Redkey

@Redkey@programming.dev

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Redkey ,

I'm sorry if you've already checked this, but I had a similar problem with a Windows laptop recently that just would NOT stay in standby. It wasn't a question of if, but how long.

Eventually I found that some "Wake on IP' settings were set to "Wake on any/all IP traffic". I switched those off and now the thing stays in standby/screen blanked.

Redkey ,

Mitchell and Webb.

"Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?"

Redkey ,

My first suspect is an incorrectly-terminated statement which looks like it should end on line 41. The compiler/interpreter probably read the newline and ticked over before uncovering the error, and didn't recover properly due to some edge case.

Redkey ,

As someone who's currently interested in Atari 2600 development, I can tell you that MobyGames is way off in their count, even if you limit the count to physically-released games. There were well more than 10 new physical releases in 2025 alone.

It helps that developers do licensing deals with a few companies that produce physical cartridges with boxes and manuals on demand, but there are also still a surprising number of people making physical copies of games for sale in advance.

Redkey ,

I am stuck using an otherwise old but theoretically bearable PC at work running Windows 11 from a spinning HDD. But I'll tell you, when I dug through the registry to turn off all the background indexing nonsense, it became damn near usable.

Redkey ,

Not only do GB and GBC games work on the GBA, but some of them even have special GBA-only content. I know that at least one of the Legend of Zelda Oracle games has an extra house in the village on GBA. When you play the game on a GB/GBC, there's just an empty lot in that place.

Redkey ,

I think it depends a lot on context.

Wiping the dust off an old, low-spec ex-office PC, getting it barely functional, throwing a couple of RGB lights in it and trying to pass it off as a competent gaming rig for a high price would be completely unethical, I agree. But salvaging an old PC, actually refurbishing it into something useful for light day-to-day use, and selling it as such with a small markup to cover parts and labour seems completely fine to me.

You and I may have the skills needed to take a worn-out old PC and breathe new life into it easily, but not everyone who'd be happy with a modest secondhand system can do that.

As it happens, until just a few years ago I was running my high-end games on what started as a secondhand commodity PC with an i5-3470, without complaint.

Redkey ,

Seriously, the best option is whatever matches the brightness of your screen to its surroundings. I read about this decades ago and it eliminated screen fatigue for me.

If switching to dark mode works for you, great. When I worked on a PC in a well-lit office all day, I would open a program with a white background, hold up a blank white piece of paper next to the screen, and adjust the screen brightness until it looked about the same as the paper. I did this once or twice a week because I was near a set of picture windows and I was affected by weather and the seasons, but in a room with more artificial light it would be "set and forget".

It seemed very dim at first, and several of my coworkers commented on it. It took a few days of resisting the urge to turn the brightness back up, but I got used to it and never went back.

My PC at home is currently set up in a partially shaded corner of a well-lit room, so I put a dim little light bar behind the screen to make the wall match the brightness of the screen and the rest of my desk/room.

Redkey ,

A couple of other commenters have given excellent answers already.

But on the topic in general I think that the more you learn about the history of computing hardware and programming, the more you realise that each successive layer added between the relays/tubes/transistors and the programmer was mostly just to reduce boilerplate coding overhead. The microcode in integrated CPUs took care of routing your inputs and outputs to where they need to be, and triggering the various arithmetic operations as desired. Assemblers calculated addresses and relative jumps for you so you could use human-readable labels and worry less that a random edit to your code would break something because it was moved.

More complex low-level languages took care of the little dances that needed to be performed in order to do more involved operations with the limited number of CPU registers available, such as advanced conditional branching and maintaining the illusion of variables. Higher-level languages freed the programmer from having to keep such careful tabs on their own memory usage, and helped to improve maintainability by managing abstract data and code structures.

But ignoring the massive improvements in storage capacity and execution speed, today's programming environments don't really do anything that couldn't have been implemented with those ancient systems, given enough effort and patience. It's all still just moving numbers around and basic arithmetic and logic. But a whole lot of it, really, really fast.

The power of modern programming environments lies in how they allow us to properly implement and maintain a staggering amount of complex minutiae with relative ease. Such ease, in fact, that sometimes we even forget that the minutiae are there at all.

Redkey ,

"rd" and "rmdir" only work on empty directories in MS-DOS (and I assume, by extension, in Windows shell). "deltree" is for nuking a complete tree including files, as the name suggests.

It was best as a silly toy language in the 1990's...

Squidward Tentacles meme format. Top panel shows Squidward looking happy while setting up a beach chair, with the text 'WANT TO CONTRIBUTE TO AN OPEN SOURCE PROJECT I USE AND APPRECIATE'. Bottom panel shows Squidward looking sad and disappointed, folding up the chair and going back inside a building, with the text 'WRITTEN IN JS'.
ALT
Redkey ,

JS has saved me many hours of mind-numbing, error-prone manual keyboard work by giving me a way to hack together a simple bit of automation as a web page.

Even when a computer has been ham-fistedly locked-down by an overzealous IT department, I can almost always still access a text editor and a browser that will load local HTML files.

Redkey ,

Many 8-bit home computer emulators have an option to recreate the sounds of their tape drives and disk drives as they load software. But are there any Dreamcast emulators that recreate that unholy screeching that made you wonder if your console was somehow already on its last legs even though it was still nearly new?

I wouldn't want to hear it the whole time, but for the first major load of a game it might be pleasantly nostalgic.

Redkey ,

When you use any piece of Internet-enabled software, any and all data that passes through it can theoretically be copied and siphoned off back to the authors of the software.

Should they do it? No. Can they do it? Yes.

Does Mozilla do it? They say they don't, and I'm inclined to trust them. Do other major browsers do it? Absolutely.

As regards your physical location, geoIP databases can get pretty close these days.

It's 2025, And We're Getting A Brand New 8-Bit Game Console ( retrododo.com )

Yes, you read that right. In a world of cloud streaming and teraflops, a gamer from New York is striving to release their own 8-bit home console with its own gaming infrastructure. Meet the GameTank, its simple controller, and its chunky cartridges that are looking to bring 8-bit gaming back

Redkey ,

There are all sorts of licensing shenanigans when dealing with HDMI, so I wonder if it's compatible with their open source policy. But personally I'd have put a VGA output on it as a compromise between period correctness and modern usage. Easy to output as analog from the console, and easy to convert cleanly for modern displays with inexpensive adapters.

TheracAriane , to Linux
@TheracAriane@thebrainbin.org avatar

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    Redkey ,

    Sure. Almost 40 years ago I started learning to program as a kid, and the only reason I knew the word "syntax" at all was because the default error message in my computer's BASIC interpreter was "SYNTAX ERROR". I didn't learn what it actually meant until many years later, in English class.

    I taught myself with the excellent Usborne books, which are now all downloadable for free from their website. You won't be able to use them as-is (unless you get your kids to use an emulator for an old 8-bit home computer), but I'm sure you can still get some useful ideas, and maybe even copy small sections here and there.

    As others have mentioned, my school also taught us a little LOGO, which was a bit of fun for me but rather simple. I remember that most of my classmates enjoyed it, though.

    Redkey ,

    Yeah, but Third Strike has the best version of her character design IMO.

    Redkey ,

    Heh, TFW someone describes "resurrecting" a "low-spec" machine, and others talk about how old and out of date it is, and it's roughly equivalent to your main gaming PC.

    Redkey ,

    Nah, you're cool. I know my system's old, but as you say there's still plenty of life in it, so I'll keep it for now. Especially since I stick entirely to indie games these days.

    But actually, I'm keeping an eye on auctions for something just a few years newer. Games that require AVX2 extensions are finally starting to come out, and my CPU doesn't support them. Even with indie games, most of them use third-party engines, so it might not be too much longer before it's an issue even for me.

    Redkey ,

    How many techie types have had someone come to them and say something like "Hey, you know tech thing XYZ? You know how it sucks? Well I've got a great idea: make a BETTER one! So what do you say? You whip it up in an afternoon, I'll handle marketing, and we'll be rich!"

    Like they really thought that the issue is just that no-one can see the flaws. They thought that the fix is super easy and they're just the first person clever enough to see it.

    Redkey ,

    Not to take away from your very good point, but I think the word you might be looking for is "eqivalence".

    Redkey ,

    I'm guessing it's because "SyncThing" is a proper noun.

    Redkey ,

    Some people can hold their length, but only in private.

    What controllers are good?

    I currently use keyboard and mouse or a Dualshock 4 controller for most games, but i'm tired of so many games being really terrible with my controller. For example, Cemu swaps the two triggers with the two axes of the right stick. So i'm considering just buying a new controller that will hopefully be easier to make work....

    Redkey ,

    There was a recent discussion about controllers that may help you, here:
    @WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world avatar WhiteOakBayou : Good controllers for couch coop? in Linux Gaming

    To add to my recommendation in that thread of the Logitech F310, for your question specifically:

    • The wires on both it and the F510 are built-in, not socketed. In my experience usually only wireless controllers have socketed cables.
    • I've never had the buttons on it get swapped around on any OS.
    • I've never had any of them develop drift, and they're all 8-12 years old at this point.
    • They don't support the WiiU.
    Redkey ,

    I scored 12/28 on https://jsdate.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

    The Finnish Marticulation Examination to move away from Linux-based exam enviroment due to perceived threat of dwindling support on student devices ( www.ylioppilastutkinto.fi )

    Context: The Finnish Marticulation Examination is a national examination required to qualify for entry into a university in Finland (not strictly required, but the vast majority will have passed the exam before university). These are basically the final exams of Finnish "high school". The current digital system used for the...

    Redkey ,

    Reading the FAQs, the whole situation smacks of changing for the sake of change. It seems like some important functionality of the old system isn't available in the new system, but they're pushing it through regardless. Combined with this downplaying of Linux support, perhaps some political representatives with low technical skills have been talking to some lobbyists. And unless the Finnish school system has bought into Chromebooks in a big way, they seem unusually eager to support ChromeOS.

    I wonder if the whole Secure Boot/Microsoft shim key issue is a part of this.

    Redkey ,

    the boss can detect headphones going on your head and music starting from 50 feet away and instantly be behind you with a burning question that doesn't make any sense.

    I'm sure you realize that the question doesn't make any sense because they had to think of it on the spot, just to prove that you can't wear headphones in the office due to all the important ambient office talk you need to be a part of.

    One of my best, most competent bosses once said to the team "I don't understand how you guys can work while listening to music, but as long as your output stays high, I'm not going to interfere."

    Redkey , (edited )

    How about that worst of both worlds, the tutorial where the author starts out writing as if their audience only barely knows what a computer is, gets fed up partway through, and vomits out the rest in a more obtuse and less complete form than they would've otherwise?

    1. Turn on your computer. Make sure you turn on the "PC" (the big box part) as well as the "monitor" (TV-like part).

    2. Once your computer is ready and you can see the desktop, open your web browser. This might be called "Chrome", "Safari", "Edge", or something else. It's the same program you open to use "the Google".

    3. In the little bar near the top of the window where you can write things, type "https://www.someboguswebsite.corn/download/getbogus.html" and press the Enter key.

    4. Download the software and unarchive it to a new directory in your borklaving software with the appropriate naming convention.

    5. Edit the init file to match your frooping setup.

    6. If you're using Fnerp then you might need to switch off autoglomping. Other suites need other settings.

    7. Use the thing. You know, the thing that makes the stuff work right. Whatever.

    Congratulations! You're ready to go!

    Redkey , (edited )

    I think that when RHoI wrote "3D", they meant "hardware accelerated 3D". Many early 3D DOS games either did their 3D entirely in software, or included hardware acceleration support as a kind of optional bonus. Software 3D shouldn't give DOSBox much more trouble than most 2D games. The original release of Quake didn't even have any accelerator support; it was patched in later.

    Redkey ,

    A tiny number of original releases don't run properly or at all on some 2600 Juniors or 7800s, due to a reliance on quirks that were changed in later versions of the graphics chip. Probably not a major issue for classic collecting, but if you're interested in modern homebrew, it could be worth considering.

    Redkey ,

    So many great games. Some of my favourites (mostly action RPGs, exclusives marked *):

    • Landstalker*
    • The Story of Thor*
    • Wonderboy in Monster World (* virtually an exclusive)
    • Soleil*
    • Flashback
    • The Immortal
    • Quackshot*
    • Light Crusader*
    • Arcus Odyssey
    • Sonic the Hedgehog 2* (the other main games are good too, but this is my favourite)
    • Desert Strike and Jungle Strike (I don't remember playing Urban Strike, but it got excellent reviews)
    • The Lost Vikings
    • Sword of Vermillion*
    Redkey ,

    Yeah, Zero Tolerance is amazing from a technical standpoint, and a solid gaming experience as it goes, but I personally felt it dragged on for too long without enough variation. Then again I felt about the same regarding the original Doom and Doom 2, so it's probably more my tastes than the game itself.

    Redkey ,

    Make sure that Windows Fast Startup is turned off. I don't know if that's specifically the problem here, but in my experience quite a few "everything's fine, it should be working!" boot issues have been resolved by booting into Windows, turning off Fast Startup, and then doing a full shut down before going back to Linux, especially on laptops.

    Redkey ,

    This is another good point. I'd try turning off Fast Startup first, and if that alone doesn't clear the issue, try this (leaving Fast Startup off).

    Yes, I did spend time on this

    Did you ever saw a char and thought: "Damn, 1 byte for a single char is pretty darn inefficient"? No? Well I did. So what I decided to do instead is to pack 5 chars, convert each char to a 2 digit integer and then concat those 5 2 digit ints together into one big unsigned int and boom, I saved 5 chars using only 4 instead of 5...

    Redkey ,

    I was so triggered by the conversion from char-to-int-to-string-to-packedint that I had to write a bitwise version that just does char-to-packedint (and back again), with bitwise operators.

    https://pastebin.com/V2An9Xva

    As others have pointed out, there are probably better options for doing this today in most real-life situations, but it might make sense on old low-spec systems if not for all the intermediate conversion steps, which is why I wrote this.

    Redkey ,

    "Windows has inconsistency with icons and design in some areas."

    I prefer Linux, but what? Oh, hello pot! Have you met my friend kettle?

    Redkey ,

    Outside the major cities, at least, video arcades in Japan are still hanging on in 2025 with a mix of games. There are a lot of pseudo-gambling token games (think prize tickets), crane-style prize games, and simple, highly physical games (big buttons and levers, controller and body tracking) aimed at the 5-to-10-year-old segment.

    In terms of things we'd recognize as "real" games, almost everything is groups of locally networked terminals with some kind of physical gimmick that doesn't translate well to a home experience. There are still some racing games, music games, and the like, with uncommon controllers and layouts, but the most common format right now is probably a flat table with an embedded screen that has some way of scanning and tracking collectible trading cards. The cards aren't just scanned in once for use and then put aside, but actually moved around the table as tokens within the game. Obviously there are "Magic" style games, but also RPGs (both turn-based and action), MOBAs, real-time strategy, and more. Horse racing games are also popular, but to be clear, the players don't "ride" the horses; they raise, trade, manage, and "bet" on them, and watch simulated races.

    And these days almost everything uses player profiles saved to IC cards, ranked across the country and sometimes even the world.

    Occasionally you'll see four or six of the old sit-down "city" style cabinets (like the ones pictured in the article) in a corner, running 1-on-1 fighting games, but those are mainly found in the specifically "retro" arcades.

    Good controllers for couch coop?

    This post had a lot really good suggestions for couch coop games on Linux and I was wondering if there are controllers people recommend or if all the third party ones are the same? I have an Xbox controller with Bluetooth I might be able to find but they are kind of pricey so I don't want to buy another unless for some reason...

    Redkey ,

    I have a stack of Logitec F310 controllers, and I've never had them fail to work on any system (Windows, Linux, Android). They're not "pro gamer" or anything, fairly basic, but they've always responded smoothly for me even after many years of use. They're inexpensive, wired, and have an "XBox - DInput" switch on the back (at least mine do; that feature may have been removed by now).

    The F310 (what I use) is wired and has no rumble feedback.

    The F510 is wired and has rumble feedback, but I've never used one.

    The F710 is wireless 2.4GHz (not Bluetooth) and has rumble feedback. I have two of these, and in my experience neither of them connects reliably, even under Windows with the official software installed.

    Redkey ,

    One thing that I discovered about charging PS3 pads, which doesn't seem to be mentioned a lot, is that they appear (my guess, unconfirmed) to require proper USB current negotiation before they will start charging. In fact, I've found multiple sources saying that they can be charged from any USB power source, which isn't true.

    The original USB standard states that USB hosts should start a connection with 100mA of current, and the client can request increases in 100mA steps up to 500mA. I assume that the PS3 USB ports support this, as do pretty much all computer USB ports. But the majority of wall plug USB chargers don't; they just allow a maximum current draw of 500mA (or more) from the start and ignore increase requests.

    It seems like the majority of equipment manufacturers ignored this part of the spec, since the host needs circuitry to limit current in any case, so many chargers don't bother with circuitry to respond, and even when the port does respond to increase requests, the port is actually always allowing the maximum draw and simply approving all requests.

    However, I think that the PS3 pads actually wait for an "OK" response before continuing, which the majority of wall chargers (especially the cheap ones) never send. I had to use the PS3 or a PC (direct connection, not through a hub) to charge my pads until I found a cheap PS3 controller charging dock that works with any supply.

    Redkey ,

    Go for it, if it's to satisfy your own curiosity, but there's virtually no practical use for it these days. I had a personal interest in it at uni, and a project involving coding in assembly for an imaginary processor was a small part of one optional CS course. Over the years I've dabbled with asm for 32-bit Intel PCs and various retro consoles; at the moment I'm writing something for the Atari 2600.

    In the past, assembly was useful for squeezing performance out of low-powered and embedded systems, but now that "embedded" includes SoCs with clock speeds in the hundreds of MHz and several megabytes of RAM, and optimizing compilers have improved greatly, the tiny potential performance gain (and you have to be very good at it before you'll be able to match or do better than most optimizing compilers) is almost always outweighed by the overhead of hand-writing and maintaining assembly language.

    Redkey ,

    I would also probably try to plug USB drives in once a year or so if I were being diligent, but in reality I recently found a handful of USB flash drives that I'd stored in a box in my parents' unattached garage, and every one of them could be read completely without any issues. They ran the gamut of build quality from expensive, name-brand drives to no-name dollar-store keychains. They'd been sitting in that box, untouched, for a little over nine years, and I'm pretty sure that some of them hadn't been used for several years even before that.

    I wouldn't rely on it for critical data, but USB flash might not be so terrible.

    Redkey ,

    I'm in a similar boat to you. I ripped almost all of my CDs to 320kbps mp3s for portability, but then I wanted to put all of them (a substantial number) plus a bunch more (my partner's collection) on a physically tiny USB stick (that I already had) to just leave plugged into our car stereo's spare port. I had to shrink the files somehow to make them all fit, so I used ffmpeg and a little bash file logic to keep the files as mp3s, but reduce the bitrate.

    128kbps mp3 is passable for most music, which is why the commercial industry focused on it in the early days. However, if your music has much "dirty" sound in it, like loud drums and cymbals or overdriven electric guitars, 128kbps tends to alias them somewhat and make them sound weird. If you stick to mp3 I'd recommend at least 160kbps, or better, 192kbps. If you can use variable bit rate, that can be even better.

    Of course, even 320kbps mp3 isn't going to satisfy audiophiles, but it sounds like you just want to have all your music with you at all times as a better alternative to radio, and your storage space is limited, similar to me.

    As regards transcoding, you may run into some aliasing issues if you try to switch from one codec to another without also dropping a considerable amount of detail. But unless I've misunderstood how most lossy audio compression works, taking an mp3 from a higher to a lower bitrate isn't transcoding, and should give you the same result as encoding the original lossless source at the lower bitrate. Psychoacoustic models split a sound source into thousands of tiny component sounds, and keep only the top X "most important" components. If you later reduce that to the top Y most important components by reducing the bitrate (while using the same codec), shouldn't that be the same as just taking the top Y most important components from the original, full group?

    Redkey ,

    Gain Ground and Arcus Odyssey both got many hours of play on my Mega Drive back in the day. :)

    Redkey ,

    Maybe we could treat the appearances of recognizable, non-living entities in games (cars, buildings, airplanes, etc.) the same way we treat musical scores; the producer would be legally obligated to pay some reasonable, small, fixed fee per use to the original creator, and that creator wouldn't be allowed to object. And this wouldn't entitle the producer to use any trademarked brand or model name, just the form.

    Redkey , (edited )

    Maybe they believe that most of their customers don't really know much about computers beyond turning them on and "bigger numbers = better". They might not be wrong.

    Redkey , (edited )

    At the very least, please state which section you made small changes to, even if you are sure it's not worth mentioning what or why.

    Redkey ,

    I'm not sure how common they are outside Japan, but I have a little (about 12" I think) Panasonic "Let's Note" that I use quite a lot as a lightweight coding (and retro/indie gaming :D) device that I can throw in even my smallest bag when there's a chance I'll have to kill more than a few minutes. They're designed to be a little bit rugged. I had Ubuntu on it previously, now Mint, and the only problem I've had is that Linux somehow sees two screen brightness systems, and by default it connects the screen brightness keys to the wrong (i.e. nonexistent) one. Once I traced the problem it was a quick and painless fix.

    They seem to be sold worldwide, so you may be able to get one cheaply second-hand. One thing to be careful about is the fact that in order to keep the physical size down, the RAM is soldered to the board. Mine is an older model (5th gen iCore), and has 4GB soldered on but also one SODIMM slot, so I was able to upgrade to 12GB total. But I've noticed that on most later models they got rid of the RAM slots entirely, so whatever RAM it comes with is what you're stuck with.

    Redkey ,

    Because the Gameboy logo check and the actual display of the logo happen separately, there were ways to pass the check while still displaying a different logo on the screen. Given that I bought cartridges from major retailers that did this, I'm guessing that Nintendo either didn't know about them, or didn't like their odds in court.

    Sega was doing something conceptually similar around the same time, and that did get tested at trial (Sega vs. Acclaim), where the court ruled that Sega could go suck a lemon. So there's some doubt as to whether any of this is enforceable anyway, although Sega kept including a similar system in their hardware up to and including the Dreamcast.

    Of course, a company as large as Nintendo could just bankrupt a lot of smaller companies with legal fees via delaying tactics.

    Redkey ,

    It's weird to me how GIMP and Krita clearly share a large amount of code under the hood, and even some UI design, but at the same time it feels so much less painful to draw illustrations in Krita than in GIMP. I'm glad I gave it a try.