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TOPIC: Hi all

Hi all 2 years, 5 months ago #4620

Been quiet here lately. Just wanted to say hi.

Re: Hi all 2 years, 5 months ago #4621

Hi! Seems like there's a bunch of us still visiting regularly, but without anything really to say we all just stay silent and/or look at the latest Retro Game of the Day image/video and then keep moving.

Re: Hi all 2 years, 5 months ago #4622

Yeah, pretty much what mossy said.

Re: Hi all 2 years, 4 months ago #4623

Honestly, I think that the world has moved on from what we all used to come here for.

It seems only recently that I took all my emulator projects out of retirement to do M1 updates. However, the download figures are only a fraction of what they used to be back in the day.

My Solitaire game might break even soon, though, which is something. Try it if you haven't:
apps.apple.com/ie/app/superior-solitaire/id1570982173?mt=12

Re: Hi all 2 years, 4 months ago #4624

One feature I'd love to see... make an option to only deal winnable games. Maybe it defeats the purpose to some... but my favorite OS 9 card game (cannto for the life of me remember the name) had this feature and it was wonderful.

Re: Hi all 2 years, 4 months ago #4625

menace690 wrote:
One feature I'd love to see... make an option to only deal winnable games. Maybe it defeats the purpose to some... but my favorite OS 9 card game (cannto for the life of me remember the name) had this feature and it was wonderful.

Eric's Ultimate Solitaire?

On a semi-related note, my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming is now back in print thanks to Bitmap Books and new copies are shipping from next week. We've done an "Expanded Edition" with some extra stories (Snood, Dungeon of Doom, Stick Man Games, a few other things), a really nice-looking timeline, a couple of icon galleries, loads more images, and some revisions to the layout. (I'll soon be self-publishing what I'm calling a digital add-on pack with just the new text, for anyone who has the first edition and doesn't want to fork out the cash to buy the Expanded Edition.)

www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/products/the-secre...ing-expanded-edition

Re: Hi all 2 years, 4 months ago #4626

Yes! Good call

Re: Hi all 2 years, 4 months ago #4628

menace690 wrote:
One feature I'd love to see... make an option to only deal winnable games. Maybe it defeats the purpose to some... but my favorite OS 9 card game (cannto for the life of me remember the name) had this feature and it was wonderful.


I've been thinking about this one – and am not at all sure how I'd go about computationally verifying that a certain deal was winnable in any half reasonable amount of time. Suggestions welcomed

Re: Hi all 2 years, 4 months ago #4629

This paper describes an algorithm to solve games, using heuristic search and state saving. So you could have your randomized deck, run through the solver, if its doesn't complete in X amount of time, you consider it unsolvable.

In their testing, they got over 60% win rate under a second of processing per deck, in 2007, so probably even higher rate of solving today.

web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~afern/papers/solitaire.pdf

Re: Hi all 2 years, 4 months ago #4630

Or a couple of solvers readily available that can potentially be adapted.

github.com/ShootMe/Klondike-Solver

github.com/shlomif/fc-solve

github.com/mchung94/pyramid-solver

Re: Hi all 2 years, 4 months ago #4631

Very interesting, thanks. I'll look into this.

In the meanwhile, I've reduced the price of my retro game bundles for Black Friday. Those who haven't tried yet, now's your chance to get ten games for just $4.99.

Bundle 1: apps.apple.com/ie/app-bundle/retro-game-bundle/id1521726386
Bundle 2: apps.apple.com/ie/app-bundle/retro-game-bundle-2/id1522892700
Bundle 3: apps.apple.com/ie/app-bundle/retro-game-bundle-3/id1545818336

Enjoy

Re: Hi all 1 year, 5 months ago #4641

I'm not sure anyone's still here, but just in case – Superior Solitaire 2.0 was released this morning, and one of the new features in this release is guaranteed winnable games.

www.superiorsolitaire.com/ for more details.

All the best.
The following user(s) said Thank You: _Em, jetboy

Re: Hi all 1 year, 4 months ago #4642

Awesome! Already bought but thank you!
The following user(s) said Thank You: jetboy

Re: Hi all 1 year, 2 months ago #4643

Just doing my annual check-in

Truth is, these days a lot of my emulation is via RetroArch, which is blandly cross-platform, and a lot of emulating I do on my phone, not on my Mac. And all the newer projects (Citra, Ryujinx, etc.) have their own GitHub pages and Discord channels.

But there's still lots of nostalgia wrapped up in this place

Re: Hi all 1 year, 1 month ago #4645

Similarly, I do most of my emulation these days on handhelds (a GPD XD+ and an Ayaneo Air) — the only exceptions being the Amiga and Atari ST emulation I do on my ThinkPad and old Mac laptops and the 8-bit computing stuff I need to jump into from time to time for work purposes on whatever system is at hand.

But I still load the site every month. Sometimes multiple times. MacScene is a part of who I am, so I love coming back here, even if just for a few seconds, to soak it all in.

Re: Hi all 9 months, 4 weeks ago #4654

I'm still around. Think I've mentioned it already but most of my retro gaming/computing these days is done with original hardware. If I can work out how then I might post a few photos of my setup.

Emulation (plus living in Japan) exposed me to a lot of gear that I otherwise never never woulda heard of. There's lotsa cool consoles out there and I like the individual feel of them all.

Consoles include:

- Multiple Game Gears (one of my favourites)

- Mega Drive

- Saturn

- Dreamcast

- PC Engine (with the suitcase-style CD unit)

- Famicom

- 4 arcade machines (can swap the games around but currently Snow Bros, Frogger, Pac-Land and TMNT)

- Wii (they are so cheap these days... kinda emulation as I run GC games on it)

- Guess it counts... a G4 Mini with MorphOS for running 68k Amiga games (FWIW it can surf the modern internet which I find quite impressive)

- Not emulation but I also use an Apple TV Gen 1 with lotsa custom apps as my goto media centre on my big 480p CRT. I watch lotsa cartoons/anime from the day. I think I can install some of Bannister's old emus on this too (which would be fun).

TBH most of the 'emulation' I do these days involves using ODEs and various Everdrives. That or things going on in the background (e.g. 68k apps on a PPC running Morphos). There's something that I enjoy about restoring/using original hardware... oddly it sorta feels like oldschool emulation where IMO you'd learn something new about the hardware with every update as bug were squished and new components of the consoles were reverse engineered.

Final note, my favourite ODE is the Satiator. I think somebody posted about it ages ago - an Aussie guy somehow cracked the CD block code of the Saturn and has subsequently made an ODE that plugs into the MPEG card slot without any modding required. Again, there's something exciting about the whole reverse engineering process.

Re: Hi all 9 months, 3 weeks ago #4655

I think there's a definite sound of crickets in the air here

For what it's worth, I'm continuing to update my projects. I've done a bit of emulation work lately, notably SGM support for Mugrat – but most of my focus has been on Superior Solitaire and Fascinating Fruit.

Details in the usual spot:
www.bannister.org/software/

Re: Hi all 9 months, 2 weeks ago #4656

From time to time I have a look at the page to check if it's still alive.
Quite sad that nothing is happening anymore, but happy to see some users are still checking in too.

Re: Hi all 4 months, 3 weeks ago #4657

MetalDragon wrote:
From time to time I have a look at the page to check if it's still alive.
Quite sad that nothing is happening anymore, but happy to see some users are still checking in too.


I mighta said this already but I feel as though emulation has become less engaging to end users as any kid can download an 'all in one' emulator that's pre-loaded with 1TB of games. I grow a little tired of people logging onto Phantasy Star Online using an emulator (always for about 5 minutes for then buzz then leaving) who talk to me as if I have NFI what emulation is and they're the expert having downloaded the full set of Dreamcast games (few of which they'll ever engage with for more than 2 seconds).

Not trying to be the gatekeeper (okay maybe I am) but I think that information overload has made people less interested in the finer details. To me the classic days of Mac emulation involved guys like RB simplifying a lot of the tech details behind emulators to us and providing regular updates. This created a community of end users who may not have been tech experts (well - Metal Dragon is) but

Anyhow there's my boring, self-fulfilling, 'one every 6 months to get it off my chest' rant for this thread. Here's some happy snaps of the halloween spook house I did the other night with a heap of retro games (lotsa kids attended I promise, but I didn't wanna photograph them or upload photos that doxed us, though it woulda made the place look more lively... oh well).

imgur.com/a/gzZJFKR
Last Edit: 4 months, 3 weeks ago by jetboy.

Re: Hi all 1 month, 1 week ago #4658

As a data point, Emulator Enhancer 3 has roughly 5% of the number of installs that Emulator Enhancer 2 had. It's not an entirely fair comparison given the existence of things like OpenEmu that were not around in the EE2 days, but it does tend to indicate that the world has moved on.

These days most of my time and effort goes into replicating classic games in modern form at www.retrogamesformac.com – if you've never tried the collection, then you should.
Last Edit: 1 month, 1 week ago by Richard Bannister.

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