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Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
First post of the new year! Honestly, things are going pretty well. Back to writing after a break over the holidays. My new short story needed more work then I thought so I'm still chipping away at that, but it's way better already. Also, I'm almost a year into HRT and I'm still loving the results. Still early, but it's quite the experiance seeing my body mold itself into a shape I can love instead of merely tolerate over the course of the last 11 months.
First off I want to address *waves hand to gesture at everything*. Look theres a lot of shit going down, but I don't think I'm the one to discuss it, nor do I think this is the place to discuss it. At the end of the day there are plenty of more informed voices saying what needs to be said in places a lot more visible than this one. I'm here mostly to talk about my life and my personal interests. Occasionally that will overlap with current events; especially where concerning trans issues, and entertainment industry events, but for the most part this is a space to just vibe with me and my fixations.
What are my fixations? Well at the moment it's PS1 emulation. I've got a retro sensibility. The 5th and 6th console generations (PS1, Sega Saturn, N64, Dreamcast, PS2, XBOX, and GameCube) are where I'm the happiest and most comfortable. Consequently, I've got a fairly sizable PS1 collection. I also have a fairly modern Android phone and a fair whack of techinical knowhow. Add all that together and you get a pocket sized PS1 which is kinda cool as hell. I can just, at any time, pull out my phone and play Metal Gear Solid, or Silent Hill. Sure these games weren't made for touch screen controls, but to be honest for some games (especially classic survival horror games like Resident Evil, and Silent Hill) they're surprisingly functional and intuitive. Besides, most controllers have bluetooth support anyway (I have like 3 that do), and they all play nicely with emulators. There is one small wrinkle... the display. These games, pretty much all of them, were designed to look good when displayed on a consumer CRT television from the late 80s to early 90s. My phone's OLED screen is... very not that. 3d graphical elements, when rendered with the massive pixel counts of modern hardware, can look overly sharp, and 2d elements (such as HUDs and pre-rendered environments) can look overly soft. The emulator I use, (the best emulator really) Duckstation, has a really cool feature which does an amazing job solving this problem called down-sampling. It's a bit techinical but heres the simple version. It takes the final rendered frame with the insane amount of pixels and shrinks it way down reducing the number of pixels to an amount on par with the original console's output. Then, that small image is expanded back out to fill your device's display using a technical process called bilinear filtering to guess at the colors of the pixes it threw out in the shrinking process. This might sound kinda dumb and pointless but just look at the results:
Especially on games with prerendered backgrounds the difference is just AMAZING! Ok, ok, I'm being a mega dork here. If I'm being honest with myself you all probably think they still just look like ugly PS1 games, or you think the softer image looks worse in comparision to the very clean and sharp non-down-sampled image. I guess to each their own, but I think modern rereleases of games from this generation, especially PS1 games should have this as an option right alongside CRT filters, and resolution options.