Dark Pulse

If only there was one way to filter sprites, that would suffice. But there isn't. Bilinear, Trilinear, Nearest...

I mean, there's a few ways around that, or so I'd figure. For example, if a mod file is loaded, simply don't show the Episode list unless it specifically made one in MAPINFO or something. I dunno, just seems like a fairly pointless whine to me. Once you're playing it's not like you're visiting the new game/episode selection anyway unless you're actually doing that. Ehh.

That's a dumb thing to complain about. One whole extra keypress that takes a fraction of a second, or just removing NRFTL if it's that much of an issue. Wow. Not criticizing you, mind, but this is so nitpicky I can't help but shake my head at those people.

I'm not even sure why people submit a pull request. Don't they know it's there purely for archival reasons and will basically never, ever get updated?

Old Doom veterans: *Wry smile*

I've heard plenty of good things about Aseprite. It looks pay-for, but if you're comfortable with compiling from the source code, that will build it for free. But it certainly is well worth buying, too.

Physical N64 package size, yes. Actual capacity, nowhere near it. Diddy Kong Racing was a 16 MB ROM, so Conker had literally 4x the space.

Well, it depends on the system. Genesis/Megadrive, for example, was FM synth, so "music" was really just instructions telling the chips what to output, but any samples to be played via the DAC had to be stored in the ROM, so the music literally needed nothing more than sequence data if you only stuck to the YM2612 and SN76489 and used no samples (though most games did for stuff like drums, for example). SNES, on the other hand, had no generative hardware and was completely a sample-based system, so every instrument used needed not only to be stored on the cartridge ROM, it also needed to fit into the SPC700's limited RAM (64 KB if memory serves), which is why a lot of samples are very short stuff that loops well and anything that plays long sounds more compressed (though a few games did use clever tricks to stream audio, like Tales of Phantasia). The PS1 sound hardware is actually an evolution of this system. The N64, on the other hand, had no dedicated sound hardware, it was entirely mixed in software. It could be done by the CPU itself or the Reality Coprocessor, supported 16-bit stereo sound at up to 48 KHz, and generally used ADPCM samples (though some games, like Conker's Bad Fur Day, are actually MP3!), but since there was no dedicated hardware, it also took up processing time. Each mixed channel meant roughly 1% of the CPU time, so in theory you top out at about 100 channels - but of course, the game wouldn't be doing anything else then. A more practical amount would be 15-25. And of course, since it too is sample-based, that means all samples must be stored on the cartridge - and naturally, the higher quality the sample, the more space it takes up. Things no longer had to be bitcrushed to fit into tiny amounts of RAM, but the capacity of the cartridge was still very much a deciding factor, and if all your other game data (code, models, textures, etc.) took up most of the space, you very well could (and likely would) compromise on the audio first before anything else.

Theoretically this would make a difference in some cases, but in practice faster ROM speed just means faster data access. If the bottleneck is the CPU being starved of data, this will definitely improve it, but if the CPU has to crunch a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with ROM, the speed will still suffer. So basically, while it will certainly make it faster, it is not going to work miracles, and there are still plenty of ways that a game could slow down that faster ROM won't solve.

It's way more likely he's the fall guy.

Yes, and of course, it had great battery life as a result of the evolution of tech in those intervening years - but Nintendo didn't really have to care too much, they had no competitors in that space. Sega bowed out around then and began making games for their system, the Neo-Geo Pocket was on its last legs and never really took off, the WonderSwan never even left Japan IIRC. Pretty much everyone ceded that space to Nintendo until the PSP came out a few years later, but by then Nintendo had an answer in the DS and we all know which strategy won that war. It's really the handhelds that have been Nintendo's safe haven. For every major success like the Wii, they have also put out major bombs like the Virtual Boy, 64DD, and Wii U, but they've always had a Game Boy, a DS, a 3DS to lean on and weather the storm, until the Switch successfully merged the two sides well. However, Nintendo in a way has more competition than ever via Smartphones. The fast evolution cycle of them means they need to lean hard on what they do well and their franchises, because even when the Switch 2 comes out, it's going to have guts from a device from a year or two ago in all likelihood - the fact devs are seeing it behind closed doors means that the hardware is pretty much finalized. It will literally be dated the moment it comes out, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing - especially if the price point is enticing, given that it will almost certainly be no more expensive than a low-mid-range smartphone.

Mmm, it's more powerful in some ways, but keep in mind this is still a system that in handheld mode is capping itself to 720p, generally 30 FPS, and even under those conditions there are still games that will run the battery dead in 2-3 hours. Battery tech is increasingly the weak point, but the point that I was trying to make is that the main guts of the Switch (nVidia's Tegra X1) was indeed 2015 hardware - which is right in line with Nintendo going at least a couple years behind the curve, since the Switch came out in 2017, and this is actually surprisingly "recent" for Nintendo in terms of how old the hardware is. In most systems they've done, it's been at least 3-5 years old. The SNES PPU was custom, but the CPU - the 65C816 - was introduced in 1985 and was also the CPU used in the Apple IIGS. So by the time the SNES came out, we're talking 5+ year-old tech at that point. Its main competitor, the Motorola 68000, was even older - late 1980. As for the GBA, it's also a case where it's really the graphics side of the chip that's impressive. The processor is an ARM7TDMI; it was publicly out in 1994, so it was seven years old before that device even released. It wasn't even the first game system to use it - the Sega Dreamcast used it as the audio processor, and the PS2 used it as a security chip.

Doom 64 was done by pretty much the same people as PS1 Doom, so the man most directly responsible would be Aaron Seeler. And in terms of 3D hardware... yes, the N64 is absolutely leagues more powerful than a PS1. The N64 CPU was about 3x as fast (93.75 MHz vs 33 MHz), it had 2-4x the RAM (PS1 had 2 MB main system RAM, N64 had 4 MB or 8 MB depending on if you had the expansion pack - though PS1 had dedicated areas for main system memory, VRAM, and sound RAM, while N64 was the first unified memory architecture system that is now common in consoles today), and a lot of stuff that you had to expressly code for if you tried it on PS1 (texture perspective, etc.) was simply "free" with the N64. You didn't have to do a thing for perspective correction, anti-aliasing, texture filtering, etc. The tradeoff is that it was also considerably more complicated to develop for than the PS1. What held the N64 back is twofold: It had a cripplingly small texture cache of 4 KB, which is why you only rarely see high-rez textures - it effectively limited a single individual texture to 64x64, as all textures get written to the cache before being put into main memory, and while more cartridge space and more RAM would let you store more textures, you can do absolutely nothing about that 4 KB texture cache. PS1 games do tend to use more polygons than N64 games, but this is a bit of a gotcha - PS1 had, for example, no sorts of Z-Buffers (N64 did) or ways to tell "which" polygons should draw over others, which is why you see a lot of that characteristic polygon popping, so a lot of PS1 games threw extra polys at the system to try to minimize that. On the N64, that was completely unnecessary, so your polys went more where it mattered. Of course, that extra power came with, as said before, extra complexity - and Nintendo generally kept stuff like custom microcode (needed to really bring the power out of the chips) close to their chest, so relatively few developers really managed to pull it off - a notable one who did is Factor 5, whose devs were full of German Demosceners and rewrote like 80% of the provided default 3D library. Rare literally reverse-engineered the default library and then built their own - apparently shocking Nintendo when they saw what Banjo-Kazooie could do. Nintendo went on to make the GameCube a lot more easy to develop for as a direct consequence of this. There is also, of course, the one other obvious difference: cartridge space. The N64's biggest games were 64 MB and even this was rare; most games on the system are in the 8-16 MB range. The system was technically capable of capacities up to just a bit under 256 MB, but it would've been prohibitively expensive (we're talking $10-20 for a 128 MB chip - cost which must be passed onto the consumer somehow to make profit). That said, you can always still go higher than that, but then you would need to implement bankswitching. On that note, even though the expansion pack only added 4 MB of RAM, the system was technically capable of having up to 16 MB of RAM - four in the system and up to 12 from the expansion slot. Naturally this is useless though, as games would have to be coded to detect and make use of anything over the 4 MB of system RAM, and naturally, no game ever has. Interesting possibility for a homebrew dev, though - if they can find enough RDRAM chips to make it work. So in short... yeah, the N64 was by far the more powerful system. PS1 isn't even really in its league, technically speaking. It is one of the very few times Nintendo actually went bleeding edge - the other being the ill-fated Virtual Boy. Every other system Nintendo has ever made has used technology that is at least several years old and very mature by the time of its release - even the Switch, released in 2017, is basically the guts of a 2014-2015 smartphone at its core, and the Switch 2 (whatever that turns out to be) will probably be tech that's from a few years ago at this point.

Known issue. Emphasis mine:

Officially, it's an in-joke.

That chart is simply ridiculous. "850 FPS isn't enough for you? No problem, we're 'bout to go W A R P S P E E D"

So... the clit mouse?

And I sat down with a homemade salami sub with some sour cream and onion chips for a side. Along with an ice-cold drink, it's a decent way to forget about the day.

Whatever order you please. That's going to vary from mapper to mapper. Some prefer to do maps that have a common theme one after the other. Others would be driven nuts by that and bounce from theme to theme. Yet others would do key/"lynchpin" maps in fixed slots, then fill in the stuff between and around them. There is no single way that will work for everyone. Indeed, every recommendation you get in this thread may or may not work for you, so the real answer is "whatever works best to minimize hiccups in your flow."

Also key to remember: Just because it provides the same nutrition does not mean it will provide the same experience. Sure, one of those liquid meal smoothies might have all your body needs, technically, to stay alive. But food is about more than mere nutrition. Some of it is a social aspect. Some of it is mouthfeel. Some of it very much is psychological. And on that note, me talking about all of this is reminding me I really should've eaten a couple of hours ago, so I'm off to make a meal myself.

That all looks correct, so it should work. Make sure you're saving the lumps. Also, I believe you need a certain amount of stuff for a minimum valid definition, namely: Map (as you added), LevelNum, Next, SecretNext, Cluster, Sky1, Par, and Music.

Yes. Yes they fucking were. Sure, at first it'll be fine. But sooner or later, it will happen. And then it's a lot less fine.

The easy solution to this: Skeletonism.