Mossy Feathers (They/Them)

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 2; Need for Speed 2 and 3; SimCity 3k.

    Also, check your monitor properties. Afaik most CRT monitors (not TVs; those run at 60hz/50hz depending on region) are meant to run at 75~85hz. If it’s running at 60hz when it’s meant to run at a higher refresh rate, then that might be why it’s nauseating (my crt has a very noticeable flicker at 60hz, but that goes away at 75hz).

    Edit: to expand on this for any late-comers: CRTs work by using an electron gun (aka particle accelerator aka a motherfucking PARTICLE CANNON) to fire an electron beam at red, green and blue phosphors. When the electron hits a phosphor, it emits light based on the color hit. This beam sweeps over the phosphors at a speed dictated by the display’s refresh rate and illuminates the phosphors one-by-one until it has illuminated the entire screen. This is why trying to take a picture or video of a CRT requires you to sync your shutter speed with the CRT. If your shutter isn’t synced then the monitor will appear to be strobing or flickering (because it is, just very, very quickly)

    These phosphors have a set glow duration, which varies based on the intended display refresh rate. A refresh rate that is too low will cause the phosphors to dim before the electron beam passes over them, while a refresh rate that’s too high can cause ghosting, smearing, etc because the phosphors haven’t had a chance to “cool off”. TVs are designed to run at 60hz/50hz, depending on the region, and so their phosphors have a longer glow duration to eliminate flickering at their designated refresh rate. Computer monitors, on the other hand, were high-quality tubes and were typically geared for +75hz. The result is that if you run them at 60hz then you’ll get flickering because the phosphors have a shorter glow duration than a TV.

    Note: this is a place where LCD/LED panels solidly beat CRTs, because they can refresh the image without de-illuminating the panel, avoiding flicker at low refresh rates.

    Edit 2: oh! Also, use game consoles with CRT TVs, not computer monitors. This is because old consoles, especially pre-3d consoles, “cheated” on sprites and took advantage of standard CRT TV resolution to blend pixels. The result is that you may actually lose detail if you play them on a CRT computer monitor or modern display. That’s why a lot of older sprite-based games unironically look better if you use a real CRT TV or a decent CRT emulator video filter.







  • Yeah, it’s entirely possible for a child of two brown-haired parents to have blonde or even red hair.

    For one thing, blonde hair tends to get darker as you get older, and so a lot of people who were born with blonde hair can end up with dirty blonde, light brown or even dark brown hair. This can mask the fact that they technically have the genetics for blonde hair.

    Another factor is that blonde hair is a recessive gene, which (if I remember my genetics correctly) means that not everyone who has the gene will actually gets blonde hair because they need two copies of it instead of one; something which can get further confused by whether you’re born with XX, XY, or some other combination of chromosomes (I think, if I remember correctly, that some genes are more likely to express themselves with XY chromosomes or vice versa, not sure if that’s true for hair color). So you can have a family with brown hair, but if the genetics line up just right, you can get a blonde-haired kid (if I understand correctly, this is also true for red hair).


  • My sister and I were both born with blonde hair (though our hair is more dirty blonde/brown now), but both my parents have brown hair; so it’s entirely possible to get blonde hair from two brown-haired parents.

    Ironically I used to wish my hair was brown because I liked the Beatles and they had brown/black hair! Now that I’m an adult and don’t have the same enthusiasm for them anymore, I wish I had blonde hair again.


  • Yeah, generally it’s whatever they enjoy the most. Some people have multiple favorites, others only have one. Some people have context-sensitive favorites (e.g. “my favorite color is purple, except I also like cyan on dark backgrounds, turquoise on accent tiles, and if it’s on a British sports car, British racing green”), others just have all-time favorites. That said, I do find it kinda weird when someone only has a single favorite thing, but humans are strange I guess.




  • You’re the one contradicting yourself when you’re saying that linux requires a Translation layer. And the translations are not always 1:1. Please show me the benchmarks.

    How is this a contradiction? It seems like it’d be the opposite. Translation layers reduce performance as they translate programs from one system to another, so the fact that Linux can run games in a translation layer and still get as good, or better, performance than Windows means that Linux is fast enough to make up for the translation layer performance penalty.

    Regardless, here are some benchmarks.

    From 2019, Windows 10 vs Pop_OS:

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/07/17/these-windows-10-vs-pop-os-benchmarks-reveal-a-surprising-truth-about-linux-gaming-performance/?sh=6035a5e65e74

    While these are all in 1080p, several are also running in translation layers. The ones that are running native were faster in Linux, while the ones running in proton achieved roughly the same performance. This was also 4~5 yrs ago, and proton has improved a lot. Additionally, these were run on an Nvidia card using their proprietary drivers, and Linux is known to be AMD-biased.

    So here’s another one from a couple years ago with Windows 11 vs Manjaro (benchmark totals for 4k, 1440p and 1080p at the end): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xwmNLqJL7Zo

    While they found that games tended to perform better on windows in 4k, they also found that games in 1440p were roughly the same while 1080p averaged faster on Linux despite running in a mix of proton, Proton-GE, and wine. This is also a couple years old though, and while the average might be better on Linux, there were some pretty significant performance gaps at the top and bottom of the chart.

    Here’s a third one from about 6 months ago. This was pretty highly circulated on Lemmy, so I’m surprised you didn’t see it, but here it is:

    https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/5340976

    They claim to have seen an average 17% improvement on the games they benchmarked, and included a video of the benchmarks. There was a later benchmark where they claimed they got +20% performance using a tweaked version of Garuda Linux, but that required user tweaks and I’m mainly concerned with “un-tweaked” performance.


    Linux isn’t perfect, and if you want to play games with no hassle, then Windows is probably still your best bet. However, in situations where you’re trying to squeeze as much performance as you can out of an underpowered device, Linux just seems obvious. You have standardized hardware that allows you to spend the time and effort to iron out bugs and deficiencies with fewer edge cases than you’d get with non-standardized hardware. I think that’s why Steam(Deck) OS is so good. It runs on standardized hardware and so it’s easy for Valve to configure and optimize for user-friendliness because they don’t have to worry about ten billion different hardware configurations.

    Also, as a side note, I’ve found that older games just run better on Linux. They ironically tend to be way less of a hassle to get working. It’s because Wine (and I think Proton/Proton-GE) have compatibility for 16bit programs, while windows doesn’t. You have to run a virtual machine with Windows XP or earlier to run 16bit programs, and I’ve found that to be a mess.

    Seriously, I cannot get a Windows 98 virtual machine set up on Windows 10 to save my life. It just won’t properly install on software like VMWare, and I’ve had to resort to actual PC emulators to get 16bit games to run on a modern windows PC (which are slow as fuck). I’ve read it has something to do with AMD CPUs? I don’t know what the specific issue is though, just that it supposedly works just fine on Intel but not AMD. However, I haven’t encountered that mess on Linux.

    Edit: as an amusing side-side note, I’m old enough that a number of my favorite games from when I was growing up are no longer able to run on Windows because they require a 16bit OS (or a 32bit OS with 16bit compatibility). Despite that, my grandfather’s Hoyle card game that’s older than I am, still somehow runs flawlessly on Windows 10. What the fuck?


  • Many of the games are made to be run on windows, windows is still a effecient os, it’s just a lot of bloat, which can be disabled.

    A) as someone else pointed out, “bloat” and “efficient” are exclusive to one another. Now, you can argue that windows is efficient in some areas and bloated in others, but “bloat” and “efficiency” are mutually exclusive when applied generally.

    B) yes, most, if not all of it, can be disabled through registry edits and 3rd party hacks. However, in my experience, the more you try to debloat windows, the more unstable it gets. Then, it will all come back eventually via updates, which means you get to disable it all again. Finally, again in my experience, the more you try to debloat windows, the less stable it gets, and this carries over even when the OS reinstalls/reenables bloat you tried to get rid of. Seriously, my experience is that even after windows updates rebloat everything, the OS remains unstable, and becomes even more unstable after you debloat again. Granted this was with windows 10, but I imagine the same is more or less true for windows 11.

    Also a lot of optimizations in nt has been done for gaming, features which are missing in the linux kernel, but there are RFCs to add nt like synchronization primitives, in the linux kernel.

    C) and yet, iirc, recent Linux vs Windows 11 benchmarks show Windows games running on Linux via Proton/Proton-GE anywhere from slightly slower to slightly faster than Windows, despite requiring translation layers to run; while the Linux-native games typically run faster than their Windows counterparts.

    Windows is just that bloated.