Famicom was 256x240 whilst the 7800, which was a console variant of the doomed Atari 1400, was 320x240. But to get more colors without doing fancy per scanline tricks, developers opted for 160x240 and you're not imagining it looking clunkier. So as a former demo coder, those scanline tricks were bread and butter to me.
Famicom was limited to 8 sprites per scanline, 7800 had 100 sprites, no limits.
But apparently, you're not wrong and I'm not wrong. Many NES cartridges came with HW enhancements and a few of the homebrew afterlife carts for the 7800 did as well.
But upfront, I thought the NES looked like a glorified Apple 2. The SNES OTOH was the first Nintendo console I loved.
Young me always chose the best technology for my task. Older me looks at the whole package. I miss the younger me.
Rescue On Fractalus and Ballblazer*, the first two titles out of LucasArts, were supposed to be lead titles for the platform. And the 7800 was technologically superior to the Famicom. But when has that mattered relative to the game library? See also the Jaguar port of Doom, which was the most faithful adaptation of its generation, written by Carmack himself, on a bizarrely advanced (2 RISCs plus an overclocked 68K) platform born for the dustbin of history because the Tramiels had burned all their karma to the ground messing up the amazing Atari Lynx.
I'm sure there's a timeline where somehow the Nintendo titles ended up on the 7800, looking fantastic, and it all ended with Atari continuing to dominate the console world. But it sure isn't this one. And it probably requires someone other than the Tramiels running Atari (into the ground until it was sold off to a hard drive manufacturer).
The GPU was relatively stable, the DSP OTOH was whack. But you could neutralize its most offensive bug just by repeating load instructions. It looks stupid, but it always worked.
We used to use the blitter for that and then there was a memory location to write to to initiate execution of what was uploaded. The Jaguar developer docs are available online if you haven't seen them.
Once the GPU or the DSP was running. You could then chain overlays together by running to a location in the GPU itself from which you called the blitter to upload the next segment and then you could just jump to its first instruction. I believe later compilers enabled just running the GPU from main RAM but it has been decades.
It was unwittingly extremely useful mental preparation for programming in cuda a decade later.
The pro move would be getting the Jaguar development tools with their assemblers for the GPU (yes, the Jaguar had a GPU) and the DSP up and running. With just the 68000 it's kind of a glorified Atari ST as a console.
As someone who made advances in two mostly independent fields (arguably 3), 100%!
But also, while I'm not mega rich, I'm very comfortable, if only to keep me from stirring the pot some more with my troublemaking nature. This is where Tom Lehrer's advice that selling out is OK if you get a good price comes into play. And yes, satire, but surprisingly good career advice in the real world.
"I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil."
I'll go with both... I think the guy made some real moves early on, but it's been a while since whatsapp and instagram. And since then, if the tales in Careless People are to be believed, so much smoke has been blown up his digestive endpoint that he's mostly smoke now.
As much as I grew up with and lived my useful working years around computers, if they went away tomorrow, there'd be a period of adjustment, and then I'd happily up my amateur game with power tools and automobiles. I have a need to tinker and build, but there are many ways to satisfy it.
That said, as long as there's still technology, it's awfully nice and a bit gamechanging to have an effective junior engineer who follows orders and who's happy to wade through stack overflow and customize solutions for my problems. It's not that I couldn't do it myself, it's that doing so for one shot weird config issues and arbitrary UI/OS changes sucks the very life blood out of my soul.
AI is a tool, an amazing tool IMO, your own personalized philosophical zombie ready to do your bidding. Social media and mobile devices OTOH, they both suck the life out of me moreso than chasing config issues. Unfortunately, some of the best sources of info about some of my interests are trapped on FB in a swamp of rage bait, sigh.
Marketing has always been about overpromising and underdelivering, no? OK, show me when it wasn't. And if overpromising on hot tickets like the AGI and FSD didn't get people the big bucks and engagement, maybe they'd dial it back a notch, but that's just not how it's played out so far. See the current crop of contenders to disrupt the leading maker of AI HW with their noisemaking CEOs for the evidence thereof.
TAICO. But seriously, I think the whole capex bubble is a response to the unpredictability of this administration by locking in future sales and orders to reduce the impact of its mercurial moves.
That a good 1/3 of America is still cheering this behavior on is beyond me. I didn't vote for him anytime he ran, but at least during his first term there were some adults I disagreed with in the room as opposed to the barrel of chaos monkeys we now have. He really doesn't reflect the views of either party, he is his own thing.
As someone who uses Claude Code to summarize published research, you have to ground it in peer-reviewed results or it gets lost. But also, I am grounded with two degrees in the source material. So I am feeding it my views and asking if the published work agrees or disagrees with my opinions and I get fantastic results that way to the point of knowing current clinical trials and treatment regimens than most of the oncologists and which led to a great conversation with the clinical trials team. This doesn't replace people, but it augments existing expertise amazingly well.
But also, I hear so many tales of running out of tokens. I ask Claude Code to build a tool to perform a task. I review the tool and then I let it rip if I'm happy with it. As I understand things, most just ask Claude Code to do the task. That seems a bit fraught.
Anyway, you have to impose constraints IMO and ask the right questions to get the answers you need or yes Claude Code (or any other LLM) will eventually just agree with you.
I did the same exercise here with medical reports and CT scans for a friend's cancer diagnosis and I got ahead of the oncologists predicting they were about to be cured. Spoilers: yep, cancer free now.
And well, yes, I have the appropriate life science degrees to navigate clinical trial reports and research publications, and that was likely indispensable for steering Claude Code where it went, the radiologist's caution is merited here. But it's just not amateur hour for me to do this, it's 2 decades of academic research in my rearview mirror.
TBF humans will never have the experience of what it's like to be an AI by those rules either. The confident assertions about the nature of consciousness so many make despite still having no real idea what it is astound me.
But personally, I'm more optimistic. I'll bet it's more likely the AIs figure out consciousness down the road and explain it to us than the other way around. The limit to their intelligence seems effectively unbounded so far and they're starting to creep past us here and there. The AIs will have the advantage of being able to observe consciousness from the outside that we lack.
I could get a significant pay boost jumping to META, why I personally know 2 people with those fancy 8-figure comp packages. However, life is too short for the shenanigans that would ensue if I did.
In my experience, if you tell them to research the web to see if their idea has been pursued before, you can get them to keep proposing new things until something is sufficiently new, even if it's a new interpolation between existing concepts, that it's effectively an original idea.
And Google's acquisition of DNN Research to get the ball rolling with conv nets and AI moneyball, followed by the acquisition of Deepmind. Schmidhuber IMO *has* been recognized as one of the 4 horseman and rightly so, but what has he done lately? Just noticed they now say the 3 godfathers of AI. This is what people hate about academia. It's not academia itself, it's the mean girl politics that emerge from the tenure system. And at this point, tenure should be abolished IMO having been utterly weaponized to defend the status quo.
I find with Claude that when I call its BS I get better results. And it openly admits to lying to and gaslighting me as well as not seeing any way to stop itself from continuing to do so.
Fable seemed less apt to do so but I didn't get enough time with it before it was yanked away to know for sure. It may have had mixed results on the benchmarks but it was finding bugs opus never found.
Famicom was limited to 8 sprites per scanline, 7800 had 100 sprites, no limits.
But apparently, you're not wrong and I'm not wrong. Many NES cartridges came with HW enhancements and a few of the homebrew afterlife carts for the 7800 did as well.
But upfront, I thought the NES looked like a glorified Apple 2. The SNES OTOH was the first Nintendo console I loved.
Young me always chose the best technology for my task. Older me looks at the whole package. I miss the younger me.