When you first joined the DCEmulation forums back around 2000-2003....

[Calavera]

Would you have believed that AI would be as powerful as it currently is? Back then we would have been amazed if SNES could run fullspeed with sound and no frame skip on the Dreamcast.

[Dr. Zoidberg]

Never really thought about it back then.

When will we get talking robot butlers?

[melancholy]

I don’t understand your point, is ChatGPT ported to Dreamcast?

No…

No wait…



What if…




They integrated ChatGPT…







Into Seaman?

[Skynet]

Would you have believed that AI would be as powerful as it currently is? Back then we would have been amazed if SNES could run fullspeed with sound and no frame skip on the Dreamcast.

Fun fact, I just installed Stable Diffusion this morning with some open midjourney model. I've been using it to create random pictures this morning and the results are hilarious and terrifying. I like doing this on my PC rather than going through paid websites or random discords like the midjourney one. I would never have thought about making random AI generated content on my PC when I first joined DCEmu

[Calavera]

Fun fact, I just installed Stable Diffusion this morning with some open midjourney model. I've been using it to create random pictures this morning and the results are hilarious and terrifying. I like doing this on my PC rather than going through paid websites or random discords like the midjourney one. I would never have thought about making random AI generated content on my PC when I first joined DCEmu

Are you saying there is an AI image creation software that can be used locally? Like not through a website but totally offline on your PC?

[Skynet]

Fun fact, I just installed Stable Diffusion this morning with some open midjourney model. I've been using it to create random pictures this morning and the results are hilarious and terrifying. I like doing this on my PC rather than going through paid websites or random discords like the midjourney one. I would never have thought about making random AI generated content on my PC when I first joined DCEmu

Are you saying there is an AI image creation software that can be used locally? Like not through a website but totally offline on your PC?

You're correct. Look up how to install Stable Diffusion, Automatic 1111, or InvokeAI. I've been using SD, but I think 1111 is the same/similar. I haven't had a lot of luck with Invoke but a mate of mine uses that exclusively now, since we set this up. I can access it locally on the PC running it, via my other devices on the network, and if I open port forwarding I can access it via the Internet outside of my own network. I even setup multi user access so my mates could use it too. Shit is wild!

[pixel]

I would've guessed AI would be more powerful than it is. AI is still an application, a tool we use. In 2002, I thought that AI would have a personality that rivals a human. It's more pervasive than invasive, and a lot more boring than I could've imagined. I had to write some remedial ad copy for work, and my co-worker asked why not ask Bard to write it?

I joined DCEMU for emulators, so I always dreamt about what the endpoint for that tech was. Could there be one system that could play all the games? If only I knew then what I know now. I thought this was the highest end of technology:

[melancholy]

Could there be one system that could play all the games?

The thing is, it does exist! On our gaming PC’s right now! 40 years of video game archives, right at our fingertips! And not just the games, but preview videos, arcade attract screens, full box art and manual scans in one single location. Gathered, tested and programmed to work by hundreds of people over the course of our lifetimes. It can run Doom! It can run Crysis! It can run Doom in Crysis! More hours of gaming than can be played in humanity’s remaining time on Earth! And if that’s not enough, many of our favorite games have hacks that turn them into new games! Surely we want for not in this gaming utopia!

But here I sit, bored because I don’t want to start anything until Final Fantasy XVI comes out and I can drop another $70 on a single game.

[ian]

Could there be one system that could play all the games?

The thing is, it does exist! On our gaming PC’s right now! 40 years of video game archives, right at our fingertips! And not just the games, but preview videos, arcade attract screens, full box art and manual scans in one single location. Gathered, tested and programmed to work by hundreds of people over the course of our lifetimes. It can run Doom! It can run Crysis! It can run Doom in Crysis! More hours of gaming than can be played in humanity’s remaining time on Earth! And if that’s not enough, many of our favorite games have hacks that turn them into new games! Surely we want for not in this gaming utopia!

But here I sit, bored because I don’t want to start anything until Final Fantasy XVI comes out and I can drop another $70 on a single game.

Yes sir!
As well as that, I'd rather spend $50-5000 playing something on original platform than using my device that can do all of that stuff to save me 27 minutes of downloading it and setting it up!

[Calavera]

Yes sir!
As well as that, I'd rather spend $50-5000 playing something on original platform than using my device that can do all of that stuff to save me 27 minutes of downloading it and setting it up!

Don't even get me started on the emulation haters. "Emulators are so hard to setup! You have to mess with all kinds of setting to get it running right."

I don't know what emulators they are using but any stand alone emulator I've used it super easy. You'll have to map your controller sure and you might have to set what resolution you want to run the games at (if it is a 3D console) but that is a one time thing. After that you open the emulator select your game and you're off. You can have every game you'd want to play from almost any console even the Switch which is a current console. And not only is it super convenient to have all your games in one place ready to play with just a few clicks but they are going to look better than they ever could on the original system. Being able to run games in a higher resolution makes them look SOOO much better. Compare a Gamecube/Wii game on the original system to the same game running on Dolphin at 1080p+. There is no comparison, games that look blurry and crappy on the original system suddenly look crisp and clean no caffeine! Not to mention the improvements like save states which make some of the old super hard games actually playable. Sure when I was 10 I might spend all day playing the same game over and over dying at a certain point and then having to play the whole game again to get up to that point but I'm not going to do that anymore. I don't care if that is "how the game was meant to be played" it sucks doing that. I'm going to play it the way that I get the most fun out of the game. If you don't want to use save states you don't have to.

I don't have an original Dreamcast anymore but if I did I wouldn't use it. The games look so much better through emulation and can be played almost immediately whenever I feel like it. The last thing I will address is the whole "games don't run the same on emulators as they do on the original console" I call bullshit on that. I'm sure there are games out there that don't run correctly on an emulator but those are the exceptions not the norm. For the large majority of games that you'd want to emulate you are going to notice no difference between emulation and the original console.

Ok I'll stop now. I could go on and on about how emulation is so much superior to original hardware.

[Calavera]

I thought this was the highest end of technology:
[Yoshi's Box Video]

Oh shit! Yoshi's Box! I remember watching that when it was new. I loved Call for Help and The Screensavers.

I've been looking for a clip from The Screensaver for many many years now and haven't been able to find it. I can't remember the exact year but it would have been early 2000s. Probably 2002-2003. They had a Windows XP machine and had several hard drives in it setup to appear as one large drive. They were going for a 1TB capacity. They got it to work and it showed up in Windows XP as 1TB and Leo commented that XP was ready for bigger drives since it actually displayed TB. He then said something like "you can tell your grandkids that you seen the first terrabyte system." He then does an old man voice and says "I remember seeing the first terrabyte system on the Screen Snickers"

It has been 20 years or more since I saw that but I never forgot about it. I'd love to be able to find it again but aside from going through every Screen Savers episode that is online from that time period I don't think there is another way to find it.

[Calavera]

The thing is, it does exist! On our gaming PC’s right now! 40 years of video game archives, right at our fingertips! And not just the games, but preview videos, arcade attract screens, full box art and manual scans in one single location. More hours of gaming than can be played in humanity’s remaining time on Earth! And if that’s not enough, many of our favorite games have hacks that turn them into new games! Surely we want for not in this gaming utopia!

But here I sit, bored because I don’t want to start anything until Final Fantasy XVI comes out and I can drop another $70 on a single game.

It really is crazy how many games come out nowadays. Even a hardcore gamer who does nothing but play games all day wouldn't have time to play them all. There are probably a lot of good ones I'd enjoy that I'm not even aware of. It's the old problem of when you have nearly unlimited choices of games to play (or movies to watch) you end up not playing/watching anything.

I complain about the retro collectors buying tons of games just so they can sit on a shelf never to be played but I pretty much do the same thing only digitally. So many games downloaded because "oh that looks cool" then they sit never to even be installed.