So I didn't follow Switch emulation too much during its prime... and saw enough near the end (blatantly updating code to support pre-release games) that I steered clear.

When the nintendo-ing happened, most "folk in the know" more or less speculated that everything would end for a few years and we would just see a lot of re-builds of the source with either slightly different input libraries or crypto miners.

Well, it has been a few years! Did that come to pass? Is it still a case where my best bet would be to check the commit hash against a known good and build Yuzu myself? Have any reputable-ish groups taken over with a "fork"? Or alternatives arisen?

Thanks.

Prefacing with: Yes yes yes, we know, you hate AI. You are truly unique and that joke about removing all previous instructions is just as funny today as it was two years ago.

Moving on.

I... honestly thought this was a joke while watching the youtube video. That said, I think this is simultaneously an excellent use of the fuzzy search/human language capabilities of LLMs AND has absolutely no good use case? And I am very wary of the input training data.

For the first part? There is a lot of value in being able to communicate what is broken without actually being an expert. That is honestly a big personal use of chatgpt et al for me. List symptoms as I understand it and then get that translated into domain expert language so I can know what terms to search.

But... I question the audience for that. How many people who can only say "sound don't work" are going to be comfortable jamming spudgers into seams and working on technically live electronics because the battery is ten layers deep? The youtube video uses an example of not being able to find the oil filter after taking the plate off and.. I would very much suggest paying to get that replaced if you are in a situation like that since you can cause a LOT of long term issues with your car if you screw that up.

Which has always been the dirty secret of Right To Repair. The vast majority of what those activists are asking for... aren't for the end user. It is for the repair shops. End users are not going to be swapping out their mac heat sinks or whatever because that requires special tools and a lot of expertise. But repair shops have done that for decades. And, in theory, that will be cheaper for the end user. In practice... there are a lot of reasons to know how to change your own oil filter, if you catch my drift.

And this is VERY much targeted at that end user.

And the last part is the training data. I've used a LOT of the ifixit guides over the years. Some are good. Some are... better than nothing. There are a lot of cases where I would have loved to get more detail on an intermediate step. But... where is that detail coming from?

So... yeah.

Hot off the heels of a colaboration with Linus Torvalds, we have tech youtube's favorite butterfingers... telling kiwi farms to use more slurs

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1pbp23m/linus_the_other_one_posted_on_kiwifarms_to_talk/

and confirmed by mister tech tips himself https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1pbp23m/comment/nrsdlzk/

So… he has been a pretty mask off piece of shit for years. But… damned if this isn’t a new world record for a collaboration to age into sour milk

And for those unaware of kiwi farms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms), they are a website that spun out of the people who were too evil for 8chan. They have a long history of targeted harassment, doxxing, and torture of individuals (generally socially progressive and/or LGBTQIA+) until their victims commit suicide. And members often will approach their targets, or their loved ones, in public to directly deliver threats and make it clear that they have their current location. Also they have links to the Christchurch mosque shooting.

Kinda borderline for this board but if we can laugh at Marques Brownlee's nonsense then it feels fitting to let people know the guy they go to for really poorly researched videos and error filled reviews is rubbing the proverbial hair of a bunch of murderers and terrorists For The Lulz.

And... if you are someone that kiwi farms fairly prominently attacks... maybe keep your head down until this blows over. Or don't. But as someone who has seen that level of hatred and evil in action towards one of their best friends... I get it.

So I've increasingly been seeing people glaze the hell out of the Faugus launcher (https://github.com/Faugus/faugus-launcher). In large part because Bottles is in the "But it might work for us" stage of a full rewrite and Lutris lost a lot of the core development team in the past year or two.

It is very much a question as to whether Bottles even needs to be meaningfully maintained at this point as it is more a way to streamline prefix management. But Lutris could definitely use some love.

I have been unable to find a good description of what Faugus actually IS. Mostly just people regurgitating/Reacting to the Faugus team's PR videos and some REALLY annoying youtubers who clearly are emulating pewdiepie as it were.

At some point I'll probably just sit around and test it (I have a new laptop to provision after all...). But would love to hear some feedback or see some coverage (and maybe find an influencer I don't actively want to push into traffic in the process...) to sell me on it. Because, near as I can tell, it doesn't seem to support the wide range of user scripts that Lutris has to make most games a double click to install? It really seems closer to a Bottles replacement? Which... if there are enough features then sure but... yeah.

Thanks

To be clear: There is nothing wrong with getting your suck on so long as all parties involved consent

(also shamelessly stolen from Strike at resetera)

Feel this is a good accompanying piece for all the folk insisting on caping for a Blackwater merc wth a nazi tattoo because he said something they liked.

My... shit I've been doing this since Lockdown, replay of the Armored Core series is just about out of the PS2 era and on to the PS3.

And that made me realize... I have no flipping idea how that works these days. I know I want an emulator (RPSC3) and I found a site that might have ISOs. And that is probably actually fine for AC4 since I don't think that got any DLC. But calibrations and the like were a thing.

From a bit of googling I saw people mention something called "nopaystation" that basically uses what I assume is a hacked/fake PSN to streamline this which sounds awesome (and that I would only ever dare use in wine because holy shit that sounds dangerous). I saw some guides that alluded to setting that up with RPSC3 but... they don't actually? But I also recall people mentioning using pirated Demon Souls and AC4 servers and... some of the Influencers I have seen very clearly play emulated PS3 games are not the kind of people who even know what an ISO is so that probably isn't the path folk are taking.

So... what are the current best practices/methods for actually grabbing PS3 games? And maybe xbox/360 if I ever decide I want to Mech Assault again.

Thanks

Still going to have narrative limitations and swimming based stamina (I assume there are some progress gates with that). But holy crap the number of times I tried to enjoy Dying Light 2 and just hated that I couldn't scale a wall or even effectively run away at night.

So I used to really like the 8bitdo controllers but firmware updates and reconfiguring on Linux is... not a thing. Theoretically a windows VM can do the former and I can use my android phone and tablet for the latter but... no. Combine that with finally getting around to playing Crosscode (beautiful game that goes on for way too long and has the jankiest engine ever used in a video game) and I ended up back on just an xbox series controller.

Then I found out that apparently Valve are finally adding support to Steam Input for 3rd parties so that I can theoretically map those back paddles and the like without grabbing my phone and shuffling dongles. And I also remembered that I have all those extra features on my Steam Deck that I never use because my brain isn't smart enough to remember two full control schemes per game.

And doing research on the 8bitdos and gamesirs and the like... at BEST you get a brief mention of "this has steam deck support but let's look at my phone games instead". Knowing how clicky a face button is is nice but I would also REALLY like to know polling rates under bluetooth, what modes expose the gyro, etc.

So is anyone aware of any websites/blogs or youtubers who tend to go into even a shallow dive on gamepads and Linux? Configuration software/firmware updating, what features are exposed on what connection type, etc. Would obviously prefer someone who understands what Linux is, but even just a heavy focus on the Steam Deck would probably provide enough data (for me, at least).