What should I write next?

A good Turkey Recipe please.

And of course please some Overview on the Sixth Generation of Video Game Consoles which Alternatives to the slowly failing optical Drives we have today.

Thank you and have a peaceful and nice Christmas Evening,my Friend.

I actually did a comparison of 6th gen hardware ages ago. Good idea though!!

alexander1970 said:

A good Turkey Recipe please.

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Chuck it in the bin or give it to the local dogs/cats, get literally any other bird that is commonly eaten and cook that instead.

As for suggestions then any of those you have will be interesting, though I doubt I will be able to put any of the lessons of singing technique into practice.

I definitely have a passion for singing as well but I know full well the audience here is a gaming one so I just wanted to advertise the option. Currently I’m edging towards a breakdown of either The Last Story’s music or technology, since that’s a game I’ve been getting back into lately so it’s fresh in my mind - but I’m not decided yet, so anything else could be good too.

Hey though man, don't let that keep you from talking about singing technique, this is definitely a community for everyone and no doubt there are a lot of artists and musicians on this site who would appreciate :3

Can you analyze Super Mario 3D World

I wouldn’t mind analysing 3D World but I just fear there isn’t that much to analyse to be honest. I don’t think it pushes the Wii U in any meaningful way so I don’t think it’s a great case study.

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas would be my next one. Don't know how much it pushed the PS2 but it was really good

Write about what open world games do wrong.
HINT:
(is too open, not enough stuff to do in them)

How about analyzing the first world problem of having so many games, yet no time to play them all?

An Atari Jaguar Emulator that includes JaguarCD Support and Fully Compatible Iron Soldier 1 & 2 CyberMorph and BattleMorph please. Thank You Santa

GTA:SA pushed the PS2 in a few interesting ways. I know for a fact they used more post-processing (see: that evening effect) specially to hide some low-res texture work! I'll read up on it.

Open world games doing things wrong would be really interesting. I'll have to put that one on the list. I take particular issue with MGSV and BOTW as bad examples of how to do open world design - and by comparison I think the more linear Last Story does it pretty well - so that might be good.

@Silent_Gunner That's a big mood. Can relate.

@CORE I wish! That would be awesome. I could do a whole breakdown on the Jaguar itself too.

I would really be interested in an "Analysing video game music" piece.
I am not sure how would you face the topic, it is related to music technology or composition?
Both sound great, but I am personally more interested in the latter.

Specially if it does not just focus on one single video game, but if instead it focuses in a video game, then it studies the composer and his other works, perhaps what influenced this composer, and what other composers/pieces did this composer influence.

Starting with The Last Story / Nobuo Uematsu sounds quite fine. That said I would love to read a piece regarding Yasunori Mitsuda some day.

And that is my opinion / suggestion, if you ever write something like that I would be glad to read it.

Definitely composition. Music technology hasn’t changed an awful lot since the n64 could produce CD quality, with maybe surround sound being the only significant jump since.

I have always wondered something:
What would happen if you, by any reason, change the processor of a videogame console for a more powerful processor?
Would it make the console faster?
Won't work at all?
Why does / does not work?

@Interstella5555

That was already done by some company with the original Xbox. I think MVG has a video about that. I'll see if I find it.

Interstella5555 said:

I have always wondered something:
What would happen if you, by any reason, change the processor of a videogame console for a more powerful processor?
Would it make the console faster?
Won't work at all?
Why does / does not work?

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The original xbox (and that guy was a fairly big player in the original xbox so I presume he knows his stuff even I have not seen the video) is the most notable example in vaguely recent times. Before that you are probably going back to the likes of the amiga (which is fairly modular by design). Or the quasi PC stuff where you would get a PC card to allow you to run X86 code on not quite IBM compatible machines, and if you count that then you also have to count things like the supercard DSTwo which had an onboard processor of some note on it (and that also brings in special chips for the SNES, various homebrew addons for the old consoles in recent times that essentially use the old console as a controller adapter and power supply).
If you want to include fancy sound chips (which are starting to get interesting right now actually with new replacements and upgrades on the market -- https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/SwinSID is one example) and RAM you get a few more examples from what Americans tend to know as minicomputers (think C64, Amstrad, Amiga, BBC micro, less Atari but there might be something there and so on and so on).

Generally though CPUs are somewhat custom things made for the devices in question, and done if not at the limits of devices of the time then beyond what any would be mod chip maker or the like is ever going to manage at the time -- even a custom pinout is not an inconsiderable challenge (though maybe look at some of the stuff done for running server chips on consumer hardware a year or two back for an idea of how that would go). This may change in years to come as we have reasonably accessible custom chip manufacture these days and what was high end or state of the art however many decades ago is trivial today to beat (indeed going back up to those gate sizes, not that you have to for this, would be a challenge), not to mention FPGAs that could run within system limits for power. At the same time CPU design is very expensive, and that did affect the console makers, so there is some scope to use another off the shelf chip (the NES 6502 was the ARM of its day, and if not then the GB/GBC 8080 or Z80 a like was, the 68K of the megadrive was nothing you would not expect to find in half a hundred devices, and indeed its predecessor and its own sound chip used the Z80 I mentioned just before) to do something nice.

Overclocking has been done for many years to varying effects.

What would happen varies with the system and what is done. The idea of independent clocks and decoupled IO on systems is not new but it is seldom implemented outside of the PC for many years (think PS2 era and even then I am not sure. Not to mention I still had PC code being in near daily use during that time PS2 was 2000 and we were still playing DOS games, using DOS tools and such that needed slowing down by this point or otherwise ran differently on different machines.). This means for what would essentially be a glorified overclock you have subtle knock on effects to how fast you can access RAM, access the controllers, possibly update the screen (maybe even damage screens in some cases -- writing outside of vblank/hblank for many systems is considered quite bad news) as well as lifetime issues for those parts if you are driving them harder.
For something where you improve internal speeds (either virtually by having a super fast internal clock and presenting the results quicker in terms of apparent cycles or more practically by better design) then homebrew authors might like it (at least until you split the scene by making some works only work with people with fancy CPUs) and if there is a game that has a glitch because it did not account for the speed then it might not glitch or might work faster if the thing checks first (even considering interrupts then very rare in old code as you don't waste cycles there, still rare in new code to this day that is not done in "safe programming" styles/paradigms).

If you gave it more abilities then most code in and of itself won't use it. Or if you prefer see all those nice sound extras that SNES and now megadrive carts provide that don't do anything until you hack each game to use it? This is that.

To go much further than this I am going to have to start general ideas of CPU design, analogue electronics issues and ideas behind assembly coding*. Not too far but beyond the scope I care to do for a blog reply today. If you wanted to look them up though then it should become apparent why it was basically never done until more modern times, and even then why it tended to require a very specific set of circumstances and type of system to even contemplate it in the first place.

*terms to look for it you want. What RISC and CISC mean at a more fundamental level, circuit hazard, interrupts, adding machines and how to use logic gates to build things. Get enough of that under your belt and you will understand why things like http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#arminstructionsummary and all things like it contain number cycles for an instruction and the binary opcode format for it, that one goes less into undefined instructions. Some more links https://mgba.io/2017/05/29/holy-grail-bugs/ https://mgba.io/2018/03/09/holy-grail-bugs-revisited/ https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/ http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/video.htm and the assembly section on the same website .

Or if you prefer it is not going to be like upgrading your PC in most cases and games suddenly not having slowdown any more, faster load times and better things in other regards.

Edit. If we were to see replacements I would initially have expected them to come from devices that regularly toasted their CPU or had security that you could accidentally forget to include in your recreation. Neither have happened to my knowledge in game consoles, though there might be some security types for odd devices or just "easy" hacks (resoldering a CPU is easier than some software stuff, but in the end every console up to the current day is blown wide open or is save for a small handful of batches). We might see some in a year or two for recreations allowing people to build their own device from scratch. Indeed we are starting to see FPGA recreations of consoles go commercial and it is reasonably easy, if not terribly efficient (not that it matters much for old consoles -- inefficient modern chip is likely unthinkably efficient back in the day), to convert FPGA designs to burn into silicon (I think one of the 3ds flash carts might have even done such a thing for their cart). Any performance boost, or indeed bug fix, elements are a distant fourth to all this.

@FAST6191

I think Fast's answer is indisputably comprehensive for literally anyone's needs so yeah. In short most consoles use (and have historically used) custom parts so swapping them is impossible and overclocking tends to cause timing issues. The original Xbox was an exception since it literally used off the shelf PC parts and could have its RAM doubled and its processor swapped with one that was twice as fast.

I would probably read a concisely written breakdown of sources of latency in emulation (video and audio) and how different emulators attempt to reduce this. I think some of the latest emulators out there use "run ahead" techniques which supposedly helps to reduce this? Probably a very interesting topic to go through.

It would be super awesome to see some practical breakdowns from latency testing with some popular ones as well. Although how you would reliably test that, I'm not certain.