mergeconflict382
===

[00:00:00] James: Welcome back, everyone, to another Merge Conflict, where Frank just moved his desk to get ready for tonight's podcast, to talk about how he's so excited for Star Wars Dark Forces Remastered to come out next year. 

[00:00:11] Frank: We're doing a video game podcast. Can you believe that? Are we gamers now? Now we're cool, man, right?

We're going to talk video games. And yes, I did move my desk because it's been the wrong height for about nine months now, and I needed a new height. 

[00:00:25] James: You do look higher up. You're, you're more at my, my level now. So 

[00:00:29] Frank: I'm working on, I'm trying to do the standing desk thing. I'm trying to be a little bit healthier, you know, instead of sitting on my butt all day, but it turns out then your feet get tired.

You know, it's, it's always something. It's always 

[00:00:39] James: something. Oh my goodness. Um, yeah, we can talk about video games. You know, I picked up the most recent Mario, which is pretty good. I haven't played anything yet, or the most recent Zelda. So I haven't played anything. Did you buy a switch? We talked about you buying a switch.

[00:00:51] Frank: No, I, I backed out because, um, then I started seeing these things called Steam Decks and I got all confused and the moment I'm presenting with more than one option, I, I get paralysis when it comes to purchasing things. Um, I, I'm still in the mood to do some gaming, especially now that it's getting to be dark around 4 PM again.

Uh, so I, I'll get there. I'll get there. It turns out games are a bit of a time sink. I don't know if you've noticed that. 

[00:01:18] James: Uh, that's very, very accurate, which is why I haven't. Play at any of the games in which I purchased. I'm too busy doing house stuff and that takes up all the time. So once the house stuff is done, which it may never be done, then I can jump back into stuff.

I actually have some really good comments about last week's pod, which was really about life stuff, missing iPod or iPhone stuff, which I have no updates because it's not like the police are going to call me and give me an update on it. So we're going to be, we're kind of in right now, A holding pattern as we wait for NET 8 launch and NET CONF and all this good stuff.

There's things happening though, in the world of development Frank. Don't 

[00:01:51] Frank: forget there's the secret spooky Apple event happening on October 30th too that we all have to stay up to 5 p. m. or 6 p. m. to watch. I don't know, man. It's Halloween on the 30th or the 31st. I always get this wrong. 31st. 

[00:02:06] James: 31st. Okay, so it's not 

[00:02:08] Frank: Halloween night.

It's Holo Eve Eve. 

[00:02:11] James: Holo Eve Eve. Yeah, my, I'm assuming they're going to do some new product that comes in like. Black titanium metal alloy or something. See, I didn't catch 

[00:02:23] Frank: any of the rumors. The best rumor I heard was they're gonna push gaming. We'll see. I love it when Apple pushes gaming. It's usually something interesting.

I don't know where that rumor comes from, though. That could be a hundred bit out of the blue. I don't think their, um, ad, what do you, what do you, invitation really gave away too much 

[00:02:43] James: stuff. Yeah. I'm not, um... Not positive. We'll see what happens and we'll break it all down for you right on this very podcast.

I hope something cool. I guess it's going to be while we're recording, I guess it's going to be the day that this podcast comes out this episode specifically, so maybe we'll have to do some Patreon exclusive thing. Cause then we'll just be late to the game. It's November and then we'll be like, come on now.

Come on now, Frank and James. Okay. So I saw a tweet. Because we talked about this earlier. At some podcast, we talked about Star Wars Dark Forces. Frank's favorite Star Wars game. Is that correct? Well, I'm 

[00:03:20] Frank: just going to put it this way. I got into programming because of this game. And so it just has that beautiful place in my heart.

I got into programming so I could mod this game back probably in 1995. So I was probably 15 years old, uh, dating myself. Sorry, everyone. And, um, I just remember this game making a big impression because it was the first time I made, um, friends online, um, had a way at this game, learning how to make mods for it.

First time I started writing my own professional articles was to talk about technical file formats in this game. First time I got to work with real good programmers, people were, who were hacking. The game online, and all that stuff. And yeah, James, you sent me the most intriguing link I've ever seen. Uh, they are doing what I guess is pretty common now, an HD remaster of a game from 1995.

And this year, 20 actually, I don't think it'll be out till 2024 or something like that. So, gosh, uh, maybe they should have just waited till 2025 and gotten that 30 year anniversary. Well, anyways, it's their 29th anniversary and they're going to do a remaster. 

[00:04:32] James: Yeah, and this is from a company called Night Dive Studio.

Now, they have a few original titles, uh, that they did in 2015, 2016. And they're working on, uh, System Shock, which is a game from them. Which is not to be confused with System Shock, but this is like System Shock. 2023, like new, it's kind of like, it's still system shop, but it's not a remaster. It's like, here it is, but they're also known for doing remasters or enhanced ports.

So they've done a system shock enhanced edition. They did Turok, Turok 2, they did Doom 64, they did Quake ports. Um, so they've worked really close with like Bethesda and Id and Iguana, They did Quake 2, Quake, um, um, Turok 3, uh, most recently. Although right now they're. They're remastering System Shock 2, Star Wars Dark Forces, and Sin Reloaded.

So, they're kind of working all over the place, and they're a Washington company, Frank. So, can I just 

[00:05:28] Frank: tell you, like, what a dream job is that to take, like, some of your old favorite games and get paid to work on them and improve them and make them as nice as you can make them for a modern release? I didn't know that job existed.

If I had known that job existed, I might have been applying because that's, that's kind of a dream job right there. And at first I was, honestly, I was jealous. I was like, wait a minute, it never even occurred to me. Just go to Lucas. Arts, film, whoever owns it after Disney, the great Disney conquest, um, and be like, Hey, you have ip, I have programmers.

Let's take your IP and reprogram it. Yeah. And make it better. And yeah, I mean, they've done all the, all the titles. The one that, uh, tour Rock, I totally forgot about Tour Rock. You remember Turo? 

[00:06:15] James: Mm-Hmm. . I own it on my switch. 

[00:06:17] Frank: I never do you, of course you do. So honestly, I was a little bit jealous to find out that this company even existed and does what they do because I'm not a gamer.

I don't live in the gaming world. And I didn't know that nostalgia had kicked in this hard. I knew the current generation of gamers were nostalgic for a past they probably never experienced. But, um, man, the nostalgia is getting me. So I, I fired back a critical tweet because that's all I do. I think critically of everything.

But at the same time, man, I'm going to buy this thing. It only runs on Windows. Come on, people. If you're going to port the game into the future, there's more operating systems out there than Windows, but you're lucky I'm going to have to play it in a VM or something. 

[00:07:00] James: I mean, it's going to come to PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, XS, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

So quite a lot of, of systems. Literally 

[00:07:07] Frank: every platform other than Mac and iPad. Thanks. Thanks, buddy. 

[00:07:13] James: So why are you upset? You, you responded back to me and said, I don't like it. I want to spend three hours on the podcast to explain why. So Frank, because we have limited time today on this podcast, Frank came in half an hour late.

Why, Frank, are you so down on this? Because this is like the original like Doom engine, right? Like, you know, no, no. I mean, it looks like it. It looks like Doom. 

[00:07:35] Frank: No, no, it's of the generation of Doom. Yeah, Doom generation. But it's not the generation. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Um, I guess this is, this is all just because this is my first experience with seeing these HD remasters of games.

I haven't dealt with them before. I've played emulators, of course. But I was a little bit shocked at how little had been HD ified. I don't want to put any shade against this company. I'm going to buy this thing. This is going to happen. You know, you already got my money, so I feel like I'm entitled to be a little bit critical now.

Um, I was a little bit surprised because we are living in the future with artificial intelligences and. Things that are GPUs on literally every computer that can do six texture passes, five deferred render targets all composited together, add some motion blur, some vignetting, let me choose my lens effects, and all that stuff.

And these HD remasters don't have any of that. They don't seem to upscale textures at all. The geometry is the same resolution. It looks like they literally just take the renderer and port it to a higher resolution. And I was just surprised. Um, I don't know. It's one of those, if I had the LucasArts IP, this is what I would do with it.

But, this is a game that I've been literally staring at since I was 15. I think I've memorized every texture in the game. I know where every pixel goes. I can, I wrote four different palette editors for this game. I literally know every texture and I know what they should look like. And when I saw the HD master, I was a little bit shocked, um, because it was this beautifully crisp rendered polygons, these, I know, 64 by 64 paletted textures applied to them.

In this world where we have normal maps. Bump maps, easy, cheap ways to just fake detail. You don't even have to add geometric detail to games anymore, you just fake it with normal maps and you can do roughness maps now, metallic maps, you can do opacity maps, they're still using 1 bit opacity, you can tell it's there, and it was just freaking me out a little.

And I think a little bit of it also came from, um, just seeing, like, other games, like Nintendo 64 games, where people are playing them on high resolution LCDs, even though they were meant for CRTs. And therefore, you had that whole movement of people writing CRT pixel shaders to actually, like, blur the colors the way they should be blurred on a CRT experience.

And I was getting that same Um, Uncanny Valley, a fact of like, yeah, it's HD by like the worst definition of HD. The resolution of the game is rendering at HD, but none of the textures have been upscaled or anything. And it just looked viscerally wrong to me. So you're a game developer, you're a gamer. Am I making any sense here?

[00:10:44] James: I want to be A little transparent here because, and talk through this, because I do believe that in the good year 2023, it's actually really confusing. There's a lot of different terminology that gets thrown around and has gotten thrown around for a long time. There's remasters, there's HD. Remasters, there's remakes, there's just ports, there's HD collections, uh, for example, uh, there's collections.

So for example, uh, Metal Gear Solid, uh, uh, just had a, um, they have HD remakes of those, but they also have this new collection and it's getting a lot of shade, if you will, because similar to this, it also is somehow not even running as good as it did on the PlayStation 2, for example, right? Now, some of these problems that they have is that, that.

If it's not a remake, which is, I'm going to build this from the ground up and their goal is to port it over, then they have a few options, right? They're either porting the code in the original integrity and making the old source code, new source code for new modern machines and getting it running or on the flippity flop.

What they have to do is they have to create an emulator or have an emulator that is emulating the and doing the original ROMs that are out there and making them run. Those all have trade offs. Then that means. You know, we're not FPGAs, right? You know, that, that are just running the original code that we have.

And it's, it's 100 percent of the layer that emulator layer has to emulate the code. It has, it's an additional layer that's taxing the CPU, but then additionally it's only as good. As the game port then is only as good as the emulator. And in fact, what's really fascinating is Nintendo. They have their NES and SNES and N64 games on their service, and those are all being emulated, right?

They don't have, they don't have the original hardware in the box. You know what I mean? That'd be cool to run it. Yeah, it's pretty cool now. Very cool. When, when Aquarena of Time came out for Nintendo 64 or um, n the Nintendo 64 port for Nintendo Switch, it actually got blasted a lot because the emulator wasn't up to snuff and it wasn't even close to what the N 64 version looked.

They, they had a lot of, uh, pop-in issues and they have a lot of like, uh, depth issues. Mm-Hmm. and fog and all this other stuff and they improved it. Now the interesting person, you can just improve the emulator and then bingo bango, right. But we know that even the best emulators in the world, it's hard to emulate that original ROM code.

And you can tell because when you're emulating stuff, mm-hmm. You have these, like all these little hardwares, there's certain games that are just really, really, really, really, really hard to emulate. 'cause they use some of these really crazy features of the hardware itself. So that's where the, the hardware comes in.

In a company like Analog, for example, they make. Uh, hardware, um, that make new hardware to play the old game. So it's all modern, all this other stuff. It's not emulating. And I think it's literally them reverse engineering the Nintendo 64 hardware, for example, or, or SNES or Genesis. So you can plug in those old games and they just work.

But of course you need those games to plug them in, uh, in general. So all these things, all these layers to it. But to my original point, it is a little bit confusing of what's a remake, a remaster, an HD remaster, an HD collection, blah, blah, blah. What does that mean, and what does that mean to the individual developers?

A game like, for example, one of my favorite games, which is Super Mario RPG, A Legend of the Seven Stars, which is a Square Enix Nintendo collaboration, which was amazing, got me into RPGs. Cool. Um, is a game that is a remake and they're completely 3Difying it all new. Now, technically that game on the SNES was pretty 3Dified already, but they're redoing everything from the ground up, right?

They're really literally building a whole new game. There's not, in that instance, they're going to painstakingly try to recreate the game anew, which is kind of legendary, where in this instance, what we're seeing. Now, I don't know how this game is made. There is an engine behind it. But my assumption is that engine is emulating some of the original code.

And from what I see, then they can swap out textures. But it looks like what they've mostly done, at least from the trailer, and I'm sorry, Night Dive Studios, I would love to have you on the pod to talk more about your process if you're listening, is the cut scenes. It looks like they redid those cut scenes.

I'm assuming they didn't redo the audio to it, but it looks like they mostly enhanced or HD ified that from what I'm seeing. But again, that's confusing. Is it a remaster? Is it an HD remaster? Is it a, is it a, is it a remake? Is it a, is it, what is it, right? What is the, yeah, the new bits and pieces? And I couldn't actually tell.

It says it's a remake. A remas sorry, a remaster. Remaster. But not necessarily an HD remaster. 

[00:15:49] Frank: Yeah, so I'll say this. Um, the very first thing that shocked me when I heard it was, no, they did not resample the audio because that audio was super compressed and I remember Mon Mothma speaking, Mon Mothma spoke with a lisp.

in Dark Forces, because the compression was so high that they lost all their high frequencies and couldn't do sibilance any S. They couldn't do sibilance anymore. And so it sounds like poor Mon Mothma has a lisp the entire time. And that was in their demo. And I was like, Ooh, ouch. You couldn't get the original WAV files.

You couldn't recompress those into MP3s. And so I think you're right. Um, so when I first saw it, my reaction was they bought the IP and rewrote the game. Because you know what, that's what I would have done. And that's actually a project I started when I was in college. I knew every file of this game, I knew exactly how to read and render every bit of the game, and so I started to recode the game as Frank's HD remaster of the game.

Obviously, I gave up on that after just a couple weeks, because see earlier episodes of the game. Games are hard. Even when you have all the content, games are still hard. Uh, but then there's been a recent, uh, I'm going to call my hacker group. I apologize if that's not the modern parlance, but that's what we would have called them in the nineties.

There's a hacker group, um, working on DF22, which was the exact same thing. Let's just rewrite the engine from scratch. We know how to read all these files. We have a vague idea of how the trigger system works. Uh, We don't have access to the IP, nor do we have access to the original, um, content, so we're just going to do it ourselves the hard way.

Redraw what needs to be redrawn, et cetera, et cetera, and that group was working at it. And so I feel a little bit bad because that group was actually going for the, um, That hard target, the rewrite. But once you started talking, um, oh, it made sense to me. Of course, they didn't just get the IP. They probably got the source code.

They probably were able to actually recompile from source. And the other thing that triggered me, there's a lot of triggering in that video. Um, uh, LucasArts had the most fantastic technology in the 90s, and one of the ones that I think is underappreciated even by modern gamers today is the iMUSE engine.

The iMUSE was a music Engine that took MIDI files and they tracked your action in the game and if you were doing something exciting, it played exciting music. If you were walking along walls trying to find secret hidden spots, it played boring Star Wars music to you. iMUSE was used in the X Wing and TIE Fighters series.

It was used in Dark Forces. I think it was used in all the click through adventures that... LucasArts used to make. And boy, when they had that demo going, I heard iMuse. They did not change one line of the synthesis engine. Now, LucasArts, I'm a music freak too. LucasArts, they built this gorgeous engine, but computers were dumb and slow in 1995.

And we couldn't do MIDI synthesis the way we do it today. Today, we have these huge sample packs, these high fidelity sample packs, and these very smart mixers, and these synthesizers, and vocoders that all mix together to create incredible sounds out of a MIDI machine. That's not what you're getting with this HD Remix.

So you're, you're not getting an audio improvement. And I was a little bit amazed, but then it all made sense because. The iMuse engine still hasn't been topped to this day. No, no one has done any better than iMuse, but it was so weird to hear 1995 music synthesis in my ears and yet see something rendered out at 1080p and Mon Mothma had a lisp because the compression is, uh, too high.

[00:19:44] James: Yeah, it's, it is really, you know, fascinating to watch. These types of games evolve because, you know, if you have a blu ray player, for example, and you put in a DVD, it will up res and do all sorts of little models on it and make it look better and crisper and do stuff for better or worse. You know what I mean?

Um, for, for what it can do, uh, inherently. And, you know, I feel like half the battle of actually getting these remakes of these remasters. is that they probably spent a lot of time, just trying to get things working on the modern hardware or repackage correctly to get things installed and running at a normal frame rate, and, and without crashes and things like that, whether they are doing a ROM type of situation, emulating it, or actually trying to compile the code down into some, you know, byte code that they can run on the machine level is actually good work, right?

Because again, this game was made What, 30 years ago. So, but yeah, almost 30 years ago, but you said, and, uh, yeah. How do you, you know, how do you get that working just magically? You know, it's, it's as if you took an iPhone, uh, app that you made 12 years ago, or it's like, I'm just going to get it running magically right now.

Like, will it probably not, you know what I mean? Like that's, that's the, that's some of the problems that we have going into this. But to your point, for a game that is iconic, you know, I feel like that is the downplay, right? When something is so iconic, then you run into these issues. And to me, when I actually look, now you talk about IMUSE, right?

I think that I think of LucasArts, and I think of some of the original just art style, right? You think of Escape from Monkey Island, you think of some of these other games that are very artistic and intense, right? So what's Even more interesting about the modernization of these games is if you modernize them and you HD ify them, do you actually take away from some of that nostalgia that was there?

Because that art was actually Pretty good back in the day. You know what I mean? How do you recreate it without losing it? So when I watched the trailer, my, I don't want to take anything away from the artists, but to me, that was a little bit striking. It was a little bit more water, uh, water color brush strokes of, of, uh, on it.

I would say more of maybe even. Tiny bit pixel art, not pixel art y, but um, a little bit more cartoony in a way, less rough, more soft. So that is what kind of hit me intentionally when I first saw it for the first time. And I said, okay, like, do you use that? Do you lose that other part of nostalgia? Now that's because of the, some of those scenes are more still right now, the ones that are of, you know, Tie Fighters and, and, and, um, and, and Bee Bombers and things like this, like, um, you know, those that are 3D models, 3D models could always use a little bit of upgrading, if you will, and, uh, in 2023, they don't necessarily hold up.

It's not a 3D 

[00:23:03] Frank: model, that's the problem. That is a rendered out sprite, buddy. 

[00:23:07] James: There you go, yeah. Well, 

[00:23:08] Frank: what was funny, yeah, this, this game was old enough that it wasn't that awkward transitional time of you weren't getting full motion video yet. Uh, we were just on the cusp of it. Like, this game was released on a CD, but people were still installing it to their hard drives, and they didn't want to take up all the space with video.

And so, it's funny that you bring up animation, because that's exactly what it feels, right? It feels like you have these sprites, and they have, like, I don't know what you call it, the South Park mouth moving up and down, just to vaguely match, uh, the lip, the, to, to achieve lip sync. Uh, I think the cutscenes came out great, like, I don't know, they hired an artist or they found the original artwork or they reanimated it or something like that.

The nice thing is, is it wasn't full motion video. So they didn't, they didn't have real human actors. Like a lot of it is very realistic though. So I do wonder if they had like reference footage and then the artist drew over it. I would love a behind the scenes on dark forces. I hope that's included in these things.

That would be cool. 

[00:24:09] James: Well, and the other aspect of it is. Can you get, and did they include a non remastered version? One of my favorite things that. Places do is when they give you like, here's, here's the upgraded version. And then in the settings, you can turn that off. You just, just give me, give me the original, you know what I mean?

Let me go back. Uh, and even like Zen pinball, for example, they recreate real list, real pinball tables, um, in pinball and they have it. So you can turn on their re remastered tables where there's three things, 3d things flying and doing stuff. And which is fun, but I'm like. Let me go into classic mode and let me just get my table, right?

Let me just, let me just play a little pinball here. Um, so I think that is, uh, is something to me, um, is a kind of noteworthy when you're thinking about these remakes and things like that. You know what I mean? 

[00:25:06] Frank: Yeah. And it's funny too. Um, I've noticed that I always thought cut scenes would go away in games, but they seem to stick around even to the point.

What's the new game? Like Jedi Survivor or something like you'll see YouTube videos of just the cut scenes because like, it's that cinematic at this point they're putting that much effort into these scenes. And me, it's just, yeah, a bunch of animated. Day of the Tentacle Monsters or something moving around on the screen.

So I don't think, think of it too much. And obviously a lot of their effort did go to that kind of stuff. Um, I guess I, I, I just want to say that I, I hope that the, um, fan remakes are still going to be coming out because I suppose I've been waiting for a remastering of this game for a long time. I.

Especially on Mac. Hi, the one Mac user. I will buy it. Please make it work on the Mac. I will totally buy it. But, um, I'm, I'm hoping that, like I mentioned to a group at DF22, that we're working on a fan remake of it. I hope this doesn't stop those people, because, um, although this will be nice to have to run on your machines, I see these old games, and I think that there is a validity to, let's preserve this game as it is, put it into a little shell.

Keep that locked tight. But I also think it's, it's Shakespeare. Let's, uh, let's remake it and let's see a better version of it. I personally want to play a game of Dark Forces that has modern metallic maps on it, that has, um, uh, Ambient occlusion in corners correctly. I want screens to actually emit light.

There are light sources in the game. They should emit light. Who thought of it? It would be great if they actually did that. Cast shadows? That would be awesome! Um, but none of that's happening. I think, like you said, they put all their effort into just getting it to work on modern hardware. Yeah. Which is good because it's probably going to give people the most, um, gameplay, uh, fidelity, high fidelity in terms of gameplay.

Gameplay was never that good, James. I just want the graphics fidelity. So I'm hoping all the fan projects will still come through and increase the graphics fidelity. Uh, maybe, maybe the gameplay will suffer, but it's a shoot them up. Who cares? 

[00:27:21] James: Yeah, it would be really cool to see them remake the game because a game such as like Doom and the Doom franchise, uh, to me, the, one of my favorite Doom games besides like the original was the Doom game from 2016, which to me was like kind of a, I don't actually know if it's supposed to be a.

A remake of the original, but to me, it's a spiritual. Remaken, a 3d modern world of it in my opinion. Um, and that was like, you know, the first doom game since doom 3, which is in 2004. So it was a long, long time. So to me it was really this recreation and that could be really cool to do. And that's the sort of thing that you want to see move forward and then asked back there in fact, I liked that one better than doom internal to don't shoot me now.

Well, but in my opinion, 

[00:28:21] Frank: It's super cool what's happened to Doom and even Quake at this point. Let's a first give a shout out to John Carmack who insisted that, I think it was at the 10 year mark for all these games, he released the source code. I think it was even sooner for some of them. And there are fantastic books you can go get, um, that describe these engines to you.

They'll describe the Doom engine to you and I think they'll do the Quake engine eventually. They've done Wolfenstein, Doom, and I think, uh, Quake is coming out. These are all awesome engines, and you can learn from them, and it's neat to see how, um, the indie community has embraced them. If someone wants to show off a new ray tracer, like, let's, let's render our games using a ray tracer instead of ray casting like we normally do.

They'll do it with, like, Doom or Quake. Because... Well, at least for our age. Everyone our age knows, um, whatever, E1L1, L1E1, whatever it's called, the first level, you know, we all have it memorized, that map, in our head. And so if you want to give a graphics demo to a bunch of 30 or 40 year olds, you show Doom, because we all know those levels, and we'll know what it's like.

You know, in the future, if you want to show off a graphics engine, it's probably going to be like Minecraft or Roblox or something. But for now, I think it's still Doom. I don't think anyone's taken it over, really. Um, and it's just been neat to see all the custom engines out there for it. I know LucasArts doesn't do it that way.

Disney certainly doesn't do it that way. So it's not going to happen like that. Uh, so I think we would have to rely on the fan remakes, but it'd be, it'd be nice if there was a John Carmack in these companies. It's just like, at least Code, what do we care? It's from 1995. 

[00:29:59] James: It's true. Now you can actually go to, yeah, github.

com forward slash id software forward slash doom. And there it is 12 years ago. It was out there. That's wild. It's even older than that. Yeah. The game, wow. And it's all just sitting there. It's funny when you, you know, the game. That I always want is the Windows XP pinball game. Oh, that's funny. Space Cadet.

Yeah, you're a pinballer. Funny. Pinball game. One day. There's actually a reverse engineer version of it out there, I think. 

[00:30:31] Frank: What did it come with? It came with that terrible 3D first person shooter that was terrible, the pinball game, and then like SkiFree. And I don't, I played the pinball game because the other two were terrible.

[00:30:44] James: Little Minesweeper. I don't know, did they ever, did Microsoft ever open source Minesweeper? That'd be great. That's a 

[00:30:51] Frank: good question. That's a Scott Hanselman question though. You're going to have to ask your boss on that one. I feel like you can make that happen. I bet you, um, I bet you, you know the funny thing with all these games though is they used to, um, license engines and other people's source code.

So I've learned a lot of the... Impediment to them releasing their source code is actually, they just have other people's license code in there and they can't really separate it out. Yeah, that makes a difficult, that actually happened with the DOR quake. I forget. They were using someone else's audio engine and they just tore that code out because they couldn't release that 

[00:31:25] James: code.

Oh wow. Well, there you go. There is our, um. Star Wars, Dark Forces. Yeah, I could have 30 minutes of, uh, of talking about remakes, remasters. Let us know what you think. Are we over boarding it? What else do you want to see us get back to development on? Um, but at the same time, it's kind of about a development because.

Even for me, when I'm thinking about what's next in my apps or the things that I'm making, am I remaking my Cadence? Am I remastering it? Am I HD remaking it? Super Deluxe Turbo Edition? I don't know, I'm just saying. We 

[00:31:56] Frank: need an HD remaster of a single number in the screen, but you should do it with a pixel shader so it glows.

[00:32:03] James: There you go. All right. Well, let us know what you think. If there's anything that's out there. Right in. Let us know what your favorite remake remaster HD turbo deluxe special edition of any game has ever been. Uh, go to mergeconflict. fm. There's contact button, there's Patreon stuff. There's all sorts of good stuff.

But that's going to do it for this week's podcast. Until next time, I'm James Montemagno. And 

[00:32:22] Frank: I'm Frank Kruger. Thanks for watching and listening. Peace.