Random Gaming Thoughts

[Ziggy]

I'm thinking about installing a mod chip in my PS2 slim, but I don't know if I feel like it. They're cheap enough these days and I can do the installation myself, but it's like 20-some-odd wires to solder which just makes it a pain in the ass.

[MrPopo]

Easier to go flip top and swap disk.

[Ziggy]

Easier to go flip top and swap disk.

Easier to install, but not easier in the long run. With the flip top and swap disc, you'll have to swap every time you boot a game. With the mod chip, you can just boot the burn straight away. Also, the mod chip would cost less too.

[RCBH928]

First, it's not necessarily a matter of ARM, RISC, or whatever else versus x86/AMD64. There are different configurations and different applications. ARM has showings at both the lowest of the low end, like the Pi Zero, up to the top supercomputer in the world right now. They may not yet have an offering that'd be competitive for typical consumer PC use, but Apple isn't trying to ship these tomorrow. Their dev machine basically has an iPad Pro CPU in it, which is good, but not a high end workstation.
.

This is the exact point that I did not know, RISC is decades old but no one thought of using it as a competitor to x86 which led me to believe its a weaker CPU. Apple themselves abandoned PPC because it couldn't catch up with intel x86. For them to go back to RISC there must be some serious advantages to go through this whole industry wide transitional processes which I am eager to see.

Setting aside that Nintendo doesn't really build their own ARM solutions anyway... it seems like you're assuming a lot about "emulation" there. This is not the same as, say, running PS2 emulation on a Windows PC where every last aspect of the system has to be simulated. It's emulation in form of command interpreter for CPU calls, something Apple did for 68k to PPC, and PPC to Intel before. For as much as the games they showed not being at high end settings anyway, they're also things that run fine on 7-8 year old desktop CPUs or the weak Jaguar cores in 8th gen consoles. Performance is a lot more reliant on the GPU, which will be the same either way.

Well as a Macbook user who had his CPU almost burst in flames playing 80s game Dragon Lair, color me very impressed to see Tomb Raider running full frames in emulation on MacOS.

This is a question that popped in my head, from software side of things, can you use a RISC CPU and an x86 GPU? or do they have to work both on same architecture? I have never heard of opposing combination before...maybe in consoles?

[MrPopo]

RISC and CISC aren't indicative of power; they are different philosophies when it comes to ISA design. CISC is complex instruction set computer, while RISC is reduced instruction set computer. CISC was how chips were originally designed; you would have a large number of fundamental operations they could do, with many of them being specialized. For example, you might have an ADD operation that can take in either a register or a constant and then you might have an INC operation which increments a register. The latter could be accomplished by the former (ADD 1), but the INC might be a cycle or two faster because they optimized the path. In the early days when every clock cycle was precious CISC was the way to go. Then as clock speeds got faster you could simplify chip design by moving to RISC; this might let you make each individual operation a bit more efficient at the consequence of some CISC operations now taking two or three RISC operations. The net result would be about the same speed to execute an arbitrary program.

The thing is, by the time clock speeds had reached this point Intel had taken off like a rocket by offering backwards compatibility. Prior to the x86 line basically every time a new CPU came out it would have a new ISA, so everyone would need to rewrite their programs to run on the new CPU. By making the iterations of the x86 line backwards compatible with each other an end user could swap out CPUs, run the same program, and see a speed benefit. This was a major game changer and catapulted Intel into being THE CPU manufacturer. And since the x86 ISA was a CISC that meant that it would keep being a CISC; throwing away backwards compatibility would utterly trash them. They tried it with the Itanium line when they introduced their non-backwards compatible 64-bit ISA, and it was an abject failure.

[Forlorn Drifter]

I’ve been digging more into handheld stuff lately, in anticipation of getting a Switch.

Holy HELL is there a lot of good stuff on handheld I was never told about. Especially during the PSP/DS and Vira/3DS days.

[marurun]

Motorola/IBM’s Power PC line preserved compatibility pretty well from chip to chip, and later chips like the G4 and Power7 were not a whole lot like the original 601. And Apple’s finesse with Rosetta made the transition from the 68k line pretty painless. Apple is rather unique in their experience transitioning major ISAs and preserving compatibility.

[Ziggy]

I’ve been digging more into handheld stuff lately, in anticipation of getting a Switch.

Holy HELL is there a lot of good stuff on handheld I was never told about. Especially during the PSP/DS and Vira/3DS days.

Yep, lots of great exclusives for those handhelds. Especially from major franchises.

[prfsnl_gmr]

I’ve been digging more into handheld stuff lately, in anticipation of getting a Switch.

Holy HELL is there a lot of good stuff on handheld I was never told about. Especially during the PSP/DS and Vira/3DS days.

Yep, lots of great exclusives for those handhelds. Especially from major franchises.

Handheld gaming > console gaming > PC gaming

[prfsnl_gmr]

Eating my own words...

My parents were getting rid of there old MacBook Air, and I’m going to take it off their hands. It’s a 2013 model. I’m planning on wiping the hard drive and performing a factory reset. Once I do that, I’m going to put Steam on it. I assume it’ll be powerful enough to play some indie games like Doki Doki Literature and, maybe, some older inexplicable PC exclusives like Legend of Grimrock II. I don’t plan on throwing the latest spec intensive AAA titles on this thing, it I would like to know ho wear I can push it. Any thought on what this thing will be able to do?