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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Video codecs mostly work by tracking movement, predicting which pixels will change, and striving to only encode the pixels that actually change or change dramatically. In other words, compression looks for patterns.

    All of that goes out the window when you try to compress static. There are no patterns. It simply can’t be compressed. This isn’t a matter of the algorithms not being good enough. It’s a fundamental limit of information theory.

    Anything fancier amounts to embedding the intro into the compressor as a well-known pattern. And at that point, you’re better off just caching a 4K version of the intro as a standalone video file directly in the app.





  • \1. Many retro games were made for CRT TVs at 480p. Updating the graphics stack modern TVs is valuable, even if nothing else is changed.

    \2. All of my old consoles only have analog A/V outputs. And my TV only has one analog A/V input. The mess of adapter cables and swapping is annoying. I want the convenience of playing on a system that I already have plugged in.

    \3. I don’t even still have some of the consoles that play my favorite classic games, and getting retro hardware is sometimes difficult. Especially things like N64 controllers with good joysticks.

    Studios don’t need to do a full blown remake to solve these problems. But I’m also not going to say the Crash and Spyro remakes weren’t welcome. Nintendo’s Virtual Console emulators toe this line pretty well.

    But studios should still put in effort to make these classic games more accessible to modern audiences, and if that means a remake, that’s fine with me.

    (I’m mostly thinking about the GameCube/PS2 generation and earlier. I don’t see much value in remakes of the Wii/PS3 generation yet.)