Interestingly enough this thought was what made western europe (but various other parts of the world had something similar) transition from the guild system to the centralised factory system, essentially laying the foundation for industrialisation.
Basically merchants realized there was a huge workforce outside the cities, families where wives and children had time left. So they purchased and place the worktools and resources with the individual families to later buy back the products they made and resell it in the markets. This was called the putting-out system if you want to look into it more.
Note-taker here. Actually, I had to really do my best to only focus on writing everything down. When I tried understanding the stuff being taught I got involved in an inner monologue trying to solve my own question and by the time I snap back to reality I missed a chunk of what was being said.
Did nobody else have this problem?
I have absolutely no idea how emulator development is but I always wondered how specific bugs like these are fixed; is it just adding an if statement specific to this game or are these just general bugs that get fixed and could just as well also fix something undiscovered in other games as well?
Both, depending on the specific issue and the emulation technique.
There’s a slew of different approaches to emulation, such as bytecode interpretation (you read the ROM on the fly and try to “do the intended thing” using platform native APIs), bytecode translation (you convert the ROM into platform native code), hardware emulation (you simulate the original chips directly, and the ROMs “just work”), and more. In many cases all those techniques are used together for different parts of the system (such as emulating a CPU vs a GPU). Depending on what the issue is, how well the hardware is documented (you may even hit an undocumented hardware bug!), and how difficult it is to create a general-purpose fix for your particular approach to emulation, or how computational expensive it is to emulate correct behavior, you may choose to add a workaround.
Some emulation projects put more emphasis on 100% correct emulation than others. Console emulators tend to be biased towards performance.
> Depending on what the issue is, how well the hardware is documented (you may even hit an undocumented hardware bug!)
What's fun is, particularly with older games and hardware, it wasn't uncommon for devs to use hardware bugs to their advantage. DK64 is notoriously hard to emulate because of that.
Can you elaborate on DK64? AFAIK it shipped with a memory leak that was known to the deva but could not be fixed in time for Christmas season 199x. This bug lead to a OOM crash in less than two hours or something so it was decided to require and ship it with the Expansion Pack with 8MB (?) RAM instead of the default jumper pack with half as much.
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The answer is both. Devs will first try to fix it by correctly emulating the system behavior because like you said, that can also fix other games and because that is the right thing to do. There are occasions where doing that can result in a huge performance penalty or some other underised behavior so they just resort to hacks in the emulator or straight up patching the game.
Also, at least in the Dolphin emulator for the Gamecube/Wii, they only use game-specific hacks as a last resort. They learned from a lot of older emulator projects that game-specific hacks pile up on each other and eventually make the code an unmaintainable mess.
This is one of the differences between the bsnes/higan family of SNES emulators and the previous generation (ZSNES/snes9x/etc). bsnes/higan and emulators derived from them managed to emulate the SNES more accurately (which required more processing power), and this allowed having fewer game-specific hacks.
Emulation benefits hugely from increases to processing power over time.
In short, no - from my understanding, it does actually fix the underlying issue, rather than special-casing the game. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few edge cases like that which are special-cased, particularly for older games (when "abuse" of CPU/GPU quirks was more common to eke out extra performance).
> If the majority of the population is made redundant and unable to earn any income then what happens to consumer spending? It drops to zero and it takes the likes of Amazon, Walmart, and countless other retailers as well as manufacturers with it.
Are they going to just let that happen?
This is a reasoning that starts with the idea there is some sort of global conspiracy of the global elite making agreements on what to do.
I strongly believe there isn't, at least not on the level you are describing.
There is however the underlying capitalist system that demands profit optimization.
If there would be some sort of new product or company that would make all other aspects of the economy obsolete but it would bring massive profits for the stakeholders it would absolutely be launched.
Companies don't make predictions on what might happen to the economy if they launch x, y or z.
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Unfortunately this hasn't been released yet and since that paper it is very quiet around that topic so chances are high it (or something similar) will just not be released.
People gliding over the ground is a huge giveaway as well, when you walk past someone else your feet don't slide to the right while you are still walking straight ahead, your movement changes.
Off topic but it's funny to me how seemingly everyone in this writes "floppy disk" correctly with a "k" but writes "discs" (when still talking about the floppy disks) incorrectly with a "c". Must be a habit when not adding floppy in front!
It is funny. I looked it up and apparently the spelling of the general work "disc" (meaning, thin circular thing) is disc in British and disk in American. But universally it's disk for floppy disks and hard disks and disc for compact discs, DVDs etc. My theory is "disc" looks a bit more "modern" for some reason, hence using it for the newer media. For me (a British speaker), it seems totally natural to use "disk" for floppies and hard disks, but disc otherwise.
Basically merchants realized there was a huge workforce outside the cities, families where wives and children had time left. So they purchased and place the worktools and resources with the individual families to later buy back the products they made and resell it in the markets. This was called the putting-out system if you want to look into it more.