I have a long history with Mario Kart; after Super Mario World, it was the second computer game – on any platform – that I bought. A cutting edge title, it used the Super Nintendo’s Mode 7 to scale and rotate 2D graphics to generate a sudo-3D play area. It was – to my pre-teen eyes – a visually stunning game combined with fantastic gameplay.

Returning to it years later I have to wonder what I was thinking. The game play remains fun – it’s fast and furious (though not as tricky as I remember) – but the landscape visuals rapidly descend into a flickering, distorted mess as soon as you try and play it.

Fortunately there is a solution: the latest version of BSNES contains a new scaling and rotation algorithm. Instead of performing the rotation with the original sprite (as performed on the original SNES), it upscales the image, rotates and then reduces it back to the original size – and looses far less detail in the process as it does so.

And the results look fantastic:

Pilotwings, a game I got towards the end of my SNES ownership and long after I had started sliding into the darkside that that was PC gaming, also benefits from the Mode 7 cleanup work. Just look at the quality of the airfield in this footage.

Now all I need to do is to find the time to go back and replay these games in their new 2019 glory!

So as part of the generally good HTML5 spec, the authors have added an absolutely awful un-feature called ‘hyperlink auditing’.

So what is this? Well a classic HTML link looks a little like this…

<a href="https://www.chrisrcook.com/">Go!</a>

This will create a simple link with the text ‘Go!’ that, when clicked, will take you to a location – in this case ‘https://www.chrisrcook.com/’.

The HTML working group have added the option of a second attribute value called ‘ping’. This allows links like this…

<a href="https://www.chrisrcook.com/" ping="http://spying-gits.com/our_tracker">Go!</a>

So what happens here? Well, as before, clicking on the ‘Go!’ link will take you to ‘https://www.chrisrcook.com’. It will also open a second connection to the ‘http://spying-gits.com/our_tracker’ – and so allow hidden third party auditing of your browsing activity and will do so in a way that will not be disabled by classic tracker and ad blockers.

Firefox have taken the sensible route and disabled this functionality by default. Chrome, being the offensive arm of the Google Ad Empire, sends the tracking mark back by default. Apple, in spite of their public commitments to privacy, have implemented it as of Safari 12.1.

Which is a terrible mistake.

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It’s just dawned on me that, after my discussion about NetNewsWire last week, I have yet to enable a feed for this site.

Well now I have – at the bottom of every blog page there should now be a link to this site’s RSS feed.

After looking over some stats related to Twitter, I have created a Twitter Deathwatch page to track its demise.

It’s going to take a while but, hopefully, over the next few years we will get there and then the world will become a slightly better place.

I’ve added a new section and created the first content to go in it – a short tutorial on running MSDOS 6.22 in QEMU on a Raspberry Pi. Alas, it’s a little rough and ready, but quality should improve as I get more practice.

I think that the next one I do will be a Windows 3.11 tutorial as I can build on the DOS 6.22 work I’ve just done.