We've been milling wheat with wind power for more than a thousand years; run-of-river hydro-mechanical solutions have been used for milling, mining, and forging for just as long.
Electric wind and hydro solutions are hundreds of years old, at this point.
And of course, there's steam.
I think we'd have had a green revolution with wind and water. Petroleum wasn't necessary.
How do you make steam without burning something? If you say nuclear fission then you're proposing that humans would somehow have invented electric mining vehicles and mined enough ore to invent fusion without burning a single hydrocarbon molecule?
I suppose in an alternate reality where we simply had no fossil fuels this may have been the tech tree. It would have taken centuries longer though.
Coal was certainly a problem; we have the word "smog" for a reason. But we were already on our way to electrified transport, via street cars and similar, when the automobile surged to popularity.
And where does all that electricity come from? Until the 40s or so, hydroelectric plants and wind turbines could provide hardly any power output compared to coal plants, later supplemented by gas plants; even the electric streetcars relied on fossil fuels further down the line. Renewable energy development would've had to scale an order of magnitude further than in reality to be a basis for industry and transportation, alongside advances in electricity distribution and storage to pull it from where it's generated.
The solution, in the absence of oil, would be to simply build more hydro and wind. Neither are particularly difficult technologies. Where they would have lagged in efficiency they make up for in simplicity.
Distributing electricity isn't easy, but it also isn't particularly insurmountable. We had to solve it even with oil as a source of electrical generation.
Your scenario seems baselessly optimistic. If it were just as simple to run society off of those, we would've been doing it to some extent already: it's not like Big Coal or Big Oil was blocking everyone else from having ideas about how to generate power (see: the initial spread of gas power, followed by the spread of nuclear power), and surely many people would've had the incentive to produce power without dealing with coal miners or oilmen. It's that it would've been dramatically more expensive without all the design iterations they have since gone through.
And if you greatly restrict supply at a given price point, without changing the underlying demand, you'll end up with much higher prices and lower total volume, so we wouldn't enjoyed all the compounding benefits from access to energy.
There are places that do. Here in Canada there are at least two provinces that subsist almost entirely off of hydro, and have for the better part of a century. Both export huge amounts of electricity to the USA.
And we have active political conflict between big oil and everyone else, where there seems to be an insatiable demand for socializing the externalities of oil and gas while receiving public funding to make oil production competitive and market viable. In that manner, it places itself in front of efforts to use literally anything else.
If oil and gas had never received a single dollar of public funding, including by way of public funding for externalities that support or recover from oil and gas, then it never would have been market viable as an energy source in places where it doesn't seep out of the soil. Roads would not have been paved, power plants would not have been built, suburbs would only exist for the very wealthy.
Respectfully, from reading all your other comments all over this thread, I don't think you understand everything that modern technology stands on top of. You're handwaving away enormously difficult, complicated things and processes with "just use hydro". It doesn't work like that.
Your heart is in the right place and I sympathize with you about car-oriented development in North America. But I think you have a massive blind spot.
Fossil fuels were good and necessary for the modern world. Their owners have perpetrated heinous lies to keep us tied to them for far longer than was good or necessary.
We might argue whether they were good (I disagree) but I cannot agree that they were ever _necessary_ as an energy source. Viable alternatives exist and have existed for the entire duration of their use as a form of energy; and the story of oil-as-energy is the story of human suffering in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; without oil there would not be wars over oil, there would be healthier populations, and (likely) climate change would be less of a concern.
It wasn't necessary for it to happen eventually, but if eventually is several generations further down the line because it would have been painfully slow that's an important factor to consider.
Slower industrial and economic development would include huge human costs in terms of slower medical, social, economic and possibly also political development. It might have some beneficial effects as well though. I don't think it's an easy calculation to make.
We had rapid social progress _despite_ suburbanization. It never came to pass that we could assume that every household had a car, there was always a statistically significant urban populations that preferred transit, and delivery of public services is less efficient with lower density populations.
I happen to believe that we would be a healthier, happier society if suburbanization had never occurred. If we walked more, and had better access to the services we need, then we'd be healthier and happier. And it would be cheaper to deliver services.
I think that may be insufficiently factoring in energy costs. If energy costs a n order of magnitude or two more for an extended period, you just get a whole lot less economy generally, and therefore a whole lot less of everything an economy can provide.
Walking more sounds great, but I'm not sure it compensates for what could be an order of magnitude less health care generally.
Health care is more efficiently delivered to higher density populations. Low density populations increase the time to access health care, which increases the risk of delivering emergency care but it also encumbers access to primary care with the associated access time. Suburban areas are a great deal more expensive in terms of health care delivery.
Consider that in the absence of suburbanization there is decreased demand for energy. Higher density housing is cheaper to service overall, but also provides greater efficiency in accessing services. The reduced efficiency of suburban residences _requires_ the existence of high density forms of readily accessible and consumable energy; it simply isn't viable to build an American suburb without cheap energy, because it is a hideously inefficient model.
But other models _do_ exist, and _are_ successful. The suburb can die and society will be better off for it.
I imagine it would not have been so dramatic, though. Might have ultimately found our way to the same spot, but a few hundred years longer. It is hard to argue that the incredible energy density of fossil fuels (oil in particular) is not a big driver of our industrialization.
There's certainly a quality to it that has lent itself to the suburbanization of the USA. In the absence of viable electric battery technology, the suburbanization would have relied on street cars and pedestrians.
Which existed. And were ripped up around the time the automobile took over; which has all sorts of theories around it as to why...
I think without oil we'd have higher density cities, better public transit, and healthier populations.
IMHO, the API and Test Suite, particularly the latter, define the contract of the functional definition of the software. It almost doesn't matter what that definition looks like so long as it conforms to the contract.
There was an issue where Google did something similar with the JVM, and ultimately it came down to whether or not Oracle owned the copyright to the header files containing the API. It went all the way to the US supreme court, and they ruled in Google's favour; finding that the API wasn't the implementation, and that the amount of shared code was so minimal as to be irrelevant.
They didn't anticipate that in less than half a decade we'd have technology that could _rapidly_ reimplement software given a strong functional definition and contract enforcing test suite.
I'm in favour of PDT from a forward-thinking perspective.
With climate change causing extreme heat events to be more frequent, having the sun rise later in the day will defend the work hours of those who find themselves labouring outside without having to adjust the hours that they work.
When side-loading and adblock stops being available then the average consumer will flip a table. Most folks I know with Android devices have them running with adblockers and such; and their Android TV devices are _loaded_ with pirate streaming software.
Because here in Canada you can buy devices preloaded with such things for a pittance over MSRP.
Yup. This sentiment expresses quite clearly how Zig has no significant understanding or interest in being a language used for widely distributed applications, like video games.
There's no way I can ship a binary that flags the scanners. This wouldn't be the first language I've avoided because it has this unfortunate behaviour.
And expecting virus scanner developers to relax their rules for Zig is a bit arrogant. Some virus scanners started flagging software built with Nim simply because Nim became popular with virus authors as a means to thwart scanners!
The originals sound better. The aliasing provides a crunchiness and sharpness to the final output that drives emotional energy. That zero mission rhythm isn't intended to sound smooth and soft, the driving hard beats are an emotional tool for eliciting anxiety and anticipation from the player.
But this is a bit like those who use smoothing filters. It's ultimately about taste, but it should be recognized that unless the filter is attempting to accurately recreate the original hardware of the era then the original design intent is not being adhered to, and so something may be lost in the "enhancement".
> The originals sound better. The aliasing provides a crunchiness and sharpness to the final output that drives emotional energy.
In the mid-1980s the first really affordable sampler was the Ensoniq Mirage, which used the Bob Yannes-designed ES5503 DOC (Digital Oscillator Chip) to generate its waveforms. It played back 8-bit samples and used a fairly simple phase accumulator that didn't do any form of interpolation (I don't count "leftmost neighbour" as interpolation). Particularly when you pitch it down, you get a rough, clanky, gritty "whine" to samples, that the analogue filters didn't necessarily do a lot to remove.
Later on they released the EPS which had 13-bit sampling. Why 13-bit? I don't know, I guess because the Emulator I and II used 8-bit samples but μ-law coding, giving effectively 13-bit equivalent resolution. It also used linear interpolation to smooth the "jumps" between samples, and even if you loaded in and converted a Mirage disk the "graininess" when you pitched things down was gone.
I'm currently writing some code to play back Mirage samples from disk images, and I've actually added a linear interpolator to it. Some things sound better with it, some things sound worse. I think I'll make it a front panel control, so you can turn it on and off as you want.
I'll just throw some more ES5503 DOC love here. It's also the audio chip in the Apple IIGS. In 1986, having a stock home computer playing 32 simultaneous hardware voices (without software mixing), each with hardware pan ... was remarkable. Otherwise you were stuck with 3 or maybe 4 hardware voices. e.g. the timbre and filter of the C64 SID chip was gorgeous (another Bob Yannes design), but 3 voices was all you got. And just 3 square waves and noise on the Ataris of the era. Chords or complex harmony? Fire up the arpeggiators! Lol.
When I browse the demoscene I'm always a bit surprised there's not much Apple IIGS content. Graphically, it was stunted, but the ES5503 DOC was a pro synth engine right there next to the 6502 ... yowza.
A friend had this killer basement setup with a projector into a huge canvas dropsheet. Plus the game cube, and the GBA dock for it, so we were projecting those games meant for a 2 inch screen maybe 10-15 feet wide.
It's really close for me. I listened to the accurate version, then the enhanced one, and my first thought was "oh, yeah, this sounds better."
Then I listened to the accurate version again, and thought "wait, never mind, this one sounds better."
After going back and forth a few times, I think I still agree the original/accurate one is better, but it's pretty close. I really encourage people to listen for themselves.
For what it's worth, I have little to no personal nostalgia for the Game Boy Advance.
This is fair, I should have made it clearer that this is all subjective. For what it's worth I have all of this disabled by default in my own emulator because I think default settings should always err towards accuracy when that's a question.
I personally do prefer the interpolated versions in most cases because to me the extra high-frequency information just sounds like noise that makes it harder for my brain to process the underlying music. But clearly many feel differently!
I think it's not so much that one sounds better or the other.
The "uninterpolated" one is incorrect.
The "interpolated" one is incorrect.
The uninterpolated one has sharp square edges, which isn't correct. The GBA has a 12dB/octave filter at around 12kHz (IIRC) on the output, which the uninterpolated simulated output doesn't appear to have. This would knock the corners off a bit and make it "smoother" and less hissy, but would still have quite crunchy low frequency sounds.
The interpolated one smooths things off excessively, and while it doesn't really have much less spectral energy high up, what's there is in the wrong place.
Well, we can't just say 'original = intent'. The original artists presumably did the best job of expressing their intent as far as possible in the medium at the time, but that doesn't mean that this necessarily is the best expression of their intent ever.
It's like saying you can only watch the Simpsons with the exact late 1980s / early 1990s ads that they originally aired with, and everything else is sacrilege.
But without asking them it's pure conjecture. I don't think trying to retcon the best expression of their intent needs to be used to justify this project, either. Sometimes it's fun to see if you can build an improvement on what exists, even if it's a vehicle for learning about DSP or whatever domain the learner is in.
I don't think so, I think you're just getting a high end that isn't in the original audio. In the places where there are high frequencies the aliasing and the hiss just gets in the way.
The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint. We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.
> The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint.
Of course the artifacts were a constraint. Whether consciously considered or not, constraints influence design decisions.
> We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.
Maybe Frédéric Chopin would have written his etudes and nocturnes for the Roland SC-55 Goblins instrument patch if that choice had been available to him, but it wasn't. What we do know of are the choices he actually made facing the constraints that he actually faced.
Similarly, maybe a GBA music composer would have preferred for the music to be a high fidelity recording of a full piano arrangement if that choice had been available to them. But it wasn't, so they didn't.
We can speculate all we want about what creative choices might have been made if the people behind them were dealt a different hand, but in reality choices don't exist in isolation of constraints, and I think any line of reasoning trying to divorce the two is futile.
The idea that sound designers on old games were totally siloed and ignorant of how their compositions would sound on final consumer hardware is completely wrong. Most of these composers were programmers themselves and knew exactly how to get the final hardware to make the sounds they wanted, even when they composed using more advanced tech.
Programmers using devkits (more powerful than the consumer hardware) likewise.
I don't understand what you mean. Nobody said they didn't know how their compositions would sound, my argument is that at least some of these composers would have chosen the more advanced interpolation method, if it were available.
I guess it's hard to stop my originalist tendencies from boiling over into other topics...
What you're saying to me is like someone saying, well, if the piano had more octaves then existing compositions would have been better. But those pieces were composed with the current amount of octaves in mind in the first place...
Maybe there's an analogue with the harpsichord-to-piano transition, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about that yet.
Haha, my first gut reaction to reading your second paragraph was "No, it'd be better to compare it to compositions written for harpsichord and played on piano".
I guess history has shown that most composers (and listeners) preferred the piano sound over the harpsichord sound the majority of the time.
That may be true, but the sound designers were still making the best of what they had. They could probably imagine how the same composition would sound better.
When you play e.g. Gamecube games in an emulator, do you run them in 480p or do you render at a higher resolution? The former is clearly what the designers were targeting, but I think there’s rarely any benefit to eschewing higher resolutions. It just looks even better.
You say that, but it was quite common to "allow" a bit of aliasing in sampling back when we had very limited equipment, to introduce a bit of "sparkle" into percussive sounds that would otherwise be lost by low sampling rates.
Given its spectral complexity can you even tell if a hihat sample is aliased?
>I don't think so, I think you're just getting a high end that isn't in the original audio. In the places where there are high frequencies the aliasing and the hiss just gets in the way.
I don't get this, are you saying that this aliasing is just an artifact of the emulation? Like the GBA speaker/headphone jack itself would also be affected by the same aliasing right? And in that case the song was composed for that, right?
I don't think it would be right to go as far as to say that there's a huge strong interplay in every single GBA title's song with the hardware (I'm sure some stuff was phoned in and only listened to by the composer in whatever MIDI DAW thing they were using) but at one point the GBA was the target right?
Yes, they absolutely have. The use of AI chat bots for role playing is now fairly commonplace, and not just for sex chat. Silly Tavern and Kobold are major tools for running those locally.
There are numerous guides for integrating an LLM as a sort of automatic game master when _also_ following solo play variants of major TTRPGs. You can find these on reddit and drivethrurpg.
Interesting, I didn't expect that. I guess stock markets have a good reason to worry about video game studios then. Now, makes me wonder if movie companies stocks were similarly affected when major video models were announced.
For what it's worth, unless it can be conclusively argued that surveillance is necessary for the task to be done this sort of continuous surveillance is illegal in Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia. It violates the privacy of employees.
Oh, it absolutely is; if your product doesn't update its EAC bits regularly then it may as well not use EAC at all. Even still, there are known ways around it.
Electric wind and hydro solutions are hundreds of years old, at this point.
And of course, there's steam.
I think we'd have had a green revolution with wind and water. Petroleum wasn't necessary.
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