It was the comment they replied to. If it was a general critique of the state of discourse around agentic tools and Claude Code in particular why not make it a top level comment?
Oh, because I wanted to illustrate that the discourse is exemplified by the pair of the GP comment (vague and positive) and the parent comment (vague and negative). Therefore I replied to the negative parent comment.
Angrylion brought a new paradigm to n64 emulation, which is "fuck it, Low Level Emulation is fully doable now", and then that incredibly successful work was ported to run as a GPU shader, where it works a million times better! Now even medium powered devices, like the Steam Deck, can run low level emulation of n64 games at upscaled resolution and never run into graphics bugs, have fewer other bugs, have great performance, etc.
Classic bugs like the perfect dark remote camera that always had trouble on High Level Emulator plugins are just gone, no tweaks required. Games that wrote their own microcode run with no trouble. The crazy shit Rare and Factor 5 did at the end of the console's lifecycle just works in emulators.
Notably, Modern Vintage Gamer released a video titled "Why is Nintendo 64 emulation still a broken mess in 2025" and to make that video he had to contrive dumb scenarios: Running n64 emulation on the Playstation Vita and a Raspberry Pi.
Efficient and accurate high level emulation of the n64 is just not possible. You can't properly emulate the complex interactions going on in the n64 without huge amounts of overhead, it's too interconnected. Angrylion and Parallel-n64 proved, with that amount of overhead, you might as well do pixel accurate low level emulation and just eliminate an entire class of emulation bugs. When angrylion came out, around 2017, even a shitty laptop with a couple cores could run n64 games pixel accurate at native resolution and full speed.
In fact, on the Raspberry Pi that MVG is complaining about in the above mentioned video, he is complaining that "n64 emulation is a broken mess" because he is getting 50fps in conkers bad fur day. Because he is running it upscaled. He's complaining "n64 emulation is a broken mess" because the Raspberry Pi has a garbage GPU. Laptop integrated GPUs, even budget laptop integrated GPUs have no problems with parallel-n64
High level emulation was always a crutch, and never a good approach for n64 emulation. Even in it's heyday, it relied on per-game patches.
Notably, the Dolphin team ended up finding the same reality. What finally solved some serious emulator problems dealing with the gamecube having a mostly Fixed Function Pipeline graphics system that could be updated whenever, a situation that does not translate at all to computer graphics systems that expect you have individual shader programs to call with certain materials, was to write a giant shader that literally emulated the entire gamecube graphics hardware and use that while you wait for the emulated shader to compile. Ubershaders they call it.
IMO this is the real blindspot: it's VR support, not Photoshop, or MS Office, or CAD tools (all of which I've got running fine via Wine). I'm guessing the intersection between VR users and Wine users must be really small and I suspect it's because of this that support is so lacking.
By using non-free software, you're compromising on politics that don't really affect anything directly - not unless great many others suddenly embrace the ideas behind Free Software.
The compromise of using SaaS in the cloud in lieu of regular, native software, is affecting both you and society directly.
> You can use Wine/Crosseover, which is cool, but even now the number of software products it supports is tiny. Steam has a lot of games.
This isn't really the case, and hasn't been for some years now, especially since Valve started investing heavily in Wine. The quality of Wine these days is absolutely stunning, to the point that some software runs better under Wine than it does on Win11. Then there's the breadth of support which has has moved the experience from there being a slight chance of something running on Wine, to now it being surprising when something doesn't.
