There is an explosion of decompilation projects spawning new ports, but was there something that enabled better decompilations? I see it across many retro games.
It has been enabled mainly by the the advent of streamlined tooling to assist with 1:1 byte-by-byte matching decompilations (https://decomp.me/ comes to mind), which allows new projects to get off the ground right away without having to reinvent basic infrastructure for disassembling, recompiling and matching code against the original binary first. The growth of decompilation communities and the introduction of "porting layers" that mimic console SDK APIs but emulate the underlying hardware have also played a role, though porting decompiled code to a modern platform remains very far from trivial.
That said, there is an argument to be made against matching decompilations: while their nature guarantees that they will replicate the exact behavior of the original code, getting them to match often involves fighting the entropy of a 20-to-30-year-old proprietary toolchain, hacks of the "add an empty asm() block exactly here" variety and in some cases fuzzing or even decompiling the compiler itself to better understand how e.g. the linking order is determined. This can be a huge amount of effort that in many cases would be better spent further cleaning up, optimizing and/or documenting the code, particularly if the end goal is to port the game to other platforms.
I had a couple senior FPGA classes with a JPL engineer who had worked on F-Prime, it was awesome to see the project and learn embedded from it. I think he suffered layoffs shortly thereafter when JPL did a big RIF. I'm grateful they put such work into it and make it public, their support is a significant part of the curriculum at the upper division computer engineering where I went.
It's so strange when it obviously hits a preprogrammed non-answer in these models, how can one ever trust them when there is a babysitter that interferes in an actual answer. I suppose that asking it what version it is isn't a valid question in it's training data so it's programmed to say check the documentation, but still definitely suspicious when it gives a non-answer.
Mine had the machines, then ripped them out, over the cost to them the regional bank they deal with imposed and other excuses. Coinstar (some) gift card is the only no-fee I've found in my area, but then you're stuck with a gift card instead of cash.
This. Government imposes too much cost on owning garbage (more so maintenance obligations coded into law than taxes IMO, but those too in some places) so our society is forced to dismantle things rather than let them be barely utilized or naturally decay on the off chance that some future use comes along.
The glow was done in-camera with a prism, the reflective tape was retroreflective so the light source would go into the prism, bounce off the quartz reflector material and into the camera lens, hence the dust coming off the sticks and the lack of glow in that spot where you see it end-on. The 'roto' was for color I think.
I'm fortunate to live in Los Angeles where we have KCRW and KCSN. Matt Pinfield is back on the air and of course Nick Harcourt was previously of Morning Becomes Ecclectic. Music discovery is enriched by these public radio stations, I hope they can keep going with public radio being so disfunded federally.
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