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John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

arstechnica.com

291–300 of 316 posts

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

#291

I'm going to give this a try later. One small fly in the ointment is that if like me you do not have and do not want to ever have a Facebook account, it will not be possible to load this onto the device after 2022. This is because loading the ADB requires putting the device in developer mode, which in turn requires an internet connection and an active login to your Oculus developer account. Oculus developer accounts…

You sure? “In part, the unlocking is an attempt to guarantee that Go hardware will continue to be fully functional well into the future, 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," Carmack wrote.”

Yes, I am sure. Look at point 2 in the instructions and follow the link.

The whole process for putting an Oculus device in developer mode is incredibly fiddly and annoying. You need a verified developer account. You an app running on a phone, which in turn requires an online login. You can't just do it from a desktop PC and you certainly can't flip a toggle on the device itself.

Ideally, as a follow-up to this, they will release something that allows putting the device into developer mode without requiring any of that. As of now, that does not exist.

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

#292
post #84
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Damn I miss being able to drop a URL into HTTRACK and then just having a whole website locally archived with everything working.

Back in the day I did that with Slashdot and some Spanish clone too as I didn't have internet at home.

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

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty likely they will; they'll just have to crack them first. Pretty much everyone does it with retro consoles today, since CDs are inconvenient and expensive for the core audience of that wants to play video games and DRM is always breakable. It'll probably be easier though, because it almost assuredly won't require you to take out a soldering iron, like you have to with most legacy consoles.

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…

>because the IBM PC was pretty simple.

You wish. NFSII for DOS was a HUGE task to run under DOSBox. Linux had it much easier with Wine on w9x games and DOSEmu for DOS games.

OFC games for the 486 and below ran pretty well on DOSBox.

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

#294
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably beneficial, as it provides a clean interface for emulation writers to target. Part of the intent on getting developers to use these APIs as much as possible is to make forward-porting / "legitimate" emulation of games easier.

Ideally you could map API calls to Vulkan but it would still be a huge amount of work.

Like Wine with Win32 and DirectX->OpenGL. 5-10% performance loss on translating is nothing, as the PS4 was low-end hardware for its day.

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

#295
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for Safari, which is tied to OS updates. And of course Apple don't allow other browsers on the store so now you're stuck on the outdated browser. I know my old iPad has issues with Home Assistant's web interface for example.

Apple allows other browsers in the App Store. I have Chrome on my iPad. Or do you mean the underlying rendering engine?

[deleted]

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

#296
post #5

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#297
post #5

> 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…

Interesting (semi-related) video here from the graphics editor of NYT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=860d8usGC0o

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

#298
post #191
post #95

I'm really glad for what Carmack did. It's rather sad though, that support was dropped for this headset after only two years. As a reminder, the Oculus Go was released more than a year after the Nintendo Switch.

It was obsolete at launch, though. 3DOF is "poison the well" territory and not good marketing for VR at all.

True. It also had a garbage Snapdragon 821 in it, even while smartphones had the Snapdragon 845.

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

#299
post #223
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples? What was not possible and what's possible now?

It's honestly hard to describe to someone who's never tried modern VR, but it basically gives you full immersion. You can watch Netflix in VR, you can move around (if you have enough real-life space), you can grab and play with things surrounding you, it's just so close to real life it's mind blowing. I actually wrote about social experiences (specifically playing boardgames in VR!) within the Go[1], and you can imag…

It's definitely immersive, but after a while I found it wasn't any more fun than normal gaming, and the constant setup was horrible. I still can't look at a headset without wishing ill will upon the Oculus Home developers. Maybe I'll pick up another headset someday when I don't have to fix the play area every single time I use it and can put the headset on without thinking whomever designed it has a grudge against people with glasses.

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely someone is archiving apks, just for the fun of it? I can imagine that someday we'd have a webarchive that embeds a simulation of the device where you can run that apk in your browser. Of course, if it's just an application shell dependent on a running backend, then yes it's not really an application so much as an "application shell" at this point, and you ALSO need to be able to move around the data corpus to…

Haha well that just blew my mind xD I personally don't really care about achieving anything. Why is this such a big thing? Why would we want to achieve all the APKs? There are too many of them lol History? Memories? Who cares, we're all going to die lol And with the qty of APKs, only 0.00000001% of them will ever be dug out of the archives.

I'm currently hunting down an old Firefox Android apk, why? Because that had a "Print" option integrated with Android's built in printer functionality, which was removed from future Firefox updates.

Why did they do it? No idea, and there is no official response in the forums, despite users complaining about its removal for over a year.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1301314

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