As for audio, I assume that base .NET will have something to manage waveforms and output those as soundwaves, or a nuget package will exist to do it for me. Or I'll just write it custom.

Ogurisama posted...

Are you going to charge for it and get sued by Nintendo?

Nothing I do is popular enough for that, but I hope they have the courtesy to DMCA me first at least. I don't think I will do a Patreon even if it does get popular.

If Nintendo starts throwing tomahawks at random NES projects (others are first) I'll start worrying about that.

Sahuagin posted...

sounds fun. looks like C#, right?

Yeah, that's just a big array declaration with one of the parameters being an array of delegates. I use this coding pattern a lot. C++ is used very often in emulators because people think it's faster, but that's a myth. It uses more memory and will chug if you don't know what you're doing, but with the latest .NET JIT optimizations generally any code you write will be just as fast as a compiled language. C/C++ diehards think I'm over here creating a new object to spam the GC every frame, when even amateur C# users know not to do that. Proof of that is RyuJinx, a switch emulator that (ran) as fast as the C++ Yuzu despite being written in C#.

Sahuagin posted...

that almost sounds not too bad except what about graphics and audio? isn't there some kind of sprite system, etc? how does that work? and how do you play 8-bit audio? maybe there are libraries for this? (I see PPU is the graphics but that doesn't sound easy).

I've only been told the PPU is easy, I haven't actually gotten to it yet. So I'll do my best to explain what I know so far about those things;

The sound is controlled via the APU, which takes parameters and outputs a couple waves accordingly. "two pulse wave generators, a triangle wave, noise, and a delta modulation channel for playing DPCM samples"
https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/APU

How it works is essentially this; the CPU writes values to the a certain area. The APU has some registers mapped to that area, the APU reads these values (just like parameters) and outputs sounds accordingly.

The PPU acts the same way, taking only 8 registers as parameters. I can't say much more about it confidently because I haven't gotten to that part yet, but the CPU can work without it.
https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/PPU

EclairReturns posted...

Curious: Where did you learn how to do systems programming?

I read the NESDev wiki
https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Programming_guide

If I didn't understand something I just Googled it and spent an hour reading random things about it until I understood it better.

I also have the output log of a known working emulator so I know if mine isn't working through any guesswork/mistakes.

I think I have an idea for what I want to do with this. I use MonoGame as the graphics library, which is easy to use casually, I should make it so you can create plugins for NES games and just hook into the game logic. Like creating a giant 3D goomba in SMB1 that you can interract with that just inserts itself into the emulation. It would be a new approach to modding (not brand new, some SNES emulators do this with LUA?)

Maybe I'll switch to Godot. I like Godot and I like the idea of promoting it.

I should also support Mesen HD graphics packs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYDzL5hVzSM

71/151 opcodes implemented for the CPU

The CPU is halfway done. This is a grind.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a4f6a99d.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/7cf204f7.jpg

JOExHIGASHI posted...

I don't know how AI learning art works. Does it steal images or parts of images to create art?

You train an image set on X artist's work by clicking a button.
You type "a picture of a new pokemon by X artist"
You get an image that's nearly identical to X artist's work.

The real metric is income inequality, which has skyrocketed since Reagan.

I don't want to say.

shadowsword87 posted...

I was showing that AI art can do more than the awful generic AI art that's being plastered on every shitty mobile game. I was fairly clear about that.

Yeah sorry I wasn't really attacking you, just the picture, which was a good example.

Some stuff a doctor might tell you to do anyway;

https://www.webmd.com/men/ss/slideshow-low-testosterone-natural-boost

Also everyone has different levels of test and it's not necessarily good or bad. A doctor might presecribe you meds if your levels are way too low.

My greatest asset is my health because by all other means I'm in the red.

AI art looks really bad if you know what to look for, and at that point it's just shameful that you thought you could get away with it.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a2bd8a42.jpg

Why is this boat so small?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/ab32bdfb.jpg

Why is this boat empty?

The thing that bothers me the most is that people actually appreciate it or think it has any deeper meaning. It's a cool tech demo, it's not art. You're not an artist for clicking a button. lol.

Now every time I see a nice painting I have to automatically assume it was some sweaty tech bro that generated it.

Yeah people always say to start with chip8, but idc about chip8, I've never heard about it in my life.

The only weird thing is dealing with the many different kinds of mappers that ROMs used, which basically put the ROM somewhere in the 64kb address space, as well as any RAM that came with the cartridge itself. After that, you spend a week or so doing every opcode, and apparently the PPU is simple enough to get done quickly, then you can play Mario.

But the reason movement is kind of janky on the NES is that the NES did not support any kind of decimal number. There is no 0.5 on the NES. And the dumb thing is that the 6502 did support decimal arithmetic, it's just they disabled it because they were using a bootleg chip that was based off the 6502, and it's speculated that they disabled the decimal functions to avoid a lawsuit.

It's in a nice middle ground where it's complicated enough to make a good emulator that you might even use, without taking years to complete. ("complete" an emulator, yeah that never happens)

There are already 40+ NES emulators out there but I want to make one just so I can learn emulation better. Here are some key things that you might not know;

The CPU is the NES. When you provide it power it just starts moving memory around which makes other things happen. You could violently rip out the other parts, and the CPU would keep chugging, probably kind of confused.

The CPU has a number inside it that tells it where to get its next instruction. That number has a max value of 65535, so that's how many "things" it can see. Some of those values lead to nothing, some lead to what's in the RAM, what's in the ROM, and two of those addresses tell it what buttons are being pressed on the controller.

Here's a log of my CPU executing 10 instructions on a ROM called "nestest.nes". I'm able to tell if it's doing things right by comparing it to a similar log that's basically the cheat sheet to the test. You might notice that these are assembly instructions. It runs until it hits an instruction that I haven't added, I have 22/151 instructions. It gets through 72 before hitting one I haven't done yet.

1 C000 4C F5 C5 JMP $C5F5 A:00 X:00 Y:00 P:24 S:FD CYC:7
2 C5F5 A2 00 LDX #$00 A:00 X:00 Y:00 P:24 S:FD CYC:10
3 C5F7 86 00 STX $00 = 00 A:00 X:00 Y:00 P:26 S:FD CYC:12
4 C5F9 86 10 STX $10 = 00 A:00 X:00 Y:00 P:26 S:FD CYC:15
5 C5FB 86 11 STX $11 = 00 A:00 X:00 Y:00 P:26 S:FD CYC:18
6 C5FD 20 2D C7 JSR $C72D A:00 X:00 Y:00 P:26 S:FD CYC:21
7 C72D EA NOP A:00 X:00 Y:00 P:26 S:FB CYC:28
8 C72E 38 SEC A:00 X:00 Y:00 P:26 S:FB CYC:30
9 C72F B0 04 BCS $C733 (?) A:00 X:00 Y:00 P:27 S:FB CYC:32
10 C735 EA NOP A:00 X:00 Y:00 P:27 S:FB CYC:35

What's it doing?

It starts at C000 (hex)
1 JMP: It's jumping to that memory location. Aka, it sets the number it looks for its next instruction to C5F5. Notice how the memory address changes after this.
2 LDX: Load that value into the X register. A register is a byte that the CPU keeps internally so it can access it faster. It has several of these.
3 STX: Store the X register value in that memory location. It's setting those memory addresses to 0.
4 JSR: It's jumping to a location and storing the return address on the stack. Later, when it hits a "RTS" instruction, it will pull this value from the stack and come back to this point in memory.
5: NOP: Just do nothing for a little bit.
6: SEC: The has a status register. It uses all 8 bits of this byte as individual true or false values. In this case, it sets the "carry" flag to 1. This one 0000_000c.
7: BCS: And immediately after that, it checks to see if the carry flag is set. If the carry flag is set, it will jump to another location. And it is, so it will.

I love mice a lot. I hate having to kill them, but those suckers multiply and poop so they get no quarter.

It must be weird having a giant just pick you up and mess with you.

Thankfully they've preserved Ayn Rand's head in a jar so we can stick it on a robot and make it president at some point.

When you fall into a black hole, because of relativity, to the outside world you freeze in time, and the outside world speeds up.

So if your loved one ever got pushed into a black hole, you would have to live with the fact that at every single moment your loved one is screaming in terror. But it's the same amount of terror overall as someone who died in real time, so would you have to dilute your empathy and accept that while your friend is suffering every second, it's scaled down to a mild annoyance?

If you pushed someone into a black hole, is that even murder? They might outlive the human race because of you.

I don't understand how any of this is even real.

OhhhJa posted...

Looks like he's dressing as a final fantasy villain lol

Idc if it's Elmo, I have a coworker that dresses like that and they look fucking badass on a daily basis while everyone else is boring. Everyone should walk around looking like an anime character.

And before you say anything about turbovirginity she's a hot girl checkmate your double standards.

Well I don't. I forgot.

Why does it keep happening and try not to do it again while explaining

adjl posted...

https://imgur.com/rBHf5DC

He actually looks pretty cool in that picture?

Better than the one where he's sucking his gut in so hard he looks like he has a giant torso.

TomNook posted...

Straight women like to watch gay porn, the same way straight guys like to watch lesbian porn.

This is true, but only a minority watching them are women

a massive 37% of all Pornhub visitors viewing gay male porn are female

I'm "bi" but I never tell anyone because I have no reason to, don't want random guys hitting on me, and don't like having it automatically be 20% of what people think of when they think of me. I think most people are bisexual to some extent and just don't like the stigma attached to it, have some kind of mental block put up to ward off any slightly gay thoughts they might have very easily.

I read that only 1.3% of the population is bisexual and I call total horseshit on that. And 1.6% identify as gay? Yeah, and that's why 30% of the porn I see posted is gay. Sure guys, whatever you say.

Further backing that up;
https://gcn.ie/straight-people-watch-lot-gay-porn-youporn/

Sure. I assume you look like this too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DMZ_ownSiM

Tbh a lot of my knowledge of software also stems from my own insecurities in trusting things we're supposed to rely on. It would weird me out to use a phone every day and have no idea how it works like it's some kind of magic. Idk why I don't feel this insecurity towards things like engineering or physics, maybe because like you say there could just be some dude spying on us and we wouldn't even know. I don't mind the questions, but for your sake consider the fact that you are taking cyber-security so seriously makes you very unlikely to ever be hacked. There's also the fact that ChromeOs is inherently more secure than Windows by virtue of having a smaller user base. Why would a hacker bother targeting ChromeOs when they could just go after people using Windows? Say you're using something like a browser on a video game console. You probably have, by complete accident, the most secure browser out of anyone else.

I still have a lot to research on cyber security, until I get really into Kali Linux's official (paid) courses.

To answer your question it won't clear cookies while you're using it since it only clears it from the hard drive, more so only while in sleep/reboot. (Basically) never from RAM. If it's loaded into a program while you're using it, it's not going to just disappear mid-use.

OhhhJa posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/c/cbcbc7a7.jpg

I can tell that guy lost his job and deserved so much more.

Your token/cookies expired/got cleaned up. They are designed to do that after a while. It's only an issue if it does it so often that it's inconvenient, otherwise it's not a security issue.

There's no real schedule to when your OS decides to do these things, but there are settings you can enable to have it do it less.

No one liked that.

Yeah when I think of child safety the first thing I think about is the state with razorwire in their rivers to drown kids

Tbf you are, with respect, very pro-death and anti-human, since you've apparently got nothing to lose and see nothing worth protecting.

I actually think artists are relatively safe, they have to learn to filter out the spam for now, but at least most people would refuse to read a book written by AI (who would do that), would prefer graphics made by a human, and musicians outright have rejected AI altogether. Even though they were attacked first, I think they'll be the last to go, until a generation 100 years from now changes societal views on what art is. Maybe people will just start generating their own custom tailor-fit media that never leaves their computer and that will be the death of art, and that generation will largely see no problem with doing it. Maybe people will decide that having friends and SOs is too hard and just live in virtual worlds.

With desk jobs you're right that no one will cry over something that was arguably lacking human creativity in the first place. Why would anyone prefer a website with backends written by a human instead of an AI? Charity? Handouts? Companies that like wasting time and money?

The silver lining here is that if/when it does take over programming jobs, it will be a problem for all of society as a whole. It won't just be the artists or 3d modelers that will be left behind.

Lay people tend to brush it off as hype, or hype it up for futurism because they like blinking lights and magic tricks. But for people following this closely, it is growing exponentially to the point where jobs are starting to be replaced. The new AI "Devin" is a standalone programmer that can create and close its own issues on GitHub with a 13% success rate. Only 13% you might say, but that's a metric that will only grow, until it's 50%, 80%, 99%. At some point, programmers are going to be out of a job.

So we're going to be relegated to physical jobs only, right? Wrong. Those are going too. These companies have made it their stated goal to replace the human workforce.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiKvPJSOUmE

Why pay someone $30k annually when you could buy one $10k robot to do it forever? And people say there will be jobs that pop up that are more advanced to replace the old ones. Maybe, but most likely there will be something like a 1:10 replacement ratio. And people say it's currently too crappy to replace humans, or that it fundamentally will never be good enough. This is just wrong. With all due respect, you are not paying attention to how fast this is growing with no major hurdles.

There will be mass layoffs, and either we adopt some kind of UBI or we will just collapse. This is a huge curveball from regular political discourse.

That idea might be considered right leaning in a couple years

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiKvPJSOUmE

Plebs all know Pi, but how many of you know e?? (I don't)

I'm not saying Elon fans are dumb, but I am saying they all have some very irrational pro-establishment bias and maybe all every last one of them have daddy issues