Secret Gamer Girl / SecretGamerGrrl / Googleshng / "Violet Hargrave" / Jacob Lawrence (Jake) Alley / Violet Cassandra Ocean - Delusional Zoe Quinn Stalker, Libelous Tweeter, Thirsty Gnome, Faux-Tranny Neckbeard Incel, Micropenis, "Known Troubled Person", Creator of "Massive vs the Masses", Self-Described "Noise Making Thing"; Lives in Niantic, CT

[Kosher Dill]

How does Jake manage to come away with precisely the wrong idea about everything?
Nobody likes Super Nintendo because it has HDMA, they like it because it's the system they played Mario World on. And the people who program for it today are doing it because they like the feeling of working on the same hardware as their childhood favorites. Nobody wants to program the Jaketendo.


And as usual, Jake has long since been Red Shirted. The project he's trying to grope his way toward already exists, it's the Playdate - hobbyist hardware for hobbyist game programmers:

Playdate. Pre-order now!

It’s yellow. It fits in your pocket. There’s a crank. It comes with 24 free games to get you started. Say hi to Playdate from Panic.

play.date

A "retro-ish" Gameboy-type console with Lua and C APIs - not ASM hackery-dackery. High-res 1-bit screen, 44.1kHz audio, a few buttons, and just one "gimmick" feature, an analog crank. You could even use the crank the same way as Jake's mythical scroll wheel

If you take a look at the API it's all very reasonable stuff for the modern day, nothing held over from the days of scanlines or CRTs or whatever - and that's as it should be. All this for $199.


Compare that to Jake's monstrosity which would probably be like that time Homer Simpson designed a car.

Anyone who wants to ride the nostalgia high is going to program a real retro console exactly as it was, and anyone wanting to program something new is going to either go to Playdate or just write a retro-styled PC game using one of the many toolkits out there.


I can't wait for the new batch of insulation.

 

[Aunt Carol]

I can't wait for the new batch of insulation.

Has Jake ever tried a Kickstarter or similar?

Was it even around for The Massive?

This would be an exciting new direction for him to seek funding, especially since his Patreon is so financially successful for what he delivers.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Has Jake ever tried a Kickstarter or similar?

Was it even around for The Massive?

Kickstarter was founded in 2009, way after World Domination LLC had already crashed and burned. He's never done one since, for the simple reason that he's never wanted to do anything.

Alas, I think Jake is - as usual - too late for a pie-in-the-sky video game Kickstarter. The morons who'd ante up for this have already been burned over and over again by the Intellivision, Commodore, Coleco, Ouya, etc etc etc. A decade-plus of pressing their burned stumps against the hot stove has finally taught the retards to steer clear.

 

[Sniperwoof]

Imagine being 6,4 something a majority of guys would kill for but also having a micropenis.

That is some monkey's paw shit right there.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

Compare that to Jake's monstrosity which would probably be like that time Homer Simpson designed a car.

Anyone who wants to ride the nostalgia high is going to program a real retro console exactly as it was, and anyone wanting to program something new is going to either go to Playdate or just write a retro-styled PC game using one of the many toolkits out there.

I think Jake's theory is that the "secret sauce" of that era of game consoles was their limitations and eccentricities. Even though all consoles before, say, the Xbox, had these for the simple reason of cost. Why isn't he building hardware that's about "racing the beam" like the Atari 2600? Or fooling with palettes and sprites like the NES? Or nine-million processors and quad-based polygons like the Saturn? Because those aren't the consoles Jake fondly remembers and presumes to be an expert about.

Jake's not even selling this with the proper method to the people who could potentially be interested. "Hey, you like getting around the issues of old game consoles to make things work? Well, just try to program for this kludge of total shit! Get Doom on this you lowlife son of a bitch!"

 

[Kosher Dill]

Why isn't he building hardware that's about "racing the beam" like the Atari 2600?

Even though I just said I think "CRT-like" designs are dumb, I bet a modernized beam-chasing toy console would actually have some appeal just because of how different it is, how "tricky" it'd encourage you to get, and the urge to show off your skills by making it do unexpectedly impressive things.

... You know, unless you throw too much horsepower at it and you can just raytrace a row of pixels from your in-memory scene in time for HBLANK.

 

[Mitt Doggy Dogg]

I haven't seen a CRT TV in decades, even if he paid all this money to make the greatest 16 bit console, it would look like crap without the original style TV. Does he really think there is a market for ancient consoles? I played enough 16 bit games in the 80s lol I'm good.

 

[Spunt]

I haven't seen a CRT TV in decades, even if he paid all this money to make the greatest 16 bit console, it would look like crap without the original style TV. Does he really think there is a market for ancient consoles? I played enough 16 bit games in the 80s lol I'm good.

The only market is for emulation systems or re-creations of already released hardware, and even then many of those systems flop. There's a tiny niche for people coding new NES games but that's a very small group of enthusiasts doing it because they can, and again this is all on existing systems or emulation of those systems.

What Jake doesn't get (or at least one of the many, many things he doesn't get) is that people aren't nostalgic for the hardware, they're nostalgic for the games they played as kids. Making a new 8 or 16 bit system is totally pointless. If you want a cheap computer to turn into a console as a project, there's Raspberry Pi and similar things. Nobody is going to develop for a brand new system based on obsolete hardware. It's the worst of both worlds, all the limitations of an old system with the total absence of an existing ecosystem of a new system. Even the most programmer-socked tranny speedrunner isn't going to code for a system that nobody uses - at least if they code a new ROM for the NES or whatever there will be other people out there with the hardware to run it.

Imagine building a new 1920s-style car but a new and proprietary one - just as slow, unsafe and difficult to drive as a Model T, but without the cultural importance and existing knowledgebase that hobbyists have to keep genuine or replica Model Ts running.

This is such a gloriously stupid idea that I hope he goes through with it, but sadly, unlike Massive vs the Masses, he doesn't even have enough money or knowledge to even fail at it.

EDIT: The issue of CRT monitors and the shortage thereof is actually a bit of an issue in the 8/16 bit enthusiast communities. CRTs distort the image in a very specific way that those original systems and software accounted for, so they look blurry and weird on flatscreens without middleware or tweaks to the emulation. If Jake developed his system with CRTs in mind, the graphics will look like shit on 99.9% of screens.

 

[Chan the Wizard]

As funny as it is to think of all the way his proposed console is a total waste of time and money, I don’t think it’s necessary because it’s never going to happen.
Jake isn’t the smart kind of autist and isn’t the coding type of troon.

 

[Mitt Doggy Dogg]

If you want a cheap computer to turn into a console as a project, there's Raspberry Pi and similar things

Exactly, I made a few different systems with my Raspberry Pi when I first got it so I could play the old games I enjoyed as a kid. The Atari, NES, SNES, etc all sucked nobody wants another one of those it's just replaying the old games that is fun. As always Jake misses the point by miles.

EDIT: The issue of CRT monitors and the shortage thereof is actually a bit of an issue in the 8/16 bit enthusiast communities.

Yea without the CRT monitor the games still don't seem the same, It was the first thing I noticed when I played Mario Bros or Punchout. Sure it's been decades since I played the original but it just looked funny on a modern flatscreen TV. I bet there is a high demand for these in the 8/16 bit communities.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Jake streamed the same Metroid romhacks on Monday and nothing at all interesting happened. He might be going back to random Steam games next week, increasing the chances for something amusing to happen.

SPC is still alive and well, he can be heard at the end of the stream.

 

[lindsayfan]

i know absolutely nothing about computer hardware, gaming console microchips etc, but i'm learning so much from jake's latest helpful explainer:

The TurboGrafix-16 (or PC Engine) really just kinda went all-in on making its own custom CPU from scratch which…we’ll get to that, and otherwise uh… it had some interesting stuff going on sound wise?

domo arigoto, sensei!!

Oh and I’m now looking at a 5V processor and making controllers compatible with a 10V system so I need to double check that all the components in those don’t really care that much and maybe adjust things.

sounds like a highly technical matter!! as long as the components don't really care that much.

if they only care a little bit the (maybe) adjustments would presumably be less involved than if the components DO really care, that much, about whether the system and processor are 5 or 10 volts. kind of like whether the system is 16 or 32 bits, it's ultimately just vibes

 

[Kosher Dill]

kind of like whether the system is 16 or 32 bits, it's ultimately just vibes

If only someone had told Byuu that in time. Rest in Chips Ahoy.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

Violet Hargrave explains that hyperbole in irrelevant internet conversations is how hate groups waste time recruiting:

 

[lindsayfan]

​

ALERT, ALL CARD-CARRIERS​

​

jake has cracked the code!​

it's true: hate groups recruit almost exclusively from tumblr fanshipping communities.

Azov Battalion got its start from a big argument over whether it was okay for the gems in steven universe to smooch, most of the charlottesville torch marchers were people upset about Reylo, and Order of the Nine Angles began as a Spock/Kirk fanart post with 666,000 notes.

Why recruit from MMA gyms or disaffected lonely dudes playing fps when you can just harvest the true elite soldiers of violence: fat millenial tumblr addicts hung up on romance between cartoon characters

 

[Broadside]

Violet Hargrave explains that hyperbole in irrelevant internet conversations is how hate groups waste time recruiting:
View attachment 6042892View attachment 6042893

That breakdown of recruitment sounds exactly like how troons use Discord

 

[Kosher Dill]

No new Jakestream here. Did anyone check in live and see if he did one last night? Could be just another delayed upload.

 

[Konstantin Romanov]

Azov Battalion got its start from a big argument over whether it was okay for the gems in steven universe to smooch

I'm so glad someone has finally addressed the rampant problem of radical left gay Steven Universe enthusiasts being recruited as nazis.

Apparently this is a theory Jake has been working on for some time.

 

[The Taco Santo!]

I've always wondered something about the card-carrying Nazis of Jake's imagination. Who issues these cards, and are there membership benefits?

 

[CyrusKissFanClub]

I've always wondered something about the card-carrying Nazis of Jake's imagination. Who issues these cards, and are there membership benefits?

Are they laminated?