Ich kann Deutsch erst am Niveau B2 sprechen.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Seconded this. Very small too, at about 10 MiB, or 250 kiB per game, which is tough to beat! The Android port is probably the best but a Linux and Windows version also exist. Get it on F-Droid

    There is also Gauguin, a similarly small app but with only 1 puzzle type, this one. There are more options though, including more operation combos, negative and non-consecutive numbers, and even rectangular grids! The controls are a little worse if you ask me and so is the performance but not by a lot. I have spent huge amounts of time playing the game in both apps and I slightly prefer this one thanks to more variation.


  • Fantastic Fist - €12.49

    Short animated WEBP from trailer

    Fantastic Fist is a platforming game focused on simultaneous keyboard and mouse controls. While the character can be moved around with the keyboard, the mouse can be used to interact with the environment by punching with a giant fist.

    A puzzle platformer with tight controls and true pixel art, much like Celeste. Makes very good use of the controls available on a PC. Low system requirements (100 MB storage). Solo dev spent years perfecting the gameplay.

    I don’t play platformers but I’d like to support the dev (not affiliated). I will gift it to you on Steam if you’re the first to ask for it via DM CLAIMED. As for games I have played, I enjoy little itch.io VNs by npckc, I just wish my devices were fast enough to run Ren’Py decently…


  • You’ve never used function keys? The dual function is annoying even inside the OS. I have to help several people with laptops and you can’t tell what mode they’re in, the user often doesn’t know either.

    On laptops, you never know if the F-key behavior is defined by the OS, BIOS or keyboard driver. I just mash F2, F8, Fn+F2, Fn+F8, Del as often as I can (these are the most common keys to do the trick). You can reduce the options with a USB keyboard with just normal F-keys.

    Some laptops don’t have a key you can hold to enter BIOS settings or boot menu (maybe to start booting before the keyboard is initialized?) and there is a reset button hole for that.



  • Even basic things in distros are quite different, for example the frontend for settings, so tech support threads will show how to do it in the backend. Oh well, but then there’s someone who suggests

    sudo nano /etc/default/grub
    

    If you’re a noob, run this and get a “nano: command not found” error, you’ll google it and learn to resolve it using apt. However, Manjaro’s package manager is pacman but you don’t know, so you install apt using a weird guide without knowing what it even is. The next update then wreaks havoc on your system.

    My first install ended in a dependency hell because of this.




  • Wanted to customize GRUB and tried the GUI program. I wanted it to boot without delays unless a key is being held, and also add a “Shutdown” option (GRUB script halt), in case I open the laptop and didn’t want it turned on. The edits looked alright in GRUB Customizer but I should not have made them both at once, because it made “Shutdown” the default option somehow, so the OS would never boot and holding none of the special keys worked. I failed to update or reinstall GRUB using a live USB and ended up having to reinstall the entire distro.



  • pure data wise

    Data-wise, the screen is 32x30 tiles, which is 256x240 pixels, or 280x240 including the border. (The height is set by the modified NTSC standard at 240p60, and the width of 256 was chosen to simplify 8-bit arithmetic, plus 24 pixels for a border.) With square pixels, the aspect ratio would be 16:15, or 7:6 including border. The video timing was chosen so that this fills the entire TV screen, which is 4:3. As a result, the pixels have an aspect ratio of (4:3)/(7:6)=8:7 (varies a little between TVs). However, the NES could only flip sprites and not rotate them 90°, so this could be taken into account when creating the rotated versions.

    Another successful system with non-square pixels was the IBM PC, whose CGA and EGA cards had a 320x200 resolution (or multiples thereof in other modes), which resulted in PAR (4:3)/(8:5)=6:5. Square pixels first became available with VGA’s hi-res mode (16 colors at 640x480), adopted by systems such as Windows 3.1 and TempleOS.


  • Guess what other obscure old system used rectangular pixels? The IBM PC.

    CGA and EGA used resolution modes that were multiples of 320x200 (PAR 6:5). VGA’s 16-color hi-res mode was the first to support square pixels at 640x480, and it would become a standard for years to come because TempleOS and Windows used it (you can even force Windows 7 to run in this mode!)

    The NES and SNES had PAR 16:15 8:7 (oops) (which is often ignored in emulation), and so did the most common NTSC DVD-Video mode (none of the commonly used ones had square pixels but you only really notice it with subtitles - you cannot correctly display them at native resolution on an LCD).

    And that’s just the successful systems I know off the top of my head.

    Soviet personal computers failed for other, obvious reasons. They struggled to copy the latest chips, and the economic incentive was minuscule despite the government’s investment - very few people could afford a computer in the Eastern Bloc, and they could not be exported due to patent infringement and being years behind. The economy collapsed after USSR broke up and nobody wanted to invest to rebuild the industry.

    That being said, people in the Eastern Bloc were very resourceful with what they had (mostly clones of Atari’s 8-bit home computers and IBM PCs). A blind person from Czechoslovakia made a speech synthesis sound card for an IBM-compatible PC, which functioned well enough to allow him to be employed as a full-time programmer. At least one of the three exemplars works to this day.