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Cake day: November 28th, 2023

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  • Eh, even with track creation, I prefer Modnation Racers and its spiritual successor LittleBigPlanet Karting. Shame both games are stuck on the PS3, but then SuperTuxKart still looks like it came out of the PS2. They run well in RPCS3 and online still works for track sharing through fan servers.

    Also, I wasn’t that impressed by Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled. It does have tons of content, certainly worth the price. Never played the originals and the remake sure does look pretty, but the track design feels pretty simple, probably because they’re from a PS1 game. Simple track layouts, few gimmicks. Some people might prefer that, but not me. I’m sure CTR beat the socks off Mario Kart 64 back in the day, but the tracks in modern Mario Kart are to me far more interesting. I expected more out of it given all the hype. Plus, for some unfathomable reason despite being multiplatform the game was only released on consoles, not PC, so that’s another game you have to emulate to play on PC. And if you do have a console to play it on, it’s locked at 30fps regardless of platform, which is disappointing for a racing game. There’s a 60fps mod if you emulate tho, thankfully.

    All-Stars Racing Transformed does have my glowing recommendation, though.


  • I dunno, I expect the Deck to last far longer than the average console if anything. It’s a PC, so the games are pretty much guaranteed to keep coming for decades to come, as they have for decades past.

    The hardware will fall behind, so I think the point where the newest Triple A games won’t be playable will come within a few years, but I bet whatever visual novels or pixelated indie games release in 2035 will still run just fine on it.

    Plus, it’s designed to be repairable, unlike most consoles. And even if Valve stops maintaining SteamOS for the Steam Deck, you’ll still be able to install other distros, so software support isn’t something I’m very concerned about either.








  • I mean, all of these emulators are already very well archived and available from several sources, not to mention downloaded to the devices of millions of people. I highly doubt we would be in danger of losing any of them even if Nintendo were to sue literally all of them overnight. Well, except for things like Github issues and pull requests, nobody bothers to archive those unfortunately.

    But yeah, IMO the danger is moreso that the attacks are leading to a massive chilling effect and loss of developer talent in the emulation community.








  • It isn’t significant. Wine already supports the vast majority of MediaFoundation codecs with GStreamer. This is just an alternative backend that uses FFmpeg instead of GStreamer. GStreamer already has an FFmpeg plugin, so this doesn’t add any new codecs to the table. It seems there’s just a long term plan to move away from GStreamer for whatever reason.

    Wine’s MF support used to be much worse, which is why Valve had to do their workaround shader hack. Not sure what exactly the current status on that is, but I do know things like mf-install or Proton-GE are rarely if ever necessary anymore, even with non-Steam games (which I have plenty of).


  • Well, Steam and Proton both already run on top of FEX or Box64 on ARM Linux, but it’s nice to see an official effort from Valve.

    Also, does ARM still have better battery life when all of the machine code has to be translated from x86? That adds a not insubstantial amount of CPU overhead, which does hurt battery life.

    And perhaps most importantly, is there any ARM chipset out there that can deliver performance on par with the Steam Deck’s CPU (even after factoring in the overhead of the x86 JIT) at a viable price for a Steam Deck successor?


  • Unless they changed it, mobile Firefox is locked to a limited set of extensions unless you:

    1. Use Nightly.
    2. Create a Mozilla account.
    3. Log in to that account on the Add-Ons site and create an add-on collection with all the extensions you want to install.
    4. Set that collection as your source of add-ons in the Firefox settings.

    You’re also unable to use about:config unless you’re using Nightly (or maybe Beta). So Nightly is really the only version worth using since it doesn’t have nearly as many artificial restrictions as the stable version does. This is also true to a lesser extent on desktop where you have to use Nightly to install unsigned extensions.

    You also can’t open any offline HTML files for whatever reason and on devices with very little RAM (like 2GB) Firefox isn’t viable, but Chrome-based browsers work mostly fine. Firefox is still the best mobile browser though, mostly because it supports extensions at all.



  • Qt1 came with two default themes. One of them mimicked Win95 and the other mimicked Motif. KDE1 defaulted to the former in order to look more familiar. To this day, the “Windows 9x” theme still ships with Qt and can be selected on any Plasma 6 install. Starting with KDE2 they started using their own custom themes for everything, tho.

    GNOME 1 actually looked very similar, which isn’t surprising because its main goal at that point was to offer a replacement for KDE that didn’t depend on then-proprietary Qt. GNOME 2 and KDE 2 is when they really started building a distinct identity.