Console Design- Can I have my cake and eat it too?

Recently I spilled the beans that I have a little hobby project slowly brewing away where I am designing a new game console. I'm still not ready to really properly pitch the whole thing, but between sharing that, explaining computer architecture, and seeing people's feedback, it keeps pushing itself towards the front burners over more practical projects I SHOULD be giving my focus to, and while people are paying attention, I might as well try to crowdsource answers to some questions I'm getting hung up on.

So... a lot of what I'm doing here is, I'll be honest, rooted in nostalgia for 16-bit consoles. There's a certain retro appeal to the look, speed, and general immediacy of 8-bit games, and more than plenty of support for making games that evoke that feel, and even recently made free dev tools for people to just make new games for older systems, and as I'm writing this, there is this massive renaissance going on with indie devs restricting them to the constraints of early polygonal-graphics-focused consoles, but we mostly skipped right past that 16-bit period, and all its hallmarks:

2D graphics with more color-depth than people really knew what to do with. All sorts of hardware-level flashy effects like transparency, resolution changes, neat little raster effects. A soundscape of crunchy FM synth and sparingly used sampling with distortion effects. Just a little taste of support for polygonal graphics. Not enough to go all-in, but enough to make a nice spice here and there. A general push to show off with fancy jointed paper doll sprites, 3D effects from sprite-scaling, just... clear ambitions all over to make low res 2D eye candy. Plus everything was cartridge based, allowing people to add extra custom chips for things they really wanted that they didn't quite have the power for.

So that's basically what I want to deliver here. A platform where you have more toys and tricks than you know what to do with if you're coming from 8-bit style stuff, but a real tricky set of restrictions to work around from a more modern approach, hopefully with its own look and sound. To that end I've been doing a ton of research into how some of those work... and a lot of it involves fun little tricks between scanlines. In particular, if you look at that mode 7 video above, right around 7:50, we've got this real eye-popping barrel distortion background. What's going on here, on a hardware level, is we have the ability to, essentially, apply one single image as a texture to a single parallelogram, which in this case is just taking a rectangular background and squishing it in towards the center then out towards its regular dimensions... but where doing that squishing and stretching between individual scan lines as we send the video out to the screen. Several changes to the shape before we've even finished rendering out one frame of the video, and tada, weird barrel.

Being able to support tricks like THAT, specifically, is a must-have feature for what I'm working on, and I'm pretty confident I can design the hardware with that exact capability... but the original hardware doing that was, to my understanding, very much working with the peculiarities of how a CRT worked and the exact number of operations it could get done while the beam was swiping back to the left to draw the next line, and I legitimately have no idea if tricks like this are even really possible if I slap together a similar chipset and send video out an HDMI cord to a modern display.

Like, I know I can fake that. I've got a Retron 5 hooked to a cheap flat panel TV with Castlevania 4 plugged in, but my understanding is that's actually emulating an SNES in software on some very-much-overkill for this sort of thing modern processor. What I would LIKE to do is build this with a chipset you really can push to its limits, hooked to modern display, and get this sort of effect. Because while I realize a big chunk of the audience for this sort of thing totally have nice well-maintained CRTs, I don't want to be married to hardware people no longer manufacture. And I'd rather not have some way more capable sub-processor wedged in here just to get the video output of whatever cheap fast legit 16-bit chipset I use otherwise to play nice with HDMI standards.

I'm still sort of in the dark about HDMI and modern display options, to be clear. And you know in a perfect world I'd like to have support built into this if you want to hook it to a CRT, but at the end of the day I need to pick an aspect ratio, and it's probably gonna be 16:9.

A similar fork in the road I may need to pick a lane for before I can really get going is looking at ASIC chips. What I'd really love is to be able to just point people at a design files for the casing and PCBs, and a warehouse of old mass-produced chips that sell for pennies, make the whole thing a neat little home electronics kit where the total price of everything is like, maybe $10 or $20 or something, you get out a soldering iron, and assemble it all yourself. But, I might need to custom design a chip or two in the end, and there's a chance it ends up being cheaper to just build literally the whole system on one chip. Simpler, easier to make a portable version of the whole thing, but it loses that DIY feel.

And of course there's also the risk that the overall architecture and chipset I'm looking at isn't going to have the oomph to do what I want it to do at a nice steady 60 FPS (maybe 120?) I'm just kind of assuming once I commit to a path I'll be able to find a dirt cheap chipset covering all the bases I need it to that'll hold up at a faster clock speed than consoles really ran at in the mid-90s. I want people to be able to do things smoothly that historically really had some slowdown, and you know, I AM planning to have a higher base resolution than the systems I'm taking inspiration from (maybe the same height but clearly more width).

And of course the real pain is going to be prototyping all this since none of it's going to work without hooking display AND something popped into a cartridge slot. I'm at least saving myself some headache starting with a controller I can at least test in other things, but wow there's gonna be so many different potential failure points to worry about at one step in here.

Big BioWare sale currently on Steam: Every Dragon Age and Mass Effect game for $20, including all DLC. "BioWare mega collection" for 90% off. The bundle includes Mass Effect Legendary Edition. [source]

"I want to go back to feeling my hand. I wanna hold my hand"

This child Ibrahim Dahouk, from gaza strip, had his arm amputated in Israeli bombardment. He's crying, saying that he wants his hand back. Ibrahim says that the doctors told him he'd be able to if he could get outside of gaza for medical attention as soon as possible, he asks for anyone to put an end to the bombing so he could get proper treatment.

Translation:

"-Why are you crying?

I want to go back to holding my hand. I want to feel my hand.

My two cousins have been killed and I got injured. Please stop the war, that's what we want. We want to go back to our homes, we want to go back to live and to walk like before. They don't care about anything, they don't care about us. For the rest of my life I only want to feel my hand again, please. The doctor told me if you want your hand to grow back you have to get treatment abroad, immediately."

Then the man goes into explaining ibrahim's situation. Please if anybody knows how to help get Ibrahim the medical treatment for prosthetic limbs do everything you can, before he loses the remaining parts of his hand, share this on all platforms. And most importantly keep demanding a ceasefire. This has to stop.

We interviewed Alex Hirsch!

Join me and fellow YouTuber @hkthatgffan for our exclusive interview with Alex Hirsch, the creator of Gravity Falls.

Will the artbook ever be revived? Are there any plans for future Gravity Falls comics, or any other comic ideas that didn't make the final result? What's the story behind the line change between editions of Journal 3? Who is the intended identity of the baby in A Tale of Two Stans?

Get Alex's responses to our questions, in not one, but TWO separate hour-long videos, releasing to each of our channels this late March! April 12!

Hana Hyperfixates on YouTube (my channel)

ThatGFFan on YouTube

ThatGFFan's FAQ on this whole process

Thumbnail images of ThatGFFan and myself made by @stephreynaart

(Oh this... this is beautiful) 3D Rendering in video by @brightdrawings

----

[Video Description: A 3D render of a red-plaid-patterned question mark floats and spins against a starry background, coming closer as dramatic music plays. White text appears on screen reading "Think of your most pressing Gravity Falls Questions…" "...and imagine finally having the answers." The voice of YouTuber HanaHyperfixates reads "Did you know about the changed line between editions of Journal 3?" "Was there ever another reunion planned between Fiddleford and Ford, aside from the one in Weirdmaggedon Part III?" "Alex, what do the red rectangles mean in Journal 3?" Then the voice of Alex Hirsch, creator of Gravity Falls, responds "That's a good question." When the plaid question mark stops spinning, very close to the screen, a light blue triangle appears, and the screen fades to aqua, with text overlayed reading "An interview with Alex Hirsch, creator of Gravity Falls/ One part of a two-part video interview, featuring That GF Fan/ Coming soon." The text then fades to include the art described above. /end video description]

The Mystery is Finally OUT of the Shack...

We interviewed Alex Hirsch!

Join me and fellow YouTuber @fordtato (Hana Hyperfixates) for our exclusive interview with Alex Hirsch, the creator of Gravity Falls.

Will the artbook ever be revived? Are there any plans for future Gravity Falls comics, or any other comic ideas that didn't make the final result? What's the story behind the line change between editions of Journal 3? Who is the intended identity of the baby in A Tale of Two Stans?

Get Alex's responses to our questions, in not one, but TWO separate hour-long videos, releasing to each of our channels this late March!

Hana Hyperfixates on YouTube

ThatGFFan on YouTube

ThatGFFan's FAQ on this whole process

3D Rendering in video by @brightdrawings

Thumbnail images of Hana and myself made by @stephreynaart

[Video Description: A 3D render of a green-plaid-patterned question mark floats and spins against a starry background, coming closer as dramatic music plays. White text appears on screen reading "Think of your most pressing Gravity Falls Questions…" "...and imagine finally having the answers." The voice of YouTuber That GF FAN reads "What would you have done if Kristen Schaal could not have voiced Mabel?" "Were there ever plans for more Gravity Falls graphic novels?" "Will the art book ever be revived?" "Alex, who is the baby?" Then the voice of Alex Hirsch, creator of Gravity Falls, responds "That's a good question." When the plaid question mark stops spinning, very close to the screen, a light blue triangle appears, and the screen fades to aqua, with text overlayed reading "An interview with Alex Hirsch, creator of Gravity Falls/ One part of a two-part video interview, featuring Hana Hyperfixiates/ Coming soon." /end video description]

Sending you a signal, sending you a signal Tingling tingling tingling tingling

close up of alien mc:

✨ HUGE NEWS ✨

I’m excited to announce my co-workers and I are unionizing!

You can find our full mission statement here on our official Twitter account - please signal boost and share with the hashtag #UnionizeSega 💪🦔

You can share articles on Polygon, Kotaku, The Verge and more, reblog this post, tell your friends, help us get the word out - we are the biggest video game studio yet to organize a union, and the only one across multiple departments! Hopefully this will have nothing but positive repercussions for the industry.

Please help support us as we attempt to make the incredible company we love an amazing place to work for everyone 💙

the aftermath of the little comic i made, hehe

Hall of the Forgotten Giants (2021)

Vote for Hi-Fi Rush!

It's time, people! The game awards are here, and it's time to give our rockstar support! Hi-Fi Rush has been nominated in these categories.

Best Action Game

Best Soundtrack

Innovation in Accessibility

Best Audio Design

Best Art Direction

So what are you waiting for?! Go to the link below and vote for a game that deserves to be in the hall of fame. Show that they made a mistake choosing Alan Wake 2 over this awesome game! Chai needs you!

https://www.thegameawards.com/nominees/best-action

in the ratatosked express. straight up "jorking it". and by "it", haha, well let's jusr say. My peanits

[source (Senior Reporter at Kotaku), linked Kotaku article, two, 'FC 24's performance link', three, four, @/N7SeveranceDay (source of the last two images, "Account supporting BioWare employees laid off in 2023."), five, six, Polygon tweet, Polygon article]

"BioWare Continues to Refuse to Pay Severance" statement transcript:

“BioWare Continues to Refuse to Pay Severance On August 23 of this year, BioWare eliminated “approximately 50 roles at BioWare”. Following the layoffs, seven ex-BioWare employees engaged the services of R. Alex Kennedy to represent their interests, stating that the amount of severance offered was insufficient under Alberta common law. Counsel for the employees has attempted to reach a compromise that would avoid requiring lengthy court proceedings, but BioWare’s lawyers refused any offers to negotiate and settle out of court. The basis of Kennedy’s claim is that according to Alberta precedents and under Canadian law, these employees should be receiving approximately 1.7 months of severance per year of service they gave to BioWare. BioWare has now filed a Statement of Defence, which argues that the seven terminated employees are only entitled to two weeks of severance per year spent in service to BioWare, because of a contract provision that Kennedy says is not enforceable. The filing means BioWare will be taking these former employees to court rather than working towards finding an out of court resolution. The developers involved in the suit have expressed their disappointment: - “We are disappointed that BioWare prefers stalling and intimidation tactics to fair dealing with people who have given years, and in some cases decades, of dedication and hard work to the company.” - “We believe they are using intimidation and stalling tactics to try and get us to drop out. A lot of the more junior employees and those with families, who had more monetary pressure on them, could not risk waiting on a court case that may take many months more to resolve, and have already had to drop out.” - “At the time of the layoffs, BioWare offered us professional assistance in finding new employment, and an additional payment, but ONLY on the condition that we signed an agreement saying we cannot talk about any details of the settlement, and that we would completely waive any right to legal action or even to complain in any way about anyone associated with BioWare now or ever in the future. Tactics like that sure make me think that BioWare knows it is in the wrong.” - “Despite what they publicly announced when they laid us off, this process has been anything but empathetic, respectful, and communicative.” The latest BioWare layoffs were the third round so far this year, and many of the developers affected even in earlier rounds are still searching for work, though some have started to find new positions. Regardless of employment status, the members of the current lawsuit state they remain determined to pursue BioWare in court, regardless of their employment status: - “We strongly believe that if Dragon Age: Dreadwolf does not do as well as BioWare or EA wants at launch, there will be more, even larger layoffs. Therefore, regardless of our own well-being, we believe it is important to hold BioWare responsible and get a clear decision on what settlement amount is legal. We’re no longer part of the development team, so the best way we can help our former teammates now is to hold BioWare accountable and ensure that the next group who is laid off are not treated as poorly as we were.” November 7th marks “N7 Day”, which is a fan celebration of BioWare’s Mass Effect games featuring Commander Shepard and the crew of the Normandy. The developers involved in the lawsuit are hoping N7 Day this year will be a reminder to BioWare of the importance of loyalty to your crew, and hope fans can have a little fun and help express their support with memes and images using an #N7SeveranceDay hashtag. The ex-employees involved in the suit are all based in Canada and have an average of 14 years at BioWare.”

[source]

You can express your support using the hashtag #N7SeveranceDay.

Edit: [Part 2/update] [more on the Keywords topic]

Update regarding Channel 4's investigation into who bombed Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on October 18th 2023

Source: @LowkeyØnline on Twitter and Channel 4

Video below:

(edit: cut off at the end, "produced it".)

VERSION 2.0 of my horror visual novel Mother's Favorite is live right now!

This has been 4 years in the making! This version of the demo covers 1/3rd of the total game and gives a pretty good slice of the atmosphere, characters and story.

The demo is free to play with a 'pay what you want' option. It would mean the world to me if this was shared around and given constructive criticism if possible.

Please note this game is a horror game and is not suitable for all audiences. A full list of content warnings are available on the itch.io page for those interested.

I am honored and humbled by all the people who have stuck with the project this long and have contacted me about their interest!

Have fun and try to keep Fourth alive!

I KNOW I WAS JUST HERE BUT THIS IS SO DAMN IMPORTANT

TikTok - Make Your Day

Thank you for sending this! Folks, this is very quick and easy to do -please vote in favor of a ceasefire with the information above so that the Bakersfield City Council (in California, US) hears your voice. And yes, as always -free Palestine.

people have been talking a lot about how tumblr altering from .gif to .mp4 will severely effect quality of a gifset - and they're right! it really does impact quality (and the more complex the gifset, the more impacted the quality is, which is also horrible for gifmakers). but i also feel like it’s worth mentioning that this goes beyond quality. converting to .gif takes away key components in gif making, including transparency.

now having transparency within a gifset is important because it allows gifmakers to get around the ‘you can only upload 10 gifs’ rule, while still preserving your tumblr experience, whatever layout your in whether it’s light mode or dark mode or anything in between. but converting to .mp4 completely changes this. you cannot preserve transparency with .mp4. this means any gif that includes multiple gifs within one canvas? it’s going to have white lines inbetween.

here is an example of a multiple-gifs-in-one saved as .gif:

and this is it now in .mp4 format (screenshot bc tumblr won’t even let me upload a .mp4):

not only is the quality severely impacted (ew), but also it has these white bars which are at complete contrast with how the rest of the set looks in dark mode.

i know to non-gifmakers it may seem overdramatic for us to complain about this change, but it really does entirely alter the giffing techniques we as gifmakers employ to make our gifs look smooth for your consumption. 

so please, make noise about this. if not for yourself but for the gifmakers you enjoy if you want to continue seeing them make content.