A long time ago I decided to ugrade my jamma arcade machine with a console harness. To give you an idea of the time I chose a PS1 console. It worked. Things like r-type delta and the emulated williams games worked really well in a big heavy chipboard box experience. I also played a lot of the first tony hawks game in a fake arcade environment. An experience I bet no one else shared.
An arcade harness consists simply of controller input and video output. For the video output I added a scart socket and for the input I took apart and wired up some cheap PS1 controllers.
So, the arcade machine pretends to be an rgb scart monitor and a couple of PS1 controllers.
I figured that PS1 controllers would continue to exist and I would be able to swap any console into this setup simply by buying some converters to PS1 controllers.
I was right.
I was also wrong.
Although PS2 controllers look remarkably like PS1 controllers they are actually completely different. Every converter you can buy has to support PS1 and PS2 controllers. The PS2 part works, the PS1 part pretends to work.
You can still buy PS1 controller adapters for any console, unfortunately these adapters really only support PS2 controllers. Sure when you press a button that button eventually registers. Probably, half a second or so later, if you are lucky.
This sort of lag makes their use unacceptable.
I tried buying many different adapters, each of them had the same problem too much lag and even dropped buttons.
This problem isn’t very well documented, since it kinda works and many gamers simply blame themselves rather than understanding the latency issues. Mostly complaints are about dancemats since many playstation dancemats are PS1 controllers not PS2. Various forums full of people serious about dancemats complain but still don’t really understand the problem.
Eventually I had to rip out the PS1 controller harness and replace it with an XBOX one. MAMEoX FTW BTW.
Which brings me to my point. 150ms of control latency is the same as switching from playing a game at 60fps to playing a game at 6fps.
Sure it still works.
Sure many gamers will not understand what is going on and blame themselves.
Sure you can sell it as being acceptable.
Sure you can go fuck yourself because only a casual gamer could be happy playing twitchy games with that sort of control lag.
The game streaming idea sold by onlive and others looks great for secure MMO style games, a thin client is ideal and yay you can even play on netbooks.
This is all good.
But they keep promoting it as the perfect thing for twitchy FPS games.
Which just smells of bullshit.
I’m not even convinced it can work a mouse pointer.
Apparently all thats important is good copy, column inches and marketing.
Nothing else matters.
It is not important to find and promote that which is good so that there is more good in the world.
Not if you are a journalist anyway, you have conferences to attend and self promoting competitions to run.
Creators create and then they die, they do not market themselves nor should they.
People who ask creators to focus on marketing are evil.
Amanda palmer is not an example of a glorious social media future she is just a self promoting media whore. The world has no shortage of these, the limit is only on how many can actually succeed.
Marketing is about changing the names of the limited number of people or products at the top.
Social media changes nothing, it is little more than a chain letter tupperware party.
Marketing is a zero sum game and it needs to be destroyed not appeased.
Once you have reached a certain established business size you must advertise, not to grow but simply because your competitors are advertising and if you don’t then they will steal your market share.
This is a form of the prisoners dilemma, the normal result is that everyone advertises and nobody wins. The money is wasted fighting each other to stay in more or less the same place.
In terms of the prisoners dilemma, both prisoners normally defect.
A better solution would be for nobody to advertise, millions could be saved if all the big players in an industry simply agreed not to waste money on advertising. If they agreed to cooperate.
Why if that happened then it would be the best thing ever for that industry.
The anti smoking brigaid lobbied and lobbied until the government agreed to ban smoking advertisements.
Smoking is bad mkay.
The unintended result was a huge win for the established tobacco industry who saved a fortune on advertising.
People that smart should be in charge and save the economy and everything. Why they could probably rid the world of crime using only prohibition.
When you change rules in a complex feedback system you need to have your smart hat on.
It is very easy for an obvious change, that everyone agrees is the right thing to do, to actually have the opposite effect.
Remember that the next time you demand the obvious solution.
today’s post attempts to elucidate the uninitiated into the world of wetgenes.
or at least, the starting screen when one becomes a registered member of this very exclusive club.
as you can see, you are automatically transported into the VIP room. the bot, jeeves, will be your butler for this particular room.
beneath the welcoming message, you will be informed the number of cookies in your possession. since they are always on the floor due to your lack of pockets, anyone may steal them from you if you are not careful.
cthulhu, the eldergod whom we all love, gives us important information about new posts in the forum which you can click on to transport you to that dimension. he is clever like that.
next is a list of the recent kerfluffle of the miscreants in chat. they vary in levels of hilarity and antisocial behaviour.
and lastly, if you see brains updating, that means we are updating the server. this includes patches, bug fixes, feature additions and other twiddly bits.
Desert Island Discs represented the beginning of an acceptance of popular music.
It was a way of defining who you are by simply choosing a few media samples.
Although it took many years, eventually it was acceptable to choose non-classical music without shaming yourself.
The “Generation who games” would gladly remove each and every gramophone record, forgo any book or luxury and instead choose only one game to live with; alone for the rest of their lives.
I love books.
I love music.
I love films.
However, such a decision makes sense to me.
If it makes sense to you, does that not imply that all of these other forms of media are not insurmountable giants that we can never match.
They are actually easily demonstrably as inferior to games on a personal level.
We exist online, our work can be transparent, you the audience can be as much a part of it as we are simply by choosing to pay attention and join in.
Developers develop day in day out, they add to the community, they create, they tinker, they make, they do not schmooze journalists hoping for good publicity.
Things have changed, journalists have not.
If you are in advertising, kill yourself.
Conferences are for dentists, we are more than that.
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