3 ms·

Honestly, this is how I've been feeling lately. Everything is old now. It's been a long time since a huge revolution tech wise happened. It's just incrementa

Honestly, this is how I've been feeling lately. Everything is old now. It's been a long time since a huge revolution tech wise happened. It's just incremental evolution now, and a lot of it is NOT for the better. The Playstation 2 was as far away from the Atari 2600 as we are from the Playstation 2 today. One of these periods had a lot more change.

fidotron 3y ago
> The Playstation 2 was as far away from the Atari 2600 as we are from the Playstation 2 today. One of these periods had a lot more change. Yeah, from PS2 to now is a much bigger difference. Of course you meant in relative terms, but in absolute terms the computation (and especially per watt) that you can do today is astonishing relative to in 2000. Software development on the 2600 had more in common with the PS2 than the PS2 does to today. (Writing assembler in Excel for the vector units was a thing on the PS2). What has happened is we have completely lost sight of what all this is for, and ever more of the created resources get allocated to enabling fast pivots towards anything that looks like it might be worth doing.
- saulpw 3y ago
  > Yeah, from PS2 to now is a much bigger difference. Maybe in terms of development, as you suggest, but definitely not in terms of player experience. For example, I'm able to play and enjoy games from the PS2 (and even the PS1), but games from the 2600 are essentially unplayable. I have a lot of nostalgia for computers and games from the 80s but I realize now that it's for the late 80s, around the time of the SNES. Sometimes I think that 1990-1995 was peak computing, in terms of "the computer as a feeling". 25MHz single core, 1MB RAM, 100MB HDD, 9600 bps modem, 320x200 256 colors--you could get a lot done and yet every byte and cycle were precious and it was all understandable by a single person. If consumer hardware had stalled out there, we'd still be flying high, albeit with a text-only internet. Software would be more stable and there would be incentive to optimize and improve instead of amass and churn. In fact the only things I'd change in that list to make it simpler would be SSD instead of floppy/HDD and packet-switched internet instead of modem. Don't get me wrong, as a consumer I would want to stall out a bit later, closer to 1GHz, 1GB RAM, 16GB SSD, 1Mbps always-on network, 1024x768 true color; but by that point the hardware is complicated enough that the software becomes unwieldy, too much for one person to grok fully, and the craft is lost to waste and bloat. For example, with 320x200x8, there's a certain magic of having byte-addressable video memory laid out in a way that directly corresponds to the screen pixels. You can still get evocative images but you have to care about each pixel. With 1024x768x24 you can waste 90% of the resources and be 'good enough'.
- doubled112 3y ago
  From a user perspective, I'm going to have to disagree. You have it backward. Atari 2600 you were playing something like Pole Position. Gran Turismo 4 was released on PS2. Gran Turismo 7 for PS5. What improved from Gran Turismo 4 until 7? Model detail? Better grass and reflections? Some improved physics simulation? It looks great, don't get me wrong, but it isn't a massive improvement in user experience for 23 years of development. VR racing could be a riot. Maybe VR is that leap forward, but VR is another tech we've been trying to get going since the 80s.
  - gochi 3y ago
    Gran Turismo 7 already plays in VR. Also disqualifying VR that way by stating we've been trying to get it going since the 80s is a bit silly. Most of the other "huge steps" we've made like the iPhone were too just incremental improvements from predecessors.

fidotron 3y ago

> The Playstation 2 was as far away from the Atari 2600 as we are from the Playstation 2 today. One of these periods had a lot more change. Yeah, from PS2 to now is a much bigger difference. Of course you meant in relative terms, but in absolute terms the computation (and especially per watt) that you can do today is astonishing relative to in 2000. Software development on the 2600 had more in common with the PS2 than the PS2 does to today. (Writing assembler in Excel for the vector units was a thing on the PS2). What has happened is we have completely lost sight of what all this is for, and ever more of the created resources get allocated to enabling fast pivots towards anything that looks like it might be worth doing.

saulpw 3y ago
> Yeah, from PS2 to now is a much bigger difference. Maybe in terms of development, as you suggest, but definitely not in terms of player experience. For example, I'm able to play and enjoy games from the PS2 (and even the PS1), but games from the 2600 are essentially unplayable. I have a lot of nostalgia for computers and games from the 80s but I realize now that it's for the late 80s, around the time of the SNES. Sometimes I think that 1990-1995 was peak computing, in terms of "the computer as a feeling". 25MHz single core, 1MB RAM, 100MB HDD, 9600 bps modem, 320x200 256 colors--you could get a lot done and yet every byte and cycle were precious and it was all understandable by a single person. If consumer hardware had stalled out there, we'd still be flying high, albeit with a text-only internet. Software would be more stable and there would be incentive to optimize and improve instead of amass and churn. In fact the only things I'd change in that list to make it simpler would be SSD instead of floppy/HDD and packet-switched internet instead of modem. Don't get me wrong, as a consumer I would want to stall out a bit later, closer to 1GHz, 1GB RAM, 16GB SSD, 1Mbps always-on network, 1024x768 true color; but by that point the hardware is complicated enough that the software becomes unwieldy, too much for one person to grok fully, and the craft is lost to waste and bloat. For example, with 320x200x8, there's a certain magic of having byte-addressable video memory laid out in a way that directly corresponds to the screen pixels. You can still get evocative images but you have to care about each pixel. With 1024x768x24 you can waste 90% of the resources and be 'good enough'.
doubled112 3y ago
From a user perspective, I'm going to have to disagree. You have it backward. Atari 2600 you were playing something like Pole Position. Gran Turismo 4 was released on PS2. Gran Turismo 7 for PS5. What improved from Gran Turismo 4 until 7? Model detail? Better grass and reflections? Some improved physics simulation? It looks great, don't get me wrong, but it isn't a massive improvement in user experience for 23 years of development. VR racing could be a riot. Maybe VR is that leap forward, but VR is another tech we've been trying to get going since the 80s.
- gochi 3y ago
  Gran Turismo 7 already plays in VR. Also disqualifying VR that way by stating we've been trying to get it going since the 80s is a bit silly. Most of the other "huge steps" we've made like the iPhone were too just incremental improvements from predecessors.