5 ms·

Dolphin Progress Report: January 2017

112 points by dEnigma 10y ago

overcast 10y ago
Yes we know this is the most transparent, and well run software development you all have ever seen. Let's discuss something more interesting about this report.
shasheene 10y ago
> There's actually no reason why it couldn't have fit on a Dual-layer disc. Our only guess as to why it'd be a double disc game is that maybe it was cheaper, and since it is installing itself, there's no need to disc-swap after the initial installation, more or less erasing the biggest annoyance with multi-disc console games. One possibility was that the optical disk lasers on early Wii units had issues reading dual-layer disks like Super Smash Bros Brawl, causing disk read errors. Nintendo's official laser cleaner disk helped to some degree, and (if I recall correctly) the power of the laser could be increased with software modifications to help.
- striking 10y ago
  There was a hardware modification that could be attempted. One of the potentiometers could be adjusted, although I forget exactly how this worked. I think this is the modification you were thinking of.
- phire 10y ago
  I wonder if they did it for a marketing reason. The fact that the game was so large that it came on two disks and needed to be installed to a usb drive could be seen as a positive to some gamers.
- jerrysievert 10y ago
  In the early to mid 90's, I was writing games for a living. We had a 2 disc game that we managed to reduce in size via in-house audio, image, and video compression down to a single disc. Our publisher felt we were too far along to drop to a single disc and remove code paths, so we ended up with a ton of duplicate content instead. There are all sorts of reasons to release with multiple discs, not all of them are obvious.
dlbucci 10y ago
> you fucked up the cache Ha! Makes me wonder how much vulgarity is in the code of games throughout the years. I feel like this sort of thing would fly these days, but maybe I don't know how it works.
- jordigh 10y ago
  If you like this sort of videogame archeology there's a whole wiki dedicated to it: https://tcrf.net/ https://tcrf.net/
  - striking 10y ago
    One of the most beautiful things about TCRF is their categorization system. They actually have a category of articles for any sort of hidden anything. Take, for example, "Games with hidden developer credits" https://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_hidden_developer_messages https://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_hidden_developer_messag...
schmichael 10y ago
As someone who enjoys writing paragraphs of prose for commit messages on even small changes, I love these updates. I have no interest in the emulator or the games, but the engineering feats and writing style are wonderful.
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  I hope you're on the Linux kernel mailing list. Some of the rants are absolutely amazing.
markcerqueira 10y ago
> leoetlino's genius solution to this is to actually check if a game is running before sending reset and power commands. Such a brilliant check was definitely not something we should have thought about a long time ago to protect from something like this. Love this tongue-in-cheek bit! :)

112 points by dEnigma 10y ago

Yes we know this is the most transparent, and well run software development you all have ever seen. Let's discuss something more interesting about this report.

shasheene 10y ago

> There's actually no reason why it couldn't have fit on a Dual-layer disc. Our only guess as to why it'd be a double disc game is that maybe it was cheaper, and since it is installing itself, there's no need to disc-swap after the initial installation, more or less erasing the biggest annoyance with multi-disc console games. One possibility was that the optical disk lasers on early Wii units had issues reading dual-layer disks like Super Smash Bros Brawl, causing disk read errors. Nintendo's official laser cleaner disk helped to some degree, and (if I recall correctly) the power of the laser could be increased with software modifications to help.

striking 10y ago
There was a hardware modification that could be attempted. One of the potentiometers could be adjusted, although I forget exactly how this worked. I think this is the modification you were thinking of.
phire 10y ago
I wonder if they did it for a marketing reason. The fact that the game was so large that it came on two disks and needed to be installed to a usb drive could be seen as a positive to some gamers.
jerrysievert 10y ago
In the early to mid 90's, I was writing games for a living. We had a 2 disc game that we managed to reduce in size via in-house audio, image, and video compression down to a single disc. Our publisher felt we were too far along to drop to a single disc and remove code paths, so we ended up with a ton of duplicate content instead. There are all sorts of reasons to release with multiple discs, not all of them are obvious.

dlbucci 10y ago

> you fucked up the cache Ha! Makes me wonder how much vulgarity is in the code of games throughout the years. I feel like this sort of thing would fly these days, but maybe I don't know how it works.

jordigh 10y ago
If you like this sort of videogame archeology there's a whole wiki dedicated to it: https://tcrf.net/ https://tcrf.net/
- striking 10y ago
  One of the most beautiful things about TCRF is their categorization system. They actually have a category of articles for any sort of hidden anything. Take, for example, "Games with hidden developer credits" https://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_hidden_developer_messages https://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_hidden_developer_messag...

schmichael 10y ago

As someone who enjoys writing paragraphs of prose for commit messages on even small changes, I love these updates. I have no interest in the emulator or the games, but the engineering feats and writing style are wonderful.

H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
I hope you're on the Linux kernel mailing list. Some of the rants are absolutely amazing.

markcerqueira 10y ago

> leoetlino's genius solution to this is to actually check if a game is running before sending reset and power commands. Such a brilliant check was definitely not something we should have thought about a long time ago to protect from something like this. Love this tongue-in-cheek bit! :)