One Happy Team…

Day: October 9, 2026

  • Halo 3

    With a few characters having access to seemingly unbound teleportation, Halo can get confusing at times. At the end of Halo 2 Master Chief heroically boarded a Covenant ship heading to Earth, only to arrive there after Master Sergeant and Arbiter.

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    Curious that they went back to assault rifle and the pistol from Halo 1. At least the assault rifle has better accuracy now.

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    The control scheme changed slightly, which threw me off guard. The reload is on the bumper now. Original Xbox didn’t have bumpers, so you used the face X button, but now it’s assigned for your inventory item.
    Also curious how they retrofit the story, not Cortana says she picked Master Chief. In fact, she was Pillar of Autumn ship’s AI, and ended up with Master Chief just so she wouldn’t get captured.
    Miranda Keyes looked cute in Halo 2, but with graphics update she fell into the uncanny valley.

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    I remembered that you could detach turrets to carry them as heavy weapons. Very effective.

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    (more…)

  • Dithering on CRTs

    Dithering is a technique to fake transparency, most famously used in Sega Genesis and Sega Saturn consoles. When CRT attempts to display a grid of pixels, it blends them instead, producing the desired effect. Waterfall from one of the Sonic games is a famous example, although I never liked Sonic, so I’m not sure which of the games had it. Streets of Rage 2, on the other hand, is a game I like, and the bar scene is another famous example, so I decided to test it.
    The problem with capturing artefacts though, is that they are, well, artefacts, side effects. Famously trying to record a CRT using a camera produces Moire pattern, that isn’t visible to human eye.

    Raw

    Retro Crisis GDV-NTSC MegaDrive Dirty

    This is the optimistic impression

    Retro Crisis GDV-NTSC MegaDrive RF100

    This is the pessimistic impression

    This is the “reality”, same emulator on CRT:

    There are a few issues with the “reality”, though.
    Even though the picture is 200M, there’s the lighting in the room, and how my phone camera reacts to it. Then there’s the natural curve and reflectiveness of the CRT TV, and the fact that I can’t hold my phone absolutely level. Then there’s also the fact that this is a PAL TV, so it has to either underscale or overscale, because it’s a weird 720×576 resolution, but MegaDrive outputs 448 lines, so there are 64 blacks pixels at the top and 64 pixels at the bottom.

    I don’t own a MegaDrive, but I do have a Dreamcast with SCART cable.
    So let’s try again on the Sega Smashpack Volume 1 for Dreamcast that has Streets of Rage 2.

    Raw:

    Emulator on CRT:

    Hardware Dreamcast on CRT:

  • Kilkerran 16

    Another bottle that I failed to purchase from Masters of Malt. Found it forgotten on one of the cigar sites, but waited too long, and it disappeared as well. So when another random wine store stocked it, I had to get one. The fact that concierges almost lost the bottle tucking it away only added to the exclusivity.
    Colorwise, much darker than Kilkerran 12, as expected. Smoke and sherry on the nose. Tastes like balanced sherry: not too sweet, not too muted. If I had to pick, I’d say “stewed apples”. Aftertaste is slightly oily. It does have a bit of “wood polish”, maybe, but you need to look for it. Overall, I’m quite pleased, although I wouldn’t pay more than 100GBP for it.