🎮 Huge Nintendo leak and more - This Geek in Review for 7 Aug 2020

By Ryan Collins

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Hackers do what Nintendon’t

Nintendo fans were suprised with a huge leak of internal Nintendo files and prototypes this past week. There was a ton of unreleased and in progress game prototypes and assets from the Super Nintendo and N-64 era. Most notably, this includes a Luigi model for Super Mario 64, probably for an unreleased two player mode, a ton of Pokémon, and high quality voice samples from Star Fox 64, F-Zero X, and Super Mario 64.

While this looks terrible for Nintendo, it has caused a little bit of a ruckus with video game archivists and historians. Since the data is still copyrighted, can they legally keep a copy? I know, the ROMs of Nintendo games will be distributed beyond the heat death of the universe, but this leak is different than publicly distributed games. This information was never meant to be distributed.

Should archivists keep a copy? Let me know at feedback@gozgeek.com

Welcome to the uncanny valley

A couple of months back Nascar went the virtual route to restart some of their races using the technology from iRacing. I watched part of a race that was posted to YouTube, and came away really impressed. It almost looked like a real Nascar race. Now, Major League Baseball and the NBA are looking at doing the same with virtual spectators of real life games.

The results… are not convincing. But hey, maybe in a few years the virtual fans can watch the virtual players, and the creation of the matrix will be complete.

There are tons of horror stories of YouTube overzealous Content ID that is used to block access to copyrighted material. Mostly, the problems are with small producers, but even the big guys aren’t safe when the Star Trek virtual ComicCon panel is blocked due to Content ID. After about 15 minutes, the panel’s YouTube stream was knocked out for copyright infringement. At least CBS was able to get someone to fix the issue after only 20 minutes.

In other Comic Con news comes the story from 2015 when John Lewis Cosplayed himself at Comic Con. At his first Comic Con, Mr. Lewis marveled (pun intended) at the cosplay going on, so he decided at the next one he was going to cosplay himself.

Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right to turn the computer on

If you didn’t know. konami makes PCs.

Javascript, is there nothing it can’t do?

JavaScript is an interpreted programming language that is used on almost every website. It’s not known for being the best thing ever, so why not create a Macintosh emulator running Mac OS 8? Felix Rieseberg has done just that, putting up cross platform apps that let you experience a late 90s Mac. I played around with it, and it works quite well, better then I thought it would. Duke Nukem runs a little slow, but hail to the king!

Back when newspapers were a thing

There is a Paperboy Intellivision port in progress. I’ve never been able to get into the home conversions of Paperboy, mainly because of the controls. In the arcade game, you are a newspaper delivery boy, riding your bike delivering papers while avoiding obstacles and trying not to break windows. The controls were a set of bike handlebars, giving you the feel of riding a bike. It’s a safe bet that the Intellivision controllers will NOT be an improvement.

No, not that kind of seed

Computers are terrible at creating random numbers. They usually use a pseudo random number generator (PRNG) algorithm. The algorithm is given a number called a seed, and from then on the algorithm will spit out random numbers. Random numbers with a twist. The sequence of random numbers generated is always the same for a given seed.

To help with the randomness, the seed is usually generated from some random input and things a computer may know such as the time.

Minecraft uses a PRNG to create its worlds. If you have the seed you can regenerate the world based on that seed. Some internet individuals discovered the seed of Minecraft’s classic title screen.

In other Minecraft news, while its no Macintosh, you can now boot a Windows 95 PC inside Minecraft and play Doom on it.

And that’s it!

And that’s it for this week! Be sure to check out gozgeek.com to find out how to keep up with the Goz.

Stay brilliant beasts! Goz out!