3 ms·

> Want to play it? Here's how. ... Fightcade: Similar to MAME, but instead runs a custom emulator in an Electron based client called FBNeo Electron. What.

busterarm 4y ago
FBNeo is just a fork of FinalBurn Alpha emulator which has been around forever. Fightcade provides accounts, rollback netplay and a lobby system and is the main way that the FGC (fighting game community) plays older games online. It works really well.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  ok but Electron? For an emulator hosting fighting games? Is that not a problem for games which require fast reactions?
  - busterarm 4y ago
    More like Electron for portability and minimal troubleshooting effort across a wide set of computer configurations. They've made it really easy to use. Can't say the same for other emulators.
  - teolandon 4y ago
    It's just the GUI wrapper, relax.
    - naikrovek 4y ago
      > It's just the GUI wrapper, relax. the "relax" bit was pretty unnecessary and condescending.
      - itintheory 4y ago
        simmer down
        naikrovek 4y ago
        no u
      - busterarm 4y ago
        About as condescending as your reaction to the project using Electron.
        naikrovek 4y ago
        well electron is garbage and I stand by that. it works well, but it's a fundamentally flawed way to produce cross-platform applications. too much performance is just wasted in the DOM and the JS runtime. developers trade a small amount of development time profit for themselves in exchange for perpetually sluggish software for each and every one of their users, who could number in the millions. it is a few weeks or months gained for the development team, but costs years and years of cpu time measured cumulatively across all users. the tradeoff should be the other way around. I will gladly trade away weeks of my time if it saves cumulative years of my users' time.
        busterarm 4y ago
        End user CPU time hasn't been a bottleneck in over a decade. There is fairly little difference in processing power requirements for home users now from roughly when Core2Quad CPUs were out. I was still running one of those as a development workstation until about 5 years ago. CPU cycles are absurdly cheap. CPU speeds have been stagnant for 15 years. Average consumer applications still aren't taking great advantage of threading and with the recent CPU architecture attacks we're better off without Hyperthreading anyway. The absurd popularity of Electron apps like Slack, Discord, VSCode, Figma, Signal and WhatsApp with consumers says clearly that nobody minds all that much.
        naikrovek 4y ago
        it's not a bottleneck, but it is extraordinarily inefficient. how many chunks of coal burned solely to give Electron the Watts required to do what it is doing over something more reasonable? it is definitely more than zero. how many laptop charge cycles are caused entirely by electron apps using more power than traditional applications? impossible to know for sure, but easy to know that it is far greater than zero. does this mean that you can carry my preference to its extreme and assume that I am advocating that all applications be written in Assembly and be extensively tuned? no, it does not. I am saying that Electron is a tool of a developer who cares about their own experience over the experience of all of the users of the software they write, combined. the entire reason we write software is so that an end user's life can be made easier. if you think anything different, you likely have an MBA or don't understand why people pay for or use software. Even games are played so that the life of the player can be enriched. Part of the work ethic of this field (that apparently only I believe in) is to not deliver terrible software to end users, and it is my personal opinion that Electron developers choose what is easiest for them to get another round of funding going, and not what is best for the users who actually consume the product. These developers write for money, and to make the world a better place for themselves, at the small, but very real, expense of everyone else. the absurd popularity of the electron apps you mention is probably due to the fact that they are only available as Electron apps or as web pages. "Look how successful electron is" doesn't count if there is not an equivalent traditional app to compare it against. And I am recalling a lot of people on the internet, including this website, and lots of people at work actively and repeatedly complaining about the performance of all of those applications, so I am not really sure that you are standing on solid ground at all.
kbenson 4y ago
Eh, given the age of the hardware, there are worse ways to distribute an emulator that you want to work on multiple different architectures and operating systems. And if you compile the intensive stuff down to WASM, is probably even easier to justify.
TheRealPomax 4y ago
What indeed, what are you remarking on here? It's just one of a dozen easily used cross-platform UI frameworks, what's the problem? (and of course, "what's the problem for people on modern computers for which even small games are 500Mb these days", electron's not being used to distribute a web app that's 50x smaller than the UI framework itself in this case)
- naikrovek 4y ago
  I've argued this so many times and it now exhausts me. there's another comment by me in this thread somewhere that summarizes it well, but because you asked nicely: WARNING: OPINION AHEAD electron encourage bad tradeoffs and because of that it is an ecological problem, literally. many thousands or millions of people suffer sluggish software and must continually wait for their electron application to respond so a few developers can save a few weeks of time. it's the exact wrong tradeoff. web developers infest this site so I am downvoted every time I say this, but I simply do not care. web tech today is absolutely horrible and if you know that (how could you NOT) and you write web software that does not improve the landscape, you are morally bankrupt.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    Sounds like you should write a blog post that details all your complaints and link to that, and then post it here so folks can comment on whether your reasoning made sense, because calling people who use the web, which isn't owned by any single person, or regulated by any single entity, and isn't policed by any single person "morally bankrupt" might already be squarely in "get off your high fucking horse" territory. A bag of insulting opinions is worth less than a bag of wooden nickels =) Cheap, easy, efficient. Pick two. People are allowed to use easy, but (sometimes severely) sub-optimal solutions to make things they think are cool, because people make things, and there are thousands of tools that let them do so. It's why PHP is still around, and it's why people flocked to Electron. Electron won because "you should learn the hard thing" is a no-sell. They should! But they won't! Because they don't have to. And if you don't like it, go make a more efficient UI framework that is cheaper (that one's tough, free is free) and easier (and that one's also tough, but maybe you'll pull it off).
bitwize 4y ago
What would you propose they use instead, given they need to develop quickly across multiple platforms?
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  SDL + ImGui

busterarm 4y ago

FBNeo is just a fork of FinalBurn Alpha emulator which has been around forever. Fightcade provides accounts, rollback netplay and a lobby system and is the main way that the FGC (fighting game community) plays older games online. It works really well.

naikrovek 4y ago
ok but Electron? For an emulator hosting fighting games? Is that not a problem for games which require fast reactions?
- busterarm 4y ago
  More like Electron for portability and minimal troubleshooting effort across a wide set of computer configurations. They've made it really easy to use. Can't say the same for other emulators.
- teolandon 4y ago
  It's just the GUI wrapper, relax.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    > It's just the GUI wrapper, relax. the "relax" bit was pretty unnecessary and condescending.
    - itintheory 4y ago
      simmer down
      - naikrovek 4y ago
        no u
    - busterarm 4y ago
      About as condescending as your reaction to the project using Electron.
      - naikrovek 4y ago
        well electron is garbage and I stand by that. it works well, but it's a fundamentally flawed way to produce cross-platform applications. too much performance is just wasted in the DOM and the JS runtime. developers trade a small amount of development time profit for themselves in exchange for perpetually sluggish software for each and every one of their users, who could number in the millions. it is a few weeks or months gained for the development team, but costs years and years of cpu time measured cumulatively across all users. the tradeoff should be the other way around. I will gladly trade away weeks of my time if it saves cumulative years of my users' time.
        busterarm 4y ago
        End user CPU time hasn't been a bottleneck in over a decade. There is fairly little difference in processing power requirements for home users now from roughly when Core2Quad CPUs were out. I was still running one of those as a development workstation until about 5 years ago. CPU cycles are absurdly cheap. CPU speeds have been stagnant for 15 years. Average consumer applications still aren't taking great advantage of threading and with the recent CPU architecture attacks we're better off without Hyperthreading anyway. The absurd popularity of Electron apps like Slack, Discord, VSCode, Figma, Signal and WhatsApp with consumers says clearly that nobody minds all that much.
        naikrovek 4y ago
        it's not a bottleneck, but it is extraordinarily inefficient. how many chunks of coal burned solely to give Electron the Watts required to do what it is doing over something more reasonable? it is definitely more than zero. how many laptop charge cycles are caused entirely by electron apps using more power than traditional applications? impossible to know for sure, but easy to know that it is far greater than zero. does this mean that you can carry my preference to its extreme and assume that I am advocating that all applications be written in Assembly and be extensively tuned? no, it does not. I am saying that Electron is a tool of a developer who cares about their own experience over the experience of all of the users of the software they write, combined. the entire reason we write software is so that an end user's life can be made easier. if you think anything different, you likely have an MBA or don't understand why people pay for or use software. Even games are played so that the life of the player can be enriched. Part of the work ethic of this field (that apparently only I believe in) is to not deliver terrible software to end users, and it is my personal opinion that Electron developers choose what is easiest for them to get another round of funding going, and not what is best for the users who actually consume the product. These developers write for money, and to make the world a better place for themselves, at the small, but very real, expense of everyone else. the absurd popularity of the electron apps you mention is probably due to the fact that they are only available as Electron apps or as web pages. "Look how successful electron is" doesn't count if there is not an equivalent traditional app to compare it against. And I am recalling a lot of people on the internet, including this website, and lots of people at work actively and repeatedly complaining about the performance of all of those applications, so I am not really sure that you are standing on solid ground at all.

kbenson 4y ago

Eh, given the age of the hardware, there are worse ways to distribute an emulator that you want to work on multiple different architectures and operating systems. And if you compile the intensive stuff down to WASM, is probably even easier to justify.

TheRealPomax 4y ago

What indeed, what are you remarking on here? It's just one of a dozen easily used cross-platform UI frameworks, what's the problem? (and of course, "what's the problem for people on modern computers for which even small games are 500Mb these days", electron's not being used to distribute a web app that's 50x smaller than the UI framework itself in this case)

naikrovek 4y ago
I've argued this so many times and it now exhausts me. there's another comment by me in this thread somewhere that summarizes it well, but because you asked nicely: WARNING: OPINION AHEAD electron encourage bad tradeoffs and because of that it is an ecological problem, literally. many thousands or millions of people suffer sluggish software and must continually wait for their electron application to respond so a few developers can save a few weeks of time. it's the exact wrong tradeoff. web developers infest this site so I am downvoted every time I say this, but I simply do not care. web tech today is absolutely horrible and if you know that (how could you NOT) and you write web software that does not improve the landscape, you are morally bankrupt.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  Sounds like you should write a blog post that details all your complaints and link to that, and then post it here so folks can comment on whether your reasoning made sense, because calling people who use the web, which isn't owned by any single person, or regulated by any single entity, and isn't policed by any single person "morally bankrupt" might already be squarely in "get off your high fucking horse" territory. A bag of insulting opinions is worth less than a bag of wooden nickels =) Cheap, easy, efficient. Pick two. People are allowed to use easy, but (sometimes severely) sub-optimal solutions to make things they think are cool, because people make things, and there are thousands of tools that let them do so. It's why PHP is still around, and it's why people flocked to Electron. Electron won because "you should learn the hard thing" is a no-sell. They should! But they won't! Because they don't have to. And if you don't like it, go make a more efficient UI framework that is cheaper (that one's tough, free is free) and easier (and that one's also tough, but maybe you'll pull it off).

bitwize 4y ago

What would you propose they use instead, given they need to develop quickly across multiple platforms?

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
SDL + ImGui