wave

uv pistol start

  • she/her
  • queer furry thing

  • constantly seeking diversion

  • chasing '90s cyberdreams

  • \ \

  • old pixel appreciator!

  • i wanna be an animal?

  • at least in VRChat

  • / /

  • my mh sucks, and

  • so does discourse

  • i avoid it

  • \ \

  • into: music, photography (๐Ÿ“ท๐Ÿ•น), old games, PCs, VR, furries, TF, gender feels, the millennium, ๐Ÿ„, yearning, etc.

  • / /

  • comments appreciated.

  • let's chat about nerd shit!

  • \ \

  • something is written here...

  • "Hexapodia as the key insight"


retro school has continued apace these past few months as i show my young apprentice various 8- and 16-bit games and we play through them on Fightcade and RetroArch. mostly RetroArch.

we just smashed through River City Ransom yesterday (she loved it) and today we swerved a bit with Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse (SNES), a game i really enjoyed renting once. early on, as we took turns back and forth, she asked "why does the boss disappear after you hit it?"

oh no.

ohhhh nooooooo


long story short it turns out yes, for some unknown reason her RetroArch was running at only 30fps (in some cores, 20?!), thus only showing half of the game's frames. ๐Ÿ™€ half the frames of nearly every game we've played over these several months... ๐Ÿ™€๐Ÿ™€๐Ÿ™€

her complaint lead directly to that diagnosis because old games frequently used "flashing" effects that alternated every other frame at 60fps, for example a character disappearing every other frame when they take damage to convey a post-damage invincibility period. if video footage of such a game ever shows objects just disappearing for some length of time, it's very likely because the footage is only showing you a fraction of the full 60fps framerate and you're only seeing the frames in which the objects are invisible.

after some fucking around we got RA running at the expected 60 (had to switch from Vulkan to GLcore video driver, for some reason, then troubleshoot vsync...) and it was gosh darn night and day for her. "wow, these games look so much better now!" ๐Ÿ˜ญ๐Ÿ˜ญ๐Ÿ˜ญ "yeah i mean old games didn't all routinely run like shit, lol"

laffs were had, relief was shared, and i am reminded how difficult it can be to fully verify tech is working from afar when its operator isn't experienced enough to notice something's off.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @wave's post:

I remember running into a very similar problem a while back on my RetroPie, where there was supposed to be some kind of flashing effect but instead just made stuff disappear off the screen! It was very funny to see, and it took us a while to figure out why it was happening.