Cool, thank you satisfying my curiosity! Wouldn't have thought of mineral surveying crossed with tech, though not surprising eh, not something I come across personally I guess.

Yeah, I suspect most game developers felt the same way about it.

Most PS3 ports were rubbish compared to the Xbox 360 versions, despite the PS3 theoretically being better hardware.

Only the fancier PS3 exclusives really made the most of it.

Fascinating insight.

It was a bit like GPU programming,

Don't remember where I've read this but supposedly SONY wanted it to be part of their geometry engine, but ultimately had to cut down the costs and use Nvidia GPU instead. So maybe that analogy isn't that far off

That sounds like something that might have made it easier to emulate, since on x64 the memory management could be simplified. Though that kind of cache control can lead to very high performance if the working set of data fits into that cache that x64 might have trouble keeping up with.

The power supply on my fat PS3 recently quit on me. It feels like the old YLOD but happens the moment the power supply kicks in instead of taking 10 seconds or so. Fingers crossed I can find a doner supply, it'll be a while before I get to it though.

Unfortunately not all the fats could run PS2 games, only the CECHAxx and CECHBxx (NTSC) had the hardware to run PS2 games. The early PAL models (CECHCxx and CECHExx) had software emulation apparently, dunno if it was any good. I hunted down a fat model specifically because I wanted the backwards compatibility, can't remember which model I ended up buying, but it was not a backwards compatible one. Very disappointed at the time, but I was still sad when it died.

Also the possiblity to dualboot Linux was patched out pretty quickly if I remember correctly, people were pretty peeved about it.

I’d like to think the Steam Deck is a PC that is changing the rules as to what form factor a “personal computer” can take - of course with a heavy focus on gaming and so it takes a lot of design inspiration from what console gaming got right.

Console used to mean “specialized hardware to be able to push pixels needed for an incredible gaming experience” but now it means “locked down PC with walled garden ecosystem and advertising built in, including tracking”

I do have to give Sony credit for trying to improve audio in games with the PS5’s audio system - but has it worked? Have any games blown anyone away with their immersive sound design?

The only other “killer” feature of the PS5 was direct texture loading onto VRAM (bypassing CPU), and I think PCs can do that now with DirectStorage. So what is the point of a console anymore?

Sony knows this and they’re out of ideas. This is why they are locking down their ecosystem. I mean, it probably won’t work well for them, least not in the long term.

I got a slim

What I grew up with. Nostalgia is a helluva drug.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I've fixed a bunch of electronics myself over the years, from rebending the metal in my logitech G7 when the click stopped behaving right to replacing the switch outright on my G900 when it started doing the same thing, to fixing the stick drift on my PSVR2 controller after I accidentally threw it across the room, to fixing a strummer that would stick on a 3rd party guitar controller. Each of those was a bit different but all pretty straightforward and saved me a bunch of money.

The part that makes me hesitate is that each of those were done at my own risk. I had to retire the G7 after one attempt to fix the button resulted in dropping the tiny plastic part on carpet, losing it forever. That was fine because it was mine and like the 3rd or 4th time I fixed it. But if I'm doing it for someone else, then I won't necessarily be able to just write it off as a loss if something breaks in the process. I might start out by buying broken items cheap, fixing them and selling them so the risk (and decisions about rasolution) is still all just on me. Or maybe letting people bet against me as an insurance. Like pay an extra $5 or something and if I break it, I'll pay you $150.

Yes it's pretty fun. The emulated version has some glitches but I found I could get rid of most of the graphical issues just by having my character wear a helmet or mask that would completely cover the face model. Basically the most glitches came from the character model's face or eyes. I wrote a guide on how to set it up awhile back, mostly cobbled together from other people's work online.

https://lemmy.world/post/25272169

Note that ShadPS4 was updated to prevent installing games the way I did, after I wrote that guide. To make that work you may have to install an old version of the emulator first and after installing your games you can update the emulator.

Thanks for doing the research I was too lazy to do 😅

I'm honestly surprised that since there was no plan for a little big planets 4, and a little big planet 3 had 1, 2, and 3, that they didn't just release only the levels data, that way that people could run fan services.

It wouldn't really cost all that much extra because they would only have to keep the data available for a week or two, and then the community would then keep it alive via torrents or their own off-site storage.