4 ms·

I've gone in the opposite direction. Stuff is just... stuff. It breaks down a lot, and while sometimes I wonder if it would be cool to have a PDP-11 or VAX to p

I've gone in the opposite direction. Stuff is just... stuff. It breaks down a lot, and while sometimes I wonder if it would be cool to have a PDP-11 or VAX to play with, if I think about it for a while it just makes no sense. A modern phone has more power than a 90s supercomputer. The classic 90s super-deluxe workstations are easily outclassed by a Raspberry Pi 4, never mind an M1 Mac. Modern consumer hardware is so unbelievably fast and powerful it's a much more exciting thing to play with.

dleslie 5y ago
I somewhat agree with this, save for in the fine details. Emulation is good until a point; often button response latency is off, audio is mixed incorrectly, and CRT rendering artifacts are not properly accounted for. For instance, I keep a grey brick Gameboy around for noodling with LSDJ about once or twice a year. The bass response is just lovely. There's a whole community that harvests and covets SID chips because emulation just doesn't nail it. There's a retro gaming convention in Vancouver every year, or was before Covid, and there's a few crews of musicians with classic hardware. I recommend checking it out just to hear the difference analog hardware makes.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  There have been so many advances in emulation that I would say a lot of this isn't true anymore. You can pretty much get next to flawless emulation of anything PSX and older (with much of the newer stuff more than good enough for playing even if not exact replica), and with runahead you can match or beat original device latency.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    I've never seen a "CRT" shader that comes anywhere close to the quality of art representation of Neo Geo titles as my MVS and its recapped Wells Gardner. And those "scanlines" ones are just sad. To say nothing of my experiences with sound quality and input latency.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      Well the last paragraph is ignoring my point about run ahead I think.
      - dleslie 5y ago
        I don't want to "beat" the device, I want to experience the device as it was intended.
        emodendroket 5y ago
        It seems absurd to say emulation is worse because you prefer a slightly greater amount of input lag.
        dleslie 5y ago
        Timing is everything in old games, change that and you change the experience into something different. Not to say it's better or worse, but it's not the same.
    - hulitu 5y ago
      To this day only the expensive LCDs come close to CRT colours.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  And on the computer side of the fence, although modern machines are outrageously powerful, responsiveness is becoming something of an endangered species, but on early to mid 90s Macs it's the rule for all but the most demanding applications. Especially if retrofitted with flash storage of some kind, those old Macs often wait for you more frequently than you wait for them. And while the OS isn't great at multitasking, that could be seen as a feature — instead of tens of tabs and a dock full of programs open, you're forced to focus only on the 1-3 apps that can be open before classic Mac OS multitasking breaks down. I'm seriously considering setting up an old pre-OS X Mac of some flavor as a zen mode writing machine for this reason.
ineedasername 5y ago
If you're not tied to the idea of owning the actual hardware then you get emulate these to tool around in the software side of things, maybe relive the glory days of DCL vs Bash flame wars.
emodendroket 5y ago
I got rid of a lot of my old game consoles when I realized that I didn't really appreciate the trouble of having them all connected when the games were equally playable on other devices I owned anyway. Actually pretty freeing.
hakfoo 5y ago
I think the one thing we've lost is the complete "down to the register" accessibility and the close coupling of hardware and software. You can write your own boot code from bare metal and actually make useful things happen based on data sheets. It's concievable to grasp an entire 8086 or 68000 system in that way, but the Raspberry Pi, for all its benefits, is almost certainly going to be dealt with with relatively high-level languages and abstractions.
hulitu 5y ago
> A modern phone has more power than a 90s supercomputer. The classic 90s super-deluxe workstations are easily outclassed by a Raspberry Pi 4, never mind an M1 Mac. And this power is used to run levels over levels of abstactions. C compilers on phones ? no way. I got some BASIC interpretter on my phone which makes a ZX Spectrum look elegant in comparison. Text is hard on a smartphone screen. Graphics is also hard. > Modern consumer hardware is so unbelievably fast and powerful it's a much more exciting thing to play with. See above. In the past you had limited computer power now you have limited screen. And the new trend in UX design does not help either.

dleslie 5y ago

I somewhat agree with this, save for in the fine details. Emulation is good until a point; often button response latency is off, audio is mixed incorrectly, and CRT rendering artifacts are not properly accounted for. For instance, I keep a grey brick Gameboy around for noodling with LSDJ about once or twice a year. The bass response is just lovely. There's a whole community that harvests and covets SID chips because emulation just doesn't nail it. There's a retro gaming convention in Vancouver every year, or was before Covid, and there's a few crews of musicians with classic hardware. I recommend checking it out just to hear the difference analog hardware makes.

emodendroket 5y ago
There have been so many advances in emulation that I would say a lot of this isn't true anymore. You can pretty much get next to flawless emulation of anything PSX and older (with much of the newer stuff more than good enough for playing even if not exact replica), and with runahead you can match or beat original device latency.
- dleslie 5y ago
  I've never seen a "CRT" shader that comes anywhere close to the quality of art representation of Neo Geo titles as my MVS and its recapped Wells Gardner. And those "scanlines" ones are just sad. To say nothing of my experiences with sound quality and input latency.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Well the last paragraph is ignoring my point about run ahead I think.
    - dleslie 5y ago
      I don't want to "beat" the device, I want to experience the device as it was intended.
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        It seems absurd to say emulation is worse because you prefer a slightly greater amount of input lag.
        dleslie 5y ago
        Timing is everything in old games, change that and you change the experience into something different. Not to say it's better or worse, but it's not the same.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    To this day only the expensive LCDs come close to CRT colours.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
And on the computer side of the fence, although modern machines are outrageously powerful, responsiveness is becoming something of an endangered species, but on early to mid 90s Macs it's the rule for all but the most demanding applications. Especially if retrofitted with flash storage of some kind, those old Macs often wait for you more frequently than you wait for them. And while the OS isn't great at multitasking, that could be seen as a feature — instead of tens of tabs and a dock full of programs open, you're forced to focus only on the 1-3 apps that can be open before classic Mac OS multitasking breaks down. I'm seriously considering setting up an old pre-OS X Mac of some flavor as a zen mode writing machine for this reason.

ineedasername 5y ago

If you're not tied to the idea of owning the actual hardware then you get emulate these to tool around in the software side of things, maybe relive the glory days of DCL vs Bash flame wars.

emodendroket 5y ago

I got rid of a lot of my old game consoles when I realized that I didn't really appreciate the trouble of having them all connected when the games were equally playable on other devices I owned anyway. Actually pretty freeing.

hakfoo 5y ago

I think the one thing we've lost is the complete "down to the register" accessibility and the close coupling of hardware and software. You can write your own boot code from bare metal and actually make useful things happen based on data sheets. It's concievable to grasp an entire 8086 or 68000 system in that way, but the Raspberry Pi, for all its benefits, is almost certainly going to be dealt with with relatively high-level languages and abstractions.

hulitu 5y ago

> A modern phone has more power than a 90s supercomputer. The classic 90s super-deluxe workstations are easily outclassed by a Raspberry Pi 4, never mind an M1 Mac. And this power is used to run levels over levels of abstactions. C compilers on phones ? no way. I got some BASIC interpretter on my phone which makes a ZX Spectrum look elegant in comparison. Text is hard on a smartphone screen. Graphics is also hard. > Modern consumer hardware is so unbelievably fast and powerful it's a much more exciting thing to play with. See above. In the past you had limited computer power now you have limited screen. And the new trend in UX design does not help either.