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John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

arstechnica.com

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Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#31

Post by amarshall »

metagame wrote: post #24
londons_explore wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As systems get more complex, cracking/emulating them gets more effort. We already see this in old stuff. DOS games run great in dosbox, because the IBM PC was pretty simple. Same with the gameboy, snes, etc. When you get to more modern things like Windows 98 games, PS3 games, xbox360 games... Most of those are much harder to emulate/crack/archive. They have more complex copy protection schemes, interact more deeply w…

I think you have a few reasoning errors in your comment: The PS3 and 360 aren't actually harder to emulate because they have more complex copy protection; they're hard to emulate because they're very novel systems (hardware-wise) and developers had to use all sorts of tricks, which is something their successors are not. Meanwhile, the PS4 is literally just a PC and already has a pretty good emulator (if early), becau…

> Xbox One … lack of emulation is largely because there's not really a point to

I thought it was because no had actually cracked the DRM yet.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#33

Post by Arrath »

freediver wrote: post #9

Imagining that future is about people wearing VR devices on their head (even as minimal as a pair of glasses) is hard to grasp. "In their head" would be a different matter but that is not what the current technology is focusing on (apart from Neuralink). Edit: not propagating for any such vision the future! just noticing that wearing stuff on head would be clunky and impractical for true immersion.

I'm just waiting for a lightweight pair of AR glasses that I can wear while wrenching on a hobby car that give overlays, labels, disassembly instructions akin to car mechanic simulator.

If they can automagically tell me what size wrench/socket i need to grab, even better.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#34

Post by buildbot »

This is tangential, but I really wish that their would be legislation, valid retroactively, to enable old unsupported devices to still be utilized. I think this goes somewhat beyond right to repair?

Take for example digital backs for medium format cameras - these things are built in low numbers, with high end FPGAs and camera sensors, with JTAG interfaces ready to go and everything - but then forgotten about a few years later. Why not enforce the creation of some document on how one would build their own OS for it? Or how the bus from the sensor ADCs works? This all existed at one point internally, but now is lost, and most of this backs will slowly die and go to waste, even though they could easily be repurposed or repaired.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#35

Post by [deleted] »

spicybright wrote: post #22
brundolf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? JS can be cached and preserved just like anything else. Even the (presumably JSON or CSV) data could be cached, though I don't know if the Wayback Machine follows API endpoints by default

Browsers evolve and break older pages. JS that requires requests as you interact with it will need an implementation of the server it uses (the subset and data of it's endpoints) How do you preserve that?

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#36

Post by metagame »

amarshall wrote: post #31
metagame wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have a few reasoning errors in your comment: The PS3 and 360 aren't actually harder to emulate because they have more complex copy protection; they're hard to emulate because they're very novel systems (hardware-wise) and developers had to use all sorts of tricks, which is something their successors are not. Meanwhile, the PS4 is literally just a PC and already has a pretty good emulator (if early), becau…

> Xbox One … lack of emulation is largely because there's not really a point to I thought it was because no had actually cracked the DRM yet.

Both have the same root problem: There's no incentive. There used to be reasons to crack consoles, and there still is for many of them, and eventually there might be an incentive to for the Xbox One, but there's no reason for the Xbox One to be right now and there never really has been. Pretty much all of the good Xbox exclusives are available on PCs as well (albeit some only via UWP, which had its copy protection broken a long time ago), and almost the entirety of its library is available on either the PS4 or PC, both of which are solved problems. There's not a reason to bother with it while Microsoft's still pushing firmware updates, so there's not as many attempts.

It's also worth noting that plenty of emulators only work with homebrew titles early-on; a lack of a crack for the copy protection wouldn't in itself prevent emulation.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#39

Post by afavour »

rchaud wrote: post #5
nicolaslem wrote: post #3

> allowing for a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now to be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down. This resonates so much with me. Each time I setup a new device that requires an Internet connection, I think about how we can enjoy booting 30 years old retro computers and how the next generation will not be able to do the sa…

The same is true of some of the best work being done on the web, such as the NYTimes interactive infographics. Because they are so JS-heavy, and reliant on CI/CD pipelines for deployment, on custom CMSes, there is no way to archive them in the way that static pages containing just text and images can be archived on the Wayback Machine. Heck, even Flash projects from 15 years ago still run fine when compiled on Ruffle…

I don’t know why CI or a custom CMS would be the problem here, the output is still static HTML. IMO the problem compared to years ago is that the client side dependency trees are so much more complex, involving third party domains and such. But dependencies are still a problem even in Flash: it can load external JSON data for example, and it’s a lot more difficult to sniff all that out than it is with JS.

Don’t get me wrong, the web is still miserable in this regard. But IMO it’s the mobile apps that are going to be a giant hole in history: we’ll just have some screenshots to look back on.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#40

Post by brundolf »

superkuh wrote: post #29
brundolf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? JS can be cached and preserved just like anything else. Even the (presumably JSON or CSV) data could be cached, though I don't know if the Wayback Machine follows API endpoints by default

It's going to be like java is now. You have to find the exact right date for the right runtime environment to get your JS to execute properly. And that is quite a task. Complex toolkit JS is generally not forwards compatible for more than a couple years.

That's... not remotely true. A built JS bundle consists of least-common-denominator JS that in theory should continue to run ad infinitum. "Don't break the web" is a mantra among browser devs.

Rebuilding the bundle from scratch might be more complicated. But you don't need to do that to preserve it.

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