Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner

Hung out in the Arcades, and still love them to this day. You'll mostly find arcade focused tweets here.

aka #CoinOpKaren

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

Karenbunga

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

@LEGIQN Beautiful ❤️

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

@sonik_br Amazing

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

@BolhaDevs Best shower ever

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

@Retroware This captures the arcade spirit so darn well.

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

We just hit a palm tree at 290km/h. The car cartwheeled into the ocean. My girlfriend and I were ejected into the stratosphere. She landed, fixed her hair, and scolded me for wasting 3 seconds. THIS RELATIONSHIP IS TOXIC! 🚩🏎️💅
#ArcadeKaren #CoinOpKaren #OutRun

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

@yasuyuking0827 Nice

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

@RannySnice Great stuff. I love your work, especially the Arcade wallpapers.

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

@KotubuKosian Love Final Fight

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

You can only pick one?
#CoinOpKaren #ArcadeKaren

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

Just slaughtered a Lizard Man and he dropped a "World's Best Dad" mug. Great. Now I have to find his wife in Level 2 and explain why he’s late for the fly roast. This game is an emotional liability lawsuit waiting to happen! 🦎☕️😭
#ArcadeKaren #CoinOpKaren #Rastan

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

I tried to de-escalate a fight at the mall by flicking a coin and shouting "WHOO!" The bad guys didn't start dancing. They just stole my purse. This game is giving terrible self-defense advice! 🕺🎩👛
#ArcadeKaren #CoinOpKaren #Moonwalker

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

@GameMistress All the best

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

@usa_retro I could go outside and fight the weather, or I can stay on this couch and spam the Elbow Smash on Abobo until he glitches through a wall.
I choose violence (but the warm kind). 🐉👊

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

Karen Level 9K+

[Tyler @RoyDonk69420]

lmao

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

The Dreamcast didn’t "port" arcade games; it WAS the arcade. Sega literally shoved a NAOMI board into a plastic box and said "You're welcome." We had arcade-perfect Crazy Taxi, SoulCalibur, and a memory card that was also a Tamagotchi. It was too pure for this world. 🌀

[Falco Girgis @falco_girgis]

OH. MY. GOD!!!! Just made probably the most FUNDAMENTAL accelerated math routine that has been used in every Sega Dreamcast port that I have been involved with either directly or indirectly, the 4x4 matrix multiply, 10-30% faster!!! WELCOME TO GAINZVILLE, FOLKS!!!

It all started the other day when Niels replaced the body of the C++ overloaded multiplication operator in the Simulant DC engine's 4x4 Matrix class with a one-line call to forward it to my SH4ZAM'd up equivalent routine, looking for some perf gainz on his skinning-heavy engine. The result? +8 FPS. EIGHT. FROM ONE FUNCTION! DO YOU KNOW WHAT I WOULD DO FOR A FREE 8 FPS IN GTA3?!?!? 🤣

Anyway, needless to say, I had always known this one operation was probably the single hottest routine in any engine or game or port to DC... It's the reason why, if you're just starting to get into DC development, and your math and TnL are in plain C code, you probably wonder why your performance sucks.

By doing your matrix transforms in plain C, you are losing out on using the DC's most powerful instruction, FTRV, which can transform a single 4D vector by a whole freaking 4x4 matrix in just 4-7 cycles. It's the reason why a Dreamcast is even competitive with other 6th consoles without hardware TnL or a PS2-style vector unit... and you cannot access it without using inline ASM or using something like my SH4ZAM library, where some chad has given you the ability to harness to the SH4's power from a C or C++ API.

ANYWAY, long story short, the gainz made me decide to go back and revisit my implementation, which I had admittedly not looked at since working on GTA3. Since then, I had always either taken with me, or had it get grabbed by jnmartin for use in our DC ports like Vice City, Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64... Plus I am about to be bringing in for Sonic Mania's 3D stages...

So last night, for about 3 hours, armed with the SH4 performance counters, I played a meticulous game of SH4 assembly Tetris, moving every instruction around in the routine and, trying to find the best organization that maximizes instruction pairing for superscalar dual dispatch as well as minimizes pipeline stalls due to resource hazards, cache misses, or frankly me fucking up with a prefetch instruction (lolz)...

What's the end result? This beauty you can see here on the left, and a net gain of 10-30%, depending on the state of the cache and the contents of the relevant cache lines above each matrix operand in memory when the routine is called...

THIS IS HUGE. Every one of these games can now leverage this gain, and everyone using my SH4ZAM library will be able to leverage it as well too!

Here's a link to SH4ZAM, which is now in kos-ports for those of you still doin' math in C or C++ and wondering why you're struggling to achieve N64+ performance: https://t.co/QWLqwVrymp

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

Modern gaming is soft. In the 80s, there was no pause button. If you had to pee, you died. Multiplayer wasn't online; it was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger who smelled like vinegar. We didn't buy skins, we bought glory with 5lbs of quarters in our pockets. 🕹️🪙

[ROME @RomeGoLARGE]

You rather play games on a PC monitor at a desk than play like this????

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

"I'd buy that for a dollar!" FALSE ADVERTISING. I’ve put $20 into this cabinet and Murphy walks slower than a Roomba on carpet. Dead or alive, I’m speaking to the manager about these difficulty settings! 🤖👮‍♂️
#ArcadeKaren #CoinOpKaren #RoboCop

[Retro Encoder @RetroEncoder]

Are you up for it?
#Robocop #SegaMegaDrive #SegaGenesis #Homebrew #Retrogames

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

I just put enough quarters into this machine to buy a real tank. If I hear "MISSION FAILED" one more time, I'm hijacking a camel and riding it through the food court. 🐪💥😤

[Neo Geo Forever @Neo_Geo_Forever]

My RPI2DMD panel playing Neo Geo animations. The color is very bright + vibrant in real life 🌟
#NeoGeo #SNK #RETROGAMING #retrogames #arcade #SNKart #MetalSlug #KOF #FatalFury

[Coin-Op Karen's Arcade Corner @theArcadeKaren]

I’ve been listening to this music loop for 3 hours. I just tried to trap my barista in a saliva bubble so she’d turn into a banana. She called security. 🦕🫧🍌
#ArcadeKaren #CoinOpKaren #BubbleBobble