Emnesium

Hi.
Self taught game dev, composer, sound designer, and modeler, interested in strange synths and styles.
Lead and owner of @StudioNeoCircle

[TK-5⁵ @_TK_555555]

Unfortunately Hughie didn't learn Spinjitzu

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[Little Ghoul @funnylilghoul]

#smilingfriends #smilingfriendsfanart

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

There are no words.

[Emnesium @emnesium]

@8BitDo Hey, what exactly am I supposed to do here?
I've always been delicate with my controllers, and my A button just... split in half?

[Jetz (Luis Cruz) @JumpNJetz]

Dear game industry,
What was so horrible about this and why did we get rid of it?
Thanks.

[Emnesium @emnesium]

With the lid getting blown on Minecraft Legacy Console Edition can someone tell me if it's possible to rip my childhood worlds off of my old Xbox One
(I transferred my worlds from 360)

[Space Koala @SpaceKoala]

Do you feel it? The sound of paperclips, building in the distance?

[Shannon Birt @birt_shannon]

** MEGA Parodius Scaling Effects Part 2 **

Well - this is the BIG one - literally !!

Huge thanks to my team @GabrielPyron & @VTRCHIPMUSIC for their efforts. Pyron has provided all the source frames for Puyon and his spikes / explosion and a lot of analysis video on how the spikes behave / move which was really helpful. Pyron also used his CRT setup for this video as we felt an emulator video would not do it justice - running on 100% real MD hardware FTW. Vector has provided the catchy boss music and its sounding great - as always !

The coding on this has been a bit insane - things done since part 1 post previous:

Implemented dual buffering - Last video was single buffered - so VRAM is very tight now , we only have about 40/2048 tiles free. For the longest time I didn't think it would fit - I found a vram jigsaw puzzle that made it work in the end. Double buffering has cleaned up the stability of the animation and matches the arcade scaling effect now albiet costing 2x more VRAM .

Vertical Scaling Implemented - the vertical scaler was taken from Lufthoheit ( my other shooter ) and its heavily optimised to reduce cpu usage. During the scaling the vertical scaler partitions the 68k processor registers into 2 sets, 4 registers are allocated to feeding the fast horizontal interrupt (h-int) that drives the vertical scaling , remaining 12 registers are for the horizontal scaler running in the background. This setup is much faster than normal backup / restore register methods, as we do not need to backup / restore registers in the h-int which would double CPU costs. The catch is the momment any background routine tries to use the H-ints registers it would break things so it has to be carefully timed.

Added the spike projectiles - this was very tricky to get close to the arcade, they are semi heat seeking missiles basically and hence needed code that worked out angle differences to player at speed theres no time for arc-tan or similar so it uses faster lookup tables to work out the angles . They speed up over time and get larger and whats more we can't keep all the scales in VRAM - we have room for 2 spike buffers only. Also what was a real pain was working out scaled coordinates for the circular launch of the spikes .

Added Fish Damage - Shock frame and Explosion frames from Arcade . Very proud of the fact we have the full arcade quality explosion is which is fully scaled also.

Added Temporal Masking - which is fancy wording for don't draw nothing to buffer if nothing is there already there for the scaling . So empty Corners and edges can be optimised out to lower cpu costs and rom costs. I had to make some scripting for this and work out what areas did not need drawing at all in the frame, which should be force cleared by cpu and which areas should just be copied from rom. This reduced rom size by 30 kb and with a bit more work we could extend that to 60 kb & get a bit more speedup even doing so.

Added a frame limiter . In the last video update we let the 68k burn hot and just pump out frames as fast as it could - here we match the arcade animation rate which does leave the cpu idling at times , particularly in the smaller frames - even at large though we could be running the animation 25 % faster , issue is though that would speed up the game logic and make it less arcade accurate. We had some real bullet / Spike hell simulations going without the limiter but yeah we had to tone it down a bit. Maybe in a hardcore mode we could let it run wild though !

Code is 95% 68k assembly with about 5% C code (v-int as its cold path ) driving things . This sort of thing needs all the speed it can get !!

Well now after all that I can return to finish off Level 1 haha - just a wee sidetrack there . No doubt we will polish stage 8 boss some more in time too !!

#SegaMegadrive #SegaGenesis #Parodius #SGDK

[eppy @epppyyy]

The release of the Epstein files feels less like transparency and more like a psychological operation. It overwhelms the most empathetic and intellectually engaged people with outrage and despair, while numbing everyone else into apathy and boredom.

Explained by a lawyer.

[Joel @toku_gami]

The funniest image on the internet is Security Gamera

[Q. Ali @NobleQAli]

They’re doing this to desensitize younger people to the utter depravity and evil controlling the world around them

[we are frighteningly well resourced @poisonjr]

Now try again, but this time, don't say “And there's nothing we can do about it.”

[Tomomi Sakai @TomomiSakai3]

34 years ago today, Gimmick! launched on the Famicom in Japan. To celebrate, here’s a quick sketch I did. #NES #retrogames

[Emnesium @emnesium]

@MaloryMalicious Oh damn I didn't know about that, I was already planning on replaying it soon so that'll be fun

[Emnesium @emnesium]

I don't like to soy out on social media over stuff I'm excited about but I'm so pumped for this
A sequel to IMSCARED is the absolute last thing I expected to happen

[Ivan Zanotti @MyMadnessWorks]

I sure hope these feelings will eventually get to you.

https://t.co/5AS33WTKxw

[Ivan Zanotti @MyMadnessWorks]

I sure hope these feelings will eventually get to you.

https://t.co/5AS33WTKxw