I often try to do this, but it's rarely cheaper, and occasionally much worse. I recently bought a beach tent directly from the manufacturer, and when it showed up, it had a big Amazon sticker on it, and didn't actually have the product inside; it was clearly something Amazon had returned to them. Meanwhile, they haven't responded to e-mails and there's no way to return it, so, uh, I just got scammed.
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.
Sure, it's just a poor analogy. YouTube doesn't show up at your door unprompted as junk mail does. You go there intentionally for the purpose of watching a video. You can pay for that video with your time or your money. No one is being "paid off" in that scenario.
We finally gave up our Prius after 12 years, and we never changed the brakes once. The brakes were just peeking into the yellow on its last service upgrade. I was really impressed with how well the "normal" hybrid could take advantage of regenerative breaking, honestly.
I really like the DE0-CV in particular for having the 7 segment displays and accessible buttons and switches. When I was first getting started in FPGA stuff, I spent a lot of time just getting basic circuits to work, and you need some physical IO to get any feedback that your stuff works. It gives you a lot of things to learn on before you start worrying about VGA output or whatever (but does have a lot of interesting stuff on board for when you do want to mess around with that stuff!)
There's a ton of of dev boards out there, but I would say to be sure to get something with hardware buttons and LEDs, as it really helps with some of the Hello World level of things, and many of the cheapest options won't have those.
I started messing with FPGAs with the DE0-Nano, but eventually got so frustrated with the tiny buttons that I upgraded to a DE0-CV, which I really enjoyed my time with. It has some 7 segment LEDs, physical switches, and buttons, and it also has a VGA port, PS/2 port, and Micro SD card slot, so you can build a pretty snazzy little PC if you want to.
Not the gp, but I used Duolingo quite a bit, and recently learned Spanish to an upper intermediate level. In my opinion, Duolingo is just as weak with pure reading as with spoken language. You'll learn some vocabulary and be introduced to ideas, and that's valuable, but not enough. Just like spoken, to learn to read, you have to read a bunch of stuff you can understand. I jumped straight from Duolingo to children and young adult books, and it was a difficult transition with lots of intensive looking-up-every-other-word study, but, I mean, you do that long enough, and eventually you're just reading.
Op's point is that the lower nominal voltage is the culprit in the battery's lower energy density. If you and I each have a 1 kg battery that stores 1 amp hour, but yours puts out 3.7v and mine puts out 2.5, then your battery is storing more total energy than mine. We can both manipulate that output voltage (via boost converter, or more commonly just using multiple batteries in serial) to get whatever we need, but given the same load, my battery's just going to drain faster than yours.
Can I ask what the feature set looked like? I always kind of wanted to do this with the Skullgirls AI, but never had the time while we were developing it. As a developer, I obviously had full access to the game state, but I'm still not really sure what the best way to represent that state to a neural network is.
Is there a good reference for potential upgrades to old, obsolete-ish parts? I definitely understand that many of the old logic ICs, transistors, and op-amps have been displaced by better parts, but I don't always know how to identify them short of a parametric search on digikey and hoping there's not some sharp corner I missed. I'd find a lot of value in a page that had some recommendations for "Are you using <OLD PART> for <PURPOSE>? Consider <NEW PART>!"
That project is actually kind of what convinced me to go ahead and buy the CV. It was fun, but it just felt like a lot of work making things that I could just already have on the board.
The DE0-CV is a bit more expensive, but I think it's probably better than the Nano for the FPGA 101 type experiments. It's got more on the way of switches and LEDs, and the buttons are a lot easier to get to. I have both, and I had a lot more fun with low level learning activities with the CV than the Nano. Moving past that, I also enjoyed messing with the VGA and SD card peripherals more than the ADC and accelerometer, and also found those easier to add on after the fact.
The art in Skullgirls was done somewhat similar to the way the article describes in "Recoloring". Each frame was composed of three different images and each sprite had a palette along with it. The palette was a list of color gradients. The first image was the black and white line work. The second image was a solid color key layer whose value acted as an index into the palette (i.e. which gradient should be selected). The third image was a monochrome shading layer which acted as the position into that gradient that should be drawn. The gradients were rendered to textures at runtime, and the shader did all the work of actually composing the layers.
It did have some downsides, in particular that it was a bit unnatural for artists to work with, and memory was a constant struggle on console. Skullgirls characters could have well over 1000 frames of animation, and the game supports 3 on 3 fights. Mike did a handful of clever tricks to optimize memory usage, including breaking the images into smaller tiles and throwing out all the empty ones, and compressing the images even in memory. I'm a big fan of the final effect; I think the sprites look great, are high resolution, and allowed artists to create an extremely varied set of palettes for the game.
It's not particularly uncommon. Check out the mapper list at http://tuxnes.sourceforge.net/nesmapper.txt. All the 0k chr entries are carts that have chr ram. Just for funsies, I looked up one I had, and cracked it open so we could take a look at it. You can see on this Cobra Triangle cart the MB8464A 8k sram chip wired up to the chr lines. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2I5cGIsgvHbN1NFdUdLNTluNHM...
It's also kind of cool to see the 74 series chips at work; the 74161 counter being used to select the prg rom bank, and the 7402 used to disable the prg rom during writes.
Dolphin uses DirectInput on Windows, so basically anything works. If you're in the market for a PC gamepad, it's hard to go wrong with a 360 controller.
It's an ARM microprocessor and wifi module. It's powered via its USB port or whatever you hook up to the vin pin. It's basically another cheap embedded platform, but it's got built in wifi. I kickstarted the Spark, and really love it, so I preordered a couple of these. Looking forward to it!
It'd be kind of hard, as what makes up a "sprite" lives in two different places - one that stores all the tile data, and another that basically describes which tiles make up which sprites. The latter is likely to change every frame, and potentially the former, too, so you'd still be rescaling some stuff every frame. You'd also have to rescale some things that are affected by palette changes, which sometimes change every frame (popular way to animate water, for example). Would you end up saving time this way? I'm not really sure. It's definitely an interesting idea.
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.