Impressive Software

Post software you think is just plain impressive in scope. It doesn't matter if you'll never use it or even if its useful for a lot of use cases, its just plain impressive software in terms of effort involved.
My vote goes to the Dolphin Emulator. These guys make NO compromises when designing this shit and their effort has clearly payed off. While a bunch of retards were hacking together N64 and PS2 emulators that don't work the Dolphin guys were running laps documenting the lowest instructions of the PowerPC 750CL and its derivatives. truly impressive.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=9v5NosQE8Tk
forum.beyond3d.com/threads/was-gc-more-or-less-powerful-than-ps2-spawn.52550/
forum.beyond3d.com/threads/strengths-and-weaknesses-of-gamecube-relative-to-its-peers-spawn.59940/
sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?26634-PS2-vs-Dreamcast-Graphics&p=645458&viewfull=1#post645458
sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?26634-PS2-vs-Dreamcast-Graphics&p=645473&viewfull=1#post645473
dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

The PPC 750 was used in Apple G3 machines, Mars rovers, and many other embedded devices. Getting documentation on it is easy. ATI Flipper, SGI Reality CoProcessor, and Sony Emotion Engine are a hell of a lot more difficult to get information on.

This isn't a particularly advanced program, but my vote goes to Geany. It's my favorite text editor and I've been using it for 10 years or so. Compared to all the other FOSS I've used it's impressive to me how I have never once witnessed a single bug in it. All the other FOSS I use on a daily basis I'm usually able to find at least a few bugs in. For instance, every linux file manager I've used I've at least ran into one bug, glitch or crash. Usually more than one. Same goes for window managers & panels.

Obviously bigger projects that receive corporate backing are more stable, but Geany is just maintained by a few guys as a hobby. There's no funding save for a paypal donate button on their site, which I'm sure they don't make much from. I wish every free program I use could be as stable as Geany, and I wonder what sets it apart and allows it to be so rock solid.

The Reality Coprocessor and Sony EE are both MIPS cores. The EE might be a bit more difficult because of its rather novel use of a Vector Processing Unit and Memory Controller on-die

Regardless, the N64 and PS2 aren't as powerful as the Gamecube, I blame poor project management. Real N64 emu development has pretty much halted to a standstill and PS2 emulation is pretty much going through a complete reboot with people finally cleaning up the messy codebase of PCSX2 and the Play! emulator coming out of fucking nowhere

Every time I see perl 6 people partying about getting startup time down to 0.5 seconds or python people whooping about their 0.08 seconds or whatever, I gain a little more respect for perl 5 with its 0.002. Code written for that will work 20 years from now with little to no change and it'll get faster with hardware instead of expanding to consume it.


Ubershaders are some "Mel The Programmer" tier batshit insanity. I still can't believe someone actually built an entire GPU emulator in GLSL.

kys ESL fag

The Reality Co processor is a wholly separate chip than the MIPS CPU on the N64. The Emotion Engine is the one with the MIPS core in it. The PS2 is absolutely more powerful than the GameCube as well.

Dolphin is FOSS retard.

Geany is pretty good (I started with it before going full emacs) but it's only a scintilla frontend. I suggest you try textadept (seems good, but it's not packaged anywhere since it bundles everything it needs) or scite (the reference scintilla editor).

That is absolutely wrong and I honestly don't know where retards get this idea

The PS2 was the weakest console that gen though, the Xbox was the most powerful by a large margin and the GameCube was somewhere in the middle. In terms of raw horsepower though the Gamecube absolutely destroyed the PS2. The only advantage the PS2 had over the GCN was larger disks to store more uncompressed textures. Geometry wise it's no contest, the Gamecube could simply pull more triangles per second than the PS2 could

...

In terms of raw power, the PS2 blew the pants of GameCube. There's a reason Criterion didn't make Burnout 3 on the GameCube. God of War is another game hell even Devil May Cry wouldn't have been possible on GameCube unless they severely toned down the number of objects on screen.

ffmpeg

How much bleach did you chug today, son?

The demoscene as a whole. Second Reality, Ocean Machine, Nature Suxx, .kkrieger, 8080 MPH... The fact that lone autists can create such technical marvels always puts a glow of warmth in my heart.

Honorable mention: ZFS, the idea of eliminating fixed volumes and abstracting RAID entirely is incredibly awesome. I just wish there was a decent implementation in any kernel other than Solaris


Speaking of Dolphin, does anybody maintain PPA builds of Ishiiruka? Mainline Dolphin is pathetic, and manually building Ishiiruka from source each update is annoying.


Flipper is basically an ArtXATIAMD R300, so it's nowhere near as internally obscure as the PS2's GS.

Agreed on the first part, the RSX was essentially an abortive primordial branch in the evolution of programmable hardware shader units encompassing both a subset and superset of conventional OGL/≤D3D11, so N64 emulation has necessarily been composed of hacks until Vulkan/D3D12.
This is not up for debate, the GCN was capable of ~10 single-precision GFLOPS, the PS2 of ~6, the GCN was simply a newer and more powerful class of hardware. As for the state of GCN vs. PS2 emulation, the PS2's architecture was extremely idiosyncratic, using all sorts of bespoke vector processing hardware in a bizarre multiprocessor arrangement encompassing the CPU(s), GPU(s), and memory, sprinkled across two packages. In contrast, the only unusual feature of the very straightforward GCN compared to a contemporary Macintosh was its 1T-SRAM cache.

>I just wish there was a decent implementation in any kernel other than Solaris
It's called btrfs :^)

systemd

Why isn't this merged back into mainline?

Pure politics, same reason they refuse to allow any FPS hacks.

Qt
Renoise
Rhinoceros

Burnout 1 and 2 did come out on Gamecube and they do full 60 fps, only at a higher resolution and without that ugly PS2 texture shimmering or fullscreen vaseline filtering. They only stopped publishing on GC because sales were bad.

youtube.com/watch?v=9v5NosQE8Tk

TempleOS.

Atom

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He's not homeless anymore.

DuckDuckGo is pretty nice, since it's basically Google but less botnet. It pretty much eclipses google's search engine in everything except more freedumbs.

too bad it makes money by sucking on amazon and ebay's cocks

dolphin is one of those few programs that I can say it just works

forum.beyond3d.com/threads/was-gc-more-or-less-powerful-than-ps2-spawn.52550/
forum.beyond3d.com/threads/strengths-and-weaknesses-of-gamecube-relative-to-its-peers-spawn.59940/
sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?26634-PS2-vs-Dreamcast-Graphics&p=645458&viewfull=1#post645458
sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?26634-PS2-vs-Dreamcast-Graphics&p=645473&viewfull=1#post645473

What an empty statement.

Sorry user, we're adults, not fanboys, this isn't a contest. Even if we compare first party PS2 titles with first party Gamecube titles it's just no contest.

Yes what do game developers know anyway?

Actual numbers don't lie. You're downright ignoring reality here. I don't deny he was having trouble getting shit to work on the Gamecube but I'm skeptical it was really because the hardware was incapable. If reality wasn't in complete contrast to what he was asserting I'd be inclined to believe him but obviously we're not getting the whole story. Anecdotes are by nature arguments by assertion.

gno. That shit is the worst modelling program I have ever used.

Hahaha!!! Oh man, oh man, I thought I remembered how retarded consolebabbies were back then, but this is like trying to claim a Radeon 7500 outclassed a GeForce 4Ti!

the only thing i don't know with geany is to use it as an actual IDE

Retroarch, I guess. The scope is big, but it works really nice.
The portability of it is also pretty impressive.

LibRetro is a very good, but not revolutionary, idea. RetroArch, on the other hand, is an abomination that somehow manages to bring the worst of Smart TV (and badly retrofitted touchscreen) UIs to the PC, in a broken format that still requires fiddling with hidden .cfg files for any but the most trivial features. And, worst of all, for a type of software (emulators) where perfectly good GUIs to configure the entire thing have been standard since the earliest days of ZNES, even for complex multi-system emulators like MAME and MESS. On top of this, they managed to invent fuckups from out of thin air, like the entire concept of the RetroPad, and their retarded library pathing system.

RetroArch should be purged from existence and replaced with an actual LibRetro frontend suitable for a WIMP environment.

There are alternative frontends, though (phoenix and minir). Honestly, I can live with XMB, but the bugs have to go. Also, per-core/per-game config is horrible to handle.

Minir is dead, Phoenix has been in feature-incomplete pre-alpha for 3 years futzing with iTunes-style library management gimmicks. It's just staggering that somebody could fail at a task so simple any dev could knock out something functional in a week with Qt or whatever.

Yeah, I know. Still better than using the standalone emulators, but the situation isn't ideal.

I mainly use it for the ultra-low-latency DRM/KMS mode under Linux, and the bleeding-edge LibRetro-specific branches of most emulator cores. If it were capable of fulfilling its intended role as a superior unified frontend for all emulators (much like MPC-HC for media filters under Windows, or the sadly deceased Bomi under Linux), it would be truly indispensable.

You can run Doom 3 like that on modern hardware too if you disable lighting and bumpmaps

I use it only to avoid avoid various GUI dependencies installed and for cores without frontend (beetle-psx especially).
Now, you should probably remember that having this kind of UI is a normal solution to the portability problem taken to the extreme (I mean, it runs on desktops, smartshits, consoles and even handhelds). I'd really like a GUI using Qt or something like that, but drawing your own shit via OpenGL works everywhere.

Wow OP, you weren't kidding. I was always under the impression you needed some kind of monster gaymen PC to emulate anything stronger than an N64. Imagine my delight to find I can run Metroid Prime with relative stability on my old laptop. Thanks.

What region?

To be fair, a proper UNIX-like system is far more complex than TempleOS.

The PS2 was a bitch to work with for the time. Moon architecture, a paltry amount of video ram, and the Emotion Engine was actually inferior to the Dreamcasts GPU.

Most consider the PS2 the 3rd or 4th most difficult console to work with ever, behind the Jaguar, Saturn, and, maybe, the PS3.

The Gamecube always had better graphics than the PS2 and the Xbox had the #1 console graphics. This was common knowledge 12 years ago and not controversial.

Blender 3d.

The Dreamcast's PowerVR GPU was a more elegant solution, like the GameCube's Flipper, but it couldn't be re-purposed to do non graphics things like physics calculations. The actual CPUs on both GameCube and Dreamcast were anemic. 4/5ths of the supposed GameCube GFLOPS performance came from the GPU. This was before compute shaders were a thing so if it wasn't graphics related, it had to be handled by the 1.9GFLOP CPU.

Going to full per-pixel realtime lighting without any radiosity is such a horse shit. Everything looks even worse than in Quake 3 for example (which was done earlier and was just fine), and yet is more costly to render.

It's controversial because of fanboyism and retarded ubderage children who think because Nintendo makea the weakest consoles now it must mean they always have

The most impressive thing about Dolphin is the Ubershaders, fucking incredible piece of software engineering.
dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/

Seconded.

Dolphin is pretty effing great. I learned a lot about graphics programming by trying to see how Vulcan could be integrated last year.

The illumination in early D3D8/OGL2 games sucked, but the ability to do realtime (if razor-sharp) shadows and bumpmapping was tremendous.

Do demos count? Because that shit is really impressive.