I’m convinced the head bonk is essentially the most loving thing a cat can do.

FLAC Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the "lossless" versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.

Yeah, this isn’t how that works.

“Lossless” refers to a mathematical property of the type of compression. If the data can be decompressed to exactly the same bits that went into the compressor then it’s lossless.

You can’t “synthetically upscale” to lossless. You can make a fake lossless file (lossy data converted into a lossless file format) but that serves zero purpose and is more of an issue with shady pirate uploaders.

Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist. That’s really all. And you want lossless for any situation where you’ll be converting again before playback. Like, for example, Bluetooth transmission.

Oh, I get it. You’re being unhelpful and just venting. That’s pretty lame.

If it helps at all, Drastic DS is developed by Exophase, the developer behind the gpSP emulator, which is open source. Drastic is safe, and has for years been the only decent choice for Android as far as performance goes.

That said, from what I’ve just found, they’ve dropped support for Drastic, so pirating it is a good idea regardless.

They don’t even have to support Linux. They just have to stop actively preventing the game from launching on Linux platforms.

Looks like rainbow chrysanthemum according to the iOS translate feature.

EDIT: and a Google search explains that “rainbow chrysanthemum” flowers don’t actually exist in a natural form, and seeds claiming to be them are usually just standard chrysanthemum seeds dyed to look different and won’t produce rainbow flowers.

Here’s one source.

I’ve got a Steam Deck, and just installed Bazzite onto it, and I’m currently wishing that installing everything was as simple as this. Back when I used Linux daily there wasn’t this whole idea of “rootless” and immutable and sandboxed environments, and just figuring out how to get yad installed for steamtinkerlaunch to work had me faffing about with Nix and Fleek and Distrobox, and they’re all neat if I had the time to learn them but long story short I wish everything was package managers with a simple GUI.

Fair point with the higher bit depths and sampling rates, I just figured there was no point in overcomplicating it when it seemed there was already some form of misunderstanding.

In this context “no longer supported” just means “no longer receiving active development support”. Not “doesn’t work with the service”.

So actually no, that’s not what “no longer supported” means here, at all.

I was going to say, I am using mods but not that mod, and I’ve definitely had gang members in active engagements with the police fly by me, giving me the option to engage. Is that not supposed to happen?

Yeah, Mod Organizer 2 beta is still broken due to a qt6 dependency issue with WINE. Vortex Mod Manager still has issues and is a pain to even install. Certain mods for games require manually renaming DLL files and figuring out which ones to rename and what the name should be. You can’t simply treat it like Windows, which means for some usecases it’ll be far more complex to handle.

Not to mention, psychoacoustics don’t really give a damn about fidelity, so if your goal is “I want it to sound good to me” moreso than “I want it to reproduce sounds accurately” then there’s arguments for vinyl, tube amplifiers, vintage speakers, etc.

Hell I have a friend who specifically uses one of the earliest CD players because it had a 14 bit DAC and no oversampling vs 16 bit DAC, and for those few albums he really likes the digital distortion that comes with it because that’s how he first heard it.

SteamOS is Steam running Big Picture mode on a modified and limited Linux distribution based on Arch, with not much else going on. There is some weird shit with the compositor, but you can replicate that on any other Linux system.

It’s quite literally nothing special. The only reason to want it on Desktop is to save a few minutes of setup for a machine you intend to only run Steam games.

Despite vinyl’s technical inferiority, it was those same limitations that meant vinyl actually sounded better than CD throughout a specific period. Vinyl cannot be too loud or the needle will jump off the track, making the vinyl unplayable. This prevented vinyl from dealing with the loudness wars, and brick wall dynamic range compression. So especially for the early 2000s, the masters used for the vinyl mix were often significantly better.

And, a clean record played on clean and properly set up equipment can sound really pristine, especially if copied to a digital format early in its life. You wouldn’t even be able to tell it’s vinyl.

Yeah I’m fairly certain exophase just charged for Drastic because they knew it was leagues better than every single open source emulator for Nintendo DS on the Arm platform, and people absolutely would pay for it.

I mean, I guess it’s fair for people to charge for their work. But I do have to wonder if the entire project was novel, Y’know?

US - specifically Michigan. The naming convention and splits most commonplace around me seem to be

Kindergarten - 4th grade | “Elementary School”

5th grade - 8th grade | “Middle School”

9th grade - 12th grade (referred to as Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior years) | “High school”

But there is a bit of variance depending on district size. For example my school district downsized. So currently we have

Kindergarten - 6th grade | “Elementary School”

7th grade - 12th grade | “Secondary School”.

The former setup seems to resemble most of what other Americans would recognize.

Regarding “postsecondary education”, at least here, that specifically refers to any education past the standard 12 year education program, be it medical school or trade school or what we call college and many other places call uni/university.

Digital and lossless. So futuristic!

Lossy compressed format? Where? Are you talking about CD? The format famous for using uncompressed PCM audio perfectly specified to cover 100% of a human’s hearing range?

Because if that’s what you mean, you’ve got some studying to go do.

How is “you can’t make an equivalent product using Windows” subjective? My bad on that, I took it as a factual claim because that’s how I read that.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m really no Windows fangirl. I prefer Linux. (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed KDE always felt like home to me) I just think as an enthusiast and user of these products being honest about where they stand is important. And at least for a world where games and their associated tools are made for Windows first, there are still some valid edge cases where installing Windows on a Deck or any other handheld PC makes sense.

So, if we’re sharing opinions, let me get yours perhaps instead of just going at each other with snark? Why couldn’t Windows be used as the base for a handheld gaming device? I could definitely see an argument about the poor UI for handheld usage, but you can set it to boot right into the new gamepad UI which is essentially just steamOS’s game mode environment, which mostly solves that.

It’s definitely not as polished, and there are still some things that aren’t great (the software for using the gamepad itself, for example. It just isn’t as automatic as over in steamOS, which is one of my primary complaints. But that could be addressed by any OEM or Microsoft directly, if they chose to do it. Whether they would, or they’d get it done as well as what’s going on in steamOS is obviously another question.