I guess it depends on how general you want it to be. A general ai that could learn SMB, breakout, bubble bobble or Warioware would different from something more specialized that is tailored for only platformers like SMB, sonic, etc.

Tennis for Two was a realtime tennis simulation a full 14 year earlier. Of course there wasn’t really a video arcade industry to bring it into the mainstream in the late 1950"s.

My first thought was “didn’t they just do that?” But I’ve checked and the Directors Cut was released on Wii and DS in 2009. Its been a minute.

Digger © 1983 Windmill Software

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digger_(video_game)

This is the game from my family’s PC AT that I go back to regularly,. But for convenience I usually use the WinDig port:

Windig, the Windows 95 version of Digger Remastered (87K). This version is rather new. If you are having trouble with it, try the older version (95K).

https://www.digger.org/download.html

I just used web archive to check and it looks like the 87K version and its description as “rather new” has been there for 21 years now. It was built to target Windows 95 and is still working on Windows 11 so at this point i would say its “pretty stable”.

And was re-released last week. I was pleased to see the 2024 console ports still support LAN play.

Don’t most ad blockers have this feature.

No lie most of those features sound like a bad idea.

They did their own ghost theme a little while ago, that was nice when you consider how easy it would have been to license Ghostbusters around that time.

The problem wasn’t that the line I wanted wasn’t on the page—it’s that the whole document wasn’t being rendered at once, so my browser’s builtin search bar just couldn’t find it.

I feel like this has been the case for a while now. Luckily they offer other search tools so its a gotcha that you only have to hit once.

In edit mode they capture the crtl-f keystrokes and offer their own search and replace tool. An argument could be made that they should offer a custom search tool for read mode if they are going to break the browsers built in tooling.

On android I take a screenshot and use the lens tool in my photos app.

The screenshot tool has a lens feature too but that one only offers opening the link while photos will also let me copy the URL without sending it to my browser.

In this case it is: https://watchdominion.org/

Lens is also good for OCR with built in copy to clipboard and translation features. As you can screenshot most apps or take a photo of a sign, letter, gift card, etc. it can be a handy little tool.

They IP blocked me on their official site

So,… What did you do?

The old version 5.0 is now replaced by the new version number 2407, reflecting the current month of July in the year 2024.

This change isn’t about introducing any fixes, updates, or features to the emulator itself;

I think this misrepresents the situation. There are 21k commits between these releases!

https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/tree/5.0

https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/tree/2407

This is their take:

Eight years have passed since that great release, and we have seen the dividends of that effort time and time again. Dolphin has seen constant updates, with new features and enhancements coming side by side with bug fixes and stability improvements. Users are now able to upgrade without fear, knowing that even in the unlikely event of a bug it will be fixed within hours. And of the thousands of titles that Dolphin can run, the number that do not function can now be counted on one hand!

All of this was achieved without a new release. In fact, Dolphin has been in the 5.0 era longer than any other, and with almost twenty-two thousand commits over the past eight years, the 5.0 era now makes up over half of Dolphin’s entire commit history! But users haven’t forgotten our past releases. They have been waiting for years, patiently anticipating when our next release may arrive.

That wait ends today.

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2024/07/02/dolphin-releases-announcement/

Yeah as far as gameplay mechanics go they would be fine, most main line Mario games have a unique gimmick.

I wonder if the family friendly branding would be as strong if people could publish rom hacks in retail channels.

The rom I’m seeing is tagged “proto” and is presumably a leak.

I wonder how the final release compares.

For a company that is iterating on its products this is probably fine from a mechanical sense but would be a nightmare for their IPs.

Consider the early Super Mario series:

• 1985 - Super Mario Bros
• 1986 - Super Mario Bros: The lost levels
• 1988 - Super Mario Bros 2
• 1988 - Super Mario Bros 3
• 1990 - Super Mario World
• 1996 - Super Mario 64

If in 1990/people could legally make their own “lost levels”-esque remixes with the SMB1 engine that would be paltry competition with SMW.

Similarly if people started remixing SMW in 1995 it wouldn’t have stopped SM64 from defining the 3d platformer genre and presenting a very strong argument for the analog stick being required for any 3d console.

But if people could tell their own Mario stories, that might tarnish the brand. If that happened we might not still be getting Mario games today.

I’m not sure how you open source both engine and assets without losing control of the narrative.

True, “community” might not be the right term.

But nonetheless if the OG developer structures their license so that each version becomes open source after 5 years then people publishing that as is or creating forks will always be a few steps behind the official release.

Of course if the title has any kind of community support that crowd sourced effort has the potential to outshine the OG developer, its important they time their license to give themselves a head start.

I think Friday Night Funkin’ will turn into a cautionary tale here, by releasing their game with much hype and open sourcing their code the first 7 weeks in 2020-21 they allowed community to really flourish. The player community has created content and then content that builds on and responds to that content (both narratively and mechanically) for several cycles now. Much of this content is now viewed as core to the FnF experience by players but much of it is also now built around other people’s IP (video games, TV shows, music, etc)

At the same time The Funkin’ Crew has been quietly working on Friday Night Funkin’: The Full Ass Game but I suspect that as a commercial game bound by the resources of single dev team and the rule of law they will be hard pressed to compete with the community they spawned.

While this is a win for remix culture it might not turn out as being the most prudent business decision. On the other hand they pulled off a two million dollar kickstarter so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On the other hand if the code from the 5 year old release was open source but the updates from today was still closed source for another 5 years that would encourage continual improvement addition content to differentiate from the community releases.

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/commit/a2a6bc534868773b9320ec3ca7399283cf7a375b

lost revenue

You can be sure this is retail only.

Enterprise Windows won’t have this feature and now appears to have added value for corporate customers.

Yep, app not found.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fit.crab

edit: but got 22 on Snake, which is nice.