He didn’t say over how many games—I just spent half that on a good 10 games

Fun fact, I read that GRRM still writes using a DOS copy of WordPerfect

Bet there’s some stellar ales around there

Archive.org still exists and still has DMCA immunity*, you can get no-intro, goodset & redump sets on there. There is a gap in PC game ISOs currently though afaik, but steam and gog do seem to be good for covering most releases

Failing legal options, those sets will be available forever via BitTorrent

*If you’re in the US, please make sure your representative knows how important it is this continues—well, unless they’re a republican, in which case, probably better they stay oblivious if they don’t already know.

Probably jumping on the popularity of retro gaming

Right, so I’m not a low-level PC hardware expert or anything, but:

We only got resizable BAR like a couple of years ago, and it was very much a premium enthusiast feature at the time. Are modern engines and the games built for them optimised to expect resizable BAR as a baseline yet? If not that will still be a limiting factor right?

I thought the reason resizable BAR was introduced was because we hit the limits of what the previous approach allowed regardless of the speed of the link

i.e. of course it doesn’t make a difference with games today, they’re built targeting hardware configurations that will limit the utility of extra storage bandwidth

Reiterating that I might have this entirely wrong, so I’m more than happy to be corrected here

Ah that’s good to know, might be one for 86box then

I would also suggest the modern emulated alternatives if you struggle to get hold of the original hardware

MT32-pi: https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi (covers the MT-32 & CM-32, can also do some general midi with sound fonts, so in theory you could emulate a soundcanvas too)

Then there’s the sound cards too

PicoGUS: https://github.com/polpo/picogus/ (emulates a Gravis Ultrasound, SB2, AdLib, Tandy & also the MPU401 if you do end up with real midi hardware)

Also gonna just drop the goldlib too: https://pcmidi.eu/goldlib.html but that one might be a bit separate from what OP is currently doing

Yes to all of those, though I never actually played empire earth, so that goes on my modern day list

ME is a bold choice regardless—those installs always seem to destroy themselves before long in my experience (admittedly from quite a while ago now)

As for games (in no particular order):

• Command & Conquer (basically all of them up to including RA2)
• Diablo 2
• Warcraft 3
• Dungeon Keeper
• Theme Hospital
• Rollercoaster Tycoon (and RCT2)
• Unreal Tournament 99
• Fury 3/Terminal Velocity
• Z
• Age of Empires 1 & 2
• Pharaoh & Caesar 3
• MechWarrior 3
• Serious Sam
• Sim City 3000
• Quake 2 & 3
• Half Life
• Deus Ex

I’m definitely forgetting some

Holy shit, a week delay is mad

Well, I can see your post on l.w, so it’s not a total disconnect!

I wonder if there are any bugs in the new version of lemmy—do you know if mander has updated yet? The l.w admins tend to drag their heels updating because of some previously rough update experiences (I think mostly down to the size of the instance compared to others)

There were some issues with federation last time, perhaps it’s something similar

And between the two we had Mozilla Suite (which is what SeaMonkey basically is today)

That’s not even true is it? I’m pretty sure you can buy DLC for various steam games on places like humble bundle and they activate on steam

I would say the definitive PS1 Wipeout game is Wip3out: Special Edition.

Specifically the special edition as it comes with double the number of tracks where the best of the previous two games are selected for the bonus content.

Also the wipeout 3 soundtrack is absolute perfection.

As for how to play, retroarch is probably the recommended approach these days, PS1 emulation is pretty mature and has been for a while.

And also, whenever the next one comes along that library will still be there

Every other console you have the concept of “backwards compatibility” as a feature rather than an expectation.

Hardware transcoding on SBCs is generally not fantastic, you’re gonna want to look for one that has VAAPI/VDPAU support or you’re gonna be looking at 100% CPU for half a day to transcode a film, which will make your other services effectively unavailable at the time.

I used to run my Plex server on a Pi4 with 4GB of ram and it basically crashed any time transcoding kicked in, I swapped to an intel NUC so I could get QuickSync for transcoding.

I’ll point out though, every SBC you’ve listed has usb, which is all you need for an external disk. If you’re worried about size, I’ve got a 5tb external drive that’s about 5cm², which is basically the footprint of any SBC you could use in this scenario

Okay fair play, if you’re doing this super short term it could make sense. Though I question what SBC you’re using that’s capable of transcoding video but not the ability to plug in an external drive.

$12/m for your 2TB of usage would make sense for maybe 5 months before it would be cheaper to buy an external disk—and of course that storage is gone once that time is up, Vs a hard disk which will probably last you a decade or so

I’m not sure about transparently, that’s more in the tdarr wheelhouse I’d say. You’d dump the files into a monitored folder and it will replace it with a version transcoded to your specification.

Transcoding video takes a fair bit of time and energy too FWIW, so you’re going to need enough local storage to handle both the full size and smaller one.

I have to question the idea though, cloud storage is always more expensive than local for anything remotely non-temporary, and transcoding a load of video all the time is going to increase your energy bills. If you have any kind of internet bandwidth restrictions that’s gonna factor in too.

I’d say it would be better to save up for a cheap external hard drive to store your video on. For a year’s subscription to a cloud storage service that would provide enough space for a media library, you could probably get twice the amount of storage forever.

Unless you’ve got raw uncompressed video, any kind of transparent compression like you describe is only going to cost you in energy bills for no benefit. Most video is already compressed with specialised video compression as part of the file format, you can’t keep compressing stuff and getting smaller files.

The alternative is a lossy compression, which you could automate with some scripts or a transcoding tool like tdarr. This would reduce the quality of the video in order to reduce the file size