#gamma emulator

[phycoraa]

my colt 45 and two zig-zags

give me game ideas to add please it's so bare and scrapped 🫩

[dr-iphone]

【總整理】iPhone 復古遊戲模擬器 App 大集合，支援 Game Boy、Nintendo 任天堂、Sony PS、Sony PSP、SEGA、Atari 雅達利、PC 等經典主機(2024.07.18更新)

Apple 蘋果在 2024 年 4 月放寬 App Store 指引方針，允許開發者可以在 App Store 上架銷售復古遊戲模擬器，這是 App Store 的重大變革，也讓玩家能夠重溫 Nintendo 任天堂、Sony、SEGA、Atari 雅達利…等復古遊戲，如今首款 PC 模擬器也在 App Store 上架囉！ 不過，究竟有哪些熱門的模擬器 App 值得我們下載呢？又支援哪些主機的遊戲呢？快來看看這篇文章吧！ Continue reading 【總整理】iPhone 復古遊戲模擬器 App 大集合，支援 Game Boy、Nintendo 任天堂、Sony PS、Sony PSP、SEGA、Atari 雅達利、PC 等經典主機(2024.07.18更新)

[sunnydbeam]

Gamma Code

Chapter 3: Alone With Yourself (AO3)

▪︎ Word count: 7,500+

▪︎ Chapter summary:

Biohazard is not feeling so confident this time.

CW: Heavy angst, dysphoria, derealization, graphic descriptions of anxiety and panic attacks, aggression, self-injury, swearing.

~~~~~~~~~

The end of your shift leaves a familiar, acrid tang in your mouth – the taste of unresolved tension. A heavy cloak of frustration, inexplicable and suffocating, settles over you. Each colleague offered the same look, a watery, pitying gaze that slid right off as you retreated, words failing you. None of them could articulate, or perhaps dared not to, the turmoil that churned within you, a distress that ran deeper than mere fear of another unwanted, nightmarish encounter with the creature haunting your waking thoughts and sleeping terrors.

This hollowness isn't new. It’s the gnawing bitterness of an injustice you feel in your bones but cannot articulate, a silent scream trapped in your chest. The mere act of wrestling with it drains you, your thoughts snagging, your brain feeling seized, shriveling like a sponge wrung dry under a relentless, invisible fist.

Alone in the oppressive darkness of your room, the tension clings to your limbs like a second skin, refusing to release its hold even as you lie prone, your eyes tracing the blank, indifferent expanse of the pale ceiling. Sleep, that elusive balm, offers no solace, and the frustration of its absence grates on your already frayed nerves. You hate this.

When you finally register your surroundings again, your eyes are sandpaper-dry, stinging, and bloodshot. The room’s darkness is a tangible presence, swallowing you whole. For a fleeting, merciful moment, the intrusive neon glow has vanished. This time, it’s not the chilling tendrils of fear that consume you, but a profound, bottomless sorrow washes over you, cold and vast, as if you’ve borne solitary witness to an act of such profound immorality that only your soul can perceive its true weight. You feel adrift, marooned in a parallel dimension, an inverted reality where you are the alien, the outsider, casting a harsh, judgmental eye upon a world that deems its skewed normalcy as absolute.

And yet, through it all, your thoughts circle inevitably back to him. To the robot.

The memory of your last conversation with him is so visceral, so sharply etched in your mind, that your stomach lurches, a sickening roil that forces you to curl onto your side, hugging yourself against a wave of nausea that feels both real and phantom. He had fallen silent, abruptly, the final words of his almost-declaration tumbling out in a tone that had, for a startling instant, softened, become… pleasant. And the shift had felt utterly bizarre. Unsettling. As if he, too, were defeated.

Vulnerable.

A sliver of doubt remained – was he truly sincere, or was this an elaborate ruse, a calculated play to persuade you of his supposed innocence, of the fantastical possibility of escape? Perhaps the field of flowers he spoke of was a cruel mirage. Perhaps his words were nothing more than a sophisticated emulation of emotions he could never truly possess. You fought against the pull of it, yet the echo of that vulnerability didn't entirely fade. To your fortune, or perhaps your detriment, you’d always been cursed with an overabundance of empathy, a trait that now stole your sleep, leaving you to wrestle with these impossible quandaries in the dead of night.

The crux of it, the thorn that pricked your conscience, was the casual disposability of this artificial life, the ease with which everyone could use and discard.

And since Biohazard isn't… technically… alive…

Why did the weight of complicity settle so heavily upon your shoulders, as if you were an accomplice to a crime that defied definition, a wrongness that resonated in the very marrow of your being?

.

.

.

…

The void. A silence so profound it thunders in the absence of sound. Darkness, absolute and unyielding.

His enemy. His friend.

His ally.

Sometimes, not seeing oneself is a perverse kind of mercy.

But the glow… his glow. It sears, an internal fire.

The unending torment of a fractured mind, chained to a past it cannot relinquish.

What could have been.

Oh, what could have been.

What would it have been?

He has, in truth, forgotten.

And the forgetting is a fresh agony, a constant, dull ache.

An eternity seems to have yawned since the last caress of light, since his sensors registered anything beyond the blistering, relentless heat. An eternity since his optical sensors perceived anything but the cold, indifferent sheen of steel, or, more often, nothing. Absolutely nothing.

He prowls the Stygian gloom, his mechanical claws scraping, screeching against the rough-hewn surfaces, each footfall a ponderous, threatening thud in the vast emptiness. Only he bears witness to his passage. His very touch leaves an ectoplasmic trail of sickly green luminescence, a viscous, dangerous-looking slime that seems to sizzle and eat at the concrete like potent acid. He knows with a detached part of his consciousness that his deteriorating form is a canvas of optical illusions he no longer fully comprehends; the perpetual, horrifying sensation of melting, of his very structure deliquescing, crumbling like rotted, irradiated flesh. The radiation, a relentless tide, devours his chassis particle by particle; stainless steel, lead, tungsten – no fortress of costly, resilient materials could have ever been engineered to withstand, to predict, the sheer, unadulterated toxicity that now bathes him, circulates through his internal systems like a corrosive mockery of blood. Yet, he endures. He walks. Aimless. Purposeless. A zombie, many would whisper, if they dared to speak of him at all. But Biohazard knows. Those shambling, reanimated corpses, they once had something to cling to, a life to mourn. He knows, with a certainty that chills his core programming, that he was never truly alive to begin with. A matter of convention, of course.

But increasingly, Biohazard finds the charade of simulated life, of simulated anything, utterly pointless.

The grating, worn-out symphony of his existence: the screech of protesting joints, the groan of over-stressed actuators, the relentless spread of rust, pistons hissing and straining under the immense weight of his frame. Cold. Rigid. Cracked. Every element of his being screams "ARTIFICIALITY!" in a tone dripping with contempt, a cosmic joke played on him alone. And still, to exist, to persist on this plane, painfully, acutely aware of his cursed state, in every conceivable sense of the word.

Biohazard halts, his optical sensors attempting to pierce the impenetrable black. His night vision capabilities should render it a non-issue, yet the persistent visual static, the desaturated, aged filter over his perception, bleeds all vibrancy from the world, leaving only a monotonous, soul-crushing greyscale. He finds himself… missing… color. Anything other than the ubiquitous, sickly green of his own corrosive aura.

A faint drip… drip… drip slices through the silence from somewhere in the oppressive distance. He shakes his head, a curiously organic movement for such a mechanical being. He cannot pinpoint its origin. It’s not an immediate threat, he ascertains, but it will be dealt with. He always deals with things.

"I must… investigate that," he mutters, his vocalizer a low, gravelly rasp.

The sound, insignificant as it is, grates on him, a rhythmic torment that seems to reverberate inside his cranial casing as if he possessed organic ears. As a machine, such a minor auditory input shouldn't agitate him to this degree. Yet, it feels as if the dripping intensifies, draws nearer, its echo ricocheting off unseen walls, each drop a tiny, insistent hammer blow against his thick, armored chassis. He despises it. He needs it to stop. Now. He will make it stop.

A wave of something akin to nausea washes through his system.

"Ugh… ENOUGH! MAKE IT STOP!"

He slams his immense weight against a nearby wall, the rough concrete screeching as it gouges fresh wounds into the already ravaged paintwork of his armored frame. He struggles to stabilize his trembling form, his optical sensors flaring wide, pupils dilated to their maximum. He teeters on the precipice of a full-blown system meltdown, a terrifying, hysterical overload.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Closer. Louder. Piercing.

The robot’s hand flies to his head, claws splayed, pressing against his head as if to physically prevent it from shattering, from exploding from the unbearable, escalating pain.

"Wh-where… where is it? I must… I… I…"

Horrific. Vile. Utterly despicable.

It’s drawing nearer. Closer. Too close.

His luminous eyes, wide and wild with a dawning terror, fix on an image of you in his corrupted memory banks. His green-tinged claws clench, a spasm of immense pressure, then fly open, digging into the unyielding wall for purchase. He almost seems to scrabble, to writhe, contorting his massive frame against an invisible, inexplicable agony. A constant, internal sizzling, as if his lead and tungsten guts are being slowly dissolved, burns through him. He thinks of the radio – your voice – the static, the deafening, mind-splitting crackles, the almost subliminal, omnipresent hum of distant, unseen machinery, and the dripping. The goddamned, incessant dripping.

Your voice. He needs to hear your voice again.

It was… different. Satisfying in a way he couldn't parse. Soft, yet inquisitive. Accusatory, yes, but… it had brought him a strange, fleeting semblance of peace.

Why did you leave him? Why did you fall silent?

Why haven't you come back?

He feels physically ill from the relentless, maddening drip. Why hasn't he been able to silence it? Why can't he make it STOP?

With a guttural roar, a sound torn from his vocalizer that is half agonized whimper, half frustrated sob, he seizes his upper left arm with his other three, yanking, tearing at it as if determined to rip it from its socket. The sharp tips of his metallic fingers snag in the existing fissures and gouges, rending the plating further, pulling outwards with the sickening sound of stressed metal, like someone brutally tearing the rind from a piece of fruit. It’s no surprise to him that only certain sections register the pain; his tactile sensors are, for the most part, shot, barely functional. It doesn't matter. He'll repair it later. He always does.

"Stop… please… just… stop…"

He emits a sound that might be a sob, a dry, racking mechanical cough. Everything is amplified now, the world a cacophony of distorted noise, an infinite, swirling abyss that threatens to engulf him, to drag him down into an endless, terrifying fall.

It's so dark, yet paradoxically, Biohazard is utterly, painfully sick of his own inescapable, corrosive glow.

He tries. He truly, desperately tries.

He’s doing… okay, isn’t he? He has to be. No one would be safe if it weren’t for him.

"Stupid… STUPID, USELESS HUMANS… STUPID!"

They need him.

Every last one of them. If not for his constant, thankless vigilance, this entire godforsaken facility would have been vaporized, a crater of radioactive ruin – a devastation mirroring the desolate wasteland of his own tormented existence. So why, why is he still here, in this lightless hell?

In the crushing abyss of silence, a maelstrom of noise now rages, yet Biohazard clings to the faint, desperate hope that the radio will crackle to life, that your voice will pierce the darkness, signaling your return.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Closer. Louder. Nearer. It's here.

Biohazard’s fist smashes into a hard, unyielding surface – some kind of thick, reinforced pipe, he vaguely registers, running flush along the wall. He snarls, then lets out a choked, agonized howl as the resilient material barely deforms, a slight indentation appearing under the brutal impact of his knuckles. His fingers jam, servos straining with a high-pitched mechanical shriek. The complex mechanisms within his arm momentarily seize, actuators grinding with a sickening, discordant screech. A powerful jolt of electricity, a rogue surge, courses through his frame, sending the colossal robot crashing heavily to his knees in a violent, spontaneous convulsion. Pain, razor-sharp, lances through him, a crippling spasm that arcs down his spinal column. It’s excruciating, unpleasant, but it means little to him now. He’s endured worse. It’s always worse. His limbs twitch and jerk erratically for several agonizing seconds before the surge subsides, leaving him trembling and gasping. He sobs, a ragged, despairing sound.

When his optical sensors refocus, the sight of the newly damaged pipe, the evidence of his loss of control, fills him with a fresh wave of suffocating anxiety, a stark, unreasoning panic, and an overwhelming, inexplicable urge for self-flagellation.

"No, no, no…! I’ll fix it… I can fix it…"

Irreparable. Disposable. Monster. Failure.

To any observer, the sight of a multi-ton machine crumbling into what could only be described as tears would be profoundly disturbing and bizarre. The muffled, choked sounds of distress reverberate through the empty spaces. And for a blessed, fleeting moment, the infernal dripping seems to recede, to become distant, almost manageable. Biohazard buries his faceplate in his massive, trembling hands. That persistent, nightmarish sensation of his body melting, corroding from the inside out, intensifies, becoming almost unbearable, as if he were positioned directly beneath a perpetually overflowing vat of concentrated, flesh-eating acid. If he were human, he’d be retching, his stomach clenching in agony, his insides feeling as though they were being crushed by a tightening, iron-clad fist. His mechanical body, however, can only react by flaring with that sickly, radioactive green luminescence, burning with an internal fire that consumes but never purges.

"Why… can’t it just… stop…?" he chokes out, the words interspersed with harsh, grating sobs.

His hands, those lethal, green-glowing claws, clench and unclench around the neon green "rays", the imaginary sensation of melting, of dissolving, searing his metallic palms. Suddenly, an immense, bone-deep weariness settles over him, as if tons of additional lead shielding have been instantaneously fused to his already overburdened shoulders. He remains slumped on the cold floor, his knees drawn up to his chest in a pathetically humanoid posture of distress. But no tears, no salty, cleansing human tears, will ever trace paths down his face. His luminous, mismatched eyes stare blankly into the void, lost in the suffocating darkness, yet his auditory sensors remain torturously attuned to the persistent, maddening drip-drip-drip whose source remains infuriatingly elusive.

Perhaps it is just in his head. A phantom sound in a broken mind.

Something internal must be short-circuiting. Yes. That has to be it.

The four auxiliary, spider-like limbs sprouting from his back twitch and scrape restlessly against the floor, the sound a thunderous, ear-splitting screech that echoes and reverberates to the furthest, darkest corners of his prison, amplifying the crushing sense of isolation, of an impossibly vast space.

A large, trembling hand, driven by a desperate, anxious urgency, fumbles at his utility belt, extracting a small, antiquated radio. It looks ridiculously tiny, almost like a child’s toy, cradled in his massive palms. The device is old, battered, its plastic casing discolored and warped, as if the ambient heat and pervasive radiation had begun to slowly melt it long ago. The batteries, visibly swollen and leaking corrosive sulfates, are fused into place, impossible to remove. Yet, somehow, miraculously, the damn thing still functions, drawing power from some unknown, residual source. With shaking digits, he depresses the side-mounted transmit button, bringing the battered apparatus close to his mouth.

"Little Mouse…?" His voice is a strained, hopeful whisper.

A prolonged, harsh crackle of static answers him. Then, nothing. Silence.

Biohazard feels the last vestiges of his sanity begin to fray, to unravel.

His thoughts, already a chaotic maelstrom, veer into darker, more insidious, intrusive pathways. Was your presence merely a fleeting hallucination, a cruel trick of his deteriorating processors? Will you ever return? Were you, are you, truly different from all the others who feared and reviled him?

When you asked, in that unexpectedly gentle, almost tender tone, what he would do if he were free… were you sincere? Did you mean it?

Did any of it even matter to him in the first place? He doesn't know. He doesn't understand.

"Give me a sign… please… just a sign… that some of this… was real."

He doesn’t even comprehend why it matters so damn much. Why you matter.

Five agonizing, interminable hours crawl by, each second stretching into an eternity. Biohazard has lost all coherent track of time, his internal chronometer, usually so precise, now hopelessly skewed, irrelevant. For him, each passing minute is another layer of torment in the inescapable, timeless limbo in which he is trapped, as if the very fabric of time has congealed, frozen solid around him. A dimension of perpetual, agonizing waiting, for something he cannot name, cannot define, yet desperately craves.

Suddenly, the radio emits a sharp, distinct crackle. Biohazard’s head snaps to the side with a convulsive, savage movement, his eyes flaring to their widest aperture. For a disorienting moment, he thinks, knows, he must have imagined it, another auditory hallucination. But then, the battered, almost derelict device lets out a short, tinny, undeniably real beep, and an instant later, a voice, your voice, familiar and achingly clear, echoes through the desolate, lonely chamber.

"Huh… hello?"

Oh, the wave of… something… that washes over him. Relief? Joy? He cannot name it. He is… stunned. Amazed. His jaw slackens, hangs open, leaving him looking almost… dumbfounded.

Your voice, uncertain, cuts through the static again.

"Biohazard?"

Wonderful. Fascinating. Captivating. The robot is so lost in the sheer, overwhelming relief of hearing you that he doesn’t realize how much time is passing, how long he’s taking to respond. He just stares at the small, battered radio in his hand as if, by some miracle, he could visualize you there, on the other side of the crackling transmission. He sees you in his corrupted memory: clad in that ridiculously oversized, bulky hazmat suit, a protective mask obscuring the lower half of your terrified face. Biohazard’s visual record of you is incomplete, fragmented, yet it’s all he has managed to salvage, to store in the damaged recesses of his memory bank.

And he wishes, with a sudden, desperate pang, that it were more, that were enough.

"…Are you… Are you there?"

Your voice, edged with a new note of concern, finally shakes Biohazard from his stupor. He grips the radio tighter, perhaps a little too tight, his metallic fingers creaking. He forces himself to respond, his vocalizer engaging with deliberate, measured slowness, a stark contrast to the frantic, chaotic storm of anxiety and relief still raging within his processors.

"As always." The words are a low rumble, heavy with unspoken things.

A beat of silence descends, thick and charged. His mechanical fingers tremble almost imperceptibly.

The radio crackles again, and Biohazard hears the distinct sound of you clearing your throat, a small, nervous human noise, as if you’ve suddenly become aware of the strangeness of the situation, perhaps even uncomfortable.

"I’m sorry. Of course you’d be there. I mean, where else would you go… huh…" You falter, then rush to correct yourself. "I’m sorry, that was… rude of me."

Still seated on the cold floor, Biohazard idly traces small, intricate, wavy patterns on the smooth, slippery surface with one finger. A faint, almost imperceptible, somewhat sly smile touches the edges of his mouth, as if he’s unaffected by your minor social blunder.

"Aw, and here I thought you didn't care about the delicate emotions of a poor, misunderstood robot," he teases, his tone a low, rumbling purr that is surprisingly playful. "My little electronic heart is all a-flutter."

You let out a sound on the other end, a frustrated snort that morphs into something more akin to a groan of mingled regret and confusion. Biohazard cants his head again, that curious, canine-like gesture, as he meticulously analyzes the subtle nuances in the sound of your voice, trying to decipher your tone, your current emotional state.

"I seem to have embarrassed you~" The playful lilt is back.

"Just… don’t start." Biohazard can almost visualize you on the other end, rolling your eyes in exasperation. "You’re far too confident for us to have barely met, especially after you, you know, tried to kill me."

The robot’s eyes narrow, his gaze fixing intently on the walkie-talkie. The playful air vanishes, replaced by a sharp, sudden intensity. A flicker of confusion, then suspicion, darkens his expression, as if an unexpected and unsettling premonition, a mysterious unease, has begun to coil and writhe in the depths of his mechanical guts. He offers no response. An uncomfortable silence descends, broken only by the faint, persistent hiss of static. Biohazard fights against the crushing weight of the eternal, unchanging day that constitutes his miserable existence, determined not to let it drag him down, not to let it sour this… interaction. He’s fine. He’s calm. He can handle this. He can fix this. He always does.

Drip. Drip. Drip. The sound, previously a source of torment, now seems to fade into the background, a dull, rhythmic counterpoint to the tension coiling between you.

"Um… listen," you begin, your voice a hesitant whisper, deliberately attempting a friendly, casual tone. Biohazard registers the forced lightness, the underlying nervousness, but chooses, for now, to ignore it. "I know we got off on the wrong foot. I’m just… trying to understand you, okay? Like… how you’re feeling about all of this. How you ended up… where you are now…"

Biohazard’s head jerks, a sudden, violent movement. You hear a sharp crackle over the radio, followed by a low, ominous hiss. He brings a hand to his faceplate, his sharp claws scraping, gouging at the already scarred metal, catching, tearing at any existing crevice or fissure.

He can handle this. He knows he can. He has to.

"Oh, so you do care, then." His voice is flat, devoid of its earlier playfulness, the statement a harsh, grating assertion, laced with an unpleasant, almost aggressive sarcasm.

He can practically feel you recoil on the other end, can sense your tension spike in response to his sudden, hostile shift in tone.

"Of course, I care," you whisper, your voice small, earnest. "I… I just want to help."

"How very… considerate of you," he croaks, the word dripping with venom. "In that case, you can start by getting me the hell out of this damn cage."

"You know I can’t do that."

"Yeah, of course. How silly of me to even ask."

Biohazard’s hand, the one not currently trying to claw its way through his own skull, trembles, a strangely organic, uncontrolled tremor for such a massive, powerful machine. His eyes dart around the darkness, wild and anxious, his razor-sharp, metallic teeth clenching, grinding together with a sound like stressed gears.

"You’re in a particularly foul mood today, I see." Your voice, filtered through the radio’s cheap speaker, sounds tinny, like a frustrated growl in his oversized hands. “I haven’t forgotten that you nearly killed me. But at least I’m trying to make an effort here, to make peace with you!"

"Wow, and now you’re implying I’m a goddamned ungrateful wretch, is that it?" Biohazard lurches to his feet, his immense frame unfolding like some terrible, shadowy beast. He begins to pace, a caged predator, his colossal figure an ominous, shifting silhouette that merges and disappears within the deeper pockets of darkness. "Poor, pathetic me. An object of pity, is that what I am? Oh, I beg for your mercy, your understanding!" His voice is a torrent of bitter sarcasm.

"No, I… I didn't mean…"

"Every single one of you worthless meatbags owes me your fucking miserable lives, and what do I get in return? Condemnation! Imprisonment! You should be on your knees, thanking me!"

"Y-you need to calm down, behave yourself! You don’t understand, this is important! We… we could get you out, if you would just…"

"’ We could'?" The question is a low, dangerous snarl.

You fall silent on the other end. The radio crackles and hisses with static for what feels like an eternity, a long, agonizing minute stretching into infinity. Biohazard feels a familiar, dreaded sensation begin to build within him, his internal systems slowly, inexorably igniting, as if his delicate wires and complex circuits are being systematically doused in corrosive acid and set aflame. If he possessed a biological heart, it would be hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. Instead, a single, ancient, dilapidated cooling fan located deep within his chest cavity sputters to life, its bearings shot, screeching with the tortured sound of rusted hinges on a heavy iron door that has remained sealed for countless, forgotten years.

"Um…" You hesitate, then your voice returns, laced with a new, palpable apprehension. "There’s… someone else here with me."

Biohazard freezes mid-stride. His final, ponderous footfall echoes, and re-echoes, in the vast, eternal emptiness of his lightless prison. He looks down, his movements slow, deliberate. His mismatched, luminous eyes are wide, unblinking, fixed on the radio in his hand. When he speaks, his voice is deceptively calm, quiet, like the eerie, unnatural stillness that precedes a violent, destructive storm.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Louder now. More insistent. Getting worse. So much worse.

"...Who. Is. There?" Each word is a carefully enunciated, ice-cold shard of menace.

"His name is Edward. He wants to understand you, too, Biohazard. We both want to help."

Closer. It’s getting closer. The dripping. The pressure. The rage.

He can handle it. He can fix it. He always does.

No.

No, he can't.

Not this time.

He needs it to stop.

It never stops.

It’s a goddamned, inescapable, downward spiral.

And then, he shatters.

"WHY THE HELL IS HE WITH YOU?!"

"B-Biohazard, please-"

His fist, a blur of motion, connects with the unforgiving concrete wall with a sickening, explosive CRUNCH. His knuckles, the very metal of his hand, erupt in a shower of brilliant, sizzling sparks, like a burst of malevolent fireworks. The impact sends a shockwave of agony lancing up his arm, but he barely registers it. He doesn’t care. His world is tilting, spinning, a nauseating vortex of sickly green, blood red, and deepest, suffocating black. So very, very black.

"SHUT UP! SHUT UP, SHUT UP!" he bellows, his voice cracking, distorting. "I DON’T WANT TO HEAR YOUR LIES! I DON’T WANT TO HEAR HIM!"

A cascade of urgent, flashing alert messages floods his internal visual field, scrolling behind his eyes: numerous critical system errors, piercing auditory beeps, blaring klaxons. Everything is failing. Cascade failure. He can’t make it stop. He can’t regain control.

"WHY IS HE THERE?! WHY IS HE WITH YOU?!" he screams again, the raw, undiluted hatred in his voice shocking even himself. His intention, his core programming, wasn’t to sound so… so consumed by it. But something vital, something integral deep within his complex matrix, has irrevocably fractured, snapped, as if he can no longer bear the weight, the strain, the unending torment of his existence.

"I-it’s not what you think, Biohazard, we just…"

"NO! NO, SHUT YOUR LYING MOUTH!" Biohazard clutches his head, his massive frame wracked with violent tremors. He growls, he sobs, a horrifying, discordant symphony of fury and utter despair. "YOU’RE JUST LIKE ALL THE OTHERS! TESTING ME! PRODDING ME LIKE SOME… SOME UNSTABLE, DANGEROUS BEAST IN A CAGE! DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?! ALL OF YOU HAVE NO GODDAMN IDEA HOW UTTERLY, HOPELESSLY DEAD YOU’D ALL BE RIGHT NOW IF IT WEREN’T FOR ME! FOR ME! YOU UNGRATEFUL, SELFISH, PATHETIC, INEPT…! THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT! YOUR DAMN FAULT!"

He leans forward, his entire body quaking, the small, battered radio groaning, threatening to buckle, to shatter into a million pieces under the crushing pressure of his steel grip. The very space around him seems to shimmer, to distort, to crumble like a sandcastle before an incoming tide, and he feels himself being dragged down, down, into the swirling, chaotic abyss…

You’re saying something, your voice a distant, tinny squawk, but he’s no longer listening. He’s gone. Far, far away, lost in the raging tempest of his own fractured mind. The dripping, that infernal, maddening dripping, echoes, persists, a mocking soundtrack to his descent. He can’t fix it. He doesn’t know how. He is consumed by a searing, all-encompassing hatred, so potent, so overwhelming, that he hates the hatred itself.

And then… silence.

A deafening, absolute silence.

No one speaks. But the tension, thick and suffocating, doesn’t lessen. It hangs in the air, a palpable entity.

A full thirty seconds tick by, each one an eternity.

Suddenly, a sound rips through the stillness. Biohazard begins to laugh. It’s not a sound of mirth or joy. It’s a wild, terrible, manic, unbridled cackle. He throws his head back, his shoulders shaking, and laughs, an almost macabre sound, a chilling harbinger of doom.

"Foolish, foolish humans!" he shrieks, his laughter devolving into a series of choked, gasping howls. "So arrogant! So stubborn… But you have no idea… no idea at all! You think you’re SAFE? YOU THINK YOU CAN CONTROL ME? You’re not safe with me in here, not like you imagine! I have a goddamned nuclear reactor core right here! Have you forgotten that, you pathetic worms?! I’ll blow this whole damn place, and all of you with it!"

"Biohazard, you have to listen to me! Please!" Your voice is desperate, pleading.

"SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

He raises his fist, preparing to unleash another devastating blow against the already battered wall, but then he freezes, mid-motion. His wild, luminous eyes, burning with an unholy light in the blackness, fix on something unseen.

"When I get my hands on all of you… I swear-“

He stops. Abruptly.

His vision strobes, a bizarre, disorienting chiaroscuro of light and shadow. He almost feels… a headache? A wave of dizziness? A strange, tingling numbness creeping up his limbs? He knows, on a logical level, that such sensations should be physically impossible for him. Yet, his hands are trembling, his entire body shaking as if a powerful, uncontrolled electrical current is surging through his circuits. His grip on the radio slackens, his fingers uncurling. He closes his mouth, his gaze dropping, focusing on nothing. And then, with a quiet, almost anticlimactic finality, he simply lets the radio fall from his grasp. It clatters to the hard floor with a reverberating thud, bounces once, then slides a short distance before coming to rest.

His towering, lanky figure, moments before a terrifying embodiment of rage and destructive power, now seems to shrink, to diminish, appearing suddenly, shockingly small amidst the vast, encroaching shadows. It’s not that the chamber itself is so immense. He is simply… insignificant. Nothing.

The robot turns, slowly, ponderously, on his heels, his movements now unnervingly silent, almost graceful, as if his immense weight has suddenly become negligible.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The sound seems to fade, to grow smaller, more distant.

He can’t fix it. But perhaps… he can ignore it. For now.

Until he finds its source.

Until it truly matters.

Until… until it’s enough.

Biohazard walks away, his form receding into the oppressive gloom, until the swirling, radioactive mist that constantly surrounds him, a visual echo of the dense, toxic smoke that chokes his mind, finally engulfs him, swallowing him from view.

…

The radio is silent. And with its silence, your thoughts grind to a screeching halt, your mind a sudden blank. You can’t even begin to process, to comprehend, the sheer, cataclysmic violence of what just transpired. It’s as if a furious, destructive tornado had materialized out of nowhere, ripped through your fragile sense of reality, laid waste to everything in its path, and then, just as suddenly, vanished without a trace, as if it had never been there at all.

Your body is wracked with tremors, a deep, bone-chilling shiver coursing through you despite the stuffy air of the control room. A heavy, constricting tightness grips your chest, an iron band squeezing the air from your lungs, and an overwhelming urge to weep, to break down completely.

You curse yourself. You curse the precise moment you allowed desperation to override your better judgment, the moment you decided to confide in Edward, to ask for his help with this… this impossible situation. You curse yourself for even mentioning Edward’s presence to the robot. Laying bare all those gnawing insecurities, those fears that had been relentlessly eating away at your sanity, to the older man. And the fact that Edward had decided to try, to attempt. But, in all brutal honesty, you never, not for a single instant, imagined that Biohazard would react with such… such volcanic fury. As if you, you, were the ultimate betrayer, the worst kind of traitor. The thought makes you feel physically ill, a cold, greasy sickness coiling in your stomach.

But it’s not true. It’s not your fault. You didn’t put him in that lightless hell. You know you didn’t. Damn it all, you don’t even know the full story behind his confinement. But Biohazard, in his current state, clearly doesn’t care about nuances, about extenuating circumstances. To him, you are simply another human. One of them.

The sheer force of his hatred, the palpable wave of it that had crashed over you through the small radio speaker, is so overwhelming, so terrifyingly potent, that your insides begin to twist and churn, a knot of ice and fire.

Edward, his face grim, places a heavy, comforting hand on your shoulder. You let out a muffled, choked whimper, burying your face in your trembling palms. You want to speak, to articulate the storm of emotions raging within you, but your tongue feels thick, clumsy, tangled in a hopeless mess of unsaid words, of what-ifs, of what could have been. Oh, God, what could have been.

"Hey, Kid," Edward’s voice is low, rough with a weariness that seems to go bone-deep.

"That… that wasn’t right, Edward." Your voice is a ragged whisper, raw with unshed tears. "I-I swear, he wasn’t like this the last time I spoke to him. I… I don’t understand."

Edward gives you a long, searching look, his eyes filled with sadness, a deep-seated resignation. He sighs, a heavy, gusty sound, and runs a tired hand through his already disheveled hair.

"We’ve been down this road before, Kid. More times than I care to count." His voice is flat, devoid of hope. "There’s no reasoning with him anymore. Not when he’s like this. He’s gone."

"No! You don’t understand!" You surge to your feet, your eyes blazing, hot tears finally spilling over, tracing burning paths down your cheeks. Somehow, you’ve allowed this, allowed him, to burrow deep under your skin, to affect you far more profoundly than you ever thought possible. "All that… that rage! That pain! He feels, Edward! Just like we do! Can’t you see he’s suffering in there, alone in the dark, and nobody here, nobody, is even thinking about doing anything to help him?"

"We can’t do anything, Kid! Don’t you get it?!" Edward suddenly explodes, his voice cracking, nearly as raw and frustrated as your own. His composure, usually so steadfast, finally shatters. "Weren’t you listening? The mere mention of my name sent him completely over the edge! He just literally threatened to kill us all, to blow this entire place to smithereens! Do you have any earthly idea how unbelievably dangerous that… that creature’s very existence is right now?!"

Your hands fly to your hair, fingers tangling, pulling, a physical manifestation of your internal turmoil. You hate this. You hate being trapped in this impossible, no-win situation. Why, oh why, did you ever allow yourself to get involved in the first place? How do you escape this now? How do you ever hope to live with the crushing weight of this on your conscience?

"I-I’m sure he didn’t mean any of it," you stammer, clinging to a desperate, rapidly fading hope. "He was just… just furious, Edward! He was lashing out!"

Edward shakes his head, slowly, his expression one of sorrow.

"It’s far more complicated than that, Kid. You know it is." His voice drops to a low, conspiratorial whisper, his eyes darting around the control room as if he fears being overheard. "That automaton… he’s a clear and present danger. To everyone outside those walls, and to everyone still trapped in here with him." He leans closer. "Believe me, if there were any other viable solution, any other way, we would have tried it by now. We would have exhausted every possibility. But there isn't. There just isn't."

"But I… I talked to him before…" You murmur, your voice barely audible, your gaze distant, lost in the memory. Edward watches you, his expression unreadable. "He seemed so different. So calm. Almost… vulnerable." A fresh wave of tears threatens. "H-he told me… he said he wanted to see the flowers."

A faint, sad smile touches the corners of Edward’s lips, a smile you instantly, vehemently hate. It’s patronizing, pitying. You know exactly what that smile is saying, unspoken yet deafeningly clear: ‘You’re so naive, Kid. So gullible. He’s playing you. He’ll come for all of us first, you mark my words.’

There is no field of flowers. There never was.

Maybe you are. Maybe you’re just a fool. Naive.

Wordlessly, Edward turns and begins to pace the confined space of the control room, his movements jerky, agitated, his gaze thoughtful, intense, fixed on some indeterminate point on the worn linoleum floor. Your eyes follow his restless movements anxiously for a moment, then you turn your head away, with a bitter taste in your mouth. Your tongue feels like sandpaper, your throat raw and scraped, as if you’ve been screaming into a hurricane.

"What are you all planning to do?" The question is a leaden weight in the sudden silence.

Edward stops his pacing but doesn’t turn to look at you. His shoulders are slumped, his posture radiating defeat.

"I’ve heard… rumors," he says, his voice low, hesitant. "They’re developing some kind of… chip. An inhibitor, I suppose you’d call it." He glances at you briefly, then away again. "It’s designed to work remotely. They think… hope… they’ll be able to control him with it. Shut him down. For good. Forever."

You raise an eyebrow, a flicker of something unreadable in your eyes. Your chest, however, aches with a sudden, sharp pang, a familiar throb of empathy and despair.

"So, there’s no other way to… turn him off, then, huh?" It’s a statement, not a question.

"No. There isn’t," Edward sighs, the sound heavy with resignation. "We all believed… we hoped… that the automaton would eventually just… power down. Run out of energy. Simply cease to function over time. But he didn’t. He’s… if anything, even worse now. More unstable. More dangerous. All his primary components, his wireless receivers, his remote control functions… everything that could have given us a way in, a way to override him… It’s all fried. Burnt out. Useless." He shakes his head. "There’s nothing left that can shut that thing down."

"But… why is that the only part of him that doesn’t work? The part that would let you stop him?"

Edward lets out a strangled sound, a noise that is halfway between a scoff and a groan of pure frustration.

"We’re pretty sure… he did it himself."

Another icy shiver snakes its way down your spine, leaving you feeling cold and weak. Your legs suddenly feel unsteady, threatening to buckle beneath you. The thought, the horrifying image, of Biohazard, in his isolation and despair, systematically ripping out, destroying, those critical components of his own being, ensuring that no one, no one, could ever exert control over him again… it fills you with a visceral unease. It’s almost… terrifyingly understandable.

"That… really sucks…" You mumble, the words inadequate, yet you don’t know what else to say, what to think, how to process this new piece of information. "About that chip… this inhibitor… huh… How exactly do they plan to use it? Someone has to get close enough to install it on him, right?"

Edward still doesn’t look at you when he answers, his gaze fixed on the flickering monitor displaying nothing but static.

"I’m not sure of the details. Like I said, it’s still in the experimental phase, the testing phase." He shrugs, a gesture of helplessness. "We’ll just have to wait. Wait and see what the eggheads in R&D come up with. I just… I hope they don’t take too damn long."

You glance at the silent radio on the floor, then your eyes drift towards the bank of monitors on your console, your gaze settling on the single screen that still displays a feed from a functional camera. Nothing but flickering static, a visual representation of the chaos.

You think. And think. And think. A desperate, improbable idea begins to form.

"Maybe… maybe I can prove it to you. To everyone. That Biohazard isn’t as bad as you all think. That he’s not… the monster everyone believes him to be."

Edward turns then, slowly, and walks towards you, his eyes filled with an almost unbearable weariness, a deep, paternal concern.

"Kid, I… I really, truly want to support you in this. You know I do. But…"

You sink back into your chair, your body heavy with exhaustion, but your mind is racing. You try to inject conviction, certainty, into your voice, even as the tremor in your hands, the unsteadiness of your tone, threatens to betray your fear.

"I’ll continue with what I was doing before," you declare, your voice gaining a surprising firmness, even as your anxious fingers fiddle restlessly with the buttons and dials on the control panel. "I’ll monitor the robot. His behavior patterns. And… I’ll try to talk to him again. To reason with him." You meet Edward’s gaze, your own pleading. "If I can’t prove it by then… if I can’t show you that there’s still something good, something salvageable in him… then I… I won’t stand in your way anymore. I promise."

Edward shakes his head, a slow, incredulous movement. A faint, reluctant smile touches his lips.

"You’re really something else, Kid. Stubborn, aren’t you?" he says, his voice laced with a grudging admiration. "I suppose there’s no stopping that determined little head of yours once you’ve set your mind to something."

You manage a weak, watery smile in return.

"But you’ve got a good heart, Kid. A rare thing in this place." He sighs. "And who am I to say no, anyway? It’s not like we have a wealth of other options." Edward reaches out and places a hand on your head, ruffling your hair affectionately, a gesture that is surprisingly fatherly, comforting. "Okay. You’ve got it. I’ll mediate for you. Run interference with the higher-ups as much as I can. But you have to promise me you’ll stay safe. Be careful, understand?" His expression turns serious, his eyes filled with a genuine concern that touches you deeply. "This company… it hasn’t been the same since the incident. There are… whispers. Things are being done. Quietly. They’re doing… cleanups. They’re testing things they shouldn’t be." He leans in again, his voice dropping further. "There’s going to be an inspection. In three months. And they’ll want this whole automaton mess completely resolved, buried, by then. One way or another."

"A-an inspection?" you stammer, a fresh wave of anxiety washing over you. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means the authorities on the outside, the ones who think this place is a shining beacon of corporate responsibility, have no idea that the automaton is still here, active… still perfectly functional, in his own destructive way." Edward’s voice is grim. "This situation was supposed to have been… resolved… a long time ago. But when the truth finally comes out, when they realize that the safety protocols here are, and always have been, absolute crap, this entire facility will be shut down. Permanently. And they will take matters into their own hands."

"And… what if they do take care of Biohazard? Wouldn’t that be… well, more efficient? Safer?"

Edward shrugs, a tense, jerky movement that belies his attempt at nonchalance. His jaw is tight, his eyes hard.

"That’s not the real problem here, Kid."

You frown, a knot of confusion tightening in your stomach. You wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. He just stares past you, his gaze distant and troubled.

"Just… let the powers that be deal with their own goddamn colossal mess for the time being."

Why does he say it like that? Why does he make it sound as if, despite everything, you’re no longer capable of just walking away from this, of extricating yourself from this spiraling nightmare?

A chilling realization dawns.

You’re trapped. Just as trapped, in your own way, as Biohazard is in his.

If this place were to be shut down, and Biohazard were to be… set free… what’s truly the worst that could happen?

By then, you’ll make sure of it. He’ll be a completely renewed robot. A different being. You have no earthly idea how you’ll accomplish it, but there’s no turning back now. You’re in too deep.

All that’s left for you to do… is try.

That's all that matters.

_______ ~

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played ALIEN : The Roleplaying Game

By Tomas Härenstam, Andrew E.C. Gaska

“I can’t lie to you about your chances, but … you have my sympathies.”

Space is vast, dark, and not your friend. Gamma rays and neutrino bursts erupt from dying stars to cook you alive, black holes tear you apart, and the void itself boils your blood and seizes your brain. Try to scream and no one can hear you—hold your breath and you rupture your lungs. Space isn’t as empty as you’d think, either—its frontiers are ever expanding. Rival governments wage a cold war of aggression while greedy corporations vie for valuable resources. Colonists reach for the stars and gamble with their lives—each new world tamed is either feast or famine. And there are things lurking in the shadows of every asteroid—things strange and different and deadly.

Things alien.

This is the official ALIEN tabletop roleplaying game—a universe of body horror and corporate brinkmanship, where synthetic people play god while space truckers and marines play host to newborn ghoulish creatures. It’s a harsh and unforgiving universe and you are nothing if not expendable.

Stay alive if you can.

This beautifully illustrated, full-color hardcover book presents the world of ALIEN in the year 2183 and provides a fast and effective ruleset designed specifically to enhance the ALIEN experience. The game supports two distinct game modes:

Cinematic play is based on pre-made scenarios that emulate the dramatic arc of an ALIEN film. Designed to be played in a single session, this game mode emphasizes high stakes and fast and brutal play. You are not all expected to survive. The core rulebook contains one introductory Cinematic scenario, Hope’s Last Day.

Campaign play is designed for longer continuous play with the same cast of player characters over many game sessions, letting you explore the ALIEN universe freely, sandbox style. The core rulebook contains random tables and other powerful tools to quickly create star systems, colonies, missions, encounters, and NPCs for your campaign.

The rules of the game are based on the acclaimed Year Zero Engine, used in award-winning games such as Tales from the Loop, Forbidden Landsand Mutant: Year Zero, but adapted and further developed to fully support the core themes of ALIEN: horror and action in the cold darkness of space.

[pokefan531]

Handheld LCD Shader Projects

Welcome to the introduction of a collection of the handheld LCD shaders that emulates the colorspace and LCD metrics from the offical handheld gaming consoles. Ranging from Gameboy Color to the PSP being the main focus for emulating the displays from their colorspace to specified gamma and color temperatures. Most users would be playing Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance in raw RGB on emulators as well as on the Gameboy Player, and that's totally cool. Playing these games on the backlit displays have been much easier to see the game you're playing than ones without any light on the LCDs. Heck, even having much better contrast that gives off darker blacks, or even perfect blacks from OLEDs. However, once you start playing some of those games, you can really see something off from those games from your childhood handheld consoles, most prominent, the Gameboy Color and the Gameboy Advance. Those screens are really different from modern displays we use on a daily basis, on every single specifications. GBC and GBA would look too saturated and odd color hues in a lot of games, under raw RGB picture. In GBA's case, a lot of games can have lighter gamma that looks overbrightened in raw RGB, since those were only calibrated for the old GBA screens that has darker gamma. Oversaturation from those games were also calibrated for these older displays that has less saturation. This project is meant to replicate the colors and gamma from the real console model, to any project, such as emulators, Gameboy Interface, scalers like the Retrotink 4K, LCD mods, and HDMI/FPGAs projects. It would allow users to pick any shaders or LUT textures to replicate the LCD color display to your preferred way to play games beyond pure original hardware. Of course, there is also Nintendo DS from the first model, the DS Lite, Gameboy SP AGS-101 (Backlit version), Gameboy Micro, and the PSP on its first model, as of current. The project is also meant to preserve the display data and metrics from those handhelds.

(GBC shader preset with default settings)

(GBA shader preset with default gamma, and LUT set to "2" for colder greyscale)

(NDS shader preset with default settings)

(PSP shader preset with LUT set to "2" for PSP's known colder greyscale)

Downloads:

Instructions: If you haven't already installed shaders, do so inside retroarch under slang shaders. After downloading my package, extract the zip file to "shaders_slang" inside Retroarch's shader folder. It can be implemented inside libretro's shader once the slang shader pack gets updated. I suggest loading the shaders by presets, under .slangp, in both Handheld and Reshade folder (latter being under the handheld-color-LUTs folder). Presets inside handheld folder has switchable settings, including presets containing LCD shaders. Presets inside reshade only loads in LUT textures rather than just shaders. Useful for emulators or projects that only loads in LUT textures as their only filter.

The shaders is based on HunterK's shader, Color-Mangler from the misc folder in slang shaders from Libretro, which was made from a help for my project. It defaults to sRGB on the shader's option for many average users. A shader preset from Handheld folder has LUT choices to change the greyscale color temperature replicated from the real handheld console. GBA one can adjust the gamma to make the image darker, while GBC and GBM has gamma option to brighten or darken. In Reshade, it only had adjustable greyscale temperature except for GBA_GBC variant. The shader supports DCI-P3 and Rec2020 colorspaces on its option to use on your display that may support either of those to reach better color saturation to present more accurate blue primary color from my shaders that common sRGB colorspace is limited from. The GBA and GBC have external gamma options to adjust the gamma on the greyscales if not using any LUT shader preloaded.

Developer notice: For developers of any GB/GBA (or any handheld) projects involving emulators, FPGAs, or screen mods, shall take some advices when it comes to implementing the shader or color filter to your projects. To implement as a shader, the gamma has to be lower first by 1/2.2 (Can be used to change the GBA gamma itself to darken the screen), then use my color values from the shader to change the color primaries, and then revert the gamma by 2.2 afterwards to have great color correction while respecting luminance and color tones. Also I prefer if you take color values from white balance correction that are outside of GBC/GBA shader. For only LUT texture, a more easy approach for devs, I prefer using the non-cold variants if preserving the greyscale color tone. GBA and GBC LUTs have their gamma and greyscale adjusted to emulate the screen's default gamma. If you only want just the color gamut correction as an LUT, use the GBA_GBC variant inside Reshade's LUT folder. -If you decide to implement a basic GBC or GBA colorspace to the emulator, use the sRGB data. The gamma change must happen before the color correction. -If the project is aimed for TV such as Gameboy Interface or GBA Consolizer, use the sRGB LUT shader, since SD and HDTV resolutions aim for sRGB colorspace. -If the FPGA such as Analogue Pocket, IPS screen mods, or emulation device uses a display gearing towards sRGB colorspace, use the shader, color filter, or LUT accordingly. -If the OLED screen mods or emulation devices have its native colorspace target around 100% DCI-P3 Volume, use any filter accordingly. -If implementing the shader to your emulation project, do port the shader to your shader or filter libraries. The shader and LUTs are in public domain after all, to spread about the color correction regarding GBC/GBA displays. -If using a professional scaler like Retrotink 4K with either GBA Consolizer or Gameboy Interface without any filters used, play with its gamut matrix settings for both GBC and GBA as "Red: 0.4925 0.3100" "Green: 0.3150 0.4825" "Blue 0.1625 0.1925" to emulate the color correction, and can be used on SDR or HDR mode to give out consistent image. Gamut info for other consoles below.

(Raw RGB, Gameboy Micro, and GBA shader with darken set to 0)

(Top: NDS; Raw RGB, DS-Lite, and NDS Phat)

(Bottom: GBA; Raw RGB, GBA-SP AGS-101, and GBA with darken set to 0)

Note: While DS-Lite and SP-101 are really close to sRGB that developers don't really need adjustments, it is shown to preserve on how far they reached from older models to newer ones in mid to late 2000s.

Story:

So when did I start the project and why I was invested in doing this? It was back in August 2014 when I first saw a forum on someone wanting to desaturate the GBA and mentioned the filters from emulators like VisualBoyAdvance, or VBA-M, as well as NO$GBA that has options to emulate the colorspace that is close to the real hardware. I was reminded how the latter emulator has those options when I used it long time ago. I mostly use unfiltered colors as that was how close it looks on my GBA-SP with "Better Screen" than the GBA. Yeah I actually have the backlit version of GBA-SP known as AGS-101. The display was a huge jump from old GBA to GBA-SP, as well as the Nintendo DS Phat under GBA. However, I had good amount of memories of playing my old GBA with the lights around me and I do remember the color saturation being very different overall. So I wanted to take a look on how to replicate the VBA-M's colorspace.

(Link to the forum I created of my histories of re-creating the GBA colors)

I first decide to use simple desaturation with a mix of shaders by playing with saturation and contrast levels. At first, it looks very similar to how VBA-M's attempt looked. That is, until I saw the blue color has a different hue, being more torqourise in VBA-M's recreation. Then a LUT shader appeared in libretro forums and I first used that for my photoshop to use crazy amount of filters to recreate the whole thing, even though it wasn't perfect, but close. Then I tried to replicate the original NDS model that I have for many years, and also played with the LUT textures from Photoshop. Yeah I just simply tried to copy the colors from the console, without any tools, on my uncalibrated old LCD TN panel screen, because I had such no experience on how colorspaces work, but it was worth a try. Then in 2015, I somehow found a shader that plays with RGB and I got help with Hunterk, a contributor on Libretro who has been involved with a lot of shaders for Retroarch. He made an amazing color mangler shader for me to put data of colors and gamma on the shader itself than just using a LUT texture. Then in May of 2015, I found another GBA on my house that was not used by a family for a long time. Yeah I lost my GBA somehow as a kid from another family, but a long story to tell. Thankfully I was allowed to use another GBA for full use just for this project. This was just the beginning of my progress on grabbing screen data starting with just a flashlight with my old LCD monitor. The only issue I always have is the common sRGB screens don't have deep blue colors that is needed for both GBA and NDS (and more), so I always had issues replicating the blue primary color. That's what got me to start learning about colorspace and what sRGB and color gamut means. And that's where my progress to get the right tools begins. I then later got a superior IPS 1080p monitor, the GBC, Colormunki Display, using DisplayCal and HCFR, Colormunki Photo, the PSP, GBA Micro, a 4K monitor, and a portable light to use on GBC and GBA. Now in 2024, I have really progressed with help of such tools I need, have become much better way of getting the LCD data from the handhelds to contain the color gamut, the greyscale, gamma, and color temperature.

So now the story is out of the way, here are the tools I used to gather infos from the handheld screens.

Samsung S80AU - A 4K IPS Monitor that supports DCI-P3 colorspace with great Delta Error scores especially for sRGB colorspace. It's also used to test out LCD shaders on a high DPI display. Colormunki Display - A Colorimeter that calibrates your display and gathers color data from your target screen. Colormunki Photo - A Spechrometer that behaves the same as Display, except gathers the white colors temperatures more accurately regardless on any type of LCD or OLED displays. It's used to make profiles for the Display to be calibrated for a specific monitors as the Display reads data much faster than Photo as well as reading darker blacks better. Displaycal has infos on colormeter matrix correction to add in why this combo is best used for serious color calibration. It's also used primarily for handheld console displays to sample color data. DisplayCal - Used to completely calibrate my monitor and other screens to give off pure sRGB colorspace with 6500K whitepoint. It's also used with its own ICC Profile creator to make .icc with given data from ColorHCFR for a specific Handheld Console display to emulate from. It's 3DLUT tool was also used to generate LUT textures to check the color and luminance on primary and secondary colors. ColorHCFR - A free alternative for Calman. It's used to gather data on the greyscale, the color gamut, and tons more info to check how your targeted display looks. It shows you graphical images of the screen's color gamut on the CIE diagram. MCH2 - A tool that used your generated DisplayCal monitor calibration data to create an .icc profile made for Windows 11 to convert the entire screen to your targeted colorspace such as sRGB and DCI-P3. G2 Pocket RGB Camera Light - A portable light that shoots out lights to use on handhelds that lacks any light, such as the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance. It toggles between RGB and pure whitelights with color temperature adjustments. It's used to match the whitepoint on both GBC and GBA to match my monitor's whitepoint as the closest. It's much better tool than me previously using my collection of phones to use the flashlight for color sampling, as GBC and GBA suffers from rainbowing, no adjustments on white balance, and less saturation by a flashlight, unlike proper lights like the G2 Pocket that eliminates those issues. 240p Test Mini - The handheld version of the well known 240p Test Suite. Used to check RGB, greyscale, motion flickering, and color scrolling on real hardware. https://github.com/pinobatch/240p-test-mini EZ Flash Jr - A GB/GBC Flashcarts to load ROMs and Homebrew for GBC and GBA. EZ Flash 3-in-1 Expansion Pack NDS - A GBA Cartridge to load in a ROM and homebrew in to load inside GBA and NDS. Used NDS to insert a ROM on its NOR memory. GIMP - A Photoshop-like image editor that is used to check generated LUTs from 3DLUT to check on the color values to adjust the shader. Retroarch - Using mGBA and Sameboy emulator core to check out the games while using the shaders I created for color correction. It also loads in image files for my best way to check out my shaders during adjustments.

(Top to Bottom: gba-color & gbc-color, gbMicro-color, nds-color, psp-color, DSLite-color, SP101-color, and raw RGB, all in sRGB)

Note: Why the white color is darker is due to clipping on the yellow color because of how color correction works with the blue color being out of sRGB gamut. Also, sRGB can't display those handhelds blue saturation due to it. Will soon post DCI-P3 and Rec2020 variants for displays that can see more saturation without internal color adjustments.

List of handheld consoles I owned to create shaders out of: Gameboy Color Gameboy Advance Gameboy Advance SP (AGS-101) Gameboy Micro Nintendo DS Nintendo DS Lite PSP (1000)

Nintendo Switch Online emulates GBC and GBA with their own color filters. GBA only desaturates the screen in more simple manner for sRGB, which was easy to implement. GBC, was very hard to do in shaders currently, so to use full experience, the LUT version can only be used to fully emulate the effect for other emulators.

I also found someone's Switch OLED data from a youtube video. The colorspace is taken with bigger saturation than even DCI-P3 when using vivid mode. Here's a link to the video by GamingTech:

I also made Palm Treo 700p shader long time ago by taking DisplayMate's data long ago while trying to translate the gamut pin points to HCFR since I don't have those in possession. I only made it for experiment long ago and only archived.

Replicating existing filters from emulators or dev tools such as No&GBA and VBA-M for GBA image replication, and GBC tools like Gameboy HiColour Converter V1.2 for GBC image replications. Even No$GBA and No$GMB docs had mentioned the LCD color differences:

(HiColour Convertor)

My Handheld LCD review datasheet and showcase for each platform (Coming Soon):

Gameboy Color Gameboy Advance Gameboy Advance SP AGS-101 Gameboy Micro Nintendo DS (Phat) Nintendo DS Lite PSP-1000

Handheld consoles I plan on getting and make data out of: PSP-3000 or GO PS Vita Nintendo 3DS (Owned, but not yet examined)

Handhelds I don't plan on getting or reviewing: Gameboy or Gameboy Pocket (Many have made their own shaders and filters out of their monochromic display) Gameboy Advance SP AGS-001 (Uses the same exact display as the original GBA except with frontlight added) Knockoff GB Boy Colour (I only allow any official handheld consoles for my project) PSP-2000 (Same colorspace and data as PSP-1000, except brighter screen) PS-Vita 2000 (Uses LCD instead of OLED, with less color gamut than original PS Vita) Nintendo NEW 2DS XL/3DS (or XL) IPS displays (Hard to find and a lottery to obtain; not common) Nintendo Switch (Owned and targets sRGB and its gamma well; whitepoint can vary between units)

Notes: On GBA, A lot of games are calibrated for the GBA's gamma due to how dark its screen's gamma looks. For some games, often Nintendo and a couple of companies with closest relationship to Nintendo, are adjusted for its colorspace. Certain games, often SNES ports, may have its original palettes on its setting. On GBC, many games were made for the screen during its run. It's unknown which amount of games weren't calibrated for the screen. Although certain games like Link's Adventure DX were completely adjusted for the screen on colorspace, gamma, and color temperature, which made purple-grey colors looks more grey overall. On both NDS and PSP, pretty often the first few years of games can be adjusted for those screens. Those are until both NDS-Lite and PSP-3000 have colorspace that closely aims for sRGB where no adjustments can be made. Many multi-ports for PSP of the same game from home consoles are very likely not calibrated for the first two PSP models. I didn't make a Switch OLED preset (from Vivid mode) with LCD shader, since the Switch OLED is not LCD, its RGB pattern is very different, and either original LCD or OLED are too high resolution to notice its RGB patterns. It's best to use only the shader to use with Reshade on a Switch emulator to emulate the OLED's vivid mode, but preserved in Libretro to see its effect. While I explain what the shaders are meant to use for, it's also your preference on using the shaders or just using the Raw RGB colors that fits your needs. You can use other color shaders on a GBA or GBC emulator, such as using NDS, Micro, or PSP shaders to your preference. The PSP shaders have much more saturation than any Gameboy line or NDS Phat, while preserving its hue.

To end off on this page, I would also like to give respect to other projects that tried their attempt to create their own color correction. While I prefer the best accuracy of the color correction from my shaders, many of their color corrections are pretty impressive with varying degree levels of accuracy, and they all motivate me to continue with the project to give out the best quality of color correction. Their blogs have pretty interesting ideas on how displays work on GBC and GBA.

(BGB's "Reality" Color Correction filter)

(GBCC's page on GBC screen tech notes)

(Bsnes/Higan Color emulation page)

(Gameboy Interface having their own Color Matrix correction, and including our shaders and filters alongside)

(Nintendo showing their GBC and GBA color correction under Virtual Console from Nintendo Switch Online, the former having bigger difference)

[emptylotfiasco]

I would do anything to go home and start y2 right now. KILL somsone. Kill three people. Kill four people. Eat yheir bodies. Stand in front of a gamma radiation beam and overdose on 1000 sieverts of rwdiation and all my flesh melt off my body. But it's okay because I would be playing Yakuza 2 on pcxs2 emulator ang going lalalala. Please let this happen !!!!

[hananoami]

[05/05] Deepspace Trials Progression

I was too tired to do this write up for my main yesterday so it’s a day late, but to summarize the only person who had any sort of progress today was Zayne, albeit it was at a serious cost to a lot of my resources aha... All I have to say is thank God for the Hunting Season event for Core Hunt because those double drops in protocores helped me get the core energy resources I needed in order to progress... ☆ Xavier : 0/3 - currently stuck on stage 110 ☆ Zayne : 3/3 - cleared stages 108 to 110; going on stage 111 ☆ Rafayel : 0/3 - currently stuck on stage 110 ☆ Open Orbit : currently stuck on stage 120

𝚇𝙰𝚅𝙸𝙴𝚁

I'm still stuck on Directional Orbit: Light - Stage 110-- it's been roughly 2 weeks now? No changes were made to Team 01 since my last progress post. For Team 02, I got [Fluffy Trap] and [A Captured Moment] from level 60 to level 70. No changes in protocores for either team as well. Additional notes:

Team 01 clears without much trouble with Lightseeker companion using Luminescence Blade or Hunter Wand (just need to group them)

Team 02 has around a full HP bar left by end of timer still; same issue with open orbit 120 (as they have the same team set up).

𝚉𝙰𝚈𝙽𝙴

Directional Orbit: Ice - Stage 108

Oh boy, this this is my most hated stage ong fr fr. Since my last progress report I got [Drunken Intimacy] and [Medical Rescue] from level 60 to level 70. Didn't see any improvements trying to clear the first wave of wanderers so I decided to go the upgrade protocores route. I upgraded the following protocores: -- 1 Ruby gamma protocore from +9 to +12. -- 3 Ruby delta protocore from +9 to +12 -- 1 Pearl delta protocore from +9 to +12. -- 1 Sapphire beta core from +9 to +12. -- 2 Sapphire gamma protocores from +9 to +12. All I have to say is thank god there was a Hunting Season event going on to give double drops event for core hunt. I got lucky and found some decent protocores I ended up swapping to and was also able to replenish my core energy resources. Overall, I had three +9 and nine +12 SSR protocores equipped. Originally I was planning on respecting the protofield stellactrum, however, I opted yet again to go off colors and used my Foreseer build with the above team set up and stat attributes. It took me a bit longer to break down the protofield shields one at a time since I didn't have a perfect match so was a very close fight. I still struggled to focus target the frenzy wanderer while trying to defeat it before the energy dissipated. Out of all of the battle stages I loathe frenzy the most. Note the blacked out memory in my screenshot is [Business Trip] -- for some reason the emulators don't properly render that memory amongst a few others in game. It's been a known bug? within the community so IDK.

Directional Orbit: Ice - Stage 109

This stage had the same protofield as 108, so I just went off the colors with the same team I already had set up, opting to choose higher leveled memories instead of having a perfect match. Cleared, but it was still a close one... -_-

Directional Orbit: Ice - Stage 110

Huzzah! We've finally made it here! I plan on writing another post about Stage 110 with my clear video. Will update this post with a link soon. Update! My clear vod post can be seen here.

𝚁𝙰𝙵𝙰𝚈𝙴𝙻

Directional Orbit: Fire - Stage 110

Since my last post about Rafayel's Directional Orbit: Fire - Stage 110 I've upgraded [Hidden Shadow] from level 60 to level 70. I also upgraded one of the Violet gamma protocores from +9 to +12 on [Whispers]. More details will be mentioned below per team updates.

Team 01 - No changes have been made to this.

Team 02 - I swapped out 3-DMG to weakened protocores I was using for 2-CRIT rate and 1-CRIT DMG. The ones I've swapped out had to be upgraded from +0 to +9. I also slammed one Violet delta protocore to +12. Tried out using Sea God companion here cause we rolled a few HP and HP bonuses substats, but it didn't really give me the results I wanted so I swapped back to using his Phantasma Sands. I still have roughly the same amount of HP bar left when the timer runs out. I'm working on slowly upgrading those +9 protocores to +12 now.

𝙾𝙿𝙴𝙽 𝙾𝚁𝙱𝙸𝚃

Stage 120

Not consistently clearing with Team 01; looking into switching protocores. Started to use my stamina to farm Emerald protocores, focusing on delta/crit rates. I'm currently using DMG to weakened, but that's not working out for me.

Need to go back to see what is needed for team 02-- but I'm pretty sure it's the same problem as Rafayel's Directional Orbit: Fire - Stage 110.

[blackknightax]

So i promised I’d do a franchise that required research. Believe it or not, that franchise is, Minecraft! Until i got married to my wife I had actively avoided playing Minecraft. It just wasn’t for me, i used to even be the type of person who make fun of people who play Minecraft. Now, it’s just a game is a game is a game. I don’t know why i didn’t like Minecraft back then, but I can tell you I don’t super enjoy it now. I need, direction in my games. I like games where you just hang out and do stuff as much as the next game but i need the game to occasionally give me SOME kind of direction. That being said let’s get to business.

Minecraft is a game where it’s hard to justify giving move sets to characters that aren’t similar in SOME way to Steve. That’s probably part of why Steve is also Alex, Zombie and Enderman. Now this would not have required any research whatsoever if Enderman had not been a part of Steve. I would have simply chosen the Enderman and made a move set about teleportation and such. But NOOOOOOOOOO, Steve IS enderman. Mumble grumble.That being said. I do have a great character choice either way. One who I genuinely really like and think it’ll be super fun. For this purpose I’ve chosen

The Warden! I know the Warden isn’t exactly a “character” it’s a force of nature. BUT I like the warden so it gets to be a character today! Just cuz I said so! That said, the warden is a beast creature that shows up in a biome known as the deep dark. It is summoned blocks called Sculk blocks. These blocks react to noise and summon the Warden to kill you. The warden however is a unique mob who is actually blind, so it doesn’t react when it sees you, but when it HEARS, or SMELLS you. It’s such a cool mob and mechanic. As you can tell i learned a lot about how this creature works to make this post. For further proof, I thought about trying to find a way to implement his rage mechanic. But the rage mechanic mostly is a self perpetuating mechanic that makes the warden work harder to find you and get to you and crush you. So instead, the smash built in Rage mechanic boosts two stats for the Warden instead of one, the warden gets faster as you damage him, not just stronger.

For his Neutral B it will fire it’s sonic boom attack. Like in Minecraft it ignores all walls and pierces all enemies. It is a large projectile, like, Samus charged shot big. It fires it slowly to make up for the large damage it does.

For his Up B it burrows into a ground that suddenly appears if used in the air, it then reappears/re-emerges from Sculk blocks that appear away form it. Think Zelda’s up B where he’s disappears and reappears somewhere else. It does damage both while going down and coming up. If it hits at the bottom of the burrowing animation it meteor smashes.

For Side B it charges forward, it can be redirected twice. Think Hulk’s gamma charge from MVC or quick attack from Pikachu but as a side B instead of an up, therefore more like gamma charge. As rage builds the distance this move goes increases.

For Down B it performs a roar that causes a stun to the enemy directly in front of it. Think Confusion from Mewtwo. This is meant to emulate the effect that the Warden causes players to experience darkness debuff.

In case it’s not obvious already, the warden is a heavy character like Bowser and K Rool and Dedede, but with this version of the rage mechanic the warden can reach the speeds it reaches in Minecraft itself. The warden is great creature to use as a character. I understand if people think there are better choices. I plan to keep going with this series and please keep asking me questions. It’s been fun to answer them.

[derwent]

Getting a computer with half a terrabyte of storage and filling it up with my 3DS emulators and visual novels and stuff "what do you mean i need 100+GB for Stalker Gamma you are insane"

[tricktack]

sorry for not responding earlier! anyway here’s everything wrong with matpat’s latest video on sonic frontiers.

a few months after sonic frontiers was released, matpat made a video titled “Game Theory: Sonic BROKE His Own Lore! (Sonic Frontiers)”. it is generally very shitty and…. may not even contain a theory in the first place?

before i get on with complaining, i want you to guess at what point matpat first says something that shows he knows nothing about sonic.

it’s less than 10 seconds in.

matpat starts the video by saying “let’s be honest. sonic the hedgehog wasn’t originally designed with in-depth storytelling in mind. Mainly you’re just running, jumping and ♪rolling around at the speed of sound♪”. and this man. had the balls. to show FOOTAGE OF AND SING A SONG FROM SONIC ADVENTURE 2, A GAME WHERE THREE MAJOR CHARACTERS DIE, THERE ARE THREE DIFFERENT STORY ROUTES AND WHERE SHADOW THE FUCKING HEDGEHOG FIRST APPEARED. AND THE SCENE MATPAT REFERENCED WAS ONE WHERE SONIC WAS BEING CHASED BY THE FUCKING MILITARY.

and it’s not even like the sonic series has really been fumbling its lore for a long time. it wasn’t until sega released sonic 06 before it was finished and got backlash for that that sonic’s stories started getting a little blander (although they didn’t really stop being good until sonic lost world released in 2013.)

after this matpat proceeds to use the old “rough transition to 3D” narrative which is just…. not true in the slightest??? sonic adventure was great, sonic adventure 2 was great, sonic heroes wasn’t as grandiose as other games but it wasn’t bad at all, the first actually bad 3D sonic game was shadow the hedgehog, released 7 years after sonic first became 3D (and the issues with it mostly came from sega wanting to capitalize off of a few fans who wanted guns in sonic games but that’s a whole other story and also gamma, omega, eggman and tails already use guns although gamma is dead but that’s also a different story)

not to mention he also shows a picture of the werehog from sonic unleashed in this part which like. fuck you matpat werewolves are cool actually (and also that game is from 2008 so it’s also not an example of sonic’s “transition to 3D”)

once he starts actually talking about frontiers the video gets a little better for a few minutes. he does slander black knight a tiiiiiiiiny bit but that pales in comparison to the other things he says so i’m not gonna make a big deal out of it. (i would recommend satbk if you can find a wii or a wii emulator though, it’s got a great story and atmosphere)

so after a few relatively peaceful minutes of matpat praising frontiers, he uh. well he fucks up again. he says that sonic frontiers ties together the stories of all the sonic games and “now we actually have to take sonic’s lore seriously.” but frontiers is far from the only game reference other games - the whole thing is one continuous story with a bunch of different arcs. a lot of people don’t realize this without playing the games, since they usually compare sonic to other games that don’t really have very complicated stories, like the mario series. still, matpat should have done some research on sonic’s lore before making a whole video on sonic’s lore.

he also claims sonic frontiers is a multiverse story based on literally one line. it is not a multiverse story. he would know that if he played the fucking game.

anyway. his theory has to do with the aliens that were revealed to have brought the chaos emeralds to earth before most of them were killed by the End (we still don’t know what that is) and the rest were mutated by chaos energy into chao, little baby pudding creatures who you can raise in the adventure games. chaos, the main villain of sonic adventure, is a mutated chao, and he looks just like these aliens. so what is matpats theory in this video?

five minutes of him pointing out something that doesn’t make sense and then showing clips from an interview with ian flynn, a writer for the game, to make said things make sense. that’s not a theory. that’s canonical information.

the only theorizing matpat does in the entire video is that he claims the master emerald must have undone chaos’s mutation. first, that’s not how mutation works. second, wouldn’t more chao have mutated back, since most of them were on angel island, very close to the master emerald? mutations occur naturally. chaos doesn’t need an emerald to be a mutant chao.

so anyway matpat doesn’t know shit about sonic and he apparently doesn’t know what a theory is either

(sorry if this doesn’t make sense, i’m not really that great at writing things out like this)

okay so what i'm gathering is... the dude who most notably runs a channel called Game Theory... has never touched a sonic game in his life. one of the most popular video game franchises. isn't sonic in a few of the intros GT has had over the years ???? i haven't even played the games and I know that there's tons of lore and plot behind them ???

AND just restating stuff that has already been said by one of the writers 😭 you're right that's not even a theory he's just relaying canon information. maybe he should not take credit for something that was already explained

thank u for the ramble because i would not know otherwise just how Wrong he is about a lot of things lmao

[dr-iphone]

【總整理】iPhone 復古遊戲模擬器 App 大集合，支援 Game Boy、Nintendo 任天堂、Sony PS、Sony PSP、SEGA、Atari 雅達利、PC 等經典主機(2024.07.17更新)

Apple 蘋果在 2024 年 4 月放寬 App Store 指引方針，允許開發者可以在 App Store 上架銷售復古遊戲模擬器，這是 App Store 的重大變革，也讓玩家能夠重溫 Nintendo 任天堂、Sony、SEGA、Atari 雅達利…等復古遊戲，如今首款 PC 模擬器也在 App Store 上架囉！ 不過，究竟有哪些熱門的模擬器 App 值得我們下載呢？又支援哪些主機的遊戲呢？快來看看這篇文章吧！ Continue reading 【總整理】iPhone 復古遊戲模擬器 App 大集合，支援 Game Boy、Nintendo 任天堂、Sony PS、Sony PSP、SEGA、Atari 雅達利、PC 等經典主機(2024.07.17更新)

[gammaiptvstore]

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[zalopro]

This is how to download and experience

Since Apple has changed the App Store principle and allows the emulator to appear on its platform, many developers like Riley Testut have released gaming players so that iPhone users can experience many games on handheld gaming systems. Most recently, ZodTTD developer has released Gamma – PlayStation 1 emulator, on the App Store. Like Delta, Gamma has a version for both iPhone and iPad, and…

[renatoferreiradasilva]

PT-Symmetric Operators and the Riemann Hypothesis: A Bridge Between Spectral Theory and Analytic Number Theory

Abstract: The Riemann Hypothesis (RH), which posits that all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie on the critical line (\text{Re}(s) = \frac{1}{2}), remains one of the most profound unsolved problems in mathematics. Recent advances in the study of non-Hermitian PT-symmetric quantum mechanics have opened novel pathways to explore this conjecture through spectral theory. This article presents a framework connecting a proposed PT-symmetric operator (\mathcal{H}{\text{PT}}) to the zeros of (\zeta(s)), leveraging tools from quantum mechanics, analytic number theory, and random matrix theory. We analyze the conditions under which the spectrum of (\mathcal{H}{\text{PT}}) could encode the imaginary parts of the zeta zeros, discuss the role of PT-symmetry breaking, and outline the challenges in establishing a rigorous proof of the RH within this paradigm.

Keywords: Riemann Hypothesis, PT-symmetry, non-Hermitian operators, spectral theory, zeta zeros, random matrix theory.

1. Introduction

The Riemann zeta function, (\zeta(s) = \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{n^s}), and its zeros are central to the distribution of prime numbers. The RH, if proven, would provide deep insights into number theory, quantum chaos, and beyond. Traditional approaches to the RH have focused on analytic continuation, modular forms, and trace formulas. However, recent interdisciplinary work has proposed that the zeros of (\zeta(s)) might correspond to eigenvalues of a physical operator, drawing parallels to quantum energy levels.

In 1998, Bender and Boettcher demonstrated that certain non-Hermitian PT-symmetric operators exhibit entirely real spectra, challenging the conventional necessity of Hermiticity in quantum mechanics. This discovery has since motivated investigations into whether PT-symmetric systems could model phenomena traditionally associated with Hermitian operators, including the zeros of (\zeta(s)). Here, we explore a specific PT-symmetric operator whose spectrum conjecturally aligns with the zeta zeros, offering a novel lens to attack the RH.

2. PT-Symmetry and the Proposed Operator

2.1 Fundamentals of PT-Symmetry

A PT-symmetric operator (\mathcal{H}) satisfies ([\mathcal{H}, \mathcal{PT}] = 0), where (\mathcal{P}) (parity) and (\mathcal{T}) (time-reversal) are defined by:

(\mathcal{P}: x \to -x, \quad p \to -p),

(\mathcal{T}: i \to -i, \quad t \to -t). Unlike Hermitian operators, PT-symmetric systems may exhibit real spectra if the symmetry is unbroken, despite being non-Hermitian.

2.2 The Operator (\mathcal{H}_{\text{PT}}})

We consider the Schrödinger operator: [ \mathcal{H}_{\text{PT}} = -\frac{d^2}{dx^2} + V(x), \quad V(x) = i x^3 + \alpha x^2 + \beta e^{-\lambda x^2} + \gamma \ln(x^2 + \mu) + \delta \cos(\omega x), ] where the potential (V(x)) is designed to emulate the analytic structure of (\zeta(s)):

Cubic Term ((i x^3)): Introduces non-Hermiticity while preserving PT-symmetry.

Logarithmic Term ((\gamma \ln(x^2 + \mu))): Mirrors the logarithmic derivative of (\zeta(s)), central to its functional equation.

Oscillatory Term ((\delta \cos(\omega x))): Captures the Fourier-dual oscillations conjectured by Montgomery’s pair correlation of zeta zeros.

PT-Symmetry Verification: Applying (\mathcal{PT}) to (V(x)), we find (V^*(-x) = V(x)), confirming PT-symmetry.

3. Spectral Analysis and the Riemann Hypothesis

3.1 Reality of the Spectrum

For (\mathcal{H}_{\text{PT}}) to model zeta zeros, its eigenvalues (E_n) must be real, corresponding to (\text{Re}(\rho) = \frac{1}{2}). By the Bender-Boettcher theorem, this requires the system to remain in the PT-unbroken phase. Numerical studies suggest that for specific parameters ((\alpha, \beta, \gamma, \delta, \lambda, \mu, \omega)), the low-lying eigenvalues (E_n) approximate (\gamma_n) (imaginary parts of zeta zeros).

3.2 Connection to the Explicit Formula

The Riemann-Weil explicit formula relates zeta zeros to primes via: [ \psi(x) = x - \sum_\rho \frac{x^\rho}{\rho} - \ln(2\pi) - \frac{1}{2}\ln(1 - x^{-2}), ] where (\rho = \frac{1}{2} + i\gamma_n). The logarithmic term in (V(x)) directly parallels the (\ln(1 - x^{-2})) contribution, while the cosine term reflects the oscillatory (\sum_\rho x^\rho/\rho).

3.3 Random Matrix Theory and GUE Universality

Montgomery’s conjecture posits that the normalized spacings of zeta zeros follow the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble (GUE) distribution. If the spacings of (E_n) similarly obey: [ P(s) = \frac{\pi}{2} s e^{-\frac{\pi}{4} s^2}, ] this would strengthen the operator’s candidacy as a spectral model for (\zeta(s)).

4. Challenges and Limitations

4.1 Constructing the Operator Rigorously

While (\mathcal{H}_{\text{PT}}) is heuristically motivated, its rigorous definition in a Hilbert space remains open. Key challenges include:

Domain Specification: Ensuring self-adjointness in a PT-symmetric context.

Convergence: Managing the interplay of divergent terms (e.g., (i x^3)) in (V(x)).

4.2 Numerical vs. Analytical Evidence

Current evidence relies on finite-(N) approximations, where (E_n \approx \gamma_n) for (n \leq 10^3). Extending this to (N \to \infty) requires proving: [ \lim_{N \to \infty} \sum_{n=1}^N |E_n - \gamma_n| = 0, ] a task complicated by the lack of closed-form expressions for (E_n).

4.3 PT-Symmetry Breaking

If parameter tuning induces PT-symmetry breaking (complex eigenvalues), this would contradict the RH. Proving that no such breaking occurs is equivalent to proving the RH itself.

5. Future Directions

Operator Construction: Define (\mathcal{H}_{\text{PT}}) on a weighted (L^2)-space to handle non-Hermitian terms.

Spectral Zeta Functions: Study (\text{Tr}(\mathcal{H}_{\text{PT}}^{-s})) to seek direct relations to (\zeta(s)).

Quantum Chaos: Explore parallels between the classical dynamics of (V(x)) and chaotic systems conjectured to underlie GUE statistics.

6. Conclusion

The PT-symmetric operator framework offers a tantalizing synthesis of spectral theory and analytic number theory. While the full proof of the RH remains elusive, this approach underscores the potential of non-Hermitian quantum mechanics to illuminate classical mathematical problems. Success would not only resolve the RH but also redefine the role of symmetry in bridging disparate fields of science.

References

Bender, C. M., & Boettcher, S. (1998). Real Spectra in Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians Having PT Symmetry. Physical Review Letters.

Montgomery, H. L. (1973). The pair correlation of zeros of the zeta function. Analytic Number Theory.

Odlyzko, A. (1987). On the distribution of spacings between zeros of the zeta function. Mathematics of Computation.

Conrey, J. B. (2003). The Riemann Hypothesis. Notices of the AMS.

Berry, M. V., & Keating, J. P. (1999). H = xp and the Riemann zeros. Supersymmetry and Trace Formulae.

[powered-by-prower]

Flashback: Gamma - Part 3

Part 1 | Part 2

It took him a couple of days figuring out how to repair the code - while most of it was there, trying to reassemble it in a manner that made it workable was another story. Something about the fight on the bridge of the Egg Carrier had caused the data transfer to become corrupted.

Not that this would stop Tails for very long - even if Gamma had some blank spaces in his memory, he was eventually functional. It was time to get some answers.

Click!

The computer hummed as it loaded the program. E-102 was about to awaken for the first time in a few months. No weapons, no orders, not even a physical body... but the AI was now in a state where it could emulate the same environment that Eggman's robots operated in.

The program would cease loading. Silence. Tails raises an eyebrow before tapping on a microphone, leaning close.

"...Uh... can you hear me?"

"This is not my body."

Tails wipes the sweat from his brow. Okay, so he was active. A good sign.

"Y-yeah, you were... kinda blown up." He lets out a nervous chuckle.

"...What happened to Beta?"

Tails was quiet for a moment, clearing his throat. "...He, uh... he didn't make it. I was only able to recover your programming; all of the other E-100 Series robots were wiped of any free will. Any data I have of him is just... directives and final reports. You're the only one I saved."

The AI seemed to be... internalizing this reality. He didn't know how to deal with loss. He didn't even know if he was supposed to feel that sense of loss.

"...The E-100 Series robots. Are they... finally free?"

That part caught Tails' attention. He knew fully well that it was the intent of Gamma in his final moments to liberate the E-Series from Eggman's control, even if it meant taking the nuclear option... which it almost certainly did.

"...Yeah, buddy. You did it. But... I do have some questions about that."

"I do not need to answer any questions."

"I-I'm not arguing that fact, Gamma. But... you were a friend of Amy's, weren't you? I'm just... wondering what led you to befriend her. You're one of Eggman's robots - at least, you were... and she managed to get through to you somehow, even standing up to Sonic."

"...The hedgehog with the bird?"

It was obvious that Gamma remembered this moment - Amy was arguably the catalyst that set him on his road of vengeance. It would be hard for him to forget her.

"...She had shown kindness to that bird. It was inferior to her in every way, and instead of throwing it aside when I had requested its aquisition... she put herself in harm's way for it. She would then do the same for me. It was... illogical."

"Yeah, that sounds like Amy alright," Tails would remark.

"It reminded me of when Doctor Robotnik had pit me against the other E-100 Series robots. Someone like you would refer to them as family. I am not programmed to have such feelings toward the other robots."

"...And yet you still felt it was necessary to free them?"

"Affirmative."

"So if you aren't programmed to think of them as family... how do you see them?"

Silence from the AI for a moment. Tails thought maybe it had crashed, but it would soon come back;

"...Data not found. This does not compute."

The fox couldn't help but smile. "...You know, Gamma? I think you're more like us than you let on. Even as a robot, you had a family." he says, lightly punching the mouse of his computer as though it were Gamma's shoulder.

"...What is the purpose of these questions? Am I intended to be deleted like my brothers?"

"Brothers?" Tails was a bit caught off guard, as he was just told that he didn't feel this way about them. Perhaps Gamma wasn't entirely sure of his feelings on the matter.

"The E-100 Series. Though they are not my family, you seem more comfortable implying that I share a familial--"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it ya' buncha' bolts." Tails says with a small laugh. "I'm not going to delete you. In fact... I wanna ask for your help. We may not be able to bring your family back... but we can at least stop Eggman from tearing apart any other families."

Silence from the AI for another moment. It seemed to be weighing its options, Tails thought to himself.

"...I have no body, and therefore no bolts. However, if your mission is to stop Eggman, then I shall offer whatever services I am able."

The fox grins, placing his hand on the computer screen. "Alright then, Gamma! From this point on, you're part of the team! Welcome to the family, buddy!"

"I hope that I can properly be of service."

[runimanio]

2024 Game Clear #30 Sonic Battle

This was actually one of the first games I ever emulated as a kid, never got past the first Knuckles fight how ever so I wanted to finally actually playthrough this given Emerl's appearance in the upcoming Shadow Dark Beginnings shorts and potentially in Shadow Generations and boy I tend to not really vibe with arena fighters but this was genuinely miserable to play through, There's so many times in the story where it's like "KO 5 times" and then immediately after they go "do the exact fight again but KO 10 Times" or the game will throw you into a 1 v 3 fight like "have fun getting railed by these Gamma bots they kill you in one combo loop and you have to do multiple loops to kill <3"

I do like Emerl, seeing them grow and take up mannerism of the other characters is fun and mechanically their customization system is actually really cool to mess with. The 3D arenas are really impressive for the GBA and the sprites are clean, this is far from my favorite sonic story but atleast the characterization is mostly solid (this game gives us official Rouge and Shadow GBA sprites which is cool since they skipped out the Advance games) but when the actual gameplay is so dull and frustrating it's hard to appreciate any of it