Man pages are the only reference material I know that has more information-free circular definition chains than Wikipedia. And I imagine that it's for much the same reason; they're primarily written and fought over by experts who only need terse reminder notes for themselves, and who can't remember what it was like not spending every day up to their elbows in the subject.

Not to take away from your very good point, but I think the word you might be looking for is "eqivalence".

I bought these... holy macaroni, 16 years ago. I played the first one for a little while but then stopped. I don't remember why, so most likely it was just that something else caught my attention.

It might be time to have another look.

There was a recent discussion about controllers that may help you, here: https://lemmy.world/post/35100527

To add to my recommendation in that thread of the Logitech F310, for your question specifically:

• The wires on both it and the F510 are built-in, not socketed. In my experience usually only wireless controllers have socketed cables.
• I've never had the buttons on it get swapped around on any OS.
• I've never had any of them develop drift, and they're all 8-12 years old at this point.
• They don't support the WiiU.

Go for it, if it's to satisfy your own curiosity, but there's virtually no practical use for it these days. I had a personal interest in it at uni, and a project involving coding in assembly for an imaginary processor was a small part of one optional CS course. Over the years I've dabbled with asm for 32-bit Intel PCs and various retro consoles; at the moment I'm writing something for the Atari 2600.

In the past, assembly was useful for squeezing performance out of low-powered and embedded systems, but now that "embedded" includes SoCs with clock speeds in the hundreds of MHz and several megabytes of RAM, and optimizing compilers have improved greatly, the tiny potential performance gain (and you have to be very good at it before you'll be able to match or do better than most optimizing compilers) is almost always outweighed by the overhead of hand-writing and maintaining assembly language.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, SDL/SDL2 is more of a general-purpose library for dealing with different operating systems, not for abstracting graphics APIs. While it does include a graphics abstraction layer for doing simple 2D graphics, many people use it to have the OS set up a window, process, and whatever other housekeeping is needed, and instantiate and attach a graphics surface to that window. Then they communicate with that graphics surface directly, using the appropriate graphics API rather than SDL. I've done it with OpenGL, but my impression is that using Vulkan is very similar.

SDL_gui appears to sit on top of SDL/SDL2's 2D graphics abstraction to draw custom interactive UI elements. I presume it also grabs input through SDL and runs the whole show, just outputting a queue of events for your program to process.

I didn't know that generative AI could do things like this now.

Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade... salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on?

I didn't have time to reply earlier, but I was thinking the same thing, except with the extra step of replacing the username with a unique user identifier randomly generated at signup by the user's instance and kept secret.

I wonder if there's a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.

In my experience, your request is unrealistic. Bluetooth shouldn't be too much of a problem, either built-in or with a dongle, but a stick that can emulate much of anything from the PS2 library is going to be ridiculously expensive compared to other options. I'm not aware of any Fire Stick, however new, that could do it. The majority of sticks are good for up to 16-bit, and quite a few that are at the upper end of the sane price range will stretch to PS1, some N64 and Saturn, and maybe even some Dreamcast and PSP.

If you have to have PS2, I'd really recommend going for a micro-pc or high-end Android box if it absolutely has to be as small as possible.

Some games are so perfectly built to suit their original hardware that they just can't benefit from a remaster. I'd argue that Killer7 is one of those games. Port it to modern systems and re-release it by all means, but I think that there's very little you could really do to it without changing some part of its core DNA.

It's a weird, janky game, but it was weird and janky back in the day, too, not just in the hindsight of hardware limitations and outdated design sensibilities.

The first time I played it (on PS2), a year or two after launch, I could not get into it at all, and even somehow got stuck quite early in the game. A few years later I gave it another try and everything just clicked for me, including passing that tricky part without breaking a sweat. I can't imagine what the issue was the first time around.

I don't think it's for everyone but it definitely has a charming kind of oddness, and a slight clumsiness that's more endearing than irritating for people in its target audience.

After watching some of a playthrough on YouTube, the PC Engine version looks fairly close to the original arcade game (also called Valkyrie no Densetsu/Legend of the Valkyrie). The Famicom game (called Valkyrie no Boken: Toki no Kagi no Densetsu/Valkyrie's Adventure: Legend of the Key of Time) is very different. The two games really only share the title (sort of) and a little backstory.

Legend of the Valkyrie is an on-rails multi-direction shooting game with light RPG elements. The most similar games I can think of are the D&D beat-em-up games Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara, which were also originally arcade games.

But the Famicom's Valkyrie's Adventure is a ridiculously open world action RPG. The player is dropped in the middle of the wilderness with a sword and no idea of what to do first. You're free to walk in any direction, like most home 2D action RPGs. There's virtually no text, and many "puzzles" which involve using particular items in particular one-tile spaces (without any clues or hints). There's a guide in the original Famicom manual that will get you part-way through the game, but from there you're on your own.

Anyone who's interested in VR but doesn't want the high outlay or to commit to particular hardware just yet, and has any half-decent Android or iOS phone, should check out VRidge from RiftCat. It turns your phone into a Steam-compatible VR headset; just get one of those head-mounted phone holders and away you go.

VR controls can be an issue; the software lets you fake them with a standard game controller, but I haven't found any easy way to have full VR controls (real first-party VR controllers all seem to be tied to the headset, and third-party software that uses things like Wii remotes and Sony PS Move controllers seems complicated and fiddly). But for this EmuVR I don't think that VR controls are likely to be a sticking point.

EDIT: The VRidge site says that it supports iOS as well.