• 32 Posts
  • 231 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • This might be an unpopular opinion, but I feel Tears of the Kingdom is overrated. Yes, it has some welcome quality-of-life improvements, and yes, it has more content than its predecessor, but I find the characters less interesting, the environments less inspired, and the encounters more repetitive. Every time I pick it up again, I get bored within a couple hours and go back to another play-through of Breath of the Wild.

    I would vote for Baldur’s Gate 3 over TotK without hesitation.



  • It’s a bit of a leap to say the “owner” changed. Ryujinx is MIT licensed, allowing anyone to clone the original code locally, build upon it, and publish it to a public host. Looks to me like that’s what happened here: a fork, but without using github’s built-in “fork” feature, perhaps to avoid being included in a mass take-down. There are others on non-github sites, although I don’t know if they have been getting new commits.

    I don’t see any reason to think the original repo was renamed or moved to another user’s account. The top contributor is gdkchan presumably because gdkchan’s commit history was preserved.

    For the record, gdkchan’s last commit to the original repo was on 2024-10-01.

    Edit: The README confirms what I thought:

    This fork is intended to be a QoL uplift for existing Ryujinx users. This is not a Ryujinx revival project.



  • I’m pretty sure they don’t block sdf. That’s where I am, and I’ve had several interactions with Beehaw folks while here. :)

    Fun fact: Beehaw and sdf are among the few well-known instances that don’t hand their users’ traffic (all their activity on Lemmy) over to Cloudflare.







  • as said in computer science it has accepted by most people (for the sake of having categories) that CPU emulation is emulation, and otherwise its not.

    It’s important to keep in mind that things said in computer science for the sake of having categories are usually said within the very narrow implicit context of a particular field of study, like microprocessor design. It makes sense there for the sake of brevity, just as arcane acronyms make sense when everyone in the room understands what they stand for in that context. But the context no longer applies when we’re out in the rest of the world using a word that is not so narrowly defined, as we are now.

    I think we mostly agree, because you pointed this out yourself:

    It’s a “domain specific” language; which means, you have to specify it before in order to make use.

    However, I want to clarify my position in response to this:

    nobody has the right to act like having a clear definition and saying anyone else is wrong.

    I often encounter people on social media chiding or mocking others for referring to Wine as an emulator, which is disheartening for a number of reasons. Importantly, the people reading such comments are being taught that it’s wrong to call Wine an emulator, when in fact it is not wrong at all. Wine’s very purpose is to emulate. This is plainly visible not just in how it is used, but also in how it is developed (many of its behaviors are reverse engineered Windows behaviors, departing from the API docs) and how it functions (it does a heck of a lot more than translating system calls).

    The Wine project’s FAQ acknowledges the misunderstanding, a bit indirectly, by pointing out that it is “more than just an emulator”.

    Unfortunately, since most people in the discussions I mentioned have no visibility into Wine’s internals, they don’t know any better than to accept what they were told by multiple people on the internet. They are misled by a smug few who love to tell others they’re wrong by repeating that officially abandoned slogan that was never really true (at least not in the context that framed it) in the first place. And then some of the misled people adopt it themselves, so we end up with more of the “you’re wrong” attitude, perpetuation of a ridiculously narrow understanding of the word, and people who publish about the topic performing awkward linguistic gymnastics to avoid simply saying “emulator” for fear of rebuke.

    I think all three of those results make the world a little worse, so I’m here to let everyone reading know that it’s perfectly appropriate to call Wine (or Proton) an emulator. Anyone who claims it’s wrong to do so is perhaps a hardware field specialist who has lost sight of the importance of context in language, or (more likely) either honestly mistaken or an internet troll.


  • Hardware is not the only thing that can be emulated. Here’s an example. To claim that things emulating software components are not emulators is simply incorrect, like claiming that squares are not rectangles. It’s always disappointing to see someone spreading that falsehood.

    It’s true that Wine is not a hardware emulator, nor is Proton. But make no mistake: they are both emulators.

    The unfortunate backronym made a kind of sense 20 years ago. At the time, lawsuits were flying hard and fast at projects offering APIs and tools modeled after commercial operating systems (Unix variants), and there was no established case law protecting them. The prospect of Wine contributors getting sued into oblivion by Microsoft was a very plausible threat. Rebranding it as “Wine Is Not an Emulator” helped frame it as something different as it grew and gained attention, and although that phrase is inaccurate, “Wine Is Not a Hardware Emulator” wouldn’t have fit the existing name or distanced it from being seen as a Windows work-alike. Also, most emulators of the time happened to be hardware emulators, so it didn’t seem like a terribly big stretch.

    That time is gone, though. The legal standing for software based on reverse engineering is more clear than it was then. Microsoft has not sent its lawyers after our favorite runtime emulator. The backronym was thankfully abandoned by the project some years ago. Weirdly, there are still people on social media spreading false statements about what the word does and doesn’t mean.






  • How would this control people selling their used hardware? I don’t see anything about Sony trying to disable resold consoles.

    you’ll get “a product that works like new with genuine PlayStation replacement parts (as needed) that has been thoroughly cleaned, inspected and tested”. You will receive all the cables and paperwork you need for a PS5, and it comes with a 12-month manufacturer’s warranty

    That’s worth a premium to some people.