@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

TomF

@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place

Graphics coder and HW architect, currently at Rec Room, previously at Muckyfoot, RAD Game Tools, Valve, Oculus and Intel.

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TomF, to random
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Had a dream where Lego decided to grow the size of technical Lego (but not normal Lego) by 33% to make more space for the electronics. Why... why does my brain do this to me?

SirTapTap, to random
@SirTapTap@mastodon.social avatar

Parkers happier and more energetic than I've seen him in a year.

He's going nuts over this new 25 cent mouse toy. He used to refuse to play if the kittens were around

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@SirTapTap Our old lad still has an on/off relationship with the "kittens" (they're 4 now) but they do certainly keep him active.

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

"Very English Conan, what is best in life?"

"To crush the tea leaves, see the milk added before then, and to hear the lamentations of the kettles."

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

my advice to anyone who wants to make a hobby programming language would be to make a lisp, except to simultaneously not worry at all about being anything like the big lisps in terms of design or syntax

so basically what i'm saying is use s-expressions

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko Yeah but what if I just RPN instead? Then I don't even need a tree.

TomF,
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@eniko a time good with me don't threaten.

eniko, (edited ) to Cats
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

Do any of your cats get their claws stuck on fabrics or furniture and if so do any of them panic when they do and seem to forget how claws work?

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko One of my cats still gets freaked out by his own tail.

GabeMoralesVR, to random
@GabeMoralesVR@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@xot that's how some DMA works. DMA does not always work like this on every system. Famously, the Sega Genesis featured something called Blast Processing, which is the ability for the 68000 and VDP to access the same bus at the exact same time during DMA, so you can write directly to the scanline during active scan to drive it at 8bpp, despite the Genesis only formally accepting 6bpp color.

TomF,
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@GabeMoralesVR @xot Unless you turn on 5 or 6 bit framebuffer mode, in which case wave good bye to your CPU cycles :-) It was a very clever machine indeed.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@GabeMoralesVR @xot Biggest mistake of that entire era for sure. I kinda understand why they did it (support for 8 color and 32 color modes) but still not worth it for the problems it caused.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@GabeMoralesVR @xot 32X was 256-colour palette byte-per-pixel, like VGA. Jaguar was very cool - a YUV style encoding that meant gouraud shading was very cheap. Atari Falcon finally got a 16-bit chunky mode - though very wide pixels. I forget if Amiga AGA was chunky or still bitplaned?

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@GabeMoralesVR @xot Trying to think if anything had a chunky 16 color mode, i.e. two pixels packed in a byte. Would have been fascinating to compare to bitplanes in the 68k era.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@GabeMoralesVR @xot Yeah it was a brilliant idea by Flare - it was kinda evolved indirectly from the Spectrum, through the Konix Multisysyem! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flare_Technology
Some brilliant ideas - by far the biggest problem was the absurd number of bugs. Atari cutting ALL the corners, as usual :-)

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Spending our 30th anniversary in Walla Walla - a wine town in Washington State. Biggest surprise so far - walking to Safeways! I thought this sort of walkable mixed use planning was illegal in America these days etc...

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Although I'm staying in an apartment with built in garages, and for places probably built this century they're surprisingly small. My Focus doesn't fit that easily, and we just watched a guy take 20 minutes to park his Honda Pilot - he finally had to park it diagonally to make it fit. This is semi-rural Washington - Cabernet Cowboy country!

djlink, to random
@djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Story about NVIDIA failing to create a GPU for Dreamcast and deliver the product, nearly going bankrupt, but SEGA still gave/invested money to save the company, despite choosing a competitor's GPU for Dreamcast. https://wallstreetsights.com/business/the-84-year-old-man-who-saved-nvidia/351/

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@djlink I never did figure out the link between the NV1 and the Saturn 3D chip. They clearly used extremely similar (and dead end) tech, but it's always been unclear what/if the link was.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@djlink To be fair, Dreamcast used PowerVR, which was also alien tech. Though by that time they had a good triangle-based front end. You could still access the infinite-planes madness though. A lovely machine.

lisyarus, to random
@lisyarus@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I accidentally left the simulation for a long time and it converged to a very cool dynamic equilibrium with two species only contacting at a single spot and neither of them winning

video/mp4

TomF,
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@lisyarus and cue Jack Nicholson's "you can't handle the truth" speech...

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Rewatching Twin Peaks, and of course everybody knows it was filmed near North Bend and/or Snoqualmie in Washington State. And I've been there a bunch - it is a lovely part of the world - and seen the signs for the Twin Peaks tourist traps etc.

But then the Sheriff's Department pops up and HOLY SHIT that's DirtFish Rally School! I know that place well - we go there once a year to drive sideways in mud. At the time of filming it was a lumber mill, which DirtFish took over afterwards.

TomF,
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The sharp-eyed may also recognize this place from the Dirt 4 rally game, since DirtFish was featured in that as a playground. So you too can do donuts in front of the Twin Peaks Sheriff Department!

dosnostalgic, to random
@dosnostalgic@mastodon.social avatar

What's the name of the song?

🔊🎵

video/mp4

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@dosnostalgic
Sandstorm by Darude:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6120QOlsfU

demofox, to random
@demofox@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Anyone have any tips for repairing or desoldering corroded solder? I've tried applying fresh solder but not all points would take it.
Also, I'm thinking the brown line across the bottom is supposed to be a connection between all of them for ground. I think its corroded to not work as well anymore. Does that look/sound right to people? In the second image, it's the side with a single wire plugged in.

image/jpeg

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@demofox It's such a simple board, I'd just ignore the traces completely and replace them with new wires. Just use the board as a physical prop.

rygorous, to random
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

You can tell that Chad really isn't much of a Chad at all going by how the usual unit in common parlance is actually the Gigachad.

and here I thought Pascals and Teslas were awkwardly normalized. This is like Farad levels of inconvenient scaling

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@rygorous We need to calibrate this by experimentation. If you fire one Chad at one milliHelen, does that completely cancel to form one Nuclear Family and 2.7 Millennials, or do we need to tweak the verniers some more?

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I need to get my mind off the bad. Anything good going on tonight for anyone? Feel free to share things your excited about or happy about or just cool stuff you've come across recently

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva We actually did notice that the number of people who had an "incident" at turn 3A in front of me is... well above statistical baseline.

However, I refuse to agree to a search of my person for a hidden stash of red shells and invoke the fifth.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva OMG can you imagine if I actually had one hanging from the dashboard and just tugged it "for good luck" every time I went through that corner. Eventually it would work. Because it has before:

(yes, this is the same turn at the same track!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLObf2VtfpQ

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@oblomov @aeva Good luck getting volunteers to test these theories.

pervognsen, to random
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

"The algorithm uses exactly the same terminology and is presented in bottom-up form. (If you prefer top-down design, please read the rest of this section backwards.)"

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@pervognsen @StompyRobot Ah this is the "no true goto, laddie!" fallacy I have heard so much about.

(in fact, they're all gotos)

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